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doesnt coal emissions have some radiation in it too?
IIRC, coal and gas plants give off more radiation per kWh than nuclear, it’s just that they dump it into the atmosphere along with millