this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2026
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okay but also, those are nuclear cooling towers in the foreground, right? that's another renewable energy source. like, id be fine with the stuff coming out of the cooling towers bc it's water. don't care if it ruins the skyline.
Nuclear fission is not renewable. It relies on mined uranium, which is rather limited.
Also, cooling towers are not seen exclusively with nuclear power plants. Many chemical refineries need lots of process heat and need to get rid of that as well. Evaporating water to steam is a great way to disperse excess heat.
Any kind of heat power plant also needs some way to expel excess steam, so oil and gas plants have them as well, just usually different designs.
Has anyone ever tried using the heat from those chemical refineries to supplement a power grid? We convert fossil fuels into electricity by boiling water to turn turbines, so pretty much anything that creates adequate heat could be a potential energy source, right?
A HRSG (heat recovery steam generator) type boiler uses waste heat from a gas turbine to generate steam that can in turn spin a steam turbine, so, kinda. You'd just need to tightly control the temperatures and flow of heating medium (flue gasses or process heat I guess) which I'd imagine is the problem. We pronounce HRSG's as "herzig" at my combined cycle plant. They massively improve efficiency by basically spinning two turbines for the price of one. Problem is they still rely on natural gas or diesel to operate that initial gas turbine. Coke oven boilers are also a thing but I've never personally worked directly with them, just learned about them. They use biproduct waste heat from making coke (component of steel) to operate boilers/make process steam/spin turbines. Im sure there are other systems too but there could always be more/better. Those are just the ones I thought of quick.
The uranium is gonna continue to undergo fission, whether we mine it or not, whether we enrich/refine it or not. At that point it's like collecting energy from our surroundings, really functionally no different than harvesting geothermal, wind, solar, hydro, etc.
Exactly, nuclear is no less renewable than solar. Where does everyone think the solar energy comes from? Nuclear.
We might as well capture the uranium decay, as you said, it will release the energy whether we collect it or not.
That's such a disingenuous presentation of the facts. Of course there is no such thing as truly renewable energy, but there is a difference in kind between a supply of energy that is practically inexhaustible on the timescale of human civilisation (what people mean when they say renewable) and energy produced from a limited fuel supply on earth (non renewable).
Solar (and its byproduct energies wind, hydro, biomass), tidal, geothermal are not in the same category as fission of rare heavy metals.
I say all this as someone pro-nuclear who agrees that we should use it while it is still fissionable.
We are talking about dozens of millennia of uranium supply on Earth. Other fuel types and nuclear technologies look to extend that into billions of years. For all functional purposes, it's infinite. Just as solar energy is functionally infinite.
As I said: Nuclear is Renewable, in the exact same way everyone uses the term.
Fusion and fission are two different processes.
I think the point he's trying to make is that the sun technically has a finite lifetime, albeit in that case one that's long enough to be functionally irrelevant from the perspective of human time scales.
Radioactive decay is not the same as fission. It's not entirely unrelated, but definitely a different process.
Different rates of decay vs the natural state.
And if you have to always evaporate a lot of water to cool your power station you will have a problem in a drought, you will either have to turn off the power station or use a lot of water for it when you already don't have enough.
It's another advantage of wind turbines and solar panels since they don't need to be cooled like that.