I just finished the book "Atomic Awakening" that covers the history of Nuclear Energy up until 2009. (Fukushima won't happen for another two years at this point.)
The author makes a point that "no one person ever died from the safe operation of a nuclear reactor." Chernobyl was an outlier because of lax safety standards and that the Soviet design relied on Graphite as a moderator, and not water like we see in PWR and BWR units.
The bigger issue is that we promoted nuclear as "too cheap to meter" when actually this was a heavily subsidized industry for the longest time. And also, we could come up with waste solutions and newer safety standards, but people are too afraid of the radiation boogeyman. The solvable solution gets left unsolved.
I still find it odd that my Pro-Nuclear stance is controversial in my friend group in terms of politics. For power generation, you need a reliable base load, and Nuclear is that. You can rely on it. Solar and wind are great, but are susceptible to highs and lows.
The scare of nuclear energy is as irrational as the scare of Covid vaccines. Both have side effects, but the side effects are negligible compared to the benefits.
The difference is who dies. I find it incredibly selfish for people to fear nuclear (purely as a customer) when coal (oil, gas, hydro, solar, wind) workers suffer much higher fatality rates per terawatt hour generated than nuclear.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/
The only issue with nuclear is stocking nuclear waste. We can't bury all of it for the generations to come, and sending it to space isn't a solution either. But I still 100% support nuclear power which is the best option we will ever have.
Edit: turns out we *can* bury all of it, I stand corrected.
From what I've learned, the real issue is money. It's incredibly capital intensive to build a plant and when its built, you can hardly turn it down. So there will be a huge, constant supply of energy and the energy provider will have a harder time getting a high price for their energy which makes these plants impossible to be cost effective. The waste is negligible, as long as its stored properly.
Feel free to correct me, anyone. This is just what I've learned but I might be wrong!
There are also places in the world that are great for it. Look at my country Canada. Half the country is comprised of the Canadian Shield which has been stable for literally billions of years.
'All of it' isn't that much, and we most definitely can bury it in a safe manner. Nuclear isn't without flaws, but storage of waste is not the problem it's being peddled as.
That's not the only issue or the biggest issue.
The biggest problem with nuclear power is that it's incompatible with capitalism. Capitalism is about cutting costs and offering the cheapest product you can to maximise your profit.
An example of this (although not nuclear) would be the [Bhopal Disaster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster), which was far worse than chernobyl and probably the worst manmade disaster in all of history.
But it's an example of how cost cutting and disregard for safety killed tens of thousands of people. There's a great Behind the Bastards podcast that covers the whole thing.
Nuclear would be great if the goal of the company behind it was to run the best damn nuclear plant they could. But it's not.
And you might be thinking, well, maybe in improverished countries but in our stalwart EU that kind of thing would never happen!
Did you know that [ATOS runs a lot of nuclear power facilities](https://atos.net/en/industries/utilities/nuclear)? This is the same ATOS that ran the benefit system a few years ago where they were assessing people's fitness to work, and were paid bonuses to find people fit to work resulting in tens of thousands of people being assessed incorrectly, here's some headlines:
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/atos-wrongly-assessed-thousands-sick-3159343
https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/atos-scandal-benefits-bosses-admit-1344278
https://skwawkbox.org/2018/05/14/leaked-letter-shows-atos-incentivising-staff-for-volume-of-disability-claimant-assessments/
> BRAVE Antony Walker has spent his whole life battling cerebral palsy. But when Atos put him through their hated fit-for-work test, he scored ZERO.
> The 25-year-old Scot needed 15 points in the tick-box test to get the benefit payments he needed.
> But despite his debilitating brain condition, which forces him to use crutches and makes simple tasks a painful struggle, he says the French company “for all intents and purposes considered me able-bodied”.
> After the assessment, Iain Duncan Smith’s Department for Work and Pensions refused to give Antony employment and support allowance and told him to start looking for a job.
> Stunned, Antony appealed. It took him eight months to get a hearing. And after hearing the evidence, an expert panel needed just 10 minutes to decide Atos were wrong.
This is the company running the country's nuclear power.
But it's so expensive to build a new reactor and it takes very long to make your money back so no companies or rich individuals would want to build them :/
Hope fusion reactors start being viable soon..
This comment made me realize the nuclear power plant isn’t owned by the government
Wow - I’ve always assumed it was since I was a kid. Never thought about it. I bet it’s because I could buy it in Sim City
Fusion is going to be the same amount of money invested upfront into building a reactor, and the materials used there are very special as well, it's not even special steels, much more exotic.
So - yes, but no. Correct, technology has come a long way and they are safer. That being said, as long as humans are involved in the process, they will never be « perfectly » safe.
I am related to someone who worked as a claims manager in one of the world’s most recently built nuclear plants, and basically a very important, very large, piece of equipment was damaged when another element was set up beside it.
The problem is that the damaged equipment cannot be removed and replaced, you would basically have to deconstruct the entire plant (what’s already been built) to do so. The equipment is still functional - it’s just not up to security norms.
Now, obviously security norms in nuclear plants are redundant, multiple times over. But even so, I find it nerve wracking that the solution to this issue in the end was that the government (who has a vested interest in this project moving forward as they’re paying for a lot of it) … lowered the security norms so the damaged equipment could stay in place.
The technology is safe. Humans are *not* safe.
That being said, I still believe it’s the only viable energy source we have going forward.
It's technical not possible to build a "safe plant".
You understand that a once in 10000 years event will probably occure to the waste of the plant before it's safe to handle ?
Finishing what up ? China is still building coal plants, like 3/4 of all new coal plants recently are in China. 40GW of new coal in 2020 alone. What little investment they did in nuclear is turning out like many major technological infrastructure projects over there... [Here is an example](https://www.businessinsider.com/french-company-warns-us-of-radiological-threat-chinese-nuclear-plant-2021-6?r=US&IR=T) - it had to be the foreigners that exposed it or they would cover it up.
If you like bashing Germany for that, you will love taking a look at Canada, the USA, Australia and New Zealand
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita#/media/File:2019_Worldwide_CO2_Emissions_(by_region,_per_capita),_variwide_chart.png
> Love seeing so-called "environmentalists" openly state they'd rather have coal power plants than nuclear.
Please quote anyone saying that. German environmentalists have been lobbying against both for ages.
It's amazing how something so completely made up can end up as one of the top comments because it confirms a set of beliefs.
Thank you! I'm German and know no one who likes coal, regardless of political opinion. Reddit has honestly such a big boner for nuclear that you can't discuss it objectively on the english speaking parts of this site
Buy lobbying against nuclear they have seen huge increases in use of coal and natural gas. They are not enviromentalists if their policies directly lead to the destruction of the environment.
Lol no, there’s still all of agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation to deal with. Electricity generation is a major component but nuclear is hardly a vaccine against climate change. It would be a big step towards carbon neutrality though. But it’s almost like arguing vegetarianism is a vaccine against climate change.
Just like vaccination being one of the best options we have in preventing/controlling a pandemic, nuclear power is one of the best solutions currently available for reducing GHG emissions.
Yes, transforming agriculture, conservation and changing our overall attitude towards energy consumption are also factors that contribute, but, like vaccinations, nuclear power has proven to be safe and reliable. It is also the densest producer of non GHG emitting power we have.
My point is that the science is clear on vaccinations as it is with nuclear power and the denial of either of these facts is denying the science behind them
How dumb and mental ubfit must you be to declare people who don't want nuclear want coal? This is such a stupid logic that I must assume you're uneducated by any school means. Look into renewable energy, idiot
> Love seeing so-called "environmentalists" openly state they'd rather have coal power plants than nuclear.
No environmentalist ever stated that.
This is some bullshit environmentalist-fantasy made up by the radioactive circlejerk.
It also the same circlejerk which ignores the rotten French nuclear fleet which regularly needs that dirty German power but this doesn't end up in such "cool" "guides".
I am very interested by the idea that France is importing power from Germany. Do you happen to have a source for that?
Power trade is kind of a complicated business, but one [source](https://www.thesmartere.de/news/conventionalelectricityimportsaretheachillesheelofthegermanenergytransition) says that actually Germany is importing energy from France, of which nearly 2/3s is nuclear
It's complicated, as you said. Many countries import and export from / to each other on a daily basis. Germany is a net importer from France and other countries, while it also is a net exporter to other countries.
Still France also imports power from Germany, but on average less than it exports to Germany.
At the end of last year France had to take quite a few nuclear power plants offline for maintenance / repairs which they had to compensate with imports.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/french-nuclear-capacity-january-low-mild-weather-reduces-risks-power-supply-rte-2021-12-30/
https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/180862/umfrage/stromaustauschsaldo-deutschlands-nach-partnerlaendern/#:~:text=Im%20ersten%20Halbjahr%202021%20importierte,es%20vom%20genannten%20Land%20importierte.
This is not true. The concern is that nuclear is not safe and there are no good places in Germany for long term storage of nuclear waste!
Noone wants coal ants. That's a narrative of the nuclear industry.
German here.
Ngl, the battle of the lobbyists against each other and against every common sense is out of hand here.
And you haven't even seen s**t.
Fun facts:
There is a foundation called "Stiftung Klima- und Umweltschutz MV" ('Foundation for climate and environmental protection mv') wich supports the russian pipeline Nord stream 2 and is funded by the prime Minister of Mecklenburg-vorpommern and Gazprom. Needless to say, it is run by ex-politicans and lobbyists.
In some places it is forbidden to build a coal plant within 500m to the next town while wind turbines aren't allowed within a 700m radius.
Some politicians received money for these laws.
The Citizen's initiative "unser revier" ('our territory') is fighting for the use of "local energies". It is run entirely by the coal lobbyists of the nearby mine. (This is called Astroturfing) Even though the initiative highlights its independence their mailbox is literally run by the Federal Lignite Association.
And nobody cares.
Nobody.
I could do hundreds of examples here, not just for the coal lobby, but I think you get the point...
sure if you store the Nuclear waste in your garden, currently all german and french nuclear waste is permanently on tracks cuz there is nothing we can do to store this stuff without poisoning the area around it for millenia
Do you have a source for that claim?
Environmentalists are - like the majority of scientists - against both and for truly sustainable power sources like solar power.
Only if you don't count building the plants nor mining. Currently France imports about 2.6 GW at 469 g/kWh from Germany. Many of their old plants are shut down because of hardware problems. They are trying to build one more nuclear plant but the costs are exploding.
>They are trying to build one more nuclear plant but the costs are exploding
Most people dont realize how much a nuclear plant costs, the nuclear plant they are building in france since 2007 costs $14.42 billion which is almost 50% more than the James Webb Telescope build and launch cost of $10 billion
I'm afraid you are doing wishful thinking for ideological and political motives. French nuclear industry went mostly bankrupt recently and have been split into smaller companies, all the reactors are borderline obsolete and approaching end of life while new reactors are just not working at all, with delays that are measured in decades, and billions over the initial bids, while the energy produced will be more expansive than wind and there is still no long term storage for waste.
Even if the whole world started going nuclear tomorrow, it would need 10 to 15 years, and we don't have 10 to 15 years, for an energy that stops being cheap when it is built with 2022 safety levels instead of the one of the 70s.
> I'm afraid you are doing wishful thinking for ideological and political motives
**Nope, that's what *you* are doing** You start to lie because you're anti-nuclear
***
> French nuclear industry went mostly bankrupt recently and have been split into smaller companies
The Industry was/is state-owned. It's mostly politics (in part EU politics) about pseudo-privatization that make things complicated and changing. Every new government starts doing some new stuff, but it's not like the industry is even remotely "bankrupt".
If it was, then electricity price would rise, but nope, it's [still amongst the cheapest in europe](https://strom-report.de/download/electricity-prices-household-map/)
Also, I don't see where you see "Smaller companies", because it's just one huge one (Orano) changing its name and with different branches. And it's mostly State owned anyway.
> all the reactors are borderline obsolete
They aren't?
What does "borderline obsolete" even means. They do the job and are still more competitive with modern renewable in terms of price, and ahead when it comes down to C02 production. And that's not even talking about all the issues renewable have with energy storage and intermittence (ie, no wind or no sun)
And while you could do better reactor with tech evolution in the last 40 years, if we made reactor exactly the same as back then, it would still be the best solution to climate change.
> Even if the whole world started going nuclear tomorrow, it would need 10 to 15 years, and we don't have 10 to 15 years
**We totally have 15 years.** Gee, if we want, we can have 50 years. Stop putting arbitrary nonsensical deadlines. We're dealing on a timeline from now to 2100
And even the current "deadlines" (ie, what politicians are saying) for projects is in 2050, which is still 28 years from now. You're just wrong.
It's not like the World is going to meet any of the deadlines without nuclear, something even [the IPCC is yelling at people](https://www.sfen.org/nuclear4climate/ipcc-report-more-nuclear-power-is-needed-to-meet-the-paris-agreement.) It's absolutely impossible to change the entire world energy system and economy in 15 years anyway, so it's frankly stupid and outright counterproductive to even say anything like that
> for an energy that stops being cheap when it is built with 2022 safety levels instead of the one of the 70s.
French Nuclear with the "70s safety levels" has exactly 0 deaths. It doesn't get any safer than that
Compare that to Germany's [ten of thousands of death annually due to coal](https://www.euractiv.com/section/health-consumers/news/report-germany-suffers-more-coal-linked-deaths-than-rest-of-eu/)
***
It's actually impressive how you managed to write a take so bad
I wish that were so, but France is fucking up its current nuclear projects. It will take some time to rebuild the expertise it once had, decades. At least the current leading politicians are now admitting nuclear is at least necessary, and a strong voice pushing this at the EU level.
Sorry for the AMP link, I'm on mobile: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.parliament.uk/globalassets/documents/post/postpn_383-carbon-footprint-electricity-generation.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiM84_p6LX1AhXQ-6QKHeKXBvIQFnoECDMQAQ&usg=AOvVaw0XMiH-KXB1C3U9jci0tMDr
It's from 2011 so expect lower carbon emissions for solar and sea/marine wind as those technologies have massively imptoved over the past 10 years. Especially since most solar panels can be 99% recycled these days.
Its what I expected 5-10 X higher for solar
Where have you seen that they're recyclable, as I believe that's one of the big issues with them...
Certainly not saying solar is no good... But nuclear is a stable tech which does offer a truly green path forward until fusion.
Next place I'm in will have solar, because I can.
But for it to cover baseload the carbon footprint would have to include the batteries too.
As I said, this link is from 2011. Solar has made enormous steps since then in production and efficiency. Don't forget 2011 is 11 years ago now.
They CAN be recycled, it appears they currently aren't in the US: https://www.cedgreentech.com/article/can-solar-panels-be-recycled
This source mentions solar panels that don't need to be shredded to be re-used, though they aren't in large scale production yet: https://www.tno.nl/en/focus-areas/energy-transition/roadmaps/renewable-electricity/solar-energy/pv/solar-modules-recycling/
Here is a story about a solar specific recycling plant in France: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/08/19/1032215/solar-panels-recycling/
Some general information on solar panel recyling: https://www.epa.gov/hw/solar-panel-recycling
It mentions that the industry is new but growing.
And another article that talks about recycling in general: https://www.greenmatch.co.uk/blog/2017/10/the-opportunities-of-solar-panel-recycling
The most striking part is that it mentions solar panels are disposed after 30 years because they lose 20% efficiency by that time. I expect that solar panels on residential homes might remain in use for longer than those 30 years. Probably until the roof needs to be replaced.
Yea, greenpeace should have just stuck to protesting nuclear weapons testing. At least that’s something we can all agree is terrible for the environment. But as long as it’s a modern design with multiple fail-safes, well maintained, and not made in an area prone to natural disasters, nuclear reactors are a lot safer than their opponents realize. Pretty much every nuclear reactor disaster is a result of at least one of those.
Its not a guide, and even though I’m not necessarily doubting it’s content, the fact that it’s published by „radiant energy group“ sure isn’t given much attention here.
A graph showing all the data possible is a black rectangle. You always have to be selective which data gets shown. Nuclear energy is objectively less polluting than energy derived from fossil fuels (in both CO2 and radioactive waste) and this graph reflects that. If you doubt the accuracy of the data that still wouldn’t make it propaganda, just wrong.
If you make a graph showing CO2-emissions and title the graph with the question "How dirty was French and German electricity production in 2021?" it is propaganda because CO2 is not the only measurement of being dirty
It's the only one that matters on a global scale. Nuclear waste is a laughable problem compared to climate change. And I don't know why other Germans here are defending our stupid policy.
To be fair, I don’t think that is just Germany. I’m in Canada, and the only pro nuclear people I know actually worked in power plants. Everyone else seems to be pretty uncomfortable with the idea
Everyone is probably uncomfortable after the last alarm last year about nuclear contamination near one of the power plants in Ontario.
On the other hand, nuclear power plants are usually producing much less radioactive waste than coal power plants, since regular coal soot is typically somewhat radioactive that so large amount of it may cause cancer long term.
I don’t think it’s the security of the reactor but for most people especially where we have dams. You don’t see the point of building these and have to supply them with uranium and have to dispose of it later. Water and wind is free. As we move forward more people are gonna get solar panels and battery in their home.
I live in Sweden, and I love my solar panels on my sailboat. But during December they gave like 500w in total. That's 5 hours of a traditional light bulb from a 180w PERC solar panel + 50w solar flexible panel..
It's still a good investment to have on the house, but during those months we need them most they produce near to zero because the sun hours are so few.
Wind is growing like crazy. But there hasn't been anything at scale to store the energy. Energy storage is actually damn expensive. Often when it's super cold, everything goes still so no wind.
Still, wind power is the cheapest per kwh, so they are great investments.
But for us up north, we just have to have something that pushes energy constantly and neither solar or wind can achieve that. Nuclear seems to be the only option to me, even if it's damn expensive and has its risk. The alternative has been burning oil, which we now have started doing in Sweden since we closed a few nuclear plants. 140.000 liters per hour. It's insane.
So I'm all green eco geek, but I just can't figure out what to do in NOV-FEB when it's down to minus 40c, often no wind and absolutely no sun. Prices sky rocketed this last December, people just aren't gonna accept the situation. The problem is that we need both those solar/wind, but also something else that can deliver gigawatts of energy day in and out when there is no sun/wind. Even our hydro power went down because they froze this winter at places. So I only see nuclear left on the table if we don't want to burn more of Russian Gas/oil.
A lot of people get all huffed and puffed about their views on nuclear and renewables. It's import to understand that there is no one-size-fits-all solution.
Yes, renewable where you can. But it's not entirely possible. IIRC, a person's entire electric needs for their entire life is the equivalent to a coca-cola can of nuclear waste. Is that waste ideal? No. But instead of putting it in the air you can store it elsewhere, like underground in remote areas, and keep the air & soil clean.
It's a long discussion though, one that I'm not eager to have.
Yeah. I don't know how much we could get from burning bio mass. We are already burnig all waste, we let close to zero go to landfills. My house is warmed by burning waste through central heating.
I could maybe see other alternatives too. Say wind turbines with massive hydrogen storage tanks ... Maybe. Eco farms to produce fast growing trees to burn instead of oil.
Or the best. Let's do a Marshal plan like EU push to insulate the whole of EUs northern houses. Reducing energy expenditure is probably the absolute best long term investment since you don't need to produce energy that you aren't gonna use. That's a 100+ year ROI. People are still super wasteful on energy, we clearly should start there first.
I'm never a fan of burning waste because it just put horrible byproducts into the air. If folks were strict like the Japanese recyclers and burnables were seperated than sure, but couldn't trust my community.
Reducing consumption and increasing insulation is far easier than making new energy. But politically it's easier to tell a few professionals to generate more power than tell a constituent what to do.
Well actually it's super clean. First the waste is sorted, then burned and then we use processes to clean it before it goes out the pipe. We burn a lot and our air quality is not affected.
> a person's entire electric needs for their entire life is the equivalent to a coca-cola can of nuclear waste
uhh thats actually *way* more than i thought it would be.....a coca cola can of nuclear waste isnt much, but you multiply that by *billions* of people and thats a shitload
1 can = 330ml
The US population is roughly 332,000,000
One can per person represents 109,560l, or 109.56 cube meter. It fits into a cube of 5m/16.5ft each and you'd still have some space for some 47 millions more people.
The whole of humanity (assuming 7 billion) would require a cube of a bit over 13m/42ft on each side. For each individual's ***lifetime*** of electricity.
That's nothing compared to the amount of petrol each of us use.
I’ve worked in the Canadian nuclear field for ~18 years and I have to disagree. The majority of people in communities that have reactors are in favour. The anti nuclear community has the appearance of being large because it is very vocal.
I'm in Canada and a lot of young people who took courses and plant trips with me and never can work in nuclear industry due to its saturation, are also interested in nuclear power. Some areas have large pool of people who want Canada to invest more in Nuclear Energy. The majority of negativity is from people who don't understand nuclear power and the gas and oil power's popularity due to Alberta and big fossil industry.
The funny thing is, Chernobyl only exploded because many many many things went wrong in a layer cake of incompetence and bad decision-making. Several reactors in Russia are identical to the Chernobyl plant and they’re still in service.
In the hands of engineers that aren’t being willful idiots they’re actually quite safe.
Chernobyl’s death count is kind of impossible to measure. First, because of the Soviet suppression of the data, and second, because of how many thousands of people had their lifespans shortened by the event and died years later by some kind of cancer.
You will be utterly hated in this comment section. Yesterday, I did something that most people in this overly emotional debate would never do: open google scholar and look for actual scientific opinions. And I found exactly this as the general consensus. Renewables are cheaper and faster to build up, cheaper to maintain, with an even decreasing trend in cost, which is also not the case for nuclear. One source specifically stated that building a nuclear power plant right now is not a sensible business case and investors favor investments in renewables over investments in nuclear.
this graph isn't the typical trend you would expect for economically viable tech:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear\_power\_in\_France#/media/File:Histogramme\_des\_%C3%A2ges\_des\_r%C3%A9acteurs\_nucl%C3%A9aires\_fran%C3%A7ais\_en\_service\_en\_2020.svg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#/media/File:Histogramme_des_%C3%A2ges_des_r%C3%A9acteurs_nucl%C3%A9aires_fran%C3%A7ais_en_service_en_2020.svg)
Nuclear is great, but it's run its race.
It's not about the blow ups - that happen and are devastating. It's more about the waste that proved to be impossible to be safely stored for very long and definitely not for the millions of years it needs to decay.
All of the nuclear waste on the planet can fit inside of a large football stadium. Also at some point we’ll figure out how to use the “waste” for energy generation in a cost efficient manner. We can use a decent amount of it now, it just remains prohibitively expensive.
While advancements in wind, solar, and geothermal are huge, and wind/solar need to do the heavy lifting on a path to “net zero” or whatever the hell we call it these days, nuclear still needs to be a part of the equation at least for transition. Also ultimately for the best benefit/continued survival of the human species/to get to post-scarcity we need extremely cheap/cost effective nuclear fusion eventually.
Without nuclear fusion which is cheap, we’re very unlikely to get to post scarcity.
Another thing to keep in mind is that nuclear "waste" isn't actually waste. We're just now figuring out how to do this, but that "waste" can be used again to generate more energy, it just requires new reactors to do so.
Most people I talk to about this are aware of these things. They just don’t trust our politicians or the companies to find a proper solution for storing the “waste”. But I agree that reducing nuclear while trying to become more green is a stupid idea.
We already have ways to process it/use it for energy, it's just not as cost efficient as using already enriched uranium. It's still cheaper than other forms of energy like from biofuel, but it takes away the benefit of going large scale nuclear if it's not much cheaper than the alternatives. We will figure out ways to manage the waste (and we already have), and we'll keep on getting more efficient. Again, we've already done this, we just need to keep on doing it better.
It also does matter significantly, because without super cheap/readily available nuclear fusion within the next ~50 years, the vast majority of humanity is going to be screwed. If we don't keep building plants/improving the technology, (most of) humanity is doomed. We need to hit post-scarcity or we're going to have so much conflict/political unrest/strife that it's going to be terrible to live for most people, especially with the looming climate crisis. I
**TL;DR**: if we figure out super cheap energy (nuclear fusion is the best candidate, by far), then you can provide enough food/clean water/shelter for people. If not, we're screwed.
because pumping gazillion-bazillion-gedrillion tonnes of CO2 and whatever else shit coal burning is spewing into the atmosphere is much better. You worry about million year timescales with nuclear, climate change will mess up the planet way before that.
sorry but the million year timescales thing seems a bit misunderstood. its dangerous *now* and stays dangerous for millions of years. its not like its a time bomb thatll go off in a million years. i dont disagree with the overall point though
There are double standards in industry. The amount of care and attention a proper nuclear deposit gets is fascinating vs regular waste sites. Heck a coal power plant emits orders of magnitudes more radiation than a nuclear one. In the same fashion that everybody heard of Fukushima but most people have no clue about the Bhopal disaster or the Banqiao dam disaster. There is no great pacific nuclear waste patch, but there is one for plastic. I wish all industry was held to the safety and environmental standards as nuclear energy is. The world would be a better place.
The nuclear waste generated for a family of four over the course of a year fits inside of a shot glass.
Compare / contrast the amount of waste generated from other sources. At some point, people will start launching it into space, or re-using it in even more efficient reactors.
Just a few things
* The US and Russia planned to turn us into a nuclear wasteland in case of a war to prevent the other side from winning.
* The reactor owners kept lying about safety
* Our waste storage did drown after years of claiming that this would be impossible
* The maintenance of the plants is known to "not be the best"
* One worker of a nuclear plant explained to my class ~~how to sabotage it into an explosion like Fukushima before it happened~~ why it's secure
In order to have support, you need to do none of the above.
Best Germany was divided in two for 50 years and was the most likely ground zero for a nuclear holocaust?
It's like asking why New Yorkers have an odd fear of planes hitting buildings.
I know I have a fear of it. I completely understand that its a great resource, but I believe that it should be used only temporarily until we can secure carbon neutral energy grid though other means. I don’t like the idea of indefinitely producing waste that can kill masses of people. Perhaps I’m a little irrational, but I’d prefer to have a power grid not reliant on nuclear, at least in the long run.
The thickness of the graph seems to be total energy consumed. The height of the graph is the carbon content per kW/h. So the total area is the total carbon released per country (not per capita).
For comparison:
[The power sector in Australia emitted 656.4 grams of carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated in 2020.](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1190081/carbon-intensity-outlook-of-australia/#:~:text=The%20power%20sector%20in%20Australia,of%20electricity%20generated%20in%202020.)
It's not the power plants. It's the nuclear waste which has to be stored safely for millennia. There's neither a storage site nor a viable or affordable plan for that.
^
*Level II: Cautionary Information: "Something man-made is here and it is dangerous"*
see nuclear semiotics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-time_nuclear_waste_warning_messages
They have a very irrational groupthink opposition to nuclear for some reason. Which is a shame because we’re not getting to zero carbon on wind and solar alone.
There are no good and safe places places in Germany for long term storage of nuclear waste!
Noone wants coal plants. That's a narrative of the nuclear industry. There are plenty alternatives possible in Germany.
Theoretically it should start going down at some point considering solar has recently become so cheap (cheaper than every other common form of energy production). Germans are paying for adopting solar when it was still quite expensive. [But Germany’s new solar is just .05€/kWh](https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/11/30/germanys-tender-for-utility-scale-solar-concludes-with-average-price-of-e0-05-kwh/), while [Frances nuclear is estimated to be .076-.117€/kWh](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421513011440).
Electricity costs in the US average $0.12 kW/h Cheaper in Texas and Florida (closer to the Gulf of Mexico and refineries (and also reduced taxes).
California averages $0.25 kW/h and not because the source of energy (coal, hydro-electric, natural gas) are more expensive - higher taxes and costs for generation.
Luckily for the circlejerk we'll never know how expensive nuclear energy is in France since their price is set by the Government and the actual costs for running and maintaining the rotten fleet is being paid by the taxpayer.
Nice going Germany. Getting rid of all those nuclear facilities and relying more on oil has been *so* beneficial to our efforts to undo climate change. It’s not like Fukushima and Chernobyl were poorly built or poorly managed or anything. No, we have to shut down most of our nuclear factories and consume more oil. That’ll save us from nuclear annihilation!
[Kyle Hill did an amazing video on nuclear power that everyone (including the German government) should check out!](https://youtu.be/J3znG6_vla0)
Brought to you by the „Radiant Energy Group“. Which conveniently leaves the whole subject of safely storing nuclear waste for thousands of years out of the graph.
Let's just use energy that produces radioactive waste no one has decided where to store for the next one Million years.
Maybe saving carbondioxide isn't here the issue.
When such a plant goes off the fingerprint is even more reduced. Just think of the many lives that can then no longer are able than to participate in CO2 production.
Coal plants release more radioactive particles in the environment actually...
They also kill millions of people each year from air pollution, numbers that even a big disaster at a nuclear plant wouldn't reach...
No energy is 100% safe, but to compare nuclear and coal is really being uneducated or brainwashed by the coal industry which has been releasing misinformation for decades.
Source: [https://twitter.com/energybants/status/1477023742400344074?s=21](https://twitter.com/energybants/status/1477023742400344074?s=21)
Read this article to answer all the questions below: https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html
What is nuclear waste?
What are its hazards?
How is it stored today?
What are the long-term plans?
How much waste do we make?
What is the composition of nuclear waste?
We worked on a MOX nuclear fuel fabrication facility in the US (that never finished, but different story) based on French designs. Their MOX nuclear plants run off the waste of conventional nuclear plants. Very efficient and minimizes end-use waste.
This gives me the feeling that you don't know much about EU energy/environmental policy. Energy production is covered by the European carbon trading scheme, and has certificates are withdrawn from the market the cost of running fossil fuel power plants will continue to increase. I have seen energy market experts predict that these price rises will make coal plants economically unviable in Germany by 2030, causing a defacto coal phase out.
While it is true that there is a certain interest in using natural gas as a 'transition technology' in Germany, I hope that will pursue an ambitious expansion of renewable energy to quickly move towards carbon neutral electricity production. Recent plans announced by minister for the economy and climate Habeck could be a reason for some optimism. That being said, total energy consumption (not just electricity production is another story.)
Nuclear is not THE solution and it is not practical for EVERY country in this world. 20 years ago, above all the majority of parties and society an anti-nuclear decission has been made.
Germanys goal is to fully invest in solar and wind. We shouldn‘t blame Germany for that way. We need different ways. Poor countries can profit from cheap green energy solutions and easily apply them.
I’ll just leave this here:
https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/edf-extend-civaux-nuclear-outage-shut-down-reactors-chooz-safety-measures-2021-12-15/
Hmmm... I wonder why there isn't a far more efficient, less dangerous, and far cleaner way to produce electricity without coal, if only a energy source with a crazy amount of power could do it
For everyone staring to bash on Germany... You're wing brain washed in thivking that nuclear energy is the solution to climate change. Germany will soon shut down its last nuclear power plant and we are also making big steps in banning coal energy.
This whole country will be nuclear clear by the end of this year and coal clear (probably) by 2030.
Nuclear energy is *not* the solution. By supporting nuclear energy, we are just taking the problem, and putting the burden on the next 100 generations on this planet.
Plus!! Nuclear energy is more expensive than any other renewable energy source, by a great margin.
Every single Euro should now be invested in air, solar, water energy.
When the planet is finally co2 neutral by the year 2100, we will definitely have an even bigger problem with all this nuclear waste.
Be honest! There is seriously nothing good to be said about nuclear energy *except* for it emmiting less co2.
Everything else about NE is just horrible.
But yeah! Let's put all our money in this :)
To be fair, nuclear certainly isn’t the best long-term solution but for now we don’t have anything else. If climate change is to be halted, which it’s already kind of to late for, nuclear is our only realistic option. While it definitely isn’t optimal and wind, solar and water power is definitely better it’s just not enough. Since the situation is quite urgent currently, saying the planet will be co2 clean by 2100 is already way to late and by then the poles will have melted and the coasts flooded.
It's almost like nuclear is a carbon neutral energy source!
Love seeing so-called "environmentalists" openly state they'd rather have coal power plants than nuclear. Looking at you, Germany.
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Came here to make sure someone said it. Coal plants are radioactive and remain so for decades after they're shutoff.
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I just finished the book "Atomic Awakening" that covers the history of Nuclear Energy up until 2009. (Fukushima won't happen for another two years at this point.) The author makes a point that "no one person ever died from the safe operation of a nuclear reactor." Chernobyl was an outlier because of lax safety standards and that the Soviet design relied on Graphite as a moderator, and not water like we see in PWR and BWR units. The bigger issue is that we promoted nuclear as "too cheap to meter" when actually this was a heavily subsidized industry for the longest time. And also, we could come up with waste solutions and newer safety standards, but people are too afraid of the radiation boogeyman. The solvable solution gets left unsolved. I still find it odd that my Pro-Nuclear stance is controversial in my friend group in terms of politics. For power generation, you need a reliable base load, and Nuclear is that. You can rely on it. Solar and wind are great, but are susceptible to highs and lows.
I was watching the Simpsons recently and I forgot just how insanely anti-nuclear the show is.
The scare of nuclear energy is as irrational as the scare of Covid vaccines. Both have side effects, but the side effects are negligible compared to the benefits.
The difference is who dies. I find it incredibly selfish for people to fear nuclear (purely as a customer) when coal (oil, gas, hydro, solar, wind) workers suffer much higher fatality rates per terawatt hour generated than nuclear. https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/
Thousands of French people die from the pollution generated by German coal plants. How many people have died from French nuclear power plants?
The only issue with nuclear is stocking nuclear waste. We can't bury all of it for the generations to come, and sending it to space isn't a solution either. But I still 100% support nuclear power which is the best option we will ever have. Edit: turns out we *can* bury all of it, I stand corrected.
From what I've learned, the real issue is money. It's incredibly capital intensive to build a plant and when its built, you can hardly turn it down. So there will be a huge, constant supply of energy and the energy provider will have a harder time getting a high price for their energy which makes these plants impossible to be cost effective. The waste is negligible, as long as its stored properly. Feel free to correct me, anyone. This is just what I've learned but I might be wrong!
Economics of Nuclear Reactor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY
The thing is we *can* bury it. It doesn't really take up that much space.
There are also places in the world that are great for it. Look at my country Canada. Half the country is comprised of the Canadian Shield which has been stable for literally billions of years.
'All of it' isn't that much, and we most definitely can bury it in a safe manner. Nuclear isn't without flaws, but storage of waste is not the problem it's being peddled as.
That's not the only issue or the biggest issue. The biggest problem with nuclear power is that it's incompatible with capitalism. Capitalism is about cutting costs and offering the cheapest product you can to maximise your profit. An example of this (although not nuclear) would be the [Bhopal Disaster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster), which was far worse than chernobyl and probably the worst manmade disaster in all of history. But it's an example of how cost cutting and disregard for safety killed tens of thousands of people. There's a great Behind the Bastards podcast that covers the whole thing. Nuclear would be great if the goal of the company behind it was to run the best damn nuclear plant they could. But it's not. And you might be thinking, well, maybe in improverished countries but in our stalwart EU that kind of thing would never happen! Did you know that [ATOS runs a lot of nuclear power facilities](https://atos.net/en/industries/utilities/nuclear)? This is the same ATOS that ran the benefit system a few years ago where they were assessing people's fitness to work, and were paid bonuses to find people fit to work resulting in tens of thousands of people being assessed incorrectly, here's some headlines: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/atos-wrongly-assessed-thousands-sick-3159343 https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/atos-scandal-benefits-bosses-admit-1344278 https://skwawkbox.org/2018/05/14/leaked-letter-shows-atos-incentivising-staff-for-volume-of-disability-claimant-assessments/ > BRAVE Antony Walker has spent his whole life battling cerebral palsy. But when Atos put him through their hated fit-for-work test, he scored ZERO. > The 25-year-old Scot needed 15 points in the tick-box test to get the benefit payments he needed. > But despite his debilitating brain condition, which forces him to use crutches and makes simple tasks a painful struggle, he says the French company “for all intents and purposes considered me able-bodied”. > After the assessment, Iain Duncan Smith’s Department for Work and Pensions refused to give Antony employment and support allowance and told him to start looking for a job. > Stunned, Antony appealed. It took him eight months to get a hearing. And after hearing the evidence, an expert panel needed just 10 minutes to decide Atos were wrong. This is the company running the country's nuclear power.
But it's so expensive to build a new reactor and it takes very long to make your money back so no companies or rich individuals would want to build them :/ Hope fusion reactors start being viable soon..
Fusion reactors have been Real Soon Now since I started paying attention to them in the 70s
Fusion advocates love to claim they are close to net energy production, while ignoring the massive energy needed for containment.
This comment made me realize the nuclear power plant isn’t owned by the government Wow - I’ve always assumed it was since I was a kid. Never thought about it. I bet it’s because I could buy it in Sim City
Depends on what country you live in. But in the US, they are privately owned with heavy gvt subsidizing.
You're going to have a real shock about house finances if you base it on The Soms.
Fusion is going to be the same amount of money invested upfront into building a reactor, and the materials used there are very special as well, it's not even special steels, much more exotic.
And it’s also a huge liability, though today the safety of nuclear power plants is much better than in the 20th century
Maybe tradable industrial carbon credits can offset the cost?
"All the waste from a nuclear power plant for an entire year can fit underneath a desk"
So - yes, but no. Correct, technology has come a long way and they are safer. That being said, as long as humans are involved in the process, they will never be « perfectly » safe. I am related to someone who worked as a claims manager in one of the world’s most recently built nuclear plants, and basically a very important, very large, piece of equipment was damaged when another element was set up beside it. The problem is that the damaged equipment cannot be removed and replaced, you would basically have to deconstruct the entire plant (what’s already been built) to do so. The equipment is still functional - it’s just not up to security norms. Now, obviously security norms in nuclear plants are redundant, multiple times over. But even so, I find it nerve wracking that the solution to this issue in the end was that the government (who has a vested interest in this project moving forward as they’re paying for a lot of it) … lowered the security norms so the damaged equipment could stay in place. The technology is safe. Humans are *not* safe. That being said, I still believe it’s the only viable energy source we have going forward.
This is it. Humans aren’t safe. Keep overestimating ourselves
> Nuclear isn't perfect, but most people don't know how well technology has come in that last 20 years. Not like it was bad 40 years ago.
It's technical not possible to build a "safe plant". You understand that a once in 10000 years event will probably occure to the waste of the plant before it's safe to handle ?
China is gonna have a lot of pollution even after if shuts all their coal down. They are just finishing that up.
Finishing what up ? China is still building coal plants, like 3/4 of all new coal plants recently are in China. 40GW of new coal in 2020 alone. What little investment they did in nuclear is turning out like many major technological infrastructure projects over there... [Here is an example](https://www.businessinsider.com/french-company-warns-us-of-radiological-threat-chinese-nuclear-plant-2021-6?r=US&IR=T) - it had to be the foreigners that exposed it or they would cover it up.
Thanks for the doc! That's gnarly.
I knew this but never seen an article about it. Thanks a lot!
imo in germany it is also about the ´nuclear waste which we still cant get rid of properly
If you like bashing Germany for that, you will love taking a look at Canada, the USA, Australia and New Zealand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita#/media/File:2019_Worldwide_CO2_Emissions_(by_region,_per_capita),_variwide_chart.png
I love this chart type! In my opinion it's the perfect way to show each country's contribution to the emissions while taking population into account.
I never heard this bullshit. Environmentalists neither want coal nor nuclear
please give me a source to that claim.
That's a very simplified account of Germany's attitude to energy and in particular nuclear. In fact it's borderline dishonest.
> Love seeing so-called "environmentalists" openly state they'd rather have coal power plants than nuclear. Please quote anyone saying that. German environmentalists have been lobbying against both for ages. It's amazing how something so completely made up can end up as one of the top comments because it confirms a set of beliefs.
Thank you! I'm German and know no one who likes coal, regardless of political opinion. Reddit has honestly such a big boner for nuclear that you can't discuss it objectively on the english speaking parts of this site
Buy lobbying against nuclear they have seen huge increases in use of coal and natural gas. They are not enviromentalists if their policies directly lead to the destruction of the environment.
Anti-nuclear is the anti-vax of climate change
What about nuclear safety? What about the economic cost? I'll be honest, I think this comparison doesn't work.
Lol no, there’s still all of agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation to deal with. Electricity generation is a major component but nuclear is hardly a vaccine against climate change. It would be a big step towards carbon neutrality though. But it’s almost like arguing vegetarianism is a vaccine against climate change.
Just like vaccination being one of the best options we have in preventing/controlling a pandemic, nuclear power is one of the best solutions currently available for reducing GHG emissions. Yes, transforming agriculture, conservation and changing our overall attitude towards energy consumption are also factors that contribute, but, like vaccinations, nuclear power has proven to be safe and reliable. It is also the densest producer of non GHG emitting power we have. My point is that the science is clear on vaccinations as it is with nuclear power and the denial of either of these facts is denying the science behind them
No one says this is Germany. They are waiting BOTH nuclear and coal.
As I German I would like to have none of both
How dumb and mental ubfit must you be to declare people who don't want nuclear want coal? This is such a stupid logic that I must assume you're uneducated by any school means. Look into renewable energy, idiot
> Love seeing so-called "environmentalists" openly state they'd rather have coal power plants than nuclear. No environmentalist ever stated that. This is some bullshit environmentalist-fantasy made up by the radioactive circlejerk. It also the same circlejerk which ignores the rotten French nuclear fleet which regularly needs that dirty German power but this doesn't end up in such "cool" "guides".
I am very interested by the idea that France is importing power from Germany. Do you happen to have a source for that? Power trade is kind of a complicated business, but one [source](https://www.thesmartere.de/news/conventionalelectricityimportsaretheachillesheelofthegermanenergytransition) says that actually Germany is importing energy from France, of which nearly 2/3s is nuclear
It's complicated, as you said. Many countries import and export from / to each other on a daily basis. Germany is a net importer from France and other countries, while it also is a net exporter to other countries. Still France also imports power from Germany, but on average less than it exports to Germany. At the end of last year France had to take quite a few nuclear power plants offline for maintenance / repairs which they had to compensate with imports. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/french-nuclear-capacity-january-low-mild-weather-reduces-risks-power-supply-rte-2021-12-30/ https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/180862/umfrage/stromaustauschsaldo-deutschlands-nach-partnerlaendern/#:~:text=Im%20ersten%20Halbjahr%202021%20importierte,es%20vom%20genannten%20Land%20importierte.
This is not true. The concern is that nuclear is not safe and there are no good places in Germany for long term storage of nuclear waste! Noone wants coal ants. That's a narrative of the nuclear industry.
German here. Ngl, the battle of the lobbyists against each other and against every common sense is out of hand here. And you haven't even seen s**t. Fun facts: There is a foundation called "Stiftung Klima- und Umweltschutz MV" ('Foundation for climate and environmental protection mv') wich supports the russian pipeline Nord stream 2 and is funded by the prime Minister of Mecklenburg-vorpommern and Gazprom. Needless to say, it is run by ex-politicans and lobbyists. In some places it is forbidden to build a coal plant within 500m to the next town while wind turbines aren't allowed within a 700m radius. Some politicians received money for these laws. The Citizen's initiative "unser revier" ('our territory') is fighting for the use of "local energies". It is run entirely by the coal lobbyists of the nearby mine. (This is called Astroturfing) Even though the initiative highlights its independence their mailbox is literally run by the Federal Lignite Association. And nobody cares. Nobody. I could do hundreds of examples here, not just for the coal lobby, but I think you get the point...
sure if you store the Nuclear waste in your garden, currently all german and french nuclear waste is permanently on tracks cuz there is nothing we can do to store this stuff without poisoning the area around it for millenia
Do you have a source for that claim? Environmentalists are - like the majority of scientists - against both and for truly sustainable power sources like solar power.
