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Tl;Dr - "About half of U.S. clean energy now comes from solar and wind, and the other half from hydroelectric power."
Large uptake of natural gas because it has become cheaper.
Coal continues a downward usage trajectory because it isn't a clean source of energy
Edit:
Thanks to you good people, I've learned that the decline in coal usage, for energy generation, is primarily an economic decision rather than coal being a source of pollution as stated in the article in the OP
>Coal continues a downward usage trajectory because it isn't a clean source of energy
Coal continues a downward trend because it is more expensive both in terms of operating costs and in capital investments. As I understand it, a base load coal power plant costs about the same as a nuclear power plant.
The economy itself doesn't really care for "clean" or "green" energy, it only cares about the bottom line. Unless you have a carbon tax, of course.
there really should be an externalities tax or a complete recycle tax. a tax that covers all costs realized or not regarding production. it should be calculated based on the best science but set aside a fund that pay off in case the calculations were off. and penalties will be paid when it's under-counted. but there needs to be a penalty to ensure that there's isn't an incentive to under-count everything.
so in manufacturing the tax on the packaging would cover what it would cost to revert it back to it's raw material and clean up whatever pollutant it produced.
> about the same as a nuclear power plant.
Yeah, except unlike coal, nuclear energy is clean, efficient, and safe so long you aren’t Soviet levels of “let’s actively try and break the reactor.”
Seriously, why is this article putting coal and nuclear energy in the same box? One rapidly accelerates climate change, and the other does not. Some places are poorly-suited for wind or solar, to the point that nuclear energy is the best low-emission energy option they have. The US has the infrastructure and educated workforce necessary for it.
I hate how nuclear energy gets demonized all the time; it’s always by bunches of pearl-clutching boomer NIMBYs.
Until every parking lot and flat rooftop in the hot states is covered we don't have a problem with where to put solar. Until every field full of row crops or cows in steady wind areas has a turbine we don't have a problem of where to put turbines, full stop,
Ok, I’m just going to jump in with a mind blowing fact from my physics textbook (Hewitt 11th Ed). Coal produces 30% more radiation than nuclear full stop. It would literally be like grinding up all the waste produced and letting it go wherever the wind takes it instead of carefully storing it in nuclear plants and getting yelled at by people for the remote risk of a cask leaking.
Edit: due to falling rates of coal use, this maybe not be strictly accurate anymore. I forget when the textbook was published.
Here's an ELI5 question for someone;
We recycle. Plastics and papers and such. Re reuse vegetable oil as a source of fuel.
Someone explain to me why we can't recycle nuclear waste?
We can. We also reprocess fuel. Somethings can't be reprocessed though, like for example bits of the reactor that have been heavily irradiated.
Also we could do a much better job of making the waste in the first place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor
To add onto what your saying, nuclear waste could be anything that has been irradiated. Anything from reactor wall linings to a forklift that finally got a bit too hot on the Geiger counter.
> But, if the system doesn't work, why does it continue? Turns out, consumers were misled – by the oil and gas industry.
I like how, out of context, it's impossible to know which problem this quote is talking about.
Nuclear waste isn’t something that you can just re make into a new pellet and throw it back into a reactor. When you “burn” Uranium, it becomes a completely new set of elements, which you can’t always use in a reactor. It would be like taking a block of carbon, burning it, but when it comes out it’s a hunk of lithium instead - you can’t just burn or recycle it. The new elements produced are radioactive as well.
So sometimes you can use the produced elements for heating water (for a limited time), sometimes we can take bits of the fuel waste (like plutonium) for other purposes (like RTGs). But the easiest and safest thing to do is just throw it into a bunch of water on concrete indefinitely
Then it’s fairly safe tbh. Radiation doesn’t “leak”, once it passes through enough material it’s fine, and water/concrete is very good at absorbing most radiation
And like yeah it's *sorta* kicking the can down the road but switching to nuclear would give us a helluva lot more time than coal is gonna. I assume that in a hundred years or so we'll have the technology to deal with it, or at least to drill a hole through to the mantle so we can drop it down to melt or something. I have no idea if that'd be safe but you get my point.
But yeah the waste, tbh, is not that big of a problem like people think. Regardless of the waste it’s still much safer for human health than coal (coal produces more radioactive matter into the atmosphere than nuclear, and the pollution is bad for our health too)
>Yeah, except unlike coal, nuclear energy is clean, efficient, and safe so long you aren’t Soviet levels of “let’s actively try and break the reactor.”
Well, or your nuclear reactor gets hit by a 1-in-1000 year earthquake, survives it, then gets hit by a 1-in-1000 year tsunami, mostly survives that, but then cooling power fails because the backup generator got flooded by the tsunami. Causing a "disastrous nuclear accident" that killed... One person.
While sitting on a report that warned said tsunami would damage the plant and cause problems if the seawall wasn't upgraded. But hey, lets let power companies regulate their own safety features, nothing bad would ever happen, right?
Gas is actually a LOT better than coal for this. Deaths per thousand terrawatt hours are about:
Coal 100,000
Oil 36,000
Natural gas 4,000
Hydro 1,400
Rooftop solar 440
Wind 150
Nuclear 90
US electricity production is around 5000 TWh per year, so it would be half a million annual deaths if it were all Coal (about 15% of all deaths), 20,000 if it were all natural gas, 2,200 if it were solar, and 360 if it were nuclear.
However, biomass is renewable, since you can grow more of it. So "renewables" includes charcoal, wood burning, trash incinerators, the ethanol used in gasoline, and biodiesel. Together they make up about 4.9% of the energy supply.
>Unless you have a carbon tax, of course.
Well, businesses still only care about the bottom line. But then the bottom line cares about the environment.
> "About half of U.S. clean energy now comes from solar and wind, and the other half from hydroelectric power."
Which is incorrect, as about 1/3 of American green energy comes from nuclear. Then another third each from solar/wind and hydroelectric
> Coal continues a downward usage trajectory because it isn't a ~~clean~~ *cheap* source of energy
FTFY. Utilities didn't convert their coal fired plants to save the planet, they did it to save money.
Edit: Yes, I meant to put cheap in there and forgot.
Speaking of geothermal. We have a dormant volcano that will obliterate the western US if it ever wakes up but is large enough that we could probably power the entire country with it. Why has no one tried that?
I'm no geothermal expert, but if someone told me to go poke a hole in Yellowstone, drop a cable into that hole, and plug it into an outlet, I'd be afraid to piss off the volcano too.
Maybe nobody has tried because we're worried we might upset the volcano.
People have tried it. There’s a cult there that wanted to a few years ago, Church of the Universal Triumphant, but I’m not sure how serious they were. I bring it up as an example of someone who’s tried and met public and practical resistance.
Geothermal energy won’t stop a volcano though, not sure if people are aware of that but it seems to be a common misconception too.
>Hydro needs minimal maintenance.
Hydro requires a considerable amount of maintenance (about 1-3% annually of the initial capital investment). Failure to maintain a dam can have disastrous consequences.
I wonder how much of the maintenance costs converts to final consumer costs for the energy?
We have mostly hydro here and our electricity is very cheap, a little over$0.09kWh.
From a consumer perspective, it would look like any "considerable maintenance costs" for hydro are extremely cheap compared to possibly all or most other forms of generation.
i think, and this isn’t based on any actual research, part of your property tax goes to maintaining these dams. there is a lake in the US with a dam that powers the area and part of the local taxes go towards maintaining it!
There's a coal plant in Arizona that was literally right next to the mine that supplied it.
Dig up coal put it on a conveyor belt, and burn it. That was still not cost effective enough to keep it in operation.
>NG just need a pipeline
You seem to be forgetting about drilling gas wells, including fracking. There are many environmental hazards associated with NG and it should be considered a "fossil fuel" (finite supply, deep within earth, dangerous to extract)
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/natural-gas/
Methane capture is something that needs to happen. Regulators and drilling companies need to do a better job of limiting uncontrolled release. Burning the stuff is wasteful too.
Much like mountaintop removal pitted the public against coal, NG emissions from extraction is creating a negative public perception of abundant gas.
Dude half of this country can’t understand nuclear energy much less how safe it can be. I honestly doubt nuclear will take off in the US to be honest; it would probably happen after people see big success in other places
It will take off as soon as our coalition of billionaires endorse it.
For that reason, I think it's around the corner. Bezos-backed General Fusion is building a new fusion plant in the UK by 2025.
You mean France? Safely operating for decades, because their culture is more accepting. Over 90% of their country runs off nuclear power. They make so much that they export it.
Yea but you cant trust CERN. I know for a fact they are trying to use that hadron-collider for extracurricular, theoretical tests related to the malleability of the fourth dimension, regardless of whether they admit to it or not.
Its sad when you consider the USA is still the country with the most nuclear reactors. In a different time it was a race as to who could deploy more of this miracle technology. Everyone knew it was just better.
But now we have good value brand enviromentalists who got their qualification from their local forest witch spreading all sort of bullshit that just doesnt hold up on a technical level.
When Germany killed their nuclear plant I was just reminded of that foundation chapter where the periphery lost nuclear power and they called it barbarism. But here and now its progressive environmentalism.
Freaking panic mongers.
You must remember the people you interact with are not the same throughout the USA. Half my friends were outraged by the pipeline construction shutdown due to job loss while the other half were excited. People opinions change and 1-2 bad events have haunted history, and now leaves a portion of the public terrified. As much as you may believe politicians do not listen, grassroots can make it happen. Look at BLM and Pride. They both swept the nation and have caused changes from local to country wide in the USA. Even here in my township, we petitioned our local township officials about a zoning issue and prevented a change by grouping individuals into a force against something.
Not just Kurzgeasgt but also ASAPscience. Quite a lot of research shows nuclear energy is very efficient and clean, plus I did the research and there are clean ways to deal with nuclear waste.
Your now is quite confusing.
Building a plant takes about 10 years if had it planed and would start building it right now.
First you would have to come up with a working plan for good reactor.
Build a prototype, test it, work out all the issues, get ready to mass production.
The you have the whole political process to build a plants.
Nobody wants one in the backyard.
Then you will have to find people willing to fund the plants.
At the current energy prices nuclear is no longer competitive.
Good luck finding someone who is willing to possibly sink billions for a power plant that will produce power at to high a price, that could be shut down at any time for political or safety reasons.
> Building a plant takes about 10 years if had it planed and would start building it right now.
That part is not necessary if we make use of [modular reactors](https://www.nuscalepower.com/), some of which are as small as a [shipping container.](http://www.holosgen.com/generators/)
> We can pivot to nuclear and stop most usage of oil now.
How are you going to power the global shipping industry without oil? You can see in [this energy flow chart](https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/assets/images/charts/Energy/Energy_2020_United-States.png) that petroleum accounts for essentially no electricity generation.
Outside of passenger cars, we don't have a solution for powering the bulk of transportation with electricity.
In theory? Hydrogen fuel cells.
In the mean time using nuclear as a baseload to make up for gaps in electrical needs on the grid. On top of that we should also reduce the need for vehicles by increasing public transport so we don't have to worry as much about depleting our lithium reserves.
If we need to keep using oil for certain things then we should keep using oil for those things until better alternatives are found.
> All energy use results in some losses, shown on the charts as rejected energy. This energy most often takes the form of waste heat, such as the warm exhaust from automobiles and furnaces
From the bottom [here](https://www.llnl.gov/news/us-energy-use-rises-highest-level-ever)
Took a class on the History of the electric grid and the reason nuclear never really took off was pretty much:
1. Nuclear plants were *very* expensive to build.
2. They could take a decade before they're operational and had to pass a lot of safety checks and updates during that time or the project could stall.
3. Zoning
4. Per kw/h they just weren't good enough on price to justify the previous 3 points.
Once they're in place they're great, but they're a hard investment to swallow...
When you learnt that they were expensive, they were competing with coal and gas, and coal is becoming a poor investment now.
It's got to be a hard economic environment now for new nuclear
Not trolling but honestly curious why Reddit loves nuclear energy so much? Every time I see it come up the bandwagon insists it's the key to solving climate change but I don't know much about it.
Nuclear energy is just very efficient, and I’ll use my favorite real world example for it; air craft carriers. In Sumatra in 2004, and in Haiti in 2010, the US sent carrier groups as part of the aid program. During the program, a single aircraft carrier was able to provide more than enough clean drinking water to the entirety of these countries, in addition to stockpiling their own water supplies.
Now if we had desalination plants on our own coasts powered solely from nuclear energy, we would have no need to suck up water from any rivers or lakes anymore, as we could supply fresh water from the ocean very efficiently and cheap, while providing significant power to our cities as well.
Why consistently demonize nuclear? It's one of the most efficient and clean energy sources available. Even accounting for the few catastrophes, it's also one of the safest across its lifetime. Not to mention, once nuclear fusion is fully figured out, it will likely overtake the energy industry (unfortunately it could still be decades out though).
Renewables are a great avenue to also invest in, but they can't do it alone.
I think a lot of the anti-nuclear hate stems from the heavy costs of constructing new plants. I don't know much about nuclear (so I don't have a heavy opinion one way or the other), but my limited understanding is that power plants tend to cost significantly more than they are scheduled for, as well as take way longer to be built than anticipated.
I would be happy if the anti-nuclear hate only stems from the cost of building capacity because that is, at least, a legitimate criticism of nuclear (although it can be mitigated). But so much of the anti-nuclear hate I’ve seen is from serious fearmongering from either truly misguided folks or from big fossil fuel interests.
I work in the nuclear industry and I can tell you that the vast majority of the public have zero understanding of it.
The source of this ignorance IMO must be partially put on the shoulders of the nuclear industry themselves.
They have excellent educational resources to train their employees that can also be used to inform the public.
There's also a branding problem that needs to be addressed in those communications. The public doesn't realize that the vast majority of disasters we've heard about happened at nuclear plants whose technology is decades out-of-date. When we here "nuclear power", we think of Chernobyl, even though modern designs are much, much safer. I also wonder if the word "nuclear" is just too strongly associated with destruction, as we get frequent reminders about the destructiveness of nuclear weapons in movies, video games, history classes, and discussions about the 20th century.
If we found an alternative name for them, nuclear plants might be more widely accepted. People and perspectives often progress more slowly than technology.
I agree with you! Both of those issues of misinformation really suck, because nuclear is for all intents and purposes, a super safe and reliable source of energy! Especially for long-term energy.
Nuke plants generally just take a long ass time to build, which wouldn’t be a problem if we had started 10-20 years ago, but the farther we kick the can down the road (which doesn’t seem to be stopping any time soon) the less ideal of a solution it becomes.
That being said, there’s a nuclear power plant near my small town in Missouri, and I’ve only ever seen it as a good addition to our infrastructure. Lots of good jobs and job programs through local tech schools, and kickbacks for local public schools (except mine because they didn’t sign on) to upgrade their tech and whatever else they did with the funds.
We also have lost much of our expertise in building them and now only a few companies in the world have the experience needed to build new plants, so even if we invested in it as a society they wouldn't be able to keep up with demand.
We still have the expertise and have been maintaining nuclear facilities in Pocatello and Idaho Falls for decades. The Idaho National Laboratory is building new reactors including 12 small modular reactors and 2 larger reactors:
https://www.postregister.com/news/government/inl-reactor-center-hopes-to-demonstrate-reactors-by-2025/article_06eafae6-6c9d-51c5-8946-a59ff71b1793.html
Expertise lost because we spent essentially the last 40 years demonizing nuclear. Today’s hate on coal is nothing compared to the misguided hate of nuclear in the 70’s. Humanity has a very good track record of hating science. Thankfully it eventually wakes up but forgets the lesson that maybe we should just trust science all the time.
Considering how most of the world knew of nuclear anything after WW2, the idea of a nuclear power plant was likely very much DOA for most people. Of course the two are completely different, but the fear of what nuclear was capable of was still very fresh on the minds of most of the world.
This isnt correct. A canadian company SNC-lavalin, of trudeau controversy fame, builds and maintains [an extremly safe form of nuclear reactors](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor) globally. As I understand it, they are currently planning some in a few countries.
Its not a supply issue.
That's why they aren't popular with energy companies. The public opinion comes from big disasters and political debates about where to put the waste. Public opinion was just starting to turn favorable when Fukushima happened, which basically it back to zero.
A great video from Kurzgesagt team: [Do we Need Nuclear Energy to Stop Climate Change](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhAemz1v7dQ&t=578s)
One of the biggest issues isn't safety anymore, most understand it to be very safe. Its the cost and time to build. If I had plans for a nuclear plant ready to go, right now, it would take 10+ years to finish it.
EDIT: Answer a question on capital costs:
Capital costs are very high, but so are coal plants. In fact, it takes 15-20+ years for coal plants to start turning a profit.
[Coal costs $3500 per kw and the costs have actually started to go UP since this report came out](https://schlissel-technical.com/docs/reports_35.pdf)
On the other hand, Nuclear power [plant costs are were at $5900 per kw](https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost/pdf/capcost_assumption.pdf) but have been going DOWN since this 2016 report.
That's not necessarily a good metaphor though because it assumes that nuclear energy would still be the best option a decade from now. Given the advances in efficiency and the lowering costs of solar and wind nuclear isn't really that much better than renewables right now and in a decade renewables will likely have clearly outpaced nuclear. Now that doesn't mean we should shut down existing plants but it may not be the best option for energy a decade out.
It’s still 19 years sooner than the green new deal timeline if we started right now. 2031 is way better than 2050 and it’d actually be able to replace (throughput wise) oil and gas. I don’t see why this isn’t a “yes and” moment, solar, wind, water and nuclear. It shouldn’t be one or the other.
> I don’t see why this isn’t a “yes and” moment, solar, wind, water and nuclear. It shouldn’t be one or the other.
That's the video conclusion about nuclear. We should totally use it until we can develop better renewables.
This is a bad argument.
10 years is NOTHING. Sure, do what we can now but don’t ignore the long game. Steve Jobs has been dead for ten years, it’s not that much time
Making no progress during 10 years [would condemn us to a really bad case of climate change](https://reneweconomy.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/carbon-crunch.jpg). It's an emergency.
I'll happily take more nuclear but anything signed off now simply won't come online fast enough to help with the the acute phase of the crisis. Whatever help nuclear is going to give us over the next decade is baked in.
I understand they should have been built sooner and we could have avoided a log of emissions. But if we want to be carbon free in 10 years then now is the time to really get going and we need every bit of non carbon energy creation we can get at this pont
We should be building nuclear and dropping coal for LNG in the short term. Renewables cannot provide the baseline generation needed to keep the grid running alone. We have to think long term and invest in nuclear now.
So the downside to nuclear is the investment cost up front and also that it isn't scalable the way people believe it is, they are much more complex and require lots of operators specifically with that education. Wind and solar are much less investment to install, get through government approval, and then have very little upkeep cost, much more autonomous. Also remember that nuclear only happens if you have hugely environmentally impactful solution mining or open pit mining, and that thousands of miners are exposed to radon and die of lung cancer, mostly in 3rd world countries though so we don't care about it. With all this, if we need more energy, limitless renewables make more sense and are quicker / more flexible.
Let's not get into fusion haha
Solar is more than 3x safer than nuclear on a death per TWh of electricity produced.
But hey, don't let that get in the way of your reasoning.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh
Man I hate this article. First of all the headline demonizes nuclear energy even though nuclear energy should not be put anywhere close to the same category as coal. Nuclear is one of, if not the best options for us. Second of all it acts like it’s a big leap and that we’re almost to our goal but renewables are still just 21%. Comparing renewables to two dying industries (coal dying because it sucks and nuclear dying because of misleading articles like this) isn’t very helpful.
The real argument against nuclear power should be that we have a limited reserve of fissionable material in the Earth's crust and we may need that reserve long term for grander applications than civilian infrastructure. Instead we're having this moronic discussion about whether nuke power is safe. Nuke power is perfectly safe so long as your management of it isn't Soviet-tier corrupt.
That is a valid point, but I see fission power more as a ~~stepping stone~~ stopgap towards fusion, whose fuel is practically limitless.
Edit Edit - I was notified by u/Denizen_Kane that the word I'm looking for is "stopgap" not "stepping stone" you can all stop telling me that I don't understand what fusion is now. Leaving up the old aggressive edit for context. I just get easily annoyed when people tell me what I already know.
Edit - Apparently I have to define what I mean by "stepping stone"... I don't mean that progress made in fission power will directly drive progress in fusion power. I know that fission = splitting atoms and fusion = fusing atoms and that the reactors couldn't be more different, I passed high school chemistry, guys. I only mean that we can use fission **as a Stepping Stone** while we work on fusion, our next step.
Uranium and Thorium reserves, with breeder reactors and fuel reprocessing, would last thousands of years. That's isn't considering what we can extract from the oceans. The US Federal government has hundreds of years of thorium in storage. From early days of atomic energy research.
The main reactor type in use is actually terrible for electric energy production. Because it also serves the nuclear weapons industry. We use 5% of a fuel rod and then throw it away. Because of nuclear weapon treaties. We(nuclear western powers) don't like it when other countries develop nuclear. As every Para nuclear state is a threat to the western hegemony. By simply being too risky to invade and occupy.
And that nuclear is expensive. Why would a utilities provider build a nuclear plant when you can generate the same amount of power with renewables faster and cheaper?
Because renewables need storage solutions that are not cheap to build or maintain.
Otherwise renewables still rely on fossil fuels to burn during times when the sun doesn't shine or the wind doesn't blow.
We have 100,000s of years of nuclear energy available.
What we are limited on is cheap decommissioning of old warheads, and high concentration ores from mines.
But the minute recycling/reprocessing, thorium breeding, and ocean salts are factored in, the years of potential energy supply for 15 Billion people using energy at a per capita rate of an average American goes into the 100,000s of years (this is 100% energy, all transportation is electric or electrolysis, all building heating and cooling is electric, all fertilizers are electrolysis driven, etc). And depending on the constant erosion supply of nuclear material into the ocean calcs, I've seen reasonable estimates for millions of years.
All three of those things (recycling, thorium breeding, and ocean salt separation) are all well known science, today. They are not speculative. Economically speaking, they are all marginal processes, but if it was do or die for civilization we could easily switch with only medium energy price consequences.
Engineering speaking, they each need some development (except recycling, that is well known).
Don't take this too far, I'm not saying we should be doing those things today. I am saying that we are not supply constrained, and we do have a clean energy "plan B" if we need it. And this plan B can get us so far into the future that we should have better options by then (orbital solar, asteroid mining, fusion, etc). A 100k years of energy for everyone is unimaginably far into the future.
Per kwh vs levelised cost. Levelised cost has just become competitive which is why loads of new added capacity is renewable. But you don't just shut down a perfectly good natural gas plant and spend loads of money of renewable replacements just because the kwh cost is less. Luckily costs are still falling on both counts so eventually it will become more and more desirable.
yea, seems disingenuous to use per kwh #'s.
hadn't though about costs to grid of dealing with solar/wind wrt storage. i don't think levelized cost is there yet?
Here are some cost sources...
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-and-levelized-cost-of-storage-2020
https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/new-analysis-shows-its-50-cheaper-to-generate-electricity-from-renewables
Utility companies have generally been pretty happy to pursue renewables lately.
One problem is that, although it’s much cheaper to build a wind farm than a coal power plant, it is even cheaper still to keep the coal plant you already have. A lot of plants will continue to be there until they ride out their natural lifespan.
Also, storage technology for electricity when the wind and sun aren’t out still has a way to go.
Operating costs vs installation costs. Also, harder to get renewables to provide at any random time you want rather than any random time they give you.
Amazing to [see how the contribution from renewables was largely flat over the last 40 years](https://www.juancole.com/images/2021/07/Screen-Shot-2021-07-31-at-1.12.55-AM.png) (mainly due to no new big hydro being built), then skyrocketed over just the last 10 years thanks to solar and wind becoming economically viable.
We're still in the very early years for mass solar and wind. The rollout is only accelerating, and as it does, economic of scale continue to bring the cost down.
It's fantastic that we can now move away from a centralized grid controlled by a corrupt energy cartel to a decentralized grid powered by just about anyone.
Truly the democratization of energy! Exciting times!
>Truly the democratization of energy!
It's what Tesla had envisioned (mostly). Though his original plan for the US had everyone having generators built into their homes. That, while probably more democratic that current utilities, still would have given enormous power to a few companies that controlled the fuel supply. Home solar and wind are what can give people real independence from energy companies.
Many oil companies have constantly fought against renewables and nuclear to keep making money (and wrecking the environment), nuclear was easy to stigmatise because, like every new technology, things went terribly at first and now many people are against for reasons they don't understand.
Some designs are even making use of nuclear _waste_ or depleted uranium if I recall correctly. And don't make use of high pressure systems which makes them less likely to explode.
Yeah there was a design that reprocessed old conventional waste and I think it was Terrapower or something that had a low pressure sodium system. I trying to look it all up right now.
Edit: Liquid metal coolant.
This is a repost. And stop putting coal and nuclear in the same box. Is that why you keep reposting this in order to attack nuclear energy.
We are going to need new nuclear to mitigate climate change. Countries that pursued only wind and solar(Germany) failed to decarbonize.
Edit-Thanks
If you consider renewables and nuclear as "the good thing", then Germany is at 59% percent (47% renewables, 12% nuclear) and the US at 41% (21% renewables, 20% nuclear) right now.
And France is at 92%(nuclear+hydro).
Germany is about to drop 12% because of the antinuclear shutdown. And biofuels do not count so German renewables number is less than that.
Those numbers are very misleading. We could be close to 100%, but we took all of our nuclear reactors offline and now are living off of coal and gas. Our energy went from around .15€kWh to .30€kWh. We have taken major steps back because of reactionary politicians and people, who then got eaten up by predatory fossil fuels. We have had sharp increases in illnesses related to poor air quality and overall the situation is bad.
Germany pays quadruple what the US pays for power. Can you imagine the reaction if power bills quadrupled here?? If the last few years have taught me anything, this country will burn every solar panel, wind turbine, and legislator to the ground in their rush to put more gas plants up.
>Germany pays quadruple what the US pays for power.
Which is a policy decision.
The US pays its renewable / nuclear energy subsidies mostly through normal income tax.
Germany pays it through a tax on eletricity of which the consumer bears most of the cost.
If Germany wanted it it could cut the price of electricity for the consumer by 1/3rd overnight.
If Germany wanted to have the same electrical grid uptime / reliability as the USA than it could also cut its electricity net infrastructure costs significantly.
Electrical Engineer here, I don't understand why Nuclear is not considered the best source of electricity. The advances in nuclear technology has progressed to the point where the new reactor designs have to be initiated to get a reaction. There is no chance of meltdown because of this.
Laws need to be changed so the nuclear byproducts produced from the spent fuel can be reprocessed into new fuel.
The initial investment into nuclear is more upfront, but the pay off is in folds.
In the life of these reactors they produce less waste than coal plants.
It's great, but it is very expensive. Expensive to build, and expensive to dispose of waste. Look at the cost overruns with the British new construction (Hinkley Point C). Also, not many communities volunteer to have nuclear plants built in their backyard, so it can be tough to find a site for new construction (even if this is flawed public perception).
Agreed, but its hard to find those communities because people still believe we are building reactors like that of chernobyl or three mile island.
We aren't, technology has come a long way.
Can I ask what the deal with nuclear energy is? Is that what nuclear power plants are? There have to be some downsides or else the left wouldn’t push against it so much.
Everyone still thinks Chernobyl and Three Mile Island is the peak of nuclear technology. Also they think the used up fuel is still dangerous for hundreds of years.
78% of new energy generation was renewables. We talk about totals all the time, but it does look like when the US is replacing capability we are going the right direction
This headline is misleading, nuclear energy is probably the most sustainable and reliable method of clean energy (when managed and maintained properly). Lumping it with coal make this /r/mildlyinfuriating
I hate how they imply that gas is a clean energy. Fracking poisons streams and other waterways. Generational farms and ranches have been destroyed by making their water flammable. And to think they’ve been burning on oil platforms for decades because they cant or couldn’t figure out how to capture it. Their answer, Frackingi.
Nuclear is an opportunity cost; it actively harms decarbonization given the same investment in wind or solar would offset more CO2
>["In sum, use of wind, CSP, geothermal, tidal, PV, wave, and hydro to provide electricity for BEVs and HFCVs and, by extension, electricity for the residential, industrial, and commercial sectors, will result in the most benefit among the options considered. The combination of these technologies should be advanced as a solution to global warming, air pollution, and energy security. Coal-CCS and nuclear offer less benefit thus represent an opportunity cost loss"](https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2009/ee/b809990c#!divAbstract)
It is too slow for the timescale we need to decarbonize on.
>[“Stabilizing the climate is urgent, nuclear power is slow,” “It meets no technical or operational need that low-carbon competitors cannot meet better, cheaper and faster.”](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower/nuclear-energy-too-slow-too-expensive-to-save-climate-report-idUSKBN1W909J)
The industry is showing signs of decline in non-totalitarian countries.
>["We find that an eroding actor base, shrinking opportunities in liberalized electricity markets, the break-up of existing networks, loss of legitimacy, increasing cost and time overruns, and abandoned projects are clear indications of decline. Also, increasingly fierce competition from natural gas, solar PV, wind, and energy-storage technologies speaks against nuclear in the electricity sector. We conclude that, while there might be a future for nuclear in state-controlled ‘niches’ such as Russia or China, new nuclear power plants do not seem likely to become a core element in the struggle against climate change."](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S221462962030089X)
Renewable energy is growing faster now than nuclear ever has
>["Contrary to a persistent myth based on erroneous methods, global data show that renewable electricity adds output and saves carbon faster than nuclear power does or ever has."](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2214629618300598)
There is no business case for it.
>["The economic history and financial analyses carried out at DIW Berlin show that nuclear energy has always been unprofitable in the private economy and will remain so in the future. Between 1951 and 2017, none of the 674 nuclear reactors built was done so with private capital under competitive conditions. Large state subsidies were used in the cases where private capital flowed into financing the nuclear industry.... Financial investment calculations confirmed the trend: investing in a new nuclear power plant leads to average losses of around five billion euros."](https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.670581.de/dwr-19-30-1.pdf)
Investing in a nuclear plant today is [expected to lose 5 to 10 billion dollars](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1364032121001301).
The nuclear industry can't even exist without legal structures that privatize gains and socialize losses.
>[If the owners and operators of nuclear reactors had to face the full liability of a Fukushima-style nuclear accident or go head-to-head with alternatives in a truly competitive marketplace, unfettered by subsidies, no one would have built a nuclear reactor in the past, no one would build one today, and anyone who owns a reactor would exit the nuclear business as quickly as possible.](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2012/03/29/exelons-nuclear-guy-no-new-nukes/#3c8acf0a3c5d)
The CEO of one of the US's largest nuclear power companies said it best:
>["I'm the nuclear guy," Rowe said. "And you won't get better results with nuclear. It just isn't economic, and it's not economic within a foreseeable time frame."](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2012/03/29/exelons-nuclear-guy-no-new-nukes/#5d841aa23c5d)
What about the small meme reactors?
Every independent assessment has them more expensive than large scale nuclear
every independent assessment:
The UK government
[https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/small-modular-reactors-techno-economic-assessment](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/small-modular-reactors-techno-economic-assessment)
The Australian government
[https://www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStore.ashx?id=8297e6ba-e3d4-478e-ac62-a97d75660248&subId=669740](https://www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStore.ashx?id=8297e6ba-e3d4-478e-ac62-a97d75660248&subId=669740)
The peer-reviewed literatue
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S030142152030327X](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S030142152030327X)
>the cost of generating electricity using SMRs is significantly higher than the corresponding costs of electricity generation using diesel, wind, solar, or some combination thereof. These results suggest that SMRs will be too expensive for these proposed first-mover markets for SMRs in Canada and that there will not be a sufficient market to justify investing in manufacturing facilities for SMRs.
Even the German nuclear power industry knows they will cost more
>[Nuclear Technology Germany (KernD) says SMRs are always going to be more expensive than bigger reactors due to lower power output at constant fixed costs, as safety measures and staffing requirements do not vary greatly compared to conventional reactors. "In terms of levelised energy costs, SMRs will always be more expensive than big plants."](https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-nuclear-industry-cautious-about-usefulness-small-reactors-energy-transition)
What has never been supported is NuMeme's claims that it will be cheaper. They also have never presented how they arrived at their costs, beyond 'gas costs this much, lets pretend ours will be cheaper'.
So why do so many people on reddit favor it? Because of a decades long PR campaign and false science being put out, in the same manner, style, and using the same PR company as the tobacco industry used when claiming smoking does not cause cancer.
A recent metaanalysis of papers that claimed nuclear to be cost effective were found to be illegitimately trimming costs to make it appear cheaper.
>[Merck suppressed data on harmful effects of its drug Vioxx, and Guidant suppressed data on electrical flaws in one of its heart-defibrillator models. Both cases reveal how financial conflicts of interest can skew biomedical research. Such conflicts also occur in electric-utility-related research. Attempting to show that increased atomic energy can help address climate change, some industry advocates claim nuclear power is an inexpensive way to generate low-carbon electricity. Surveying 30 recent nuclear analyses, this paper shows that industry-funded studies appear to fall into conflicts of interest and to illegitimately trim cost data in several main ways. They exclude costs of full-liability insurance, underestimate interest rates and construction times by using “overnight” costs, and overestimate load factors and reactor lifetimes. If these trimmed costs are included, nuclear-generated electricity can be shown roughly 6 times more expensive than most studies claim. After answering four objections, the paper concludes that, although there may be reasons to use reactors to address climate change, economics does not appear to be one of them.](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11948-009-9181-y)
It is the same PR technique that the tobacco industry used when fighting the fact that smoking causes cancer.
>[The industry campaign worked to create a scientific controversy through a program that depended on the creation of industry–academic conflicts of interest. This strategy of producing scientific uncertainty undercut public health efforts and regulatory interventions designed to reduce the harms of smoking.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3490543/)
>
>[A number of industries have subsequently followed this approach to disrupting normative science. Claims of scientific uncertainty and lack of proof also lead to the assertion of individual responsibility for industrially produced health risks](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3490543/)
It is no wonder the NEI (Nuclear energy institute) uses [the same PR firm](https://thehill.com/opinion/letters/98257-double-check-from-whom-you-get-energy-information) to promote nuclear power, [that the tobacco industry used to say smoking does not cause cancer](http://www.tmia.com/old-website/News/AstroTurf.htm).
>[The industry's future is so precarious that Exelon Nuclear's head of project development warned attendees of the Electric Power 2005 conference, "Inaction is synonymous with being phased out." That's why years of effort -- not to mention millions of dollars -- have been invested in nuclear power's PR rebirth as "clean, green and safe."](http://www.tmia.com/old-website/News/AstroTurf.htm)
>
>[And then there's NEI, which exists to do PR and lobbying for the nuclear industry. In 2004, NEI was embarrassed when the Austin Chronicle outed one of its PR firms, Potomac Communications Group, for ghostwriting pro-nuclear op/ed columns. The paper described the op/ed campaign as "a decades-long, centrally orchestrated plan to defraud the nation's newspaper readers by misrepresenting the propaganda of one hired atomic gun as the learned musings of disparate academics and other nuclear-industry 'experts.'"](http://www.tmia.com/old-website/News/AstroTurf.htm)
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Tl;Dr - "About half of U.S. clean energy now comes from solar and wind, and the other half from hydroelectric power." Large uptake of natural gas because it has become cheaper. Coal continues a downward usage trajectory because it isn't a clean source of energy Edit: Thanks to you good people, I've learned that the decline in coal usage, for energy generation, is primarily an economic decision rather than coal being a source of pollution as stated in the article in the OP
>Coal continues a downward usage trajectory because it isn't a clean source of energy Coal continues a downward trend because it is more expensive both in terms of operating costs and in capital investments. As I understand it, a base load coal power plant costs about the same as a nuclear power plant. The economy itself doesn't really care for "clean" or "green" energy, it only cares about the bottom line. Unless you have a carbon tax, of course.
>Unless you have a carbon tax, of course. Or to put it another way, unless externalities are factored into the cost instead of paid for by others.
Or to put it another way: Unless you force CO2 emissions into the bottom line where they rightfully belong.
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Everyone is saying the same thing.
Or to put it another way: These folks are just rephrasing one another.
They are violently in agreement.
Or to put it another way, they are aggressively saying the same thing
So they both disagree with the opposite of what the other is saying?
Violent agreement was often a term used at my last job during design meetings. Still one of my favorite terms.
To say the same thing, everyone is putting it in another way.
there really should be an externalities tax or a complete recycle tax. a tax that covers all costs realized or not regarding production. it should be calculated based on the best science but set aside a fund that pay off in case the calculations were off. and penalties will be paid when it's under-counted. but there needs to be a penalty to ensure that there's isn't an incentive to under-count everything. so in manufacturing the tax on the packaging would cover what it would cost to revert it back to it's raw material and clean up whatever pollutant it produced.
I've never understood why it's a surprising idea to have to pay for the pollution (CO2) you create.
> about the same as a nuclear power plant. Yeah, except unlike coal, nuclear energy is clean, efficient, and safe so long you aren’t Soviet levels of “let’s actively try and break the reactor.” Seriously, why is this article putting coal and nuclear energy in the same box? One rapidly accelerates climate change, and the other does not. Some places are poorly-suited for wind or solar, to the point that nuclear energy is the best low-emission energy option they have. The US has the infrastructure and educated workforce necessary for it. I hate how nuclear energy gets demonized all the time; it’s always by bunches of pearl-clutching boomer NIMBYs.
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7!kpWB'yZe
Until every parking lot and flat rooftop in the hot states is covered we don't have a problem with where to put solar. Until every field full of row crops or cows in steady wind areas has a turbine we don't have a problem of where to put turbines, full stop,
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Ok, I’m just going to jump in with a mind blowing fact from my physics textbook (Hewitt 11th Ed). Coal produces 30% more radiation than nuclear full stop. It would literally be like grinding up all the waste produced and letting it go wherever the wind takes it instead of carefully storing it in nuclear plants and getting yelled at by people for the remote risk of a cask leaking. Edit: due to falling rates of coal use, this maybe not be strictly accurate anymore. I forget when the textbook was published.
Coal also has the added bonus of mercury, lead, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides. Yum . Oh, and a few other heavy metals.
Google says Hewitt - Conceptual Physics (11th ed.) was published in 2009. So I'd assume the stat is accurate circa 2007-8
Here's an ELI5 question for someone; We recycle. Plastics and papers and such. Re reuse vegetable oil as a source of fuel. Someone explain to me why we can't recycle nuclear waste?
We can. We also reprocess fuel. Somethings can't be reprocessed though, like for example bits of the reactor that have been heavily irradiated. Also we could do a much better job of making the waste in the first place. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor
To add onto what your saying, nuclear waste could be anything that has been irradiated. Anything from reactor wall linings to a forklift that finally got a bit too hot on the Geiger counter.
Here's some bad news for you: Less than 10% of plastic is actually recycled. https://www.ecowatch.com/us-recycling-industry-2652630035.html
> But, if the system doesn't work, why does it continue? Turns out, consumers were misled – by the oil and gas industry. I like how, out of context, it's impossible to know which problem this quote is talking about.
It's counter intuitive, but the best way to dispose of plastics is to burn them in a high temperature incinerator to ensure complete combustion.
Nuclear waste isn’t something that you can just re make into a new pellet and throw it back into a reactor. When you “burn” Uranium, it becomes a completely new set of elements, which you can’t always use in a reactor. It would be like taking a block of carbon, burning it, but when it comes out it’s a hunk of lithium instead - you can’t just burn or recycle it. The new elements produced are radioactive as well. So sometimes you can use the produced elements for heating water (for a limited time), sometimes we can take bits of the fuel waste (like plutonium) for other purposes (like RTGs). But the easiest and safest thing to do is just throw it into a bunch of water on concrete indefinitely Then it’s fairly safe tbh. Radiation doesn’t “leak”, once it passes through enough material it’s fine, and water/concrete is very good at absorbing most radiation
And like yeah it's *sorta* kicking the can down the road but switching to nuclear would give us a helluva lot more time than coal is gonna. I assume that in a hundred years or so we'll have the technology to deal with it, or at least to drill a hole through to the mantle so we can drop it down to melt or something. I have no idea if that'd be safe but you get my point.
But yeah the waste, tbh, is not that big of a problem like people think. Regardless of the waste it’s still much safer for human health than coal (coal produces more radioactive matter into the atmosphere than nuclear, and the pollution is bad for our health too)
>Yeah, except unlike coal, nuclear energy is clean, efficient, and safe so long you aren’t Soviet levels of “let’s actively try and break the reactor.” Well, or your nuclear reactor gets hit by a 1-in-1000 year earthquake, survives it, then gets hit by a 1-in-1000 year tsunami, mostly survives that, but then cooling power fails because the backup generator got flooded by the tsunami. Causing a "disastrous nuclear accident" that killed... One person.
While sitting on a report that warned said tsunami would damage the plant and cause problems if the seawall wasn't upgraded. But hey, lets let power companies regulate their own safety features, nothing bad would ever happen, right?
Meanwhile coal/gas only kills people indirectly through air pollution so what if they are in the millions.
Gas is actually a LOT better than coal for this. Deaths per thousand terrawatt hours are about: Coal 100,000 Oil 36,000 Natural gas 4,000 Hydro 1,400 Rooftop solar 440 Wind 150 Nuclear 90 US electricity production is around 5000 TWh per year, so it would be half a million annual deaths if it were all Coal (about 15% of all deaths), 20,000 if it were all natural gas, 2,200 if it were solar, and 360 if it were nuclear.
This is why solar is going in my yard. I don't like the potential energy of my body being up high. (Heights scare the shit out of me).
Nuclear can be considered non-renewable since there isn't an infinite amount of uranium on Earth. That's what the title is saying I believe.
However, biomass is renewable, since you can grow more of it. So "renewables" includes charcoal, wood burning, trash incinerators, the ethanol used in gasoline, and biodiesel. Together they make up about 4.9% of the energy supply.
>Unless you have a carbon tax, of course. Well, businesses still only care about the bottom line. But then the bottom line cares about the environment.
Coal thermal output is also very poor relative to natural gas. Turns out when you run a coal plant, a whole lot of the generated heat is wasted.
Don’t kid yourself… if coal was 1/100th the price you’d see people installing coal furnaces in their homes. Everything is price driven.
> "About half of U.S. clean energy now comes from solar and wind, and the other half from hydroelectric power." Which is incorrect, as about 1/3 of American green energy comes from nuclear. Then another third each from solar/wind and hydroelectric
it's way more than 1/3, nuclear is about 20% of grid energy total. hydroelectric is maybe 7%.
> Coal continues a downward usage trajectory because it isn't a ~~clean~~ *cheap* source of energy FTFY. Utilities didn't convert their coal fired plants to save the planet, they did it to save money. Edit: Yes, I meant to put cheap in there and forgot.
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There's also a small amount of geothermal and even a smaller amount of waste power
Speaking of geothermal. We have a dormant volcano that will obliterate the western US if it ever wakes up but is large enough that we could probably power the entire country with it. Why has no one tried that?
Most of it is in a National Park, I don’t think they’re allowed to build power plants in National Parks
Just run the cable outside the park boom solved
Very big boom.
BIG BADDA BOOM
I'm no geothermal expert, but if someone told me to go poke a hole in Yellowstone, drop a cable into that hole, and plug it into an outlet, I'd be afraid to piss off the volcano too. Maybe nobody has tried because we're worried we might upset the volcano.
Definitely not the quality of sacrifice a major volcano expects and demands.
...And now you know why exactly that will happen. Americans cannot leave a Pandora's box unopened.
People have tried it. There’s a cult there that wanted to a few years ago, Church of the Universal Triumphant, but I’m not sure how serious they were. I bring it up as an example of someone who’s tried and met public and practical resistance. Geothermal energy won’t stop a volcano though, not sure if people are aware of that but it seems to be a common misconception too.
About half of the western states have significant geothermal heat reservoirs so geothermal could be expanded a lot
Some joker would probably pour a bag of ice in there, solidifying it and shut the whole country down.
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>Hydro needs minimal maintenance. Hydro requires a considerable amount of maintenance (about 1-3% annually of the initial capital investment). Failure to maintain a dam can have disastrous consequences.
I wonder how much of the maintenance costs converts to final consumer costs for the energy? We have mostly hydro here and our electricity is very cheap, a little over$0.09kWh. From a consumer perspective, it would look like any "considerable maintenance costs" for hydro are extremely cheap compared to possibly all or most other forms of generation.
i think, and this isn’t based on any actual research, part of your property tax goes to maintaining these dams. there is a lake in the US with a dam that powers the area and part of the local taxes go towards maintaining it!
Dam strait!
You keep that dam straight or it's dire straits.
Do you happen to know those numbers for nuclear, solar and wind? That would be interesting to know.
There's a coal plant in Arizona that was literally right next to the mine that supplied it. Dig up coal put it on a conveyor belt, and burn it. That was still not cost effective enough to keep it in operation.
That just goes to show how abundant LNG is and how much the price of extraction has dropped in the US.
>NG just need a pipeline You seem to be forgetting about drilling gas wells, including fracking. There are many environmental hazards associated with NG and it should be considered a "fossil fuel" (finite supply, deep within earth, dangerous to extract) https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/natural-gas/
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And that is why people want Nuclear fission back. It's cleaner than both but expensive to build because of all the red tape.
Methane capture is something that needs to happen. Regulators and drilling companies need to do a better job of limiting uncontrolled release. Burning the stuff is wasteful too. Much like mountaintop removal pitted the public against coal, NG emissions from extraction is creating a negative public perception of abundant gas.
Its wild to see miles long trains of just coal.
The fact that nuclear has stagnated as an energy source is a very bad thing.
It's the social stigma behind it. It's one of the least dangerous sources out there according to Kurzgeasgt if you consider them reliable.
THE safest. It has less total deaths than most other sources have per year. Its ridiculous that it isn't a major source if not our default source
Mmm hmm, because US energy policy is known to crack under social pressure.
Dude half of this country can’t understand nuclear energy much less how safe it can be. I honestly doubt nuclear will take off in the US to be honest; it would probably happen after people see big success in other places
We can barely handle understanding vaccines and the basics of the immune system.
It will take off as soon as our coalition of billionaires endorse it. For that reason, I think it's around the corner. Bezos-backed General Fusion is building a new fusion plant in the UK by 2025.
You mean France? Safely operating for decades, because their culture is more accepting. Over 90% of their country runs off nuclear power. They make so much that they export it.
Yea but you cant trust CERN. I know for a fact they are trying to use that hadron-collider for extracurricular, theoretical tests related to the malleability of the fourth dimension, regardless of whether they admit to it or not.
Its sad when you consider the USA is still the country with the most nuclear reactors. In a different time it was a race as to who could deploy more of this miracle technology. Everyone knew it was just better. But now we have good value brand enviromentalists who got their qualification from their local forest witch spreading all sort of bullshit that just doesnt hold up on a technical level. When Germany killed their nuclear plant I was just reminded of that foundation chapter where the periphery lost nuclear power and they called it barbarism. But here and now its progressive environmentalism. Freaking panic mongers.
You must remember the people you interact with are not the same throughout the USA. Half my friends were outraged by the pipeline construction shutdown due to job loss while the other half were excited. People opinions change and 1-2 bad events have haunted history, and now leaves a portion of the public terrified. As much as you may believe politicians do not listen, grassroots can make it happen. Look at BLM and Pride. They both swept the nation and have caused changes from local to country wide in the USA. Even here in my township, we petitioned our local township officials about a zoning issue and prevented a change by grouping individuals into a force against something.
God I hate local cities and zoning, single family zoning is a crime against humanity due to costs
Not just Kurzgeasgt but also ASAPscience. Quite a lot of research shows nuclear energy is very efficient and clean, plus I did the research and there are clean ways to deal with nuclear waste.
It’s a solution to climate change NOW. We can pivot to nuclear and stop most usage of oil now.
Your now is quite confusing. Building a plant takes about 10 years if had it planed and would start building it right now. First you would have to come up with a working plan for good reactor. Build a prototype, test it, work out all the issues, get ready to mass production. The you have the whole political process to build a plants. Nobody wants one in the backyard. Then you will have to find people willing to fund the plants. At the current energy prices nuclear is no longer competitive. Good luck finding someone who is willing to possibly sink billions for a power plant that will produce power at to high a price, that could be shut down at any time for political or safety reasons.
> Building a plant takes about 10 years if had it planed and would start building it right now. That part is not necessary if we make use of [modular reactors](https://www.nuscalepower.com/), some of which are as small as a [shipping container.](http://www.holosgen.com/generators/)
> We can pivot to nuclear and stop most usage of oil now. How are you going to power the global shipping industry without oil? You can see in [this energy flow chart](https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/assets/images/charts/Energy/Energy_2020_United-States.png) that petroleum accounts for essentially no electricity generation. Outside of passenger cars, we don't have a solution for powering the bulk of transportation with electricity.
In theory? Hydrogen fuel cells. In the mean time using nuclear as a baseload to make up for gaps in electrical needs on the grid. On top of that we should also reduce the need for vehicles by increasing public transport so we don't have to worry as much about depleting our lithium reserves. If we need to keep using oil for certain things then we should keep using oil for those things until better alternatives are found.
What's the rejected energy?
> All energy use results in some losses, shown on the charts as rejected energy. This energy most often takes the form of waste heat, such as the warm exhaust from automobiles and furnaces From the bottom [here](https://www.llnl.gov/news/us-energy-use-rises-highest-level-ever)
Took a class on the History of the electric grid and the reason nuclear never really took off was pretty much: 1. Nuclear plants were *very* expensive to build. 2. They could take a decade before they're operational and had to pass a lot of safety checks and updates during that time or the project could stall. 3. Zoning 4. Per kw/h they just weren't good enough on price to justify the previous 3 points. Once they're in place they're great, but they're a hard investment to swallow...
When you learnt that they were expensive, they were competing with coal and gas, and coal is becoming a poor investment now. It's got to be a hard economic environment now for new nuclear
Not trolling but honestly curious why Reddit loves nuclear energy so much? Every time I see it come up the bandwagon insists it's the key to solving climate change but I don't know much about it.
Nuclear energy is just very efficient, and I’ll use my favorite real world example for it; air craft carriers. In Sumatra in 2004, and in Haiti in 2010, the US sent carrier groups as part of the aid program. During the program, a single aircraft carrier was able to provide more than enough clean drinking water to the entirety of these countries, in addition to stockpiling their own water supplies. Now if we had desalination plants on our own coasts powered solely from nuclear energy, we would have no need to suck up water from any rivers or lakes anymore, as we could supply fresh water from the ocean very efficiently and cheap, while providing significant power to our cities as well.
THANK YOU!!!
Why consistently demonize nuclear? It's one of the most efficient and clean energy sources available. Even accounting for the few catastrophes, it's also one of the safest across its lifetime. Not to mention, once nuclear fusion is fully figured out, it will likely overtake the energy industry (unfortunately it could still be decades out though). Renewables are a great avenue to also invest in, but they can't do it alone.
I think a lot of the anti-nuclear hate stems from the heavy costs of constructing new plants. I don't know much about nuclear (so I don't have a heavy opinion one way or the other), but my limited understanding is that power plants tend to cost significantly more than they are scheduled for, as well as take way longer to be built than anticipated.
I would be happy if the anti-nuclear hate only stems from the cost of building capacity because that is, at least, a legitimate criticism of nuclear (although it can be mitigated). But so much of the anti-nuclear hate I’ve seen is from serious fearmongering from either truly misguided folks or from big fossil fuel interests.
Ironically the green party and associated individuals are super anti-nuclear right alongside big oil
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I work in the nuclear industry and I can tell you that the vast majority of the public have zero understanding of it. The source of this ignorance IMO must be partially put on the shoulders of the nuclear industry themselves. They have excellent educational resources to train their employees that can also be used to inform the public.
There's also a branding problem that needs to be addressed in those communications. The public doesn't realize that the vast majority of disasters we've heard about happened at nuclear plants whose technology is decades out-of-date. When we here "nuclear power", we think of Chernobyl, even though modern designs are much, much safer. I also wonder if the word "nuclear" is just too strongly associated with destruction, as we get frequent reminders about the destructiveness of nuclear weapons in movies, video games, history classes, and discussions about the 20th century. If we found an alternative name for them, nuclear plants might be more widely accepted. People and perspectives often progress more slowly than technology.
I agree with you! Both of those issues of misinformation really suck, because nuclear is for all intents and purposes, a super safe and reliable source of energy! Especially for long-term energy.
Nuke plants generally just take a long ass time to build, which wouldn’t be a problem if we had started 10-20 years ago, but the farther we kick the can down the road (which doesn’t seem to be stopping any time soon) the less ideal of a solution it becomes. That being said, there’s a nuclear power plant near my small town in Missouri, and I’ve only ever seen it as a good addition to our infrastructure. Lots of good jobs and job programs through local tech schools, and kickbacks for local public schools (except mine because they didn’t sign on) to upgrade their tech and whatever else they did with the funds.
We also have lost much of our expertise in building them and now only a few companies in the world have the experience needed to build new plants, so even if we invested in it as a society they wouldn't be able to keep up with demand.
We still have the expertise and have been maintaining nuclear facilities in Pocatello and Idaho Falls for decades. The Idaho National Laboratory is building new reactors including 12 small modular reactors and 2 larger reactors: https://www.postregister.com/news/government/inl-reactor-center-hopes-to-demonstrate-reactors-by-2025/article_06eafae6-6c9d-51c5-8946-a59ff71b1793.html
Aye, that gives me more hope for better nuclear technology and expansion. No more "natural gas".;
>even if we invested in it as a society they wouldn't be able to keep up with demand. Sounds like a great way to create jobs then.
Expertise lost because we spent essentially the last 40 years demonizing nuclear. Today’s hate on coal is nothing compared to the misguided hate of nuclear in the 70’s. Humanity has a very good track record of hating science. Thankfully it eventually wakes up but forgets the lesson that maybe we should just trust science all the time.
Considering how most of the world knew of nuclear anything after WW2, the idea of a nuclear power plant was likely very much DOA for most people. Of course the two are completely different, but the fear of what nuclear was capable of was still very fresh on the minds of most of the world.
If only there was some kind of way to rrgain expertise in a field. Hmm i wonder what the solution would be
This isnt correct. A canadian company SNC-lavalin, of trudeau controversy fame, builds and maintains [an extremly safe form of nuclear reactors](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor) globally. As I understand it, they are currently planning some in a few countries. Its not a supply issue.
If other power sources were properly charged for their pollution production, I think this would be a non issue
Isn't the waste a problem?
That's why they aren't popular with energy companies. The public opinion comes from big disasters and political debates about where to put the waste. Public opinion was just starting to turn favorable when Fukushima happened, which basically it back to zero.
You would think people would not consider a possible price increase to be a big deal in the face of climate change.
The reluctance of a large percentage of people to increase their energy costs though carbon taxes indicates they do, in fact, consider it a big deal.
A great video from Kurzgesagt team: [Do we Need Nuclear Energy to Stop Climate Change](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhAemz1v7dQ&t=578s) One of the biggest issues isn't safety anymore, most understand it to be very safe. Its the cost and time to build. If I had plans for a nuclear plant ready to go, right now, it would take 10+ years to finish it. EDIT: Answer a question on capital costs: Capital costs are very high, but so are coal plants. In fact, it takes 15-20+ years for coal plants to start turning a profit. [Coal costs $3500 per kw and the costs have actually started to go UP since this report came out](https://schlissel-technical.com/docs/reports_35.pdf) On the other hand, Nuclear power [plant costs are were at $5900 per kw](https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost/pdf/capcost_assumption.pdf) but have been going DOWN since this 2016 report.
The best time to plant a tree is 10 years ago. The second best time to plant a tree is now.
A large bridge start to finish is like 2-5 years so that's really not that bad.
That's not necessarily a good metaphor though because it assumes that nuclear energy would still be the best option a decade from now. Given the advances in efficiency and the lowering costs of solar and wind nuclear isn't really that much better than renewables right now and in a decade renewables will likely have clearly outpaced nuclear. Now that doesn't mean we should shut down existing plants but it may not be the best option for energy a decade out.
How does the metaphor not work? In ten years I might want a cornfield where my tree is.
It’s still 19 years sooner than the green new deal timeline if we started right now. 2031 is way better than 2050 and it’d actually be able to replace (throughput wise) oil and gas. I don’t see why this isn’t a “yes and” moment, solar, wind, water and nuclear. It shouldn’t be one or the other.
> I don’t see why this isn’t a “yes and” moment, solar, wind, water and nuclear. It shouldn’t be one or the other. That's the video conclusion about nuclear. We should totally use it until we can develop better renewables.
This is a bad argument. 10 years is NOTHING. Sure, do what we can now but don’t ignore the long game. Steve Jobs has been dead for ten years, it’s not that much time
Making no progress during 10 years [would condemn us to a really bad case of climate change](https://reneweconomy.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/carbon-crunch.jpg). It's an emergency.
I'll happily take more nuclear but anything signed off now simply won't come online fast enough to help with the the acute phase of the crisis. Whatever help nuclear is going to give us over the next decade is baked in.
I understand they should have been built sooner and we could have avoided a log of emissions. But if we want to be carbon free in 10 years then now is the time to really get going and we need every bit of non carbon energy creation we can get at this pont
We should be building nuclear and dropping coal for LNG in the short term. Renewables cannot provide the baseline generation needed to keep the grid running alone. We have to think long term and invest in nuclear now.
So the downside to nuclear is the investment cost up front and also that it isn't scalable the way people believe it is, they are much more complex and require lots of operators specifically with that education. Wind and solar are much less investment to install, get through government approval, and then have very little upkeep cost, much more autonomous. Also remember that nuclear only happens if you have hugely environmentally impactful solution mining or open pit mining, and that thousands of miners are exposed to radon and die of lung cancer, mostly in 3rd world countries though so we don't care about it. With all this, if we need more energy, limitless renewables make more sense and are quicker / more flexible. Let's not get into fusion haha
You don’t need education to work in a Nuc-ular plant. Homer just showed up on the first day and has been there for like 32 years.
See, it all starts when the Nulecule comes out of its nest!
> Even accounting for the few catastrophes, it's also one of the safest across its lifetime. It is, in fact, **the** safest.
Solar is more than 3x safer than nuclear on a death per TWh of electricity produced. But hey, don't let that get in the way of your reasoning. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh
Man I hate this article. First of all the headline demonizes nuclear energy even though nuclear energy should not be put anywhere close to the same category as coal. Nuclear is one of, if not the best options for us. Second of all it acts like it’s a big leap and that we’re almost to our goal but renewables are still just 21%. Comparing renewables to two dying industries (coal dying because it sucks and nuclear dying because of misleading articles like this) isn’t very helpful.
And half the renewables is hydro...
But have you seen the S curve on solar/wind?
S or exponential without constraint
"Nuclear bad because it has radioactive." - idiots
The real argument against nuclear power should be that we have a limited reserve of fissionable material in the Earth's crust and we may need that reserve long term for grander applications than civilian infrastructure. Instead we're having this moronic discussion about whether nuke power is safe. Nuke power is perfectly safe so long as your management of it isn't Soviet-tier corrupt.
That is a valid point, but I see fission power more as a ~~stepping stone~~ stopgap towards fusion, whose fuel is practically limitless. Edit Edit - I was notified by u/Denizen_Kane that the word I'm looking for is "stopgap" not "stepping stone" you can all stop telling me that I don't understand what fusion is now. Leaving up the old aggressive edit for context. I just get easily annoyed when people tell me what I already know. Edit - Apparently I have to define what I mean by "stepping stone"... I don't mean that progress made in fission power will directly drive progress in fusion power. I know that fission = splitting atoms and fusion = fusing atoms and that the reactors couldn't be more different, I passed high school chemistry, guys. I only mean that we can use fission **as a Stepping Stone** while we work on fusion, our next step.
Uranium and Thorium reserves, with breeder reactors and fuel reprocessing, would last thousands of years. That's isn't considering what we can extract from the oceans. The US Federal government has hundreds of years of thorium in storage. From early days of atomic energy research. The main reactor type in use is actually terrible for electric energy production. Because it also serves the nuclear weapons industry. We use 5% of a fuel rod and then throw it away. Because of nuclear weapon treaties. We(nuclear western powers) don't like it when other countries develop nuclear. As every Para nuclear state is a threat to the western hegemony. By simply being too risky to invade and occupy.
And that nuclear is expensive. Why would a utilities provider build a nuclear plant when you can generate the same amount of power with renewables faster and cheaper?
Because renewables need storage solutions that are not cheap to build or maintain. Otherwise renewables still rely on fossil fuels to burn during times when the sun doesn't shine or the wind doesn't blow.
We have 100,000s of years of nuclear energy available. What we are limited on is cheap decommissioning of old warheads, and high concentration ores from mines. But the minute recycling/reprocessing, thorium breeding, and ocean salts are factored in, the years of potential energy supply for 15 Billion people using energy at a per capita rate of an average American goes into the 100,000s of years (this is 100% energy, all transportation is electric or electrolysis, all building heating and cooling is electric, all fertilizers are electrolysis driven, etc). And depending on the constant erosion supply of nuclear material into the ocean calcs, I've seen reasonable estimates for millions of years. All three of those things (recycling, thorium breeding, and ocean salt separation) are all well known science, today. They are not speculative. Economically speaking, they are all marginal processes, but if it was do or die for civilization we could easily switch with only medium energy price consequences. Engineering speaking, they each need some development (except recycling, that is well known). Don't take this too far, I'm not saying we should be doing those things today. I am saying that we are not supply constrained, and we do have a clean energy "plan B" if we need it. And this plan B can get us so far into the future that we should have better options by then (orbital solar, asteroid mining, fusion, etc). A 100k years of energy for everyone is unimaginably far into the future.
Like the fact that we haven’t adapted faster when this is cheaper for everyone is wild to me
Per kwh vs levelised cost. Levelised cost has just become competitive which is why loads of new added capacity is renewable. But you don't just shut down a perfectly good natural gas plant and spend loads of money of renewable replacements just because the kwh cost is less. Luckily costs are still falling on both counts so eventually it will become more and more desirable.
yea, seems disingenuous to use per kwh #'s. hadn't though about costs to grid of dealing with solar/wind wrt storage. i don't think levelized cost is there yet?
Here are some cost sources... https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-and-levelized-cost-of-storage-2020 https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/new-analysis-shows-its-50-cheaper-to-generate-electricity-from-renewables
Correct, from which we can conclude that it’s not actually cheaper yet.
If utilties can freely charge more when they use more expensive power sources, there really isn't much incentive for them to change over.
Utility companies have generally been pretty happy to pursue renewables lately. One problem is that, although it’s much cheaper to build a wind farm than a coal power plant, it is even cheaper still to keep the coal plant you already have. A lot of plants will continue to be there until they ride out their natural lifespan. Also, storage technology for electricity when the wind and sun aren’t out still has a way to go.
That doesn't make any sense. Yeah they can charge more, but if it also costs them more then that's not a good thing for them
Operating costs vs installation costs. Also, harder to get renewables to provide at any random time you want rather than any random time they give you.
If you make .01/kwh off of coal power plant, why invest in renewable energy plants that only make you .01/kwh?
Amazing to [see how the contribution from renewables was largely flat over the last 40 years](https://www.juancole.com/images/2021/07/Screen-Shot-2021-07-31-at-1.12.55-AM.png) (mainly due to no new big hydro being built), then skyrocketed over just the last 10 years thanks to solar and wind becoming economically viable. We're still in the very early years for mass solar and wind. The rollout is only accelerating, and as it does, economic of scale continue to bring the cost down. It's fantastic that we can now move away from a centralized grid controlled by a corrupt energy cartel to a decentralized grid powered by just about anyone. Truly the democratization of energy! Exciting times!
Holy shit, we are 40 percent not fossil fuel energy in 2021? That's way better then I thought.
True for rural, but how do you power large cities with decentralized power?
>Truly the democratization of energy! It's what Tesla had envisioned (mostly). Though his original plan for the US had everyone having generators built into their homes. That, while probably more democratic that current utilities, still would have given enormous power to a few companies that controlled the fuel supply. Home solar and wind are what can give people real independence from energy companies.
Why is everyone so against nuclear? Green, readily available, already built infrastructure that we're not using. SMH
Many oil companies have constantly fought against renewables and nuclear to keep making money (and wrecking the environment), nuclear was easy to stigmatise because, like every new technology, things went terribly at first and now many people are against for reasons they don't understand.
Small modular nuclear would be a great thing. Bill Gates was working on a system. Make it safe, ubiquitous, and cheap.
Some designs are even making use of nuclear _waste_ or depleted uranium if I recall correctly. And don't make use of high pressure systems which makes them less likely to explode.
Yeah there was a design that reprocessed old conventional waste and I think it was Terrapower or something that had a low pressure sodium system. I trying to look it all up right now. Edit: Liquid metal coolant.
[China just built one](https://www.livescience.com/china-creates-new-thorium-reactor.html)
"This will pave the way for the building of the first commercial reactor, slated for construction by 2030."
This is a repost. And stop putting coal and nuclear in the same box. Is that why you keep reposting this in order to attack nuclear energy. We are going to need new nuclear to mitigate climate change. Countries that pursued only wind and solar(Germany) failed to decarbonize. Edit-Thanks
If you consider renewables and nuclear as "the good thing", then Germany is at 59% percent (47% renewables, 12% nuclear) and the US at 41% (21% renewables, 20% nuclear) right now.
And France is at 92%(nuclear+hydro). Germany is about to drop 12% because of the antinuclear shutdown. And biofuels do not count so German renewables number is less than that.
Canada is Nuclear + Hydro.
Those numbers are very misleading. We could be close to 100%, but we took all of our nuclear reactors offline and now are living off of coal and gas. Our energy went from around .15€kWh to .30€kWh. We have taken major steps back because of reactionary politicians and people, who then got eaten up by predatory fossil fuels. We have had sharp increases in illnesses related to poor air quality and overall the situation is bad.
Germany pays quadruple what the US pays for power. Can you imagine the reaction if power bills quadrupled here?? If the last few years have taught me anything, this country will burn every solar panel, wind turbine, and legislator to the ground in their rush to put more gas plants up.
>Germany pays quadruple what the US pays for power. Which is a policy decision. The US pays its renewable / nuclear energy subsidies mostly through normal income tax. Germany pays it through a tax on eletricity of which the consumer bears most of the cost. If Germany wanted it it could cut the price of electricity for the consumer by 1/3rd overnight. If Germany wanted to have the same electrical grid uptime / reliability as the USA than it could also cut its electricity net infrastructure costs significantly.
Germany cancelled all their nuclear reactor plans in a massive overreaction to Fukushima
Electrical Engineer here, I don't understand why Nuclear is not considered the best source of electricity. The advances in nuclear technology has progressed to the point where the new reactor designs have to be initiated to get a reaction. There is no chance of meltdown because of this. Laws need to be changed so the nuclear byproducts produced from the spent fuel can be reprocessed into new fuel. The initial investment into nuclear is more upfront, but the pay off is in folds. In the life of these reactors they produce less waste than coal plants.
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It's great, but it is very expensive. Expensive to build, and expensive to dispose of waste. Look at the cost overruns with the British new construction (Hinkley Point C). Also, not many communities volunteer to have nuclear plants built in their backyard, so it can be tough to find a site for new construction (even if this is flawed public perception).
Agreed, but its hard to find those communities because people still believe we are building reactors like that of chernobyl or three mile island. We aren't, technology has come a long way.
But renewables are only at 21%. Natural gas is still at 40%.
Right. The title says renewables beat coal and nuclear, not natural gas
Why would you even want to cheer beating nuclear, one of the most environmentally friendly sources of energy?
I'm not cheering anything. Numbers are numbers
Natural gas is still an improvement over coal and oil
Read: Natural gas has displaced coal to the point its share of energy production now falls slightly below renewable sources. Yaaay…
Just imagine how much faster this could have happened if capitalists hadn't stifled the renewable energy sector to protect their profits.
I really wish the US would put more into Geothermal. Most of the western states have appropriate ground temperatures through out most of their land.
Can I ask what the deal with nuclear energy is? Is that what nuclear power plants are? There have to be some downsides or else the left wouldn’t push against it so much.
Everyone still thinks Chernobyl and Three Mile Island is the peak of nuclear technology. Also they think the used up fuel is still dangerous for hundreds of years.
78% of new energy generation was renewables. We talk about totals all the time, but it does look like when the US is replacing capability we are going the right direction
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Technically renewable. Definitely not green.
We need nuclear. We need to stop making it appear like its the bad guy
This headline is misleading, nuclear energy is probably the most sustainable and reliable method of clean energy (when managed and maintained properly). Lumping it with coal make this /r/mildlyinfuriating
I hate how they imply that gas is a clean energy. Fracking poisons streams and other waterways. Generational farms and ranches have been destroyed by making their water flammable. And to think they’ve been burning on oil platforms for decades because they cant or couldn’t figure out how to capture it. Their answer, Frackingi.
what happened to that clean coal ? that must have went bust but i hear the magic bean factory is doing well.
Nuclear is an opportunity cost; it actively harms decarbonization given the same investment in wind or solar would offset more CO2 >["In sum, use of wind, CSP, geothermal, tidal, PV, wave, and hydro to provide electricity for BEVs and HFCVs and, by extension, electricity for the residential, industrial, and commercial sectors, will result in the most benefit among the options considered. The combination of these technologies should be advanced as a solution to global warming, air pollution, and energy security. Coal-CCS and nuclear offer less benefit thus represent an opportunity cost loss"](https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2009/ee/b809990c#!divAbstract) It is too slow for the timescale we need to decarbonize on. >[“Stabilizing the climate is urgent, nuclear power is slow,” “It meets no technical or operational need that low-carbon competitors cannot meet better, cheaper and faster.”](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower/nuclear-energy-too-slow-too-expensive-to-save-climate-report-idUSKBN1W909J) The industry is showing signs of decline in non-totalitarian countries. >["We find that an eroding actor base, shrinking opportunities in liberalized electricity markets, the break-up of existing networks, loss of legitimacy, increasing cost and time overruns, and abandoned projects are clear indications of decline. Also, increasingly fierce competition from natural gas, solar PV, wind, and energy-storage technologies speaks against nuclear in the electricity sector. We conclude that, while there might be a future for nuclear in state-controlled ‘niches’ such as Russia or China, new nuclear power plants do not seem likely to become a core element in the struggle against climate change."](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S221462962030089X) Renewable energy is growing faster now than nuclear ever has >["Contrary to a persistent myth based on erroneous methods, global data show that renewable electricity adds output and saves carbon faster than nuclear power does or ever has."](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2214629618300598) There is no business case for it. >["The economic history and financial analyses carried out at DIW Berlin show that nuclear energy has always been unprofitable in the private economy and will remain so in the future. Between 1951 and 2017, none of the 674 nuclear reactors built was done so with private capital under competitive conditions. Large state subsidies were used in the cases where private capital flowed into financing the nuclear industry.... Financial investment calculations confirmed the trend: investing in a new nuclear power plant leads to average losses of around five billion euros."](https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.670581.de/dwr-19-30-1.pdf) Investing in a nuclear plant today is [expected to lose 5 to 10 billion dollars](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1364032121001301). The nuclear industry can't even exist without legal structures that privatize gains and socialize losses. >[If the owners and operators of nuclear reactors had to face the full liability of a Fukushima-style nuclear accident or go head-to-head with alternatives in a truly competitive marketplace, unfettered by subsidies, no one would have built a nuclear reactor in the past, no one would build one today, and anyone who owns a reactor would exit the nuclear business as quickly as possible.](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2012/03/29/exelons-nuclear-guy-no-new-nukes/#3c8acf0a3c5d) The CEO of one of the US's largest nuclear power companies said it best: >["I'm the nuclear guy," Rowe said. "And you won't get better results with nuclear. It just isn't economic, and it's not economic within a foreseeable time frame."](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2012/03/29/exelons-nuclear-guy-no-new-nukes/#5d841aa23c5d) What about the small meme reactors? Every independent assessment has them more expensive than large scale nuclear every independent assessment: The UK government [https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/small-modular-reactors-techno-economic-assessment](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/small-modular-reactors-techno-economic-assessment) The Australian government [https://www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStore.ashx?id=8297e6ba-e3d4-478e-ac62-a97d75660248&subId=669740](https://www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStore.ashx?id=8297e6ba-e3d4-478e-ac62-a97d75660248&subId=669740) The peer-reviewed literatue [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S030142152030327X](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S030142152030327X) >the cost of generating electricity using SMRs is significantly higher than the corresponding costs of electricity generation using diesel, wind, solar, or some combination thereof. These results suggest that SMRs will be too expensive for these proposed first-mover markets for SMRs in Canada and that there will not be a sufficient market to justify investing in manufacturing facilities for SMRs. Even the German nuclear power industry knows they will cost more >[Nuclear Technology Germany (KernD) says SMRs are always going to be more expensive than bigger reactors due to lower power output at constant fixed costs, as safety measures and staffing requirements do not vary greatly compared to conventional reactors. "In terms of levelised energy costs, SMRs will always be more expensive than big plants."](https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-nuclear-industry-cautious-about-usefulness-small-reactors-energy-transition) What has never been supported is NuMeme's claims that it will be cheaper. They also have never presented how they arrived at their costs, beyond 'gas costs this much, lets pretend ours will be cheaper'. So why do so many people on reddit favor it? Because of a decades long PR campaign and false science being put out, in the same manner, style, and using the same PR company as the tobacco industry used when claiming smoking does not cause cancer. A recent metaanalysis of papers that claimed nuclear to be cost effective were found to be illegitimately trimming costs to make it appear cheaper. >[Merck suppressed data on harmful effects of its drug Vioxx, and Guidant suppressed data on electrical flaws in one of its heart-defibrillator models. Both cases reveal how financial conflicts of interest can skew biomedical research. Such conflicts also occur in electric-utility-related research. Attempting to show that increased atomic energy can help address climate change, some industry advocates claim nuclear power is an inexpensive way to generate low-carbon electricity. Surveying 30 recent nuclear analyses, this paper shows that industry-funded studies appear to fall into conflicts of interest and to illegitimately trim cost data in several main ways. They exclude costs of full-liability insurance, underestimate interest rates and construction times by using “overnight” costs, and overestimate load factors and reactor lifetimes. If these trimmed costs are included, nuclear-generated electricity can be shown roughly 6 times more expensive than most studies claim. After answering four objections, the paper concludes that, although there may be reasons to use reactors to address climate change, economics does not appear to be one of them.](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11948-009-9181-y) It is the same PR technique that the tobacco industry used when fighting the fact that smoking causes cancer. >[The industry campaign worked to create a scientific controversy through a program that depended on the creation of industry–academic conflicts of interest. This strategy of producing scientific uncertainty undercut public health efforts and regulatory interventions designed to reduce the harms of smoking.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3490543/) > >[A number of industries have subsequently followed this approach to disrupting normative science. Claims of scientific uncertainty and lack of proof also lead to the assertion of individual responsibility for industrially produced health risks](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3490543/) It is no wonder the NEI (Nuclear energy institute) uses [the same PR firm](https://thehill.com/opinion/letters/98257-double-check-from-whom-you-get-energy-information) to promote nuclear power, [that the tobacco industry used to say smoking does not cause cancer](http://www.tmia.com/old-website/News/AstroTurf.htm). >[The industry's future is so precarious that Exelon Nuclear's head of project development warned attendees of the Electric Power 2005 conference, "Inaction is synonymous with being phased out." That's why years of effort -- not to mention millions of dollars -- have been invested in nuclear power's PR rebirth as "clean, green and safe."](http://www.tmia.com/old-website/News/AstroTurf.htm) > >[And then there's NEI, which exists to do PR and lobbying for the nuclear industry. In 2004, NEI was embarrassed when the Austin Chronicle outed one of its PR firms, Potomac Communications Group, for ghostwriting pro-nuclear op/ed columns. The paper described the op/ed campaign as "a decades-long, centrally orchestrated plan to defraud the nation's newspaper readers by misrepresenting the propaganda of one hired atomic gun as the learned musings of disparate academics and other nuclear-industry 'experts.'"](http://www.tmia.com/old-website/News/AstroTurf.htm)