Can somebody please explain why the world hasn't gone nuclear yet? : energy

[–] GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca 16 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Realistically, the time for nuclear (fission) has past. If we were in the 50s or 60s, and were making a concerted effort to remove fossil fuel energy production, nuclear could have helped us do it. Now, with steadily decreasing renewable energy costs and cheaper and more effective battery storage, it's a break-even option at best, and takes a long time to implement.

Fusion has a real chance, provided we can figure it out well enough to do anything with it. It may not be economically viable, and it's hard to be certain before we actually get it working. Fusion could also be more effective for certain space missions, especially to the gas giants and farther from the sun. Realistically, anything closer than Mars does pretty well with solar.

[–] BussyCat@lemmy.world 9 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Renewables get cheaper because we are building them… if we built nuclear at the same frequency as renewables their price would plummet as well.

Personally see the best option as a combination, in places like LA, Las Vegas, Phoenix solar should be the number 1 power source. Build wind power in places like Wyoming, and off shore wind where it’s possible. But when you have a place that needs huge amounts of batteries to try and compensate for inconsistent wind/solar that’s where you should build nuclear.

Nuclear is not renewable and has a lot of issues but we also shouldn’t ignore the negatives of lithium, nickel, cadmium, and cobalt mining. At the end of the day all of them are better than fossil fuels

[–] aupag@feddit.org 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

We did build a lot of nuclear in the 60s and 70s, but prices didn't really drop and began to increase (higher safety standards, more oversight, general cost disease as is usual for large civil engineering projects), so we stopped building nuclear. It also wasn't sustainable to build nulear at that rate for some countries, as, well, after you built enough you don't need more (france) for a while.

[–] BussyCat@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago

The U.S. has an increase in energy demand, and if we consider phasing out fossil fuels then the demand for new power plants is huge.

Arkansas nuclear one which started construction in 1968 and finished in 1974 had a total construction cost of 2.522B (2007 dollars) and produces 13555 GWh a year with a 66 year license giving it a $2.81//MWh in general initial construction represents 60-80% of total nuclear power costs so if we use the conservative value that’s still under $5/MWh using 2007 dollars and if we scale to today that’s $8/MWh. So not sure what you mean by it didn’t drop costs.

It was expensive compared to fossil fuels that had little to no safety systems

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

But when you have a place that needs huge amounts of batteries to try and compensate for inconsistent wind/solar that’s where you should build nuclear.

With High Voltage transmission lines, it's possible to send excess energy hundreds to thousands of miles away with relatively little loss. I believe Germany sends solar power north where it's more cloudy, and wind power south.

China also went this route, sending solar energy across the country thanks to that infrastructure.

There's nothing technological stopping the EU or the US from doing the same, only politics.

[–] BussyCat@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

There are still losses in those lines that can be around 10%, high voltage transmission lines use a lot of copper and can have high cost, they can be a point of failure, they can start forest fires, and if we actually build full scale nuclear system their price will drop down extensively. An MIT study estimated $66/MWh is achievable with a full build out which is already cheaper than solar plus storage, So when you factor in the additional cost of transmission lines nuclear just makes more sense.

But for places like LA that see huge electricity transients during the day as peak sun correlates to peak AC nothing is better than solar and while I haven’t done extensive research on off shore wind everything I have heard about it is incredible where it works.

Nuclear is for places like Seattle that for large chunks of the year gets negligible sun so the amount of storage you need to maintain full power is impracticable and the losses for sending electricity there from sunny places is unsustainable

I definitely don’t think nuclear should be our first or even second choice but it should be an option that fits its niche because our number one priority needs to be reducing our fossil fuel usage and wasting a bunch of material in places that aren’t a good fit is irresponsible

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

At least in China, the losses have been negated by recent technology that allows higher voltages than previously feasible, bringing the losses down to 2.6% per 500 miles.

I'm not against any existing nuclear power continuing to exist, it would be foolish to shut any down at this point. I'm also not entirely against new construction depending on who's doing it and where (France seems capable of getting them online fairly quickly, while the US seems incredibly bad at keeping on time and on budget).

I just think overall, due to how solar can scale up and down, it's overall the most promising solution, as individuals can collectively take action now, instead of waiting for a nuclear power plant to maybe get built in time to help with the climate.

[–] BussyCat@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago

France actually also has had cost overuns and projects extended as well. The biggest problem hurting nuclear is we do each project as a one off design which increases the cost and time immensely. Solar had gotten much cheaper and able to be installed quickly largely because of manufacturing standards and continued development which encourages companies to develop specialized equipment, construction teams to be familiar with standards, and costs to be lowered due to mass production.

That’s why I mentioned the NOAK study on nuclear power which shows a lifecycle cost of 66/MWh compared to solar plus storage which even with only 17 hours of storage is sitting at $104/MWh then if you factor in the additional losses from transmission, cost of installing UHV transmission lines, and trying to use solar to power places that end up with high energy costs for heating at night and 24hr manufacturing, solar doesn’t make as much sense.