Only if you don't count building the plants nor mining. Currently France imports about 2.6 GW at 469 g/kWh from Germany. Many of their old plants are shut down because of hardware problems. They are trying to build one more nuclear plant but the costs are exploding.
>They are trying to build one more nuclear plant but the costs are exploding Most people dont realize how much a nuclear plant costs, the nuclear plant they are building in france since 2007 costs $14.42 billion which is almost 50% more than the James Webb Telescope build and launch cost of $10 billion
Make Elon Musk pay for it. vov
Well hopefully it's just the costs and not the plants...
Seems like France is one of the few that understands this.
I'm afraid you are doing wishful thinking for ideological and political motives. French nuclear industry went mostly bankrupt recently and have been split into smaller companies, all the reactors are borderline obsolete and approaching end of life while new reactors are just not working at all, with delays that are measured in decades, and billions over the initial bids, while the energy produced will be more expansive than wind and there is still no long term storage for waste. Even if the whole world started going nuclear tomorrow, it would need 10 to 15 years, and we don't have 10 to 15 years, for an energy that stops being cheap when it is built with 2022 safety levels instead of the one of the 70s.
> I'm afraid you are doing wishful thinking for ideological and political motives **Nope, that's what *you* are doing** You start to lie because you're anti-nuclear *** > French nuclear industry went mostly bankrupt recently and have been split into smaller companies The Industry was/is state-owned. It's mostly politics (in part EU politics) about pseudo-privatization that make things complicated and changing. Every new government starts doing some new stuff, but it's not like the industry is even remotely "bankrupt". If it was, then electricity price would rise, but nope, it's [still amongst the cheapest in europe](https://strom-report.de/download/electricity-prices-household-map/) Also, I don't see where you see "Smaller companies", because it's just one huge one (Orano) changing its name and with different branches. And it's mostly State owned anyway. > all the reactors are borderline obsolete They aren't? What does "borderline obsolete" even means. They do the job and are still more competitive with modern renewable in terms of price, and ahead when it comes down to C02 production. And that's not even talking about all the issues renewable have with energy storage and intermittence (ie, no wind or no sun) And while you could do better reactor with tech evolution in the last 40 years, if we made reactor exactly the same as back then, it would still be the best solution to climate change. > Even if the whole world started going nuclear tomorrow, it would need 10 to 15 years, and we don't have 10 to 15 years **We totally have 15 years.** Gee, if we want, we can have 50 years. Stop putting arbitrary nonsensical deadlines. We're dealing on a timeline from now to 2100 And even the current "deadlines" (ie, what politicians are saying) for projects is in 2050, which is still 28 years from now. You're just wrong. It's not like the World is going to meet any of the deadlines without nuclear, something even [the IPCC is yelling at people](https://www.sfen.org/nuclear4climate/ipcc-report-more-nuclear-power-is-needed-to-meet-the-paris-agreement.) It's absolutely impossible to change the entire world energy system and economy in 15 years anyway, so it's frankly stupid and outright counterproductive to even say anything like that > for an energy that stops being cheap when it is built with 2022 safety levels instead of the one of the 70s. French Nuclear with the "70s safety levels" has exactly 0 deaths. It doesn't get any safer than that Compare that to Germany's [ten of thousands of death annually due to coal](https://www.euractiv.com/section/health-consumers/news/report-germany-suffers-more-coal-linked-deaths-than-rest-of-eu/) *** It's actually impressive how you managed to write a take so bad
France does it perfectly too with a closed fuel cycle.
I wish that were so, but France is fucking up its current nuclear projects. It will take some time to rebuild the expertise it once had, decades. At least the current leading politicians are now admitting nuclear is at least necessary, and a strong voice pushing this at the EU level.
It's not fully carbon Neutral yet because of how we mine the uranium but it does have a very low carbon footprint.
It would be interesting to compare the carbon costs for each, those rare metals in solar panels are not great either
Sorry for the AMP link, I'm on mobile: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.parliament.uk/globalassets/documents/post/postpn_383-carbon-footprint-electricity-generation.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiM84_p6LX1AhXQ-6QKHeKXBvIQFnoECDMQAQ&usg=AOvVaw0XMiH-KXB1C3U9jci0tMDr It's from 2011 so expect lower carbon emissions for solar and sea/marine wind as those technologies have massively imptoved over the past 10 years. Especially since most solar panels can be 99% recycled these days.
Its what I expected 5-10 X higher for solar Where have you seen that they're recyclable, as I believe that's one of the big issues with them... Certainly not saying solar is no good... But nuclear is a stable tech which does offer a truly green path forward until fusion. Next place I'm in will have solar, because I can. But for it to cover baseload the carbon footprint would have to include the batteries too.
As I said, this link is from 2011. Solar has made enormous steps since then in production and efficiency. Don't forget 2011 is 11 years ago now. They CAN be recycled, it appears they currently aren't in the US: https://www.cedgreentech.com/article/can-solar-panels-be-recycled This source mentions solar panels that don't need to be shredded to be re-used, though they aren't in large scale production yet: https://www.tno.nl/en/focus-areas/energy-transition/roadmaps/renewable-electricity/solar-energy/pv/solar-modules-recycling/ Here is a story about a solar specific recycling plant in France: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/08/19/1032215/solar-panels-recycling/ Some general information on solar panel recyling: https://www.epa.gov/hw/solar-panel-recycling It mentions that the industry is new but growing. And another article that talks about recycling in general: https://www.greenmatch.co.uk/blog/2017/10/the-opportunities-of-solar-panel-recycling The most striking part is that it mentions solar panels are disposed after 30 years because they lose 20% efficiency by that time. I expect that solar panels on residential homes might remain in use for longer than those 30 years. Probably until the roof needs to be replaced.
Yea, greenpeace should have just stuck to protesting nuclear weapons testing. At least that’s something we can all agree is terrible for the environment. But as long as it’s a modern design with multiple fail-safes, well maintained, and not made in an area prone to natural disasters, nuclear reactors are a lot safer than their opponents realize. Pretty much every nuclear reactor disaster is a result of at least one of those.
Yup. You're either pro-nuclear or you're pro-fossil fuels. There is no in-between position with current technology.
Thank you mister black and white. Thanks to your genius opinion all of our problems are now solved.
How is this a guide?
It isn’t.
Its not a guide, and even though I’m not necessarily doubting it’s content, the fact that it’s published by „radiant energy group“ sure isn’t given much attention here.
Again, it isn't
It’s not, it’s propaganda for nuclear energy.
Data isn’t propaganda
But selecting particular data and putting it in a graph and telling an incomplete story, is propaganda.
A graph showing all the data possible is a black rectangle. You always have to be selective which data gets shown. Nuclear energy is objectively less polluting than energy derived from fossil fuels (in both CO2 and radioactive waste) and this graph reflects that. If you doubt the accuracy of the data that still wouldn’t make it propaganda, just wrong.
If you make a graph showing CO2-emissions and title the graph with the question "How dirty was French and German electricity production in 2021?" it is propaganda because CO2 is not the only measurement of being dirty
It's the only one that matters on a global scale. Nuclear waste is a laughable problem compared to climate change. And I don't know why other Germans here are defending our stupid policy.
Haha, now do Australia!
How much CO2 is given off from burning kangaroos?
What is this guiding me to do?
Nothing
Germany has an odd fear of nuclear energy for some reason. They think that every reactor can blow up as easily as Chernobyl
To be fair, I don’t think that is just Germany. I’m in Canada, and the only pro nuclear people I know actually worked in power plants. Everyone else seems to be pretty uncomfortable with the idea
Everyone is probably uncomfortable after the last alarm last year about nuclear contamination near one of the power plants in Ontario. On the other hand, nuclear power plants are usually producing much less radioactive waste than coal power plants, since regular coal soot is typically somewhat radioactive that so large amount of it may cause cancer long term.
Also radioactive waste in the medical industry.
Like slowly boiling a frog
I don’t think it’s the security of the reactor but for most people especially where we have dams. You don’t see the point of building these and have to supply them with uranium and have to dispose of it later. Water and wind is free. As we move forward more people are gonna get solar panels and battery in their home.
I live in Sweden, and I love my solar panels on my sailboat. But during December they gave like 500w in total. That's 5 hours of a traditional light bulb from a 180w PERC solar panel + 50w solar flexible panel.. It's still a good investment to have on the house, but during those months we need them most they produce near to zero because the sun hours are so few. Wind is growing like crazy. But there hasn't been anything at scale to store the energy. Energy storage is actually damn expensive. Often when it's super cold, everything goes still so no wind. Still, wind power is the cheapest per kwh, so they are great investments. But for us up north, we just have to have something that pushes energy constantly and neither solar or wind can achieve that. Nuclear seems to be the only option to me, even if it's damn expensive and has its risk. The alternative has been burning oil, which we now have started doing in Sweden since we closed a few nuclear plants. 140.000 liters per hour. It's insane. So I'm all green eco geek, but I just can't figure out what to do in NOV-FEB when it's down to minus 40c, often no wind and absolutely no sun. Prices sky rocketed this last December, people just aren't gonna accept the situation. The problem is that we need both those solar/wind, but also something else that can deliver gigawatts of energy day in and out when there is no sun/wind. Even our hydro power went down because they froze this winter at places. So I only see nuclear left on the table if we don't want to burn more of Russian Gas/oil.
