this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2024
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Slow, expensive, riddeled with corruption, long ago surpassed by renewables. Why should we use it?
only antimatter could provide more energy density, it's insanely powerful.
produces amounts of waste orders of magnitude lower than any other means of energy production
reliable when done well
it shouldn't be replaced with renewables, but work with them
Nuclear energy indeed has very high energy per mass of fuel. But so what? Solar and wind power doesn't even use fuel. So the energy density thing is a bit of a distraction.
But it's not done well. Just look at the new built plants, which are way over budget and take way longer to build then expected. Like the two units in Georgia that went from estimated 14bn to finally 34bn $. In France who are really experienced with nuclear, they began building their latest plant in 2007 and it's still not operational, also it went from 3.3bn to 13.2bn €. Or look at the way Hinkley Point C in the UK is getting developed. What a shit show: from estimated 18bn£ to now 47bn£ and a day where it starts producing energy not in sight.
Do you know WHY they went over budget?
The same problems faced the oil industry too, with their drilling rigs & refineries (over budget and over schedule, with gov money grants and subsidies), it's just less in the media & more spread out (more projects).
Also 10s of billions is still insignificant for any power, transport, or healthcare infrastructure in the scheme of things - we have the money, we just don't tax profit enough. And we don't talk about how the whole budget gets spent (private or public), where all the money actually goes, instead we get the highlighted cases everyone talks about. But not about the shielded industries when they fuck up.
Bullshit. If you can get the same amount of reliable power by just slapping up some solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries, then obviously the cost is not insignificant.
That sentence shows that you really aren't thinking about this as a practical means of power generation. I've found that most fission boosters don't so much like actual nuclear power, but the idea of nuclear power. It appeals to a certain kind of nerd who admires it from a physics and engineering perspective. And while it is cool technically, this tends to blind people to the actual cold realities of fission power.
There's also a lot of conspiratorial thinking among the pro-nuclear crowd. They'll blame nuclear's failures on the superstitious fear of the unwashed ignorant masses or the evil machinations of groups like Greenpeace. Then, at the same time, they'll ignore the most bone-headedly obvious cause of nuclear's failure: it's just too fucking expensive.
I'm thinking in practical terms how that still doesn't happen that often, humans allocate assets, humans don't behave logically (behavioural economics).
Nothing ever is going to be perfect and efficient, solar panels might get through vast price volatilities as well, installation costs hand already soared.
So why did we subsidised so much expensive oil infrastructure. And at higher cost of life.
Oil rigs can go into billions of dollars (and thats not even the total cost), nuclear plants tend to have the total running cost up-front (with decommission costs after the planned decades).
Humans don't make economic decisions rationally.
Well if we had no alternative I would agree with you and I would be okay if we had to subsidize nuclear (which isn't emissions free due to the mining and refining of uranium bye the way). But if a country like France, which has a pretty high rate of acceptance regarding nuclear, can't get it to work, who will? Apart from maybe authoritarian countries. Just think about the amount of plants we have to build to create a significant impact, if hardly any plant has been built in a relative short timeframe. I'd say put money in research yeah but focus on renewable, network, storage and efficiency optimization for now.
Right now we probably use more energy to produce antimatter than getting it back
Who gives a fuck about energy density beyond some physics nerds? Unless you're planning on building a flying nuclear-powered airplane, energy density is irrelevant. This is why solar is eating fission's lunch.
Yes, but energy density doesn't matter for most applications and the waste it produces is highly problematic.
"85% of used fuel rods can be recycled" is like "We can totally capture nearly all the carbon from burning fossil fuels and then remove the rest from the atmosphere by other means".
In theory it's correct. In reality it's bullshit that will never happen because it's completely uneconomical and it's just used as an excuse to not use the affordable technology we already have available and keep burning fossil fuels.
Capturing all the extra carbon from the atmosphere is not as expensive as it sounds like. It can easily be done by a few rich countries in very few decades once we stop adding more there every day.
Recycling nuclear waste is one of those problems that should be easy but nobody knows what the easy way looks like. It's impossible to tell if some breakthrough will make it viable tomorrow or if people will have to work for 200 years to get to it. But yeah, currently it's best described as "impossible".
They’re saying that plausible uses don’t necessarily translate to real world use, in practice. I have no stake in this, just translating
Fossil fuel lobbyists know very well that their business model is running into a dead end. So now their goal is to extend it as long as possible.
Today's fossil fuel propaganda isn't "Climate change from CO₂ isn't real" anymore. It's "We can totally fix this with carbon capturing later", "Renewables are actually bad for the environment" and "Better don't build renewables now as a much better solution will be available soon™ ". Yet it's not happening. Nuclear is uneconomically expensive and produces toxic waste we actually don't know how to handle safely for the amounts of time it stays toxic.
Nuclear basically only has a very limited amount of fake arguments constantly used in variations of the same chain:
"Nuclear is perfectly safe!"
"That's not the problem. The problems are the massive costs and the waste."
"But we can recycle most of the waste. Also renewables produce so much waste, too."
"But you actually don't do it because it's very expensive and makes nuclear power even less economicallly viable. Also how is recycling wind-turbine blades and solar-panels unrealistic but recycling nuclear waste is not?"
"But nuclear would be economically viable and so much cheaper if it wasn't so over-regulated. And lithium mining is so toxic to the environment."
"It's only perfectly safe because it's highly regulated. And we don't actually need lithium for grid storage where energy optimised density is not the biggest concern."
", also nuclear will totally become much cheaper with SMRs any day now..."
In the end it's always the same story. Nuclear might be safe but it is insanely expensive and produces radioactive waste. No, the fact that you can theoretically recycle the waste doesn't matter, because you don't do it. No, it will not become cheap magically soon. And no it is not expensive because it's highly regulated because without those regulations we can start at the top again and talk about how safe it is.
There are only two reasons to pretend otherwise: you work in nuclear power and need to sell your product or you work in fossil fuels and need to keep the discussion up so people keep talking instead of actually working to get rid of them. And the nuclear industry and lobby is actually not that massive compared to the fossil fuel one. So it's very clear where the vast majority of nuclear fan boys get their talking points. Have you ever thought about the fact why pro-nuclear is so massively over-represented on social media? 😉
PS: Nice, I only need to scroll ~ one page up and down to find all those fake arguments repeated here. How surprising ^/s^
It's a solved problem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aUODXeAM-k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhHHbgIy9jU
Not sure I get what you mean by "slow".
And it's not entirely shocking that we have more of the power source we've been building and less of the one we stopped building.