Vogtle is everyone’s example of why nuclear power is bad in the U.S. but it was also the exact lesson on why nuclear power can work as the cost overruns had to do with their original contractor filing for bankruptcy, having to return 3 core baskets because they didn’t have a reliable manufacturer, and the fact that they had to come up with the R&D cost for 2 nuclear reactor designs. Now that the project is complete though the AP1000 is approved to be built so designs costs will be a fraction, numerous designs are being built around the world so manufacturers should be able to handle the project parts, and we have construction crews who have built the exact reactor before

As I said before solar and wind should defenitely be considered before nuclear but nuclear can still be a viable option

[–] jagermo@feddit.org 49 points 1 week ago (21 children)

Its a type of energy that gets more expensive

Hard to get insurance, so all costs fall to the states while all profits go to companies

Trash is not solved

A minor error can have a huge environmental impact, especially in densly populated areas like Europe

Plants need cooling, most use rivers and that does not mix well with rising temperatures, and have to be shut down in summer

No public backing

High initial costs, high costs so run, high costs to dismantle

Nuclear plants are not flexible and can't react to energy availability

Most fuel is produced by less reliable states. Renewable energy is produced in your home country.

No chance of decentralizing the grid, making it a target for single point of failures or attacks (State sponsored or terrorism)

Solar is cheaper, battery parks are cheaper, hydrogen is cheaper, wind is cheaper, hydro is cheaper.

All in all, there are cheaper ways to create and store more energy safely, more decentralized and with less ties to single big companies.

Money is no issue, because if we have billions to throw at one plant, we obviously have enough for a smarter grid with storage options.

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[–] FartMaster69@lemmy.dbzer0.com 39 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Both the association with nuclear weapons and several high profile nuclear accidents worked to shape public perception negatively towards nuclear power.

[–] Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 24 points 1 week ago (4 children)

And the tiny tiny matter of it never having been economically viable. Both the R&D and construction were massively subsidised by the state. Then the corporations were allowed to skim off the profits while the nukes were running. After that the state gets stuck with the bill for decommissioning. It's always been a racket. The only reason "civilian" nuclear power exists is as a fig leaf for nuclear armament.

[–] Tiresia@slrpnk.net 1 points 6 days ago

Nuclear safety standards in most western countries are legally defined as whatever was high enough to make the reactors unprofitable (with language such as "the highest reasonably attainable level of safety"). This results in ridiculous scenarios like nuclear reactors being expected to store their waste perfectly for 100,000 years even if nobody attends to it while fossil fuel plants kill millions with polluted air and agriculture just pisses pollution into the environment. We build monuments to nuclear waste so that future civilizations may know to fear it properly even if all contact is lost because oh no what if like ten of these hypothetical post-post-apocalyptic people die, while hundreds of millions are set to die right now because of the climate change that waste could have mitigated.

Nuclear reactors are safe enough that grad students can operate them. If the entire world electrical supply ran on electricity you could put the nuclear waste in a couple hundred oil drums and drop those in an olympic swimming pool and people nearby would be under less risk than from a steel mill.

And yes, without the nuclear arms industry it would have made more sense to develop cheaper and safer fuels like thorium. But nuclear disasters are like train crashes - terrible, of course, but vastly overblown by the media in a way that somehow coincides perfectly with fossil fuel/car industry interests.

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[–] WolfLink@sh.itjust.works 20 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Also propaganda and lobbying by fossil fuel industries.

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[–] schmorpel@slrpnk.net 13 points 1 week ago (4 children)

I guess I have to keep asking every time this shit idea of nuclear as green energy pops up: where to put the waste? Have we figured that out yet? Or will we continue hiding that stuff somewhere and hoping it stays there? 20 years ago I joined the protests in this location, where they were going to store nuclear waste in an abandoned salt mine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorleben_salt_dome

Despite thousands of people blocking roads the train full of nuclear waste arrived anyways. Guess what, briefly after that (or who knows, they probably knew anyways) they found the salt mine wasn't such a great idea. And now that shit sits there in some storage building waiting for an accident to happen. Maybe Russia wants to drop a drone onto it when they feel like it, or in time the whole thing just gets abandoned because nobody has money to care anymore.

Only way to make energy green is degrowth, so spending less of it. Every single way of producing energy is damaging to the environment, and inventing new stuff or rebranding old stuff as "green" isn't going to change it. They tear up the country I live in for lithium and the people can't grow their gardens anymore, common lands are now filled with wind power and the people cannot send their herds onto the mountain anymore, they produce fuel out of maize and large areas of monoculture now grow fuel instead of food, huge areas of agricultural land are being filled with solar panels. It all causes damage, just stop spending so much energy. Don't produce shit nobody needs, switch the fucking AI off, stay at home and just relax.

[–] jumping_redditor@sh.itjust.works 0 points 6 days ago (1 children)

worst case scenario you could send rockets of it into the sun.

[–] schmorpel@slrpnk.net 1 points 6 days ago

And as rocket fuel we use? You are all a fucking bunch of nuclear cartoon clowns, please just go and switch yourselves off.

[–] halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world 18 points 1 week ago

If you were to take all of that nuclear waste ever produced in the US, processed and stored inside dry cases, it would fit within an American football field less than 100 ft high. That's an insanely tiny amount of space for all the waste ever created for an entire type of energy production. For some comparison the amount of coal removed from the ground each year would form a cube over a mile wide.

However, most nuclear waste is low level waste and decays within a decade or less. Some of the medium level waste lasts a few decades. The longer stuff is a small fraction of overall waste. But some of it can be reprocessed and used as fuel again. It is also perfect for the starter fuel for some Thorium-based nuclear breeder reactor designs. Some are useful for various nuclear medicines. Very little of it actually has no use whatsoever.

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[–] Lemmchen@feddit.org 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

US nuclear propaganda is strong with you guys.

[–] halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Scientific education rather than emotional reactions to the unknown does that.

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