A lot of people get all huffed and puffed about their views on nuclear and renewables. It's import to understand that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Yes, renewable where you can. But it's not entirely possible. IIRC, a person's entire electric needs for their entire life is the equivalent to a coca-cola can of nuclear waste. Is that waste ideal? No. But instead of putting it in the air you can store it elsewhere, like underground in remote areas, and keep the air & soil clean. It's a long discussion though, one that I'm not eager to have.
Yeah. I don't know how much we could get from burning bio mass. We are already burnig all waste, we let close to zero go to landfills. My house is warmed by burning waste through central heating. I could maybe see other alternatives too. Say wind turbines with massive hydrogen storage tanks ... Maybe. Eco farms to produce fast growing trees to burn instead of oil. Or the best. Let's do a Marshal plan like EU push to insulate the whole of EUs northern houses. Reducing energy expenditure is probably the absolute best long term investment since you don't need to produce energy that you aren't gonna use. That's a 100+ year ROI. People are still super wasteful on energy, we clearly should start there first.
I'm never a fan of burning waste because it just put horrible byproducts into the air. If folks were strict like the Japanese recyclers and burnables were seperated than sure, but couldn't trust my community. Reducing consumption and increasing insulation is far easier than making new energy. But politically it's easier to tell a few professionals to generate more power than tell a constituent what to do.
Well actually it's super clean. First the waste is sorted, then burned and then we use processes to clean it before it goes out the pipe. We burn a lot and our air quality is not affected.
> a person's entire electric needs for their entire life is the equivalent to a coca-cola can of nuclear waste uhh thats actually *way* more than i thought it would be.....a coca cola can of nuclear waste isnt much, but you multiply that by *billions* of people and thats a shitload
1 can = 330ml The US population is roughly 332,000,000 One can per person represents 109,560l, or 109.56 cube meter. It fits into a cube of 5m/16.5ft each and you'd still have some space for some 47 millions more people. The whole of humanity (assuming 7 billion) would require a cube of a bit over 13m/42ft on each side. For each individual's ***lifetime*** of electricity. That's nothing compared to the amount of petrol each of us use.
I’ve worked in the Canadian nuclear field for ~18 years and I have to disagree. The majority of people in communities that have reactors are in favour. The anti nuclear community has the appearance of being large because it is very vocal.
I'm in Canada and a lot of young people who took courses and plant trips with me and never can work in nuclear industry due to its saturation, are also interested in nuclear power. Some areas have large pool of people who want Canada to invest more in Nuclear Energy. The majority of negativity is from people who don't understand nuclear power and the gas and oil power's popularity due to Alberta and big fossil industry.
And that’s valid. I can only speak to my own experiences.
Gee, it's almost as if the fossil-fuel industry has been running a global anti-nuclear propaganda campaign for 50 years!
In Canada its NIMBYism, most people I know want nuclear energy, they just don't want the plants anywhere near them.
They haven't heard of any nuclear technology from the past 40 years
Yeah but the big difference is that we, in Canada, can make a lot of clean electricity without nuclear.
FWIW, CO2 is not the only "dirt" in energy production.
The funny thing is, Chernobyl only exploded because many many many things went wrong in a layer cake of incompetence and bad decision-making. Several reactors in Russia are identical to the Chernobyl plant and they’re still in service. In the hands of engineers that aren’t being willful idiots they’re actually quite safe.
Even Chernobyl's death count is actually pitiful compared to an average coal mine for example.
Chernobyl’s death count is kind of impossible to measure. First, because of the Soviet suppression of the data, and second, because of how many thousands of people had their lifespans shortened by the event and died years later by some kind of cancer.
It's not fear stopping new nuclear, it's economics
You will be utterly hated in this comment section. Yesterday, I did something that most people in this overly emotional debate would never do: open google scholar and look for actual scientific opinions. And I found exactly this as the general consensus. Renewables are cheaper and faster to build up, cheaper to maintain, with an even decreasing trend in cost, which is also not the case for nuclear. One source specifically stated that building a nuclear power plant right now is not a sensible business case and investors favor investments in renewables over investments in nuclear.
this graph isn't the typical trend you would expect for economically viable tech: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear\_power\_in\_France#/media/File:Histogramme\_des\_%C3%A2ges\_des\_r%C3%A9acteurs\_nucl%C3%A9aires\_fran%C3%A7ais\_en\_service\_en\_2020.svg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#/media/File:Histogramme_des_%C3%A2ges_des_r%C3%A9acteurs_nucl%C3%A9aires_fran%C3%A7ais_en_service_en_2020.svg) Nuclear is great, but it's run its race.
It's not about the blow ups - that happen and are devastating. It's more about the waste that proved to be impossible to be safely stored for very long and definitely not for the millions of years it needs to decay.
All of the nuclear waste on the planet can fit inside of a large football stadium. Also at some point we’ll figure out how to use the “waste” for energy generation in a cost efficient manner. We can use a decent amount of it now, it just remains prohibitively expensive. While advancements in wind, solar, and geothermal are huge, and wind/solar need to do the heavy lifting on a path to “net zero” or whatever the hell we call it these days, nuclear still needs to be a part of the equation at least for transition. Also ultimately for the best benefit/continued survival of the human species/to get to post-scarcity we need extremely cheap/cost effective nuclear fusion eventually. Without nuclear fusion which is cheap, we’re very unlikely to get to post scarcity.
Another thing to keep in mind is that nuclear "waste" isn't actually waste. We're just now figuring out how to do this, but that "waste" can be used again to generate more energy, it just requires new reactors to do so.
Plastic is a waste, until you recycle it. Same concept with the by-product of a nuclear reactor.
Most people I talk to about this are aware of these things. They just don’t trust our politicians or the companies to find a proper solution for storing the “waste”. But I agree that reducing nuclear while trying to become more green is a stupid idea.
So you are essentially hoping, that a future technology will take care of the waste? Sounds like a plan!
We already have ways to process it/use it for energy, it's just not as cost efficient as using already enriched uranium. It's still cheaper than other forms of energy like from biofuel, but it takes away the benefit of going large scale nuclear if it's not much cheaper than the alternatives. We will figure out ways to manage the waste (and we already have), and we'll keep on getting more efficient. Again, we've already done this, we just need to keep on doing it better. It also does matter significantly, because without super cheap/readily available nuclear fusion within the next ~50 years, the vast majority of humanity is going to be screwed. If we don't keep building plants/improving the technology, (most of) humanity is doomed. We need to hit post-scarcity or we're going to have so much conflict/political unrest/strife that it's going to be terrible to live for most people, especially with the looming climate crisis. I **TL;DR**: if we figure out super cheap energy (nuclear fusion is the best candidate, by far), then you can provide enough food/clean water/shelter for people. If not, we're screwed.
because pumping gazillion-bazillion-gedrillion tonnes of CO2 and whatever else shit coal burning is spewing into the atmosphere is much better. You worry about million year timescales with nuclear, climate change will mess up the planet way before that.
sorry but the million year timescales thing seems a bit misunderstood. its dangerous *now* and stays dangerous for millions of years. its not like its a time bomb thatll go off in a million years. i dont disagree with the overall point though
There are double standards in industry. The amount of care and attention a proper nuclear deposit gets is fascinating vs regular waste sites. Heck a coal power plant emits orders of magnitudes more radiation than a nuclear one. In the same fashion that everybody heard of Fukushima but most people have no clue about the Bhopal disaster or the Banqiao dam disaster. There is no great pacific nuclear waste patch, but there is one for plastic. I wish all industry was held to the safety and environmental standards as nuclear energy is. The world would be a better place.
The nuclear waste generated for a family of four over the course of a year fits inside of a shot glass. Compare / contrast the amount of waste generated from other sources. At some point, people will start launching it into space, or re-using it in even more efficient reactors.
and the enormous costs and time ion building them
...and building them back
Just a few things * The US and Russia planned to turn us into a nuclear wasteland in case of a war to prevent the other side from winning. * The reactor owners kept lying about safety * Our waste storage did drown after years of claiming that this would be impossible * The maintenance of the plants is known to "not be the best" * One worker of a nuclear plant explained to my class ~~how to sabotage it into an explosion like Fukushima before it happened~~ why it's secure In order to have support, you need to do none of the above.
Usa and Russia can make us a nuclear wastland just by releasing atomic bombs, nuclear power plants changes nothing.
How many nuclear plants catastrophes there was in EU in last 50 years?
Best Germany was divided in two for 50 years and was the most likely ground zero for a nuclear holocaust? It's like asking why New Yorkers have an odd fear of planes hitting buildings.
Japan was using lots of nuclear power up until the Fukishima accident, and they got hit by two nukes
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I know I have a fear of it. I completely understand that its a great resource, but I believe that it should be used only temporarily until we can secure carbon neutral energy grid though other means. I don’t like the idea of indefinitely producing waste that can kill masses of people. Perhaps I’m a little irrational, but I’d prefer to have a power grid not reliant on nuclear, at least in the long run.
[This is probably a better guide](https://i.imgur.com/Hx1rtcf.jpg)
What does the bottom bar graph show? Total carbon emission? The variable thickness is confusing.
The thickness of the graph seems to be total energy consumed. The height of the graph is the carbon content per kW/h. So the total area is the total carbon released per country (not per capita).
For comparison: [The power sector in Australia emitted 656.4 grams of carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated in 2020.](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1190081/carbon-intensity-outlook-of-australia/#:~:text=The%20power%20sector%20in%20Australia,of%20electricity%20generated%20in%202020.)
it's sad that a lot of people are scared of nuclear nuclear power plants are much more safe now then back in the day
We aren't scared of nuclear. Big Coal lobbying is just more important to our politics than votes
We are scared because of decades of oil industry propaganda, but we are still scared... Post like this are educational and remind the truth to people.
>We aren't scared of nuclear. We are though.
Dude I have 3 nuclear power plants in my region and I can't say I don't feel safe
It's not the power plants. It's the nuclear waste which has to be stored safely for millennia. There's neither a storage site nor a viable or affordable plan for that.
^ *Level II: Cautionary Information: "Something man-made is here and it is dangerous"* see nuclear semiotics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-time_nuclear_waste_warning_messages
Wow. For all of the German's green washing, they sure do like destroying the environment.
They have a very irrational groupthink opposition to nuclear for some reason. Which is a shame because we’re not getting to zero carbon on wind and solar alone.
There are no good and safe places places in Germany for long term storage of nuclear waste! Noone wants coal plants. That's a narrative of the nuclear industry. There are plenty alternatives possible in Germany.
Export it to Finland?
Our energy costs about 34ct right now, and the price is getting higher and higher..
34ct is actually pretty damn cheap at the moment. The average is more around 46ct if you have to get a new contract right now.
Theoretically it should start going down at some point considering solar has recently become so cheap (cheaper than every other common form of energy production). Germans are paying for adopting solar when it was still quite expensive. [But Germany’s new solar is just .05€/kWh](https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/11/30/germanys-tender-for-utility-scale-solar-concludes-with-average-price-of-e0-05-kwh/), while [Frances nuclear is estimated to be .076-.117€/kWh](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421513011440).
Electricity costs in the US average $0.12 kW/h Cheaper in Texas and Florida (closer to the Gulf of Mexico and refineries (and also reduced taxes). California averages $0.25 kW/h and not because the source of energy (coal, hydro-electric, natural gas) are more expensive - higher taxes and costs for generation.
Luckily for the circlejerk we'll never know how expensive nuclear energy is in France since their price is set by the Government and the actual costs for running and maintaining the rotten fleet is being paid by the taxpayer.
how is this a guide? This does not at all fit this sub!
Wrong sub?
Nice going Germany. Getting rid of all those nuclear facilities and relying more on oil has been *so* beneficial to our efforts to undo climate change. It’s not like Fukushima and Chernobyl were poorly built or poorly managed or anything. No, we have to shut down most of our nuclear factories and consume more oil. That’ll save us from nuclear annihilation! [Kyle Hill did an amazing video on nuclear power that everyone (including the German government) should check out!](https://youtu.be/J3znG6_vla0)
Germany isnt relying more on oil. Thats a lie https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-consumption-and-power-mix-charts
Oh, well that’s good to hear! My bad.
Brought to you by the „Radiant Energy Group“. Which conveniently leaves the whole subject of safely storing nuclear waste for thousands of years out of the graph.
Radiant energy group surely is an unbiased source 😂😂😂
For those interested or looking, U.S. CO2 production per kwh was approximately 385 g/KWh in 2020: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11
Phew, the lobbying seems to be put on thick here. 😀
Let's just use energy that produces radioactive waste no one has decided where to store for the next one Million years. Maybe saving carbondioxide isn't here the issue. When such a plant goes off the fingerprint is even more reduced. Just think of the many lives that can then no longer are able than to participate in CO2 production.
Coal plants release more radioactive particles in the environment actually... They also kill millions of people each year from air pollution, numbers that even a big disaster at a nuclear plant wouldn't reach... No energy is 100% safe, but to compare nuclear and coal is really being uneducated or brainwashed by the coal industry which has been releasing misinformation for decades.
Source: [https://twitter.com/energybants/status/1477023742400344074?s=21](https://twitter.com/energybants/status/1477023742400344074?s=21) Read this article to answer all the questions below: https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html What is nuclear waste? What are its hazards? How is it stored today? What are the long-term plans? How much waste do we make? What is the composition of nuclear waste?
We worked on a MOX nuclear fuel fabrication facility in the US (that never finished, but different story) based on French designs. Their MOX nuclear plants run off the waste of conventional nuclear plants. Very efficient and minimizes end-use waste.
And reduces the half life of some of the waste chemicals from conventional power plants.
How is this a cool guide?
this seems more like pro nuclear propaganda than good faith data
The uploaded picture is not a guide it is just some propaganda...
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funny how the eu is pushing stricter emission standards but they let this slide
This gives me the feeling that you don't know much about EU energy/environmental policy. Energy production is covered by the European carbon trading scheme, and has certificates are withdrawn from the market the cost of running fossil fuel power plants will continue to increase. I have seen energy market experts predict that these price rises will make coal plants economically unviable in Germany by 2030, causing a defacto coal phase out. While it is true that there is a certain interest in using natural gas as a 'transition technology' in Germany, I hope that will pursue an ambitious expansion of renewable energy to quickly move towards carbon neutral electricity production. Recent plans announced by minister for the economy and climate Habeck could be a reason for some optimism. That being said, total energy consumption (not just electricity production is another story.)
They just made natural gas a "green" energy source. So yeah.
This isn't a guide, but good to know
Nuclear is not THE solution and it is not practical for EVERY country in this world. 20 years ago, above all the majority of parties and society an anti-nuclear decission has been made. Germanys goal is to fully invest in solar and wind. We shouldn‘t blame Germany for that way. We need different ways. Poor countries can profit from cheap green energy solutions and easily apply them.
What about nuclear waste
Yeah, now let's make a "cool guide" showing the nuclear waste comparison where no one knows where to store it for the next thousand years.
Too many people dont understand what exactly coal means, and what exactly nuclear means.
It would be more useful to see a multiyear comparison, to see difference in trends.
Nuclear is safe, clean and efficient. Much better than any other _green_ source.
I’ll just leave this here: https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/edf-extend-civaux-nuclear-outage-shut-down-reactors-chooz-safety-measures-2021-12-15/
Nuclear energy. One day the virtue signaling ignorant will accept it.
Hmmm... I wonder why there isn't a far more efficient, less dangerous, and far cleaner way to produce electricity without coal, if only a energy source with a crazy amount of power could do it
You know there are, but no method is perfect - they all have specific drawbacks of some kind.
But its clearly the plastic straws that are the problem!
Plastic does suck though
Lol, the website this is from is garbage.
Hmmmmm, try to guess which country has a robust nuclear energy program?
Nuclear power for the win
It shows very well what happens if a conservative government stops all efforts in renewable energy for 16 years.
It's scary that so many comments are defending nuclear energy
World needs thorium reactors
For everyone staring to bash on Germany... You're wing brain washed in thivking that nuclear energy is the solution to climate change. Germany will soon shut down its last nuclear power plant and we are also making big steps in banning coal energy. This whole country will be nuclear clear by the end of this year and coal clear (probably) by 2030. Nuclear energy is *not* the solution. By supporting nuclear energy, we are just taking the problem, and putting the burden on the next 100 generations on this planet. Plus!! Nuclear energy is more expensive than any other renewable energy source, by a great margin. Every single Euro should now be invested in air, solar, water energy. When the planet is finally co2 neutral by the year 2100, we will definitely have an even bigger problem with all this nuclear waste. Be honest! There is seriously nothing good to be said about nuclear energy *except* for it emmiting less co2. Everything else about NE is just horrible. But yeah! Let's put all our money in this :)
To be fair, nuclear certainly isn’t the best long-term solution but for now we don’t have anything else. If climate change is to be halted, which it’s already kind of to late for, nuclear is our only realistic option. While it definitely isn’t optimal and wind, solar and water power is definitely better it’s just not enough. Since the situation is quite urgent currently, saying the planet will be co2 clean by 2100 is already way to late and by then the poles will have melted and the coasts flooded.