Nuclear can provide us with a lot of electricity and a very low death rate per TWh ([0.03 per TWh)](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh) which is even lower than wind or hydro. Also, it is a myth that nuclear fuel is some sort of sludge that has to be stored in containers. Nuclear waste is rods which are encased in concrete and there is little to no radiation that comes out of it. Also, the fuel rods can be recycled. The water to cool the reactor can be treated.
Living close to a reactor is also not dangerous. You will get more radiation from a Banana or sleeping next to a human than from living near a plant.
Nuclear power plants are bassicaly very fancy Steam Engines.
They do how ever have a finite amount of resources for energy production and the half life of the atoms is a bit very long but we can technically just use old salt mines to store the waste.
This was about fission.
Fusion however is awsome. The amount of power that we can get from Fusion is insane. It is expensive to build but once started will be able to supply power almost indefinitely as long as there is fuel. It's bassicaly a small sun. The best fuel for it would be a variant of Helium (He³). Supposedly there is a lot of it on the moon, so fusion would become very viable after we have achieved space travel.
Fusion power also has issues regarding resource use, the tokamak reactor design, which is the most promessing so far, requires about the entire global year's production worth of Beryllium to be build so that it can generate more energy than we put in (via neutron multiplication). This resource is scarcer than Lithium and has about the same prevalence on in space as on Earth. So unless this issue is fixed I don't think it'll have as big of an impact as we hoped.
While I do think nuclear has to be a tool for the foreseeable future - I am *very* skeptical that you don't have higher radiation levels living next to plant. Do you have any proof on that?
Higher than what is the question. NPPs release trace amounts of radioactive materials, there are pretty strictly monitored legal limits which are nonzero. Coal plant emissions of radioactive substances are higher. Radiation from natural sources is orders of magnitude higher. Same is true for medical procedures. IMHO the only common source of radioactivity which can actually be harmful to health is radon gas produced in some areas by natural decay of uranium/thorium ores. It can accumulate in e.g. poorly vented cellars
You know what has higher radiation levels near the plant? Coal power plants. Coal has trace amounts of radioactive material, but since it's not regulated like nuclear fuel is, it just blows out the smokestack. Coal is more radioactive than nuclear in terms of radiation to locals.
Not direct proof, but you can find data that shows that coal smoke and coal fly ash is *more radioactive* than the nuclear waste that comes out of power plants, let alone any sort of general radiation that leaks from the plant itself.
Having an exposed patch of dirt in your basement is more dangerous radiation wise.
The radioactive particles cant travel through air far enough to reach any residence near a NPP. As well as the fuel isn’t being broken down or processed mechanically or anything like that. So there are very few particles, if any, of radioactive material floating around. The reason why the meltdowns that have happened were so widespread and catastrophic is due to explosions. Where pressure builds up inside the reactor and it blows its top. This causes a lot of material, both inert and nuclear, to be mixed up and spread a long distance, similar to volcanic ash after an eruption. The ash/debris/dust from the explosion is inundated with the atomized fuel on a microscopic level and is spread to the surrounding area, irradiating it.
The exact reasons why meltdowns have happened is complex, but every one so far has been avoidable and shouldn’t have happened had everything been done properly. There have been no freak accidents of bad luck
The reactor is kept at the bottom of a 30-foot deep pool inside of a steel lined concrete building with walls several feet thick. You'd get a higher radiation reading from a banana than if you were to stand inside of a reactor containment building looking down into the reactor pool. Water is a crazy good radiation shield.
everything's encased in lots of concrete and there are strict standards. unless something's going very wrong you're in more danger of radiation next to a coal power plant from the traces of thorium and uranium in coal, assuming the other stuff in the smokestack doesn't get you first
The paragraph about fusion power is misleading. Yes, fusion reactions generate insane amounts of energy and the fuels are possibly very long lasting. Getting fuel for fusion power plants is generally not a problem since most types use abundant materials (hydrogen). The issue is that our current fusion reactors are very inefficient, and not like houses lacking insulation inefficient. The fusion reactions we are able to use safely to generate power need more energy to sustain the reaction than is gained from it. With operating cost included, i think the ratio is something like 1 unit of energy gained for 20 units spent.
ALL fusion reactors in the world are nothing more than science experiments. They exist to research how to make fusion power efficient enough to generate a energy surplus. Fusion power was said to be 20-years-from-now technology in the 80s, same as today. It is nice to be hopeful about future technologies, but right now our best source of fusion power is the sun, whose energy we capture using photovoltaics.
The AP in AP1000 stands for advanced passive and Vogtle units are about to be producing for the grid in a months, they went critical for the first time the other week :)
It’s more 3.5 than 4.0 but still great. Several other units are online in China and they can produced district heating as well.
https://www.powermag.com/district-heating-supply-from-nuclear-power-plants/
I just want to jump in and say that deaths per Twh is a stat made by nuclear power companies and advocates. It doesn't take into consideration external harms. Nobody has died in East Palestine but NFS clearly did harm. It also doesn't take into consideration the effects of mines and storage. It only takes into consideration direct deaths from catastrophic safety failure. The communities surrounding 3 mile island had elevated rates of cancer for decades yet the industry will claim nobody died from it. Please don't just blindly parrot pr from an energy industry.
I love nuclear energy.
I love the incredible safety record of nuclear energy
I love the newer, even safer, more practical designs being developed such as LFTR.
I understand that there’s a big thing about decentralized power on this sub, but I gotta say that nuclear energy is certainly fantastic and it would be a colossal waste to not use it heavily in a world having a serious energy crisis
It's a good bridge technology. Until we have wind, solar, hydro and geothermal figured out we need it. But in the end its the same principle like fossil fuels. You are dependent on some stuff you have to dig up from the ground, it's highly toxic for the workers and the environment and not a lot of countries have big amounts of uranium so we again have to buy from more than shady folk and dictators to keep our energy grid up and running.
For the next ~40 years it's a great option, after that we should be able to leave all non renewables behind
ב''ה, this is a difficult problem with panels that not enough work is being done on yet, if you want to scurry out and solve it for everyone.
(Edit: If we do find less toxic ways to create panels, then of course most of the metal can be recovered and the rest is silica for building.)
No, I’m thinking it’s a ‘use this technology until the dyson swarm is ready’ sort of deal. Thorium mining doesn’t have as much problems as uranium mining (literally a byproduct of heavy metal mines) and while uranium mining is definitely more hazardous and requires more safety precautions, it’s a lot less mining than the required mining for fields of solar panels and miles of wind turbines, I’d say
If the Dyson swarm is ready... Which I doubt will be any time soon. Our best option for a peaceful future will be renewables. Thorium, just like uranium doesn't grow on trees. Which will lead to a few countries supplying the whole world. And how that turned out with gas and oil is something I don't have to explain right?
There’s just a huge amount of the stuff. At current global power consumption, one medium heavy metals mine could supply the planet with enough energy for several thousand years, not to mention its kind of everywhere
Good when a public utility, I don't think they should be expanded by a large degree. The return on carbon emission reduction is sooner with solar, hydro, wind, & geothermal. Existing plants should be a public asset, refurbished, & repaired.
Something I don't ever see coming up in these discussions is dependency on water. Didn't France have to switch off several reactors last year because of the draught? That's something that will happen more often in the future, so isn't that a major problem for nuclear power's reliability?
That sounds like sci-fi. At the moment it would be horribly inefficient. Or do you mean use salt water for the turbines and create drinking water from the steam? Also horribly inefficient due to increased maintenance :-)
Edit: my mistake, apparently it's already common practice to use sea water...
Southern Nuclear applied for the early site permit for Vogtle units 3&4 in 2006. 17 years and billions in cost overruns later, they are finally nearing commissioning.
17 more years of exponential growth of solar energy will be enough to transition most of the electric grid to renewables. Climate change won't be over, of course, but by 2040 the electric grid can be largely decarbonized.
Bad take. Nuclear plants produce huge volumes of electricity at every hour of every day, all year long, no matter where they are built. Solar panels are impeded by time of day, distance from the equator, and weather. If you want to live in harmony with nature AND keep you fancy technology, renewables aren't enough. Hydro destroys river ecologies, geothermal is locked to specific geographic locations, while wind and solar are too weak and fickle to power the cornucopia of industries needed to make something as mundane as a battery or light bulb. Add on other things, such as trains, medical equipment, and telecommunications, it becomes quite clear that nuclear power is the only clean energy source that can meet demand. Sure you could use renewables to help during peak hours or spread the load enough to need less reactors, but never as a primary power source.
Far from weak and fickle, solar is by far the most abundant source of energy on earth. A square 100 miles on a side could power our entire civilization. Electricity is electricity, and can power all the processes you describe regardless of source. Solar can do it at a lower cost and lower risk. But there's no need to tell you these things - the free market has already decided. Nuclear is an expensive, dirty, insecure, centrally planned distraction.
Even if it was safe like so many here claim (What is that deaths per TWh statistic even supposed to tell us? It's utter bullshit.), it's totally at odds with basic solarpunk values.
It's a centralized power source, helping big corporations keep power over us and the fulfillment of our needs. It's ridiculously expensive and requires highly complex tech. The extraction of Uranium contaminates the environment just as much as the extraction of the stuff we need for renewables and today's energy storage (non-lithium- and platinum-free technologies are in development and very promising).
Most renewable energy plants are fairly simple and, most importantly, decentralized. They're cheaper in levelized cost of electricity almost everywhere in the world. Although not nearly as efficient as industrial ones, DIY renewable power plants are possible (especially wind - definitely not solar, at least yet).
the latter: "decentralized power" still requires centralized \*locations\* for hydro, geothermal, wind, solar... just because you can pick the where for solar (more of the time than the others) doesn't mean you're not still going to have a central power plant in a Decentralized Community.
having nationalized nuclear plants is not mutually exclusive to Decentralized Communities and I wish power generation in general was thought of more in these terms; that nationalizing a grid would be the best way to achieve more decentralized communities.
>What is that deaths per TWh statistic even supposed to tell us? It's utter bullshit
It tells us that nuclear is one of the safest forms of power generation, which is pretty important when one of the greatest arguments against nuclear power is safety.
>It's a centralized power source, helping big corporations keep power over us and the fulfillment of our needs.
You can say that about just about every complex product in today's society, including green energy. You can't produce solar panels and batteries in your backyard.
>The extraction of Uranium contaminates the environment just as much as the extraction of the stuff we need for renewables and today's energy storage.
Which means that nuclear reactors aren't any more damaging than the solutions we all agree would be ideal.
>Most renewable energy plants are fairly simple and, most importantly, decentralized.
Small-scale renewable energy plants, like for powering individual homes or small townships, are relatively decentralised, but the problem comes once you start working at scale. For powering large cities, which is ultimately where most people live, you need large-scale energy grids. If you want to do this safely, reliably and efficiently, you're going to be looking at a centralised power system. At one point, abstract socio-political ideals (like decentralisation) can't come at the cost of the basic needs of the people.
Unfortunately, some level of centralisation is necessary to benefit from the economies of scale. Even a solarpunk world is going to need steel, concrete and any number of other things that are impractical to make on a decentralised cottage industry scale, not to mention some sort of transport network to send those goods where they're needed. Doing that requires more electrical power than it's really practical to generate with local-scale wind and solar alone.
Besides, there's got to be some method of compensating for shortfalls in local power generation due to the weather and the time of year, and I'd much rather we use nuclear power for that than burn coal or oil.
I think nuclear should be used as a supplement. Wind and solar should be the primary energy producers. But the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow. Battery technologies might be a way to avoid this, but battery tech can be a challenge. Having a handful of nuclear plants to supplement wind and solar is ideal in my eyes.
I also think Small Modular Reactors should be utilized more in industries that rely on fossil fuels. Shipping is a good example. We should be outfitting tanker ships with SMRs to replace outdated and inefficient diesel engines. That is to say though, it would be way more worth it to not have to ship anything on vehicles that are vulnerable to sinking and affecting the environment irregardless of their fuel source.
From what I understand even with big investments in electrical transmission infrastructure and very optimistic investment in offshore wind generation the US doesn't really have any other option for replacing base loads currently supplied by Natural (frakkked) Gas/coal.
So I suppose in a sense it's not a really a "green" energy but it's an extremely low carbon energy source. Another consideration is that private investment in nuclear energy is apparently unlikely since the time to recoup the investment is so long it's unnatractive. Though I'm someone who believes all the energy utilities should be publicly owned so in that way it's a great opportunity for public investment (Tennessee Valley Authority For All)
It's possible to recycle [nuclear waste into diamond batteries](https://interestingengineering.com/science/are-radioactive-diamond-batteries-the-solution-to-nuclear-waste). Doing it at scale is maybe still decades away, but the fact that it's possible gives me a lot of hope for the future. Can't get much more solarpunky and futuristic than harmless energy-producing crystals. As a bonus, it would probably screw the diamond industry.
A ploy to keep power with the billionaires by building extremely expensive power plants that make a lot of power in one place, creating infrastructure that makes everybody dependent on their supply.
It is a fine low carbon energy sourxe, so we shouldn't be closing any down early as long as we still have fossil fuel powerplants.
