Safe, sure. Efficient? Not even close.
It's far, far more expensive than renewable energy. It also takes far, far longer to build a plant. Too long to meet 2030 targets even if you started building today. And in most western democracies you wouldn't even be able to get anything done by 2040 if you also add in political processes, consultation, and design of the plant.
There's a reason the current biggest proponents of nuclear energy are people and parties who previously were open climate change deniers. Deciding to go to nuclear will give fossil fuel companies maximum time to keep doing their thing. Companies which made their existence on the back of fossil fuels, like mining companies and plant operators also love it, because it doesn't require much of a change from their current business model.
Hi, I work in waste handling, and I would like to tell you about dangerous materials and what we do with them.
There are whole hosts of chemicals that are extremely dangerous, but let's stick with just cyanide, which comes from coal coking, steel making, gold mining and a dozen chemical synthesis processes.
Just like nuclear waste, there is no solution for this. We can't make it go away, and unlike nuclear waste, it doesn't get less dangerous with time. So, why isn't anyone constantly bringing up cyanide waste when talking about gold or steel or Radiopharmaceuticals? Well, that's because we already have a solution, just not "forever".
Cyanide waste, and massive amounts of other hazardous materials, are simply stored in monitored facilities. Imagine a landfill wrapped in plastic and drainage, or a building or cellar with similar measures and someone just watches it. Forever. You can even do stuff like build a golfcourse on it, or malls, or whatever.
There are tens of thousands of these facilities worldwide, and nobody gives a solitary fuck about them. It's a system that works fine, but the second someone suggests we do the same with nuclear waste, which is actually less dangerous than a great many types of chemical waste, people freak out about it not lasting forever.
If you're interested in energy solutions and haven't read the RethinkX report on the feasibility of a 100% solar, wind and battery solution, it's definitely worth taking a look.
Whilst I agree that we need to decarbonise asap with whatever we can, any new nuclear that begins planning today is likely to be a stranded asset by the time it finishes construction. That money could be better spent leaning into a renewable solution in my view.
There are two main problems in my opinion, and they are both related to the "fuel". First, uranium is rare and you often need to buy it from other countries. For instance, Russia. Not great. Second, it is not renewable energy. We can't rely on nuclear fission in the long run. Then there's also the issue of waste, which despite not being as critical as some argue, is still a problem to consider
In Spain we are starting to get negative prices every weekend for electricity thanks to renewables. France is not even close to those prices with their bet for nuclear.
Don't get me wrong, I love nuclear power. And I'm not a big fan ok what thousands of windmills made to our landscapes. But efficiency wise renewable is unbeatable nowadays.
Just because it's safe doesn't mean it's the best we have right now.
- It's massively expensive to set up
- It's massively expensive to decommission at end of life
- Almost half of the fuel you need to run them comes from a country dangerously close to Russia. (This one is slightly less of a thing now that Russia has bogged itself down in Ukraine)
- It takes a long time to set up.
- It has an image problem.
A combination of solar, wind, wave, tidal, more traditional hydro and geothermal (most of the cost with this is digging the holes. We've got a lot of deep old mines that can be repurposed) can easily be built to over capacity and or alongside adequate storage is the best solution in the here and now.
lol nuclear is really uneconommical, way too expensive and therefore really inefficient. You need 10-20 years to build a plant for energy 3 times more expensive than wind. For plants that still require mining. That produce waste we cannot store and still cannot reuse (except for one small test plant). For plants that no insurance company want to insure and energy companies dont like to build without huge government subsidies.
I know lemmy and reddit have a hard on for nuclear energy because people who dont know anything about it think its cool. But this post is ridiculous even for lemmy standards.
I'm pro nuke energy but to pretend there are no downsides is what got us into the climate mess we are in in the first place.
Cost, being a major drawback, space being another. And of course while they almost never fail, they do occasionally, and will again. And those failures are utterly catastrophic, and it'd hard to convince a community to welcome a nuclear plant, and if the community doesn't want it then it can't or shouldn't be forced onto them.
They also represent tactical strike sites in time of combat engagement. Big red X for a missile.
There are also significant environmental concerns, as we really have no good way to dispose of nuclear waste in a safe or efficient manner at this time.
It's likely that nuclear based energy is the future, but you need to discuss the bad with the good here or we are just going to end up at square one again. There are long term ramifications.
Deep level irony that you used a Simpsons meme, which takes place in a city that suffers from a Nuclear Power Plant that doesn't dispose of nuclear waste properly.
Every form of energy generation is problematic in the hands of capital. Security measures can and are often considered unnecessary expense. And even assuming that they will respect all safety standards, we still have the problem of fuel: France, for example, was only able to supply its plants at a cheap cost because of colonialism in Africa. Therefore, nuclear energy potentially has the same geopolitical problems as oil, in addition to the particular ones: dual technology that can and is applied in the military, not necessarily but mainly atomic bombs.
__
Also, I thought memes were supposed to be funny...
It's definitely not the best we have
literally the least efficient in terms of cost and time.
battery backed renewables are a fraction of the price and are being deployed right now.
https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/GenCost
edit: the tech is cool as hell. go nuts on research reactors. nuclear medicine has saved my sisters life twice.... but i'm sorry, its just not a sane solution to the climate crisis.
Thats not even funny. It's not even a meme. It's just straight outright corporate propaganda. F off with that, Pinkerton!
I would rather see more investment on better renewable tech then relaying on biohazard.
You would be surprised to know the amount of scientific research with actual solutions that aren't applied cause goes against the fossil fuel companies and whatnot. Due to the fact that they have market monopoly.
I'm sure nuclear can be super safe and efficient. The science is legit.
The problem is, at some point something critical to the operation of that plant is going to break. Could be 10 years, could be 10 days. It's inevitable.
When that happens, the owner of that plant has to make a decision to either:
- Shut down to make the necessary repairs and lose billions of dollars a minute.
- Pretend like it's not that big of a deal. Stall. Get a second opinion. Fire/harass anyone who brings it up. Consider selling to make it someone else's problem. And finally, surprise pikachu face when something bad happens.
In our current society, I don't have to guess which option the owner is going to choose.
Additionally, we live in a golden age of deregulation and weaponized incompetence. If a disaster did happen, the response isn't going to be like Chernobyl where they evacuate us and quarantine the site for hundreds of years until its safe to return. It'll be like the response to the pandemic we all just lived through. Or the response to the water crisis in Flint Michigan. Or the train derailment in East Palestine.
Considering the fallout of previous disasters, I think it's fair to say that until we solve both of those problems, we should stay far away from nuclear power. We're just not ready for it.
I agree it's safe but idk it's the best we currently have, I think that probably depends on locale.
Solar and wind (and maybe tidal?), with pumped hydro energy storage is probably cheaper, safer, and cleaner... But it requires access to a fair bit more water than a nuclear plant requires, at least initially.
But nuclear is still far better than using fossil fuels for baseline demand.
Must. Not. Feed. The. Troll.
But we don't really have it now, which is the main problem. In the time it takes to build these things (also for the money it takes), we could plaster everything full with renewables and come up with a decentralized storage solution. Plus, being dependent on Kazachstan for fissile material seems very... stupid?
Where the fuck we gonna put all the waste product? I'm not saying nuclear power is bad, far from it, but we have two problems here:
- Its cost prohibitive to build new Third Generation reactors that are fault tolerant, and moreso to assure that all the Second Generation reactors are fully fault tolerant given how adjacent they are to flood plains and fault lines in the US
- Where the fuck are we gonna put the waste at? Yucca Mountain is off the table for good, WIPP is nearing capacity for a pilot plant, and we have nothing like Onkalo planned out despite the funding being there many times over
Nah renewables are the best we've got
The good safety of nuclear in developed countries goes hand in hand with its costly regulatory environment, the risk for catastrophic breakdown of nuclear facilities is managed not by technically proficient design but by oversight and rules, which are expensive yes , but they also need to be because the people running the plant are it's weakest link in terms of safety.
Now we are entering potentially decades of conflict and natural disaster and the proposition is to build energy infrastructure that is very centralized, relies on fuel that must be acquired, and is in the hands of a relatively small amount of people, especially if their societal controll/ oversight structure breaks down. It just doesn't seem particularly reasonable to me, especially considering lead times on these things, but nice meme I guess.
I hate to say it, but regardless of one's stance, on his back should be "Public perception of Fukushima, Chernobyl, and 3-mile Island."
I say regardless of one's stance, because even if the public's perceptions are off...when we remember those incidents but not how much time was in between them or the relative infrequency of disasters, they can have outsized effects on public attitude.
@spicytuna62 It's not the best we got. The best we got is to stop the wasteful overproduction and stop letting society being about building building building.
We should rather reframe society into being about growing and localizing the economy. Focusing on living with nature, not at it's expense.
It's interesting watching the discussion in this thread evolving and polarizing. Yesterday the discussion started as 'nuclear is one solution in a portfolio of solutions to combat climate change. vs. nuclear is always bad.' and developed into 'nuclear is good and you're dumb. vs. nuclear is bad and you're evil'.
I agree on them being safe - when rules are properly adhered to, they're extremely safe, similarly to air travel. People only suspect their safety because when they do fail, they tend to fail spectacularly, again similar to air travel.
Having said that, they may be efficient to operate, but they are by no means efficient to build. They cost a lot of resources, and have a 10 year lead time - plus you need to worry about the cost of waste storage and decommissioning.
So sure, nuclear is better than fossil fuels, but you're just kicking the nonrenewable can down the road.
That time and resources would be far better spent on renewables, because that where humanity is gonna have to go long-term no matter how well any other alternatives work.
Meme propaganda? In my Lemmy feed?
It’s more likely than you think
People are kind of missing the point of the meme. The point is that Nuclear is down there along with renewables in safety and efficiency. It's lacking the egregious cover up in the original meme, even if it has legitimate concerns now. And due to society's ever increasing demand for electricity, we will heavily benefit from having a more scalable solution that doesn't require covering and potentially disrupting massive amounts of land before their operations can be scaled up to meet extraordinary demand. Wind turbines and solar panels don't stop working when we can't use their electricity either, so it's not like we can build too many of them or we risk creating complications out of peak hours. Many electrical networks aren't built to handle the loads. A nuclear reactor can be scaled down to use less fuel and put less strain on the electrical network when unneeded.
It should also be said that money can't always be spent equally everywhere. And depending on the labor required, there is also a limit to how manageable infrastructure is when it scales. The people that maintain and build solar panels, hydro, wind turbines, and nuclear, are not the same people. And if we acknowledge that climate change is an existential crisis, we must put our eggs in every basket we can, to diversify the energy transition. All four of the safest and most efficient solutions we have should be tapped into. But nuclear is often skipped because of outdated conceptions and fear. It does cost a lot and takes a while to build, but it fits certain shapes in the puzzle that none of the others do as well as it does.
My issue with nuclear energy isn't that it's dangerous or that it's inherently bad. The world needs a stable source of energy that compensates for wind and solar fluctuations anyways. For the current realistic alternatives that's either going to be nuclear or coal/oil/natural gas. We have nothing else for this purpose, end of discussion.
My problem is the assumption underlying this discussion about nuclear energy that it somehow will solve all of our problems or that it will somehow allow us to continue doing business as usual. That's categorically not the case. The climate crisis has multiple fronts that need to be dealt with and the emissions is just one of them. Even if we somehow managed to find the funds and resources to replace all non renewable energy with nuclear, we would still have solved just 10% of the problem, and considering that this cheap new energy will allow us to increase our activities and interventions in the planet, the situation will only worsen.
Nuclear energy is of course useful, but it's not the answer. Never has technology been the answer for a social and political issue. We can't "science and invent" our way out of this, it's not about the tech, it's about who decides how it will be used, who will profit from it, who and how much will be affected by it etc. If you want to advocate for a way to deal with the climate crisis you have to propose a complete social and political plan that will obviously include available technologies, so stop focusing on technologies and start focusing on society and who takes the decisions.
One simple example would be the following: no matter how green your energy is, if the trend in the US is to have increasingly bigger cars and no public transport, then the energy demands will always increase and no matter how many nuclear plants you build, they will only serve as an additional source and not as a replacement. So no matter how many plants you build, the climate will only deteriorate.
This is literally how the people in charge have decided it will work. Any new developing energy source that is invented serves only to increase the consumption, not to replace previous technologies. That's the case with solar and wind as well. So all of this discussion you all make about nuclear Vs oil or whatever is literally irrelevant. The problem is social and political, not technological.
No, it's not the best we have. Solar and wind are way safer, cost less and don't produce waste.
Sure, nuclear power is safe until it isn't. Fukushima and Chernobyl are examples of that. Nuclear plants in Ukraine were at risk during Russian attacks. Even if you have a modern plant, you don't really think that under capitalism there is an incentive to care properly for them in the long run. Corners will be cut.
Besides that they produce so much waste that has to be: a) being transported b) stored somewhere
Looking at the US railroad system and how it is pushed beyond it's capacity right now and seeing how nuclear waste sites are literally rotting and contaminating everything around them I'd say it's one of the least safe energies. Especially if you have clean alternatives that don't produce waste.
Literally one of the safest sources of energy production in existence.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/charted-safest-and-deadliest-energy-sources/
Nuclear waste is still an unsolved problem that absolutely no one wants to touch with a ten foot pole. Also nuclear power is a pretty expensive method of power generation and can't be insured, leaving all risk of disaster on the shoulders of society. To be clear: society will be pretty fucked when a nuclear disaster happens anyway.
It's a lot better than coal, though.
Solar and wind will always need batteries for times of low output, until we get more resilient and larger capacity batteries we will need a backbone to support the electricity grid to avoid having to overbuild battery capacity.
As of right now natural gas is that backbone but that could change and very well be nuclear energy until we figure out something like mass produced solid state batteries.
I like your pitch black humour.
Idealists and reality. Natural opposites.
Renewables are unreliable. That's a fact. Yes you have moments, days even weeks where they can deliver what is currently required. In total output. Not yet in delivers when you actually need it output.
Sure you can have 100% renewable generation for a 24hr period, but if your generation is during the day and your usage is spread into the night, you're not really covering your needs, no matter how good it looks on paper.
It is also your current usage. Now do the math and replace all fossil fuel usage with electric alternatives. Cars, buses, trucks, heating, cooking, etc. Now calculate just how much more renewables you need to cover all that in ideal circumstances.
Now do the same for windless winter days.
If we're going to step away from fossil fuels entirely, you're going to have to accept nuclear as an option. Thinking we'll manage only with renewables is a dream. While you dream, we're burning fossil fuels non-stop. Cuz that's reality.
You can have renewables with nuclear, or renewables with fossil fuels. You're actively choosing renewables with fossil fuels.
If the goal of this meme was to start a discussion pointing out all of the shortcomings or nuclear or was very successful.
Plenty of benefits, but pretty far from problem free.
When can we start talking about fusion again?
Iam so sick of this conversation. It is not cheap, it’s not clear where to let the waste and in the end it’s even dangerous. Don’t let some populists make you think nuklear energy is good. France made a big mistake to go all in. All projects take longer than expected and cost much more than calculated.
No it is not. If you calculate in the future money tax payers have to pay to keep the nuclear waste safe (for thousands of years) or the cost of a larger incident like Chernobyl or Fukushima which also has to be paid by the tax payers then the 'cheap nuklear power' is not so cheap as it looks like...
What? Do you live in the 1950s? Have you heard of nuclear accidents? How many people did wind and solar energy kill so far?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accidents_by_country
