All reactors are subject to overheat leading to meltdown when suddenly shutdown. They become massive energy vampires, requiring huge cooling power (and manpower) for up to 2 years after to avoid that.
What are the odds that a “social collapse” (war, plague, disaster, etc) leaves some with no workers and no external juice? Not if, when! Meltdowns will occur, some will breach containment. Only fools light an unextinguishable fire that kills them if they ever stop feeding it.
While reactor designs are “safe”: this requires that they follow protocols, which often means unplanned downtime. Given the social pressures for energy, it seems that reactor operators will sometimes disobey shutdown requirements. Corruption is real in all societies. With reactors it absolutely includes a non-zero catastrophe chance. Again not if, when!
Reactors are safe, for a pre-designed lifespan. Often 50 years. To decommission properly is massively expensive and takes years of labour, and requires a replacement plant. Are operators actually squirreling away the funds to have this all saved up 50 years later (by “overcharging” now)? Or are the future governments just gonna keep patching a pig… not if, when!
What kind of containment system will work for 10s of thousands of years? What does that cost, or even look like?
https://www.damninteresting.com/this-place-is-not-a-place-of-honor/
Pro unless you want to build one in a 15 mile proximity of my house then I get cold feet
Pro, I think a lot of the anti-nuclear sentiments are leftovers from when nuclear power was not as heavily regulated as it is now.
Now it’s basically impossible for a meltdown except for if a literal natural disaster happens, and sometimes even then
And it’s a very clean energy source, with the one problem of what to do with the radioactive waste, but there is far less waste than fossil fuels, and it’s easier to get rid of.
I’m nominally pro, or maybe passively anti while cheaper, more scalable, and cleaner sources are at hand. If you’re already going full wind, solar, and geo and there’s still a rationale for a nuclear plant, I’m open to it. But that’s a big fat if.
The thing with nuclear power is that it’s FAR easier to convert a fossil fuel generator to nuclear than it is to convert it to green or to build a new one.
And yes, I agree, we need more green, but we first need to kill off all the fossil fuel options.
Although you are right in the sense that nuclear produces steam, I am not aware of any instance of this having been done. The steam turbine is such a small part of a nuclear plant.
In my view nuclear is best as a baseline production and heat production method. The baseline part may reduce as grid batteries smooth out the volatile production of the renewables.
I used to be anti-nuclear in the past but I realized a lot of the talking points were either wrong or directly favoring the fossil fuel companies. 100% for Nuclear and renewable energy.
Pro, but renewables do deploy way faster so we do want those renewables to be running while we wait for the nuclear plants to be constructed.
Turning off fossil fuel burning plants is the priority
Pro. If you consider how absolutely minuscule the risks are (keep your regulatory bodies free of corruption, guys), all political criticism looks uninformed and performative, answers in this thread included.
Imagine an anti-vaxx hippie: presents as progressive, gushes of pointless contrarianism, easily exploitable by the estabilishment*. That’s how I see the nuclear power-“critics”, both here and elsewhere.
* E.g.: I consider the Green Party of Switzerland the epitome of counter-productive performative idiocy ever since they’ve been campaigning for replacing our NPPs with gas turbine plants. Fuckin’ 🤡s the lot of them.
I’m against nuclear because it’s too expensive and there is no proper place to store the depleted material.
Unlike where we store all the CO2, plenty of room for that in our atmosphere.
There’s plenty of places?
And do remember, it’s taking what was already a dangerous material, processing it to be less dangerous, and then putting it somewhere safe
I was pro for a long time until I read Nassim Taleb on the tail risk associated with nuclear power.
Look at Fukushima.
Look at nuclear power plants becoming targets in war.
Look at how the capitalists who will be running these things treat risk generally.
There are better options available.
At this rate, I’m grateful for anything that isn’t burning fossil fuels.
I’d rather see solar and wind power though.
I think it works great in other places, but it is dangerous for America, where they will be built and maintained by bureaucratic Sociopathic corporations who will cut corners at every opportunity, until they fail, and kill millions.
Maybe someday America will evolve to the point where opportunities like this won’t be automatically hijacked by financial psychopaths.
where they will be built and maintained by bureaucratic Sociopathic corporations who will cut corners at every opportunity, until they fail, and kill millions.
That applies everywhere though regardless of profit incentive. Even the Soviet Union cut corners on the development and running of the Chernobyl plant which led to its infamous disaster. It’s not because of profiting mindset, but due to bureaucratic fear from an authoritarian leadership who want to speed up the process.
Im pro nuclear power as long as it is cost effective.
Renewable solar and wind with backup batteries is by far the least expensive power supply at the moment.
Anything contradicting the previous sentence is a complete lie that was spread by liars with money to gain.
yes. its stable and powerful, you cant rely entitely on renewable energy because sun does not always shine, wind does not always blow and hydro-electric outputs too little power compared to the damage caused. you also cant rely on coal because youre going to fucking die
Expensive, takes forever to build, produces shit ton of waste. Also ugly as sin.
Fossil fuel companies want you to support it because it takes a really long time to set up and they can turn a profit during that time.
You’re way off on the amount of waste they produce.
If you collected the waste of every nuclear plant in the United States since 1950 in one place, it would only fill a football field up to about 30ft deep. That’s really not all that much considering it’s 70+ years of power. That’s very easily manageable if people would just get over their fear.
The entire NPP is also nuclear waste when it is taken out of operation. That is a lot of waste. Sure, it may not be highly radioactive, but you cannot just dump it on a landfill and call it a day, either. Every screw, every doorknob, every everything has to be properly disposed of.
As someone who has done quite a bit of work on power systems (in the New Zealand context) recently.
You have to consider any energy generation technology in the environment it is going to be deployed in.
Whilst I am generally pro-nuclear; as a technology. It doesn’t really work as a deployable energy system in comparison to other forms of generation; especially here in NZ. There are three main reasons for this:
- Cost in both time and money to construct nuclear is far too high.
- Industry to support nuclear doesn’t exist in NZ. Expert techs, operators, fabricators etc are not here; we would need to build an industry alongside building the first plant.
- Regulatory framework to enable nuclear generation is almost nonexistent. We have medical isotope framework; as a basic way to work with radiological material.
- Bonus challenge; we would have to import all the fuel.
Countries with existing nuclear industries and power plant have a much easier time; but when comparing the cost in time and money to get the first GWh out of a nuclear generator; it is a hard sell.
One major advantage nuclear has over other forms of generation is physical footprint; effective power density is absolutely massive. To get similar power density in renewable generation, the only thing close would be the in development supercritical geothermal power; though nuclear would still have higher power density and is not geographically constrained.
Maybe things will change in the future. Maybe small modular reactors will eventuate in an easy to deploy way; or the developments in Chinese thorium reactors will pan out to a viable generation tech. But technology is not the only stumbling block that nuclear energy faces; especially in a small country that doesn’t have an existing nuclear industry.
I know there is a lot of money being thrown at fusion; and that may change the game entirely, it is an interesting time to be looking at energy systems.
I’m amazed at how level headed and straight forward the arguments are presented across a rather large variety of instances!
Also, against. Renewable + Battery + grid is the way to go. Connect every power source and distribute the energy. Include redundancy because energy is important.
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