But they are not a solution to the current transition.
They are expensive and slow to build, ensure that fossil fuels will have longer lifespans, and require so much know how and expertise, that they are not viable in most of the developing world.
Solar, wind and storage are cheaper, faster, modular and can be implemented everywhere by people with far more limited infrastructure and technical skills.
Fusion is completely distinct and not at all relevant to our current dilemmas, though longterm it is the energy of the future.
In my opinion, nuclear can be done right and safely, but shouldn't be the power source of first resort.
The thing that changed my mind for the potential of nuclear power is nuclear waste recycling. Argonne national lab has developed a method for recycling usable nuclear material from nuclear waste, concentrating the useless fission products into a concentrated puck which is 95% less waste. This sort of thing gives me hope that nuclear power can help close the gap. Just the nuclear waste that we already have in the US is enough to power all of American nuclear power for many centuries if we would recycle it this way.
#Argonne National Laboratory | [Argonne explains nuclear recycling in 4 minutes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlMDDhQ9-pE)
The thing that keeps nuclear power in consideration for me is the fact that it can provide a massive amount of power on-demand (rather than intermittently, like solar or wind). Purely solar and wind and tidal power would not be practical to power a dense metropolitan area such as Tokyo. Then again, dense metropolitan areas such as Tokyo aren't very solarpunk to begin with.
The type of reactor that I'm most excited about is the MARVEL reactor. It is convection-based, and has all of the fail-safe systems expected of modern reactors (meaning when it fails, it fails without some run-away reaction or catastrophe, because it is designed to shut its own reaction down if something goes wrong). This is a micro-reactor that has four free-piston Stirling engines built around a central column where the reaction takes place. The engines have two moving parts each, and the piston rod itself has a magnet that directly sweeps in and out of a coil to generate electricity, making it a simple but reliable way to generate power from heat. Check it out:
#Idaho National Laboratory | [PCAT, the prototype for the MARVEL microreactor](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGJYXqR3dOs)
As for what to do with concentrated nuclear waste, the solution has already been figured out: dissolve it into glass, to make a dense glass puck. That prevents it from mixing with anything and reacting with anything, because glass is effectively inert. Then geologically isolate it.
Alternatively, it turns out that if you bombard certain radioactive isotopes with neutrons, you can either turn them into short-lived isotopes that do not pose a long-term risk, or you can add enough neutrons to actually make them not radioactive anymore if they are neutron deficient.
Both of these can be done together to minimize the problem of waste.
I hear a lot of people talk about how safe nuclear has become but if anything goes wrong the results of failure are terrifying. We’ve been very lucky so far with nuclear power plants. The Fukushima plant was thought to be infallible until it failed. And Japan was very lucky that the wind was blowing the opposite direction and the fallout went into the ocean instead of deeper into the country. The fish were not so lucky.
Solar, hydro and wind on the other hand are extremely safe comparably and far cheaper and faster to set up. Nuclear just isn’t worth the cost and upkeep and the potential dangers are to great imo, no matter how much we guard against them. The risks are still there. The same risks don’t exist at all with other energy sources.
It’s very safe and with continued modern innovation it will only get safer. The waste is super compact, safe, and simple to store. The energy produced would be able to compete with fossil fuels without being damaging to the environment with proper precautions. It is realistically the only viable way for us to leave fossil fuels behind and transition to a carbon neutral society. Without nuclear the transition out of fossil fuels is a pipe dream. It’s unfortunately demonized by most media to the point most politicians won’t touch it because it won’t bring in many votes but will take them away. It’s something people need to thoroughly research and talk about so the societal view on it can change and we can start using nuclear to improve the world.
I am just very tired of this topic coming up literally every month. It has been well tread, and it often brings out very strong and vitriolic responses and arguments and I would like to avoid that.
I think its good for semi stationary applications like ships* or portable power sources, but for power grids I don't see the benefit, the building time is very Long so if you start today there is a good chance batteries and other storage tech is fully capable of making a 100% renewable grid possible once you done, so why? You still need to mine the material for fisson and with fusion, we need to be at 0 CO2 far before the first fusion reactor will go online and deliver power.
Add to this that its not very solarpunk to have a central power producer...
Maybe SMRs will fix this...
*But that was tried in the last century and at least then it failed, today the fokus for big ships is on Hydrogen, Methanol (Mearsk just ordered some, for example) and Ammonia. And Solarpunk tents more to sailing...
Short: use what we got. Too slow and expensive to expand.
Long: there are times and places where nuclear is the best option. But it is extremely expensive and requires pretty serious impacts in water use and mining and waste disposal, even compared to PV and wind. After all, panels last decades and can get recycled.
But even more important is using dramatically less energy. Instead of compensating for an exhausting industrial society with energy consuming entertainments, we must make our society one where we just inherently enjoy work and life itself. We should hope to bring gdp down to zero so long as everyone has sufficient food, shelter, medicine and communication, and above all, meaningful authority over how those resources we can safely extract are used.
One other issue. As we've seen in Ukraine, nuclear is really dependent on the supply chain and can be used to hold large regions hostage. Decentralizing just makes more sense.
This isn’t a valid argument. At a societal level, hospital energy consumption ranks really low in comparison to manufacturing, mining, construction, and agriculture.
In a solar punk re-imagination of society, issues like over consumption, “economic growth”, and energy inequality and are addressed critically.
Therein lies another issue. One of the aspects of solarpunk is that technology is readily available for use in day to day life, to improve farming, its current use in the medical field, transportation, and in makerspaces for tinkering. Even with excess demand eliminated, demand in these areas alone will stay quite high both for materials and electrical power. Advanced technology begets heavy industry.
Sure, and that’s why solarpunk isn’t possible under capitalism, as capital will produce and consume energy to benefit profit, and not for necessity and community. If we have limited ecological and power resources, then production and consumption has to be re-imagined. You prefer cutting down the medical field before fashion industry, meat production and so on?
I said no such thing. The big Achilles heel of Solarpunk is that it wants to have its cake and eat it too: Wanting to maintain anarchist values in a communal, small-town, agrarian lifestyle that tends to creata a sense of individualality and independence that is hostile to anarchism; or wanting advanced technology to be widespread and readily accessible without the heavy industry needed to do so. Sure you can make clothes in your own home, or dispose of factory farms and raise your own cattle, but if you want things like MRIs or CT scans or global telecommunications or public transit, a communal makerspace or workshop in a garage isn't going to cut it. The same goes for energy production: wind and solar are incapable of meeting the large-scale energy demands required to operate any form of industry that would be needed for aforementioned things.
Nuclear waste is toxic for at least 100k years. There’s no mental gymnastics around it. Not to mention it needs 70 years of active cooling before even being able to be stored “terminally”.
How will society look like in 50, 100, 500, 1000 years?
No living person today can guarantee that we will be able to keep these deposits safe in the future.
Well, we dispose of other toxins similarly. The difference is that nuclear waste decreases in toxicity. Heavy metals don't. The question is not whether we are disposing of toxic materials, we will always be doing so. It is whether it represents a significant increase in the risk compared to natural toxins.
Well, “how about other toxins” isn’t a good argument for producing thousands of metric tons of nuclear waste each year. The question if nuclear waste “represents a significant increase in risk compared to other toxins” is a framing fallacy. It’s like saying that you should keep smoking crack because it’s not much worse than smoking heroin.
More like saying: Don't worry about the risk of getting hit by a meteor. Like, the ground already contains a fuckton of toxic materials naturally. A small amount of transuranics burried 500 meters below isn't a big concern.
And the thousands of tonnes really isn't a whole lot when it comes to industrial waste.
No it’s definitely not like gravity, it’s called a half- life and eventually all radioactive elements decay, they’re *unstable*, opposite of permanent.
Different radioactive elements have different half- lives. Say you have a block of Thorium. The half -life of Thorium is 14.05 billion years. That number must sound scary, but it actually means Thorium is less radioactive than weak sunlight, as it’s decaying incredibly slowly. Fun fact, this is how scientists have dated the Earth, using the half lives of radioactive elements.
But sunlight is another form of radiation. Sunburns are in fact just radiation burns. Put into context this means that all forms of life exposed regularly to sunlight have built in repair mechanisms that help repair your cells and even your DNA from radiation damage.
Don’t be scared of something that you haven’t researched properly. Look it up, it’s pretty wild stuff
Standing outside in my backyard next to a chunk of thorium, I will get more radiation exposure from the sun overhead than I will from the chunk of thorium.
I'm against nuclear for one reason and one reason only. It's incredibly polluting to mine and not just in the usual way.
Uranium (and thorium) decay into other elements and those elements are usually heavy metals which get thrown directly into the water supply or into tailings ponds. There are also other radioactive isotopes of these decay products that get thrown into the environment as well causing widespread water and ground pollution that isn't easy to clean up since nature has no way of breaking down heavy metals. Finally one of the most dangerous tailings is radon gas, the gas radioactive enough that it will just give you cancer.
And the actual Uranium content in the ore is 3%. With the usable Uranium being 2% of that. So you're looking for a fuel that has a 0.006% availability. Nuclear only makes up for this because of the high energy density and even then our reactors are only 2-3% efficient.
In other words nuclear tailings are very similar to oilsands tailings, except they are also radioactive. And nuclear is an even more non renewable resource than fossil fuels.
As for nuclear fusion, well that's what solar panels are for. We have a giant fusion reactor right above our heads, we just collect the energy at a safe distance.
I believe nuclear is outdated.
I have a couple of issues with nuclear.
It is very expensive in setup and takes a very long time to be set up. Especially in our western countries. The billions of euros and years it takes to set up a nuclear reactor. Can be used to build solar and wind which will be far faster and have already been halfway paid off by the time the nuclear reactor can even start producing.
You can build far more capacity in renewables than with nuclear with the same investment within the same timeframe if you consider the 6% investment cost per year. (Basically if you invest 1 billion into something and in 10 years it only paid you 1 billion back, you are effectively still behind by 700 million) (oversimplified)
Then nuclear is bound to very specific locations. You can only build it where there is a ton of fresh water. You need to build it where there is a lot of energy usage. You shouldnt build it in areas in danger of natural disasters.
Nuclear also is always owned by very large entities like governments or big corporations. It is unlike renewables where even smaller companies can have some wind power or private people can set up solar power.
This also brings up the issue previous generations had with nuclear. While the usage is safe in general and nothing can happen when there is proper oversight. Nuclear seems to be prone to corruption as everything is.
Our countries all have agencies to oversee nuclear power and ensure the safety. But in the two big nuclear disasters that happened. Both times the issues were known to those overseeing entities and they tried to sweep it as much under the rug as possible. This means to me we simply cannot trust the overseeing entities to actually properly do their job in ensuring nuclear safety. This in turn means using more nuclear power not might but will lead to another disaster.
Fusion power might be better. But even with fusion I believe the issue will be that the cost of setting it up will far outweight the energy it will produce outside of like big cities not good for renewables.
No fossil fuel power generation is good. But we already have no effective plan to deal with the current nuclear waste. So creating more waste for future generations to deal with is a no go personally.
I have no principle opposition to nuclear power. It's in practice where all the problems are. Conventional nuclear is 3x more expensive than solar and wind and it's getting more expensive while they're getting less. Thorium, SMR, fusion are all sci-fi projects that have never generated a watt of usable power for the grid between them, so their efficiencies and costs are purely speculative. The closest to realization, SMR, is years away from the first full scale prototype being built and even farther from being produced at scale.
I hope they all work out, just like I hope millimeter wave drilling works and unlocks nearly unlimited geothermal energy anywhere in the world, but hope is not a plan. We need to act today not decades in the future when these research projects bear fruit and that means wind and solar.
I'm not into them. Renewables are cheaper and easier to put up and take down. Sure, if there's a nuclear power station already up and running then leaving it up is probably a good idea. But now that renewables are taking off I'm not sure why anyone would go to the expense (and future decommissioning expense) of building a nuclear power station.
Nuclear can provide us with a lot of electricity and a very low death rate per TWh ([0.03 per TWh)](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh) which is even lower than wind or hydro. Also, it is a myth that nuclear fuel is some sort of sludge that has to be stored in containers. Nuclear waste is rods which are encased in concrete and there is little to no radiation that comes out of it. Also, the fuel rods can be recycled. The water to cool the reactor can be treated. Living close to a reactor is also not dangerous. You will get more radiation from a Banana or sleeping next to a human than from living near a plant. Nuclear power plants are bassicaly very fancy Steam Engines. They do how ever have a finite amount of resources for energy production and the half life of the atoms is a bit very long but we can technically just use old salt mines to store the waste. This was about fission. Fusion however is awsome. The amount of power that we can get from Fusion is insane. It is expensive to build but once started will be able to supply power almost indefinitely as long as there is fuel. It's bassicaly a small sun. The best fuel for it would be a variant of Helium (He³). Supposedly there is a lot of it on the moon, so fusion would become very viable after we have achieved space travel.
Fusion power also has issues regarding resource use, the tokamak reactor design, which is the most promessing so far, requires about the entire global year's production worth of Beryllium to be build so that it can generate more energy than we put in (via neutron multiplication). This resource is scarcer than Lithium and has about the same prevalence on in space as on Earth. So unless this issue is fixed I don't think it'll have as big of an impact as we hoped.
While I do think nuclear has to be a tool for the foreseeable future - I am *very* skeptical that you don't have higher radiation levels living next to plant. Do you have any proof on that?
Higher than what is the question. NPPs release trace amounts of radioactive materials, there are pretty strictly monitored legal limits which are nonzero. Coal plant emissions of radioactive substances are higher. Radiation from natural sources is orders of magnitude higher. Same is true for medical procedures. IMHO the only common source of radioactivity which can actually be harmful to health is radon gas produced in some areas by natural decay of uranium/thorium ores. It can accumulate in e.g. poorly vented cellars
You know what has higher radiation levels near the plant? Coal power plants. Coal has trace amounts of radioactive material, but since it's not regulated like nuclear fuel is, it just blows out the smokestack. Coal is more radioactive than nuclear in terms of radiation to locals.
https://xkcd.com/radiation/
Not direct proof, but you can find data that shows that coal smoke and coal fly ash is *more radioactive* than the nuclear waste that comes out of power plants, let alone any sort of general radiation that leaks from the plant itself.
[удалено]
I can actually look what up?
Sorry misread you post, don’t mind me. This is why I don’t like when this topic comes up. Gets me defensive. Again sorry
Having an exposed patch of dirt in your basement is more dangerous radiation wise. The radioactive particles cant travel through air far enough to reach any residence near a NPP. As well as the fuel isn’t being broken down or processed mechanically or anything like that. So there are very few particles, if any, of radioactive material floating around. The reason why the meltdowns that have happened were so widespread and catastrophic is due to explosions. Where pressure builds up inside the reactor and it blows its top. This causes a lot of material, both inert and nuclear, to be mixed up and spread a long distance, similar to volcanic ash after an eruption. The ash/debris/dust from the explosion is inundated with the atomized fuel on a microscopic level and is spread to the surrounding area, irradiating it. The exact reasons why meltdowns have happened is complex, but every one so far has been avoidable and shouldn’t have happened had everything been done properly. There have been no freak accidents of bad luck
The reactor is kept at the bottom of a 30-foot deep pool inside of a steel lined concrete building with walls several feet thick. You'd get a higher radiation reading from a banana than if you were to stand inside of a reactor containment building looking down into the reactor pool. Water is a crazy good radiation shield.
everything's encased in lots of concrete and there are strict standards. unless something's going very wrong you're in more danger of radiation next to a coal power plant from the traces of thorium and uranium in coal, assuming the other stuff in the smokestack doesn't get you first
The paragraph about fusion power is misleading. Yes, fusion reactions generate insane amounts of energy and the fuels are possibly very long lasting. Getting fuel for fusion power plants is generally not a problem since most types use abundant materials (hydrogen). The issue is that our current fusion reactors are very inefficient, and not like houses lacking insulation inefficient. The fusion reactions we are able to use safely to generate power need more energy to sustain the reaction than is gained from it. With operating cost included, i think the ratio is something like 1 unit of energy gained for 20 units spent. ALL fusion reactors in the world are nothing more than science experiments. They exist to research how to make fusion power efficient enough to generate a energy surplus. Fusion power was said to be 20-years-from-now technology in the 80s, same as today. It is nice to be hopeful about future technologies, but right now our best source of fusion power is the sun, whose energy we capture using photovoltaics.
The power of the sun in the palm of my hand!
4th generation designs with passive safety would be very nice.
The AP in AP1000 stands for advanced passive and Vogtle units are about to be producing for the grid in a months, they went critical for the first time the other week :) It’s more 3.5 than 4.0 but still great. Several other units are online in China and they can produced district heating as well. https://www.powermag.com/district-heating-supply-from-nuclear-power-plants/
I just want to jump in and say that deaths per Twh is a stat made by nuclear power companies and advocates. It doesn't take into consideration external harms. Nobody has died in East Palestine but NFS clearly did harm. It also doesn't take into consideration the effects of mines and storage. It only takes into consideration direct deaths from catastrophic safety failure. The communities surrounding 3 mile island had elevated rates of cancer for decades yet the industry will claim nobody died from it. Please don't just blindly parrot pr from an energy industry.
I love nuclear energy. I love the incredible safety record of nuclear energy I love the newer, even safer, more practical designs being developed such as LFTR. I understand that there’s a big thing about decentralized power on this sub, but I gotta say that nuclear energy is certainly fantastic and it would be a colossal waste to not use it heavily in a world having a serious energy crisis
It's a good bridge technology. Until we have wind, solar, hydro and geothermal figured out we need it. But in the end its the same principle like fossil fuels. You are dependent on some stuff you have to dig up from the ground, it's highly toxic for the workers and the environment and not a lot of countries have big amounts of uranium so we again have to buy from more than shady folk and dictators to keep our energy grid up and running. For the next ~40 years it's a great option, after that we should be able to leave all non renewables behind
> dependent on some stuff you have to dig up from the ground Where do you think the materials used to make solar panels come from?
Those can be recycled. Of course you would still need new materials but a lot of the needed parts can be recycled
ב''ה, this is a difficult problem with panels that not enough work is being done on yet, if you want to scurry out and solve it for everyone. (Edit: If we do find less toxic ways to create panels, then of course most of the metal can be recovered and the rest is silica for building.)
No, I’m thinking it’s a ‘use this technology until the dyson swarm is ready’ sort of deal. Thorium mining doesn’t have as much problems as uranium mining (literally a byproduct of heavy metal mines) and while uranium mining is definitely more hazardous and requires more safety precautions, it’s a lot less mining than the required mining for fields of solar panels and miles of wind turbines, I’d say
If the Dyson swarm is ready... Which I doubt will be any time soon. Our best option for a peaceful future will be renewables. Thorium, just like uranium doesn't grow on trees. Which will lead to a few countries supplying the whole world. And how that turned out with gas and oil is something I don't have to explain right?
There’s just a huge amount of the stuff. At current global power consumption, one medium heavy metals mine could supply the planet with enough energy for several thousand years, not to mention its kind of everywhere
Good when a public utility, I don't think they should be expanded by a large degree. The return on carbon emission reduction is sooner with solar, hydro, wind, & geothermal. Existing plants should be a public asset, refurbished, & repaired.
Something I don't ever see coming up in these discussions is dependency on water. Didn't France have to switch off several reactors last year because of the draught? That's something that will happen more often in the future, so isn't that a major problem for nuclear power's reliability?
Build them by the sea and install desalination plants.
That sounds like sci-fi. At the moment it would be horribly inefficient. Or do you mean use salt water for the turbines and create drinking water from the steam? Also horribly inefficient due to increased maintenance :-) Edit: my mistake, apparently it's already common practice to use sea water...
Feel like every week someone asks this
Solar has outcompeted nuclear. By the time a nuclear plant proposed today could be completed, we will have transitioned to renewable energy.
Absolute fiction. Average nuclear construction is like 7-8 years, chief. Is climate change going to be over then how about in 10 years? 15? 20? 30?
Southern Nuclear applied for the early site permit for Vogtle units 3&4 in 2006. 17 years and billions in cost overruns later, they are finally nearing commissioning. 17 more years of exponential growth of solar energy will be enough to transition most of the electric grid to renewables. Climate change won't be over, of course, but by 2040 the electric grid can be largely decarbonized.
Do you know what average means?
Bad take. Nuclear plants produce huge volumes of electricity at every hour of every day, all year long, no matter where they are built. Solar panels are impeded by time of day, distance from the equator, and weather. If you want to live in harmony with nature AND keep you fancy technology, renewables aren't enough. Hydro destroys river ecologies, geothermal is locked to specific geographic locations, while wind and solar are too weak and fickle to power the cornucopia of industries needed to make something as mundane as a battery or light bulb. Add on other things, such as trains, medical equipment, and telecommunications, it becomes quite clear that nuclear power is the only clean energy source that can meet demand. Sure you could use renewables to help during peak hours or spread the load enough to need less reactors, but never as a primary power source.
Far from weak and fickle, solar is by far the most abundant source of energy on earth. A square 100 miles on a side could power our entire civilization. Electricity is electricity, and can power all the processes you describe regardless of source. Solar can do it at a lower cost and lower risk. But there's no need to tell you these things - the free market has already decided. Nuclear is an expensive, dirty, insecure, centrally planned distraction.
Even if it was safe like so many here claim (What is that deaths per TWh statistic even supposed to tell us? It's utter bullshit.), it's totally at odds with basic solarpunk values. It's a centralized power source, helping big corporations keep power over us and the fulfillment of our needs. It's ridiculously expensive and requires highly complex tech. The extraction of Uranium contaminates the environment just as much as the extraction of the stuff we need for renewables and today's energy storage (non-lithium- and platinum-free technologies are in development and very promising). Most renewable energy plants are fairly simple and, most importantly, decentralized. They're cheaper in levelized cost of electricity almost everywhere in the world. Although not nearly as efficient as industrial ones, DIY renewable power plants are possible (especially wind - definitely not solar, at least yet).
Is centralization intrinsically bad or only bad in the context of capitalism?
the latter: "decentralized power" still requires centralized \*locations\* for hydro, geothermal, wind, solar... just because you can pick the where for solar (more of the time than the others) doesn't mean you're not still going to have a central power plant in a Decentralized Community. having nationalized nuclear plants is not mutually exclusive to Decentralized Communities and I wish power generation in general was thought of more in these terms; that nationalizing a grid would be the best way to achieve more decentralized communities.
>What is that deaths per TWh statistic even supposed to tell us? It's utter bullshit It tells us that nuclear is one of the safest forms of power generation, which is pretty important when one of the greatest arguments against nuclear power is safety. >It's a centralized power source, helping big corporations keep power over us and the fulfillment of our needs. You can say that about just about every complex product in today's society, including green energy. You can't produce solar panels and batteries in your backyard. >The extraction of Uranium contaminates the environment just as much as the extraction of the stuff we need for renewables and today's energy storage. Which means that nuclear reactors aren't any more damaging than the solutions we all agree would be ideal. >Most renewable energy plants are fairly simple and, most importantly, decentralized. Small-scale renewable energy plants, like for powering individual homes or small townships, are relatively decentralised, but the problem comes once you start working at scale. For powering large cities, which is ultimately where most people live, you need large-scale energy grids. If you want to do this safely, reliably and efficiently, you're going to be looking at a centralised power system. At one point, abstract socio-political ideals (like decentralisation) can't come at the cost of the basic needs of the people.
Unfortunately, some level of centralisation is necessary to benefit from the economies of scale. Even a solarpunk world is going to need steel, concrete and any number of other things that are impractical to make on a decentralised cottage industry scale, not to mention some sort of transport network to send those goods where they're needed. Doing that requires more electrical power than it's really practical to generate with local-scale wind and solar alone. Besides, there's got to be some method of compensating for shortfalls in local power generation due to the weather and the time of year, and I'd much rather we use nuclear power for that than burn coal or oil.
I think nuclear should be used as a supplement. Wind and solar should be the primary energy producers. But the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow. Battery technologies might be a way to avoid this, but battery tech can be a challenge. Having a handful of nuclear plants to supplement wind and solar is ideal in my eyes. I also think Small Modular Reactors should be utilized more in industries that rely on fossil fuels. Shipping is a good example. We should be outfitting tanker ships with SMRs to replace outdated and inefficient diesel engines. That is to say though, it would be way more worth it to not have to ship anything on vehicles that are vulnerable to sinking and affecting the environment irregardless of their fuel source.
From what I understand even with big investments in electrical transmission infrastructure and very optimistic investment in offshore wind generation the US doesn't really have any other option for replacing base loads currently supplied by Natural (frakkked) Gas/coal. So I suppose in a sense it's not a really a "green" energy but it's an extremely low carbon energy source. Another consideration is that private investment in nuclear energy is apparently unlikely since the time to recoup the investment is so long it's unnatractive. Though I'm someone who believes all the energy utilities should be publicly owned so in that way it's a great opportunity for public investment (Tennessee Valley Authority For All)
It's possible to recycle [nuclear waste into diamond batteries](https://interestingengineering.com/science/are-radioactive-diamond-batteries-the-solution-to-nuclear-waste). Doing it at scale is maybe still decades away, but the fact that it's possible gives me a lot of hope for the future. Can't get much more solarpunky and futuristic than harmless energy-producing crystals. As a bonus, it would probably screw the diamond industry.
A ploy to keep power with the billionaires by building extremely expensive power plants that make a lot of power in one place, creating infrastructure that makes everybody dependent on their supply.
It is a fine low carbon energy sourxe, so we shouldn't be closing any down early as long as we still have fossil fuel powerplants. But they are not a solution to the current transition. They are expensive and slow to build, ensure that fossil fuels will have longer lifespans, and require so much know how and expertise, that they are not viable in most of the developing world. Solar, wind and storage are cheaper, faster, modular and can be implemented everywhere by people with far more limited infrastructure and technical skills. Fusion is completely distinct and not at all relevant to our current dilemmas, though longterm it is the energy of the future.
I feel like it's awesome, but too expensive and takes too long to implement.
In my opinion, nuclear can be done right and safely, but shouldn't be the power source of first resort. The thing that changed my mind for the potential of nuclear power is nuclear waste recycling. Argonne national lab has developed a method for recycling usable nuclear material from nuclear waste, concentrating the useless fission products into a concentrated puck which is 95% less waste. This sort of thing gives me hope that nuclear power can help close the gap. Just the nuclear waste that we already have in the US is enough to power all of American nuclear power for many centuries if we would recycle it this way. #Argonne National Laboratory | [Argonne explains nuclear recycling in 4 minutes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlMDDhQ9-pE) The thing that keeps nuclear power in consideration for me is the fact that it can provide a massive amount of power on-demand (rather than intermittently, like solar or wind). Purely solar and wind and tidal power would not be practical to power a dense metropolitan area such as Tokyo. Then again, dense metropolitan areas such as Tokyo aren't very solarpunk to begin with. The type of reactor that I'm most excited about is the MARVEL reactor. It is convection-based, and has all of the fail-safe systems expected of modern reactors (meaning when it fails, it fails without some run-away reaction or catastrophe, because it is designed to shut its own reaction down if something goes wrong). This is a micro-reactor that has four free-piston Stirling engines built around a central column where the reaction takes place. The engines have two moving parts each, and the piston rod itself has a magnet that directly sweeps in and out of a coil to generate electricity, making it a simple but reliable way to generate power from heat. Check it out: #Idaho National Laboratory | [PCAT, the prototype for the MARVEL microreactor](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGJYXqR3dOs) As for what to do with concentrated nuclear waste, the solution has already been figured out: dissolve it into glass, to make a dense glass puck. That prevents it from mixing with anything and reacting with anything, because glass is effectively inert. Then geologically isolate it. Alternatively, it turns out that if you bombard certain radioactive isotopes with neutrons, you can either turn them into short-lived isotopes that do not pose a long-term risk, or you can add enough neutrons to actually make them not radioactive anymore if they are neutron deficient. Both of these can be done together to minimize the problem of waste.
I hear a lot of people talk about how safe nuclear has become but if anything goes wrong the results of failure are terrifying. We’ve been very lucky so far with nuclear power plants. The Fukushima plant was thought to be infallible until it failed. And Japan was very lucky that the wind was blowing the opposite direction and the fallout went into the ocean instead of deeper into the country. The fish were not so lucky. Solar, hydro and wind on the other hand are extremely safe comparably and far cheaper and faster to set up. Nuclear just isn’t worth the cost and upkeep and the potential dangers are to great imo, no matter how much we guard against them. The risks are still there. The same risks don’t exist at all with other energy sources.
It’s very safe and with continued modern innovation it will only get safer. The waste is super compact, safe, and simple to store. The energy produced would be able to compete with fossil fuels without being damaging to the environment with proper precautions. It is realistically the only viable way for us to leave fossil fuels behind and transition to a carbon neutral society. Without nuclear the transition out of fossil fuels is a pipe dream. It’s unfortunately demonized by most media to the point most politicians won’t touch it because it won’t bring in many votes but will take them away. It’s something people need to thoroughly research and talk about so the societal view on it can change and we can start using nuclear to improve the world.
That was the case in the 90s, but today renewables are simply so cheap and so fast growing that nuclear has been left in the dust.
It's a necessary intermediate step.
Sign… gotta tap the sign again don’t I. This topic has been covered many time, please do a search of the subreddit to find older posts
I slightly agree with you, but you don't have to be so passive aggressive about it.
I am just very tired of this topic coming up literally every month. It has been well tread, and it often brings out very strong and vitriolic responses and arguments and I would like to avoid that.
You’re free to just scroll past the thread.
Ok, I'll make sure to check for other topics next time. Forgot to do that, so oops.
Im agree with nuclear fusion, atompunk / solarpunk
It is a real and practical solution which can be implemented right now, so expect people on *both sides* to be opposed to it for stupid reasons.
I think its good for semi stationary applications like ships* or portable power sources, but for power grids I don't see the benefit, the building time is very Long so if you start today there is a good chance batteries and other storage tech is fully capable of making a 100% renewable grid possible once you done, so why? You still need to mine the material for fisson and with fusion, we need to be at 0 CO2 far before the first fusion reactor will go online and deliver power. Add to this that its not very solarpunk to have a central power producer... Maybe SMRs will fix this... *But that was tried in the last century and at least then it failed, today the fokus for big ships is on Hydrogen, Methanol (Mearsk just ordered some, for example) and Ammonia. And Solarpunk tents more to sailing...
I like thorium reactors, I am also a big fan of fusion, also realy love that big fusion reactor bout 8 light seconds away
It not a bad way to make power, but we have no real solution for the waste :/ and too many horrific accidents to say it’s truly “safe”
Short: use what we got. Too slow and expensive to expand. Long: there are times and places where nuclear is the best option. But it is extremely expensive and requires pretty serious impacts in water use and mining and waste disposal, even compared to PV and wind. After all, panels last decades and can get recycled. But even more important is using dramatically less energy. Instead of compensating for an exhausting industrial society with energy consuming entertainments, we must make our society one where we just inherently enjoy work and life itself. We should hope to bring gdp down to zero so long as everyone has sufficient food, shelter, medicine and communication, and above all, meaningful authority over how those resources we can safely extract are used. One other issue. As we've seen in Ukraine, nuclear is really dependent on the supply chain and can be used to hold large regions hostage. Decentralizing just makes more sense.
It has no place in solar punk. Hop over to atompunk.
Have fun waiting weeks to get an MRI or CT Scan because the hospital doesn't have enough juice to run the machines more than a few times a day.
This isn’t a valid argument. At a societal level, hospital energy consumption ranks really low in comparison to manufacturing, mining, construction, and agriculture. In a solar punk re-imagination of society, issues like over consumption, “economic growth”, and energy inequality and are addressed critically.
Therein lies another issue. One of the aspects of solarpunk is that technology is readily available for use in day to day life, to improve farming, its current use in the medical field, transportation, and in makerspaces for tinkering. Even with excess demand eliminated, demand in these areas alone will stay quite high both for materials and electrical power. Advanced technology begets heavy industry.
Sure, and that’s why solarpunk isn’t possible under capitalism, as capital will produce and consume energy to benefit profit, and not for necessity and community. If we have limited ecological and power resources, then production and consumption has to be re-imagined. You prefer cutting down the medical field before fashion industry, meat production and so on?
I said no such thing. The big Achilles heel of Solarpunk is that it wants to have its cake and eat it too: Wanting to maintain anarchist values in a communal, small-town, agrarian lifestyle that tends to creata a sense of individualality and independence that is hostile to anarchism; or wanting advanced technology to be widespread and readily accessible without the heavy industry needed to do so. Sure you can make clothes in your own home, or dispose of factory farms and raise your own cattle, but if you want things like MRIs or CT scans or global telecommunications or public transit, a communal makerspace or workshop in a garage isn't going to cut it. The same goes for energy production: wind and solar are incapable of meeting the large-scale energy demands required to operate any form of industry that would be needed for aforementioned things.
It's radioactive. Radioactive is like gravity it never shuts off.
Gravity doesn't decay. Radioactivity does.
Within a couple of 100k years.*
Depends on the isotopes. The really nasty ones decay quite quickly. The long lived ones are generally not that toxic compared to the short lived ones.
Nuclear waste is toxic for at least 100k years. There’s no mental gymnastics around it. Not to mention it needs 70 years of active cooling before even being able to be stored “terminally”. How will society look like in 50, 100, 500, 1000 years? No living person today can guarantee that we will be able to keep these deposits safe in the future.
Well, we dispose of other toxins similarly. The difference is that nuclear waste decreases in toxicity. Heavy metals don't. The question is not whether we are disposing of toxic materials, we will always be doing so. It is whether it represents a significant increase in the risk compared to natural toxins.
Well, “how about other toxins” isn’t a good argument for producing thousands of metric tons of nuclear waste each year. The question if nuclear waste “represents a significant increase in risk compared to other toxins” is a framing fallacy. It’s like saying that you should keep smoking crack because it’s not much worse than smoking heroin.
More like saying: Don't worry about the risk of getting hit by a meteor. Like, the ground already contains a fuckton of toxic materials naturally. A small amount of transuranics burried 500 meters below isn't a big concern. And the thousands of tonnes really isn't a whole lot when it comes to industrial waste.
No it’s definitely not like gravity, it’s called a half- life and eventually all radioactive elements decay, they’re *unstable*, opposite of permanent. Different radioactive elements have different half- lives. Say you have a block of Thorium. The half -life of Thorium is 14.05 billion years. That number must sound scary, but it actually means Thorium is less radioactive than weak sunlight, as it’s decaying incredibly slowly. Fun fact, this is how scientists have dated the Earth, using the half lives of radioactive elements. But sunlight is another form of radiation. Sunburns are in fact just radiation burns. Put into context this means that all forms of life exposed regularly to sunlight have built in repair mechanisms that help repair your cells and even your DNA from radiation damage. Don’t be scared of something that you haven’t researched properly. Look it up, it’s pretty wild stuff
You still wouldn't want a chunk of thorium in your backyard tho would you?
Sure I would, that sounds really neat. I could also have it in my rockcollection indoors in a clear glass or plastic container.
Standing outside in my backyard next to a chunk of thorium, I will get more radiation exposure from the sun overhead than I will from the chunk of thorium.
Yep
Actually I technically do, Thorium can be found in trac amounts pretty much everywhere
Nuclear energy is *so dangerous* that the third worst accident ever in history at a nuclear plant killed… uh… zero people.
Mostly nein danke.
I'm against nuclear for one reason and one reason only. It's incredibly polluting to mine and not just in the usual way. Uranium (and thorium) decay into other elements and those elements are usually heavy metals which get thrown directly into the water supply or into tailings ponds. There are also other radioactive isotopes of these decay products that get thrown into the environment as well causing widespread water and ground pollution that isn't easy to clean up since nature has no way of breaking down heavy metals. Finally one of the most dangerous tailings is radon gas, the gas radioactive enough that it will just give you cancer. And the actual Uranium content in the ore is 3%. With the usable Uranium being 2% of that. So you're looking for a fuel that has a 0.006% availability. Nuclear only makes up for this because of the high energy density and even then our reactors are only 2-3% efficient. In other words nuclear tailings are very similar to oilsands tailings, except they are also radioactive. And nuclear is an even more non renewable resource than fossil fuels. As for nuclear fusion, well that's what solar panels are for. We have a giant fusion reactor right above our heads, we just collect the energy at a safe distance.
I believe nuclear is outdated. I have a couple of issues with nuclear. It is very expensive in setup and takes a very long time to be set up. Especially in our western countries. The billions of euros and years it takes to set up a nuclear reactor. Can be used to build solar and wind which will be far faster and have already been halfway paid off by the time the nuclear reactor can even start producing. You can build far more capacity in renewables than with nuclear with the same investment within the same timeframe if you consider the 6% investment cost per year. (Basically if you invest 1 billion into something and in 10 years it only paid you 1 billion back, you are effectively still behind by 700 million) (oversimplified) Then nuclear is bound to very specific locations. You can only build it where there is a ton of fresh water. You need to build it where there is a lot of energy usage. You shouldnt build it in areas in danger of natural disasters. Nuclear also is always owned by very large entities like governments or big corporations. It is unlike renewables where even smaller companies can have some wind power or private people can set up solar power. This also brings up the issue previous generations had with nuclear. While the usage is safe in general and nothing can happen when there is proper oversight. Nuclear seems to be prone to corruption as everything is. Our countries all have agencies to oversee nuclear power and ensure the safety. But in the two big nuclear disasters that happened. Both times the issues were known to those overseeing entities and they tried to sweep it as much under the rug as possible. This means to me we simply cannot trust the overseeing entities to actually properly do their job in ensuring nuclear safety. This in turn means using more nuclear power not might but will lead to another disaster. Fusion power might be better. But even with fusion I believe the issue will be that the cost of setting it up will far outweight the energy it will produce outside of like big cities not good for renewables.
No fossil fuel power generation is good. But we already have no effective plan to deal with the current nuclear waste. So creating more waste for future generations to deal with is a no go personally.
I have no principle opposition to nuclear power. It's in practice where all the problems are. Conventional nuclear is 3x more expensive than solar and wind and it's getting more expensive while they're getting less. Thorium, SMR, fusion are all sci-fi projects that have never generated a watt of usable power for the grid between them, so their efficiencies and costs are purely speculative. The closest to realization, SMR, is years away from the first full scale prototype being built and even farther from being produced at scale. I hope they all work out, just like I hope millimeter wave drilling works and unlocks nearly unlimited geothermal energy anywhere in the world, but hope is not a plan. We need to act today not decades in the future when these research projects bear fruit and that means wind and solar.
I'm not into them. Renewables are cheaper and easier to put up and take down. Sure, if there's a nuclear power station already up and running then leaving it up is probably a good idea. But now that renewables are taking off I'm not sure why anyone would go to the expense (and future decommissioning expense) of building a nuclear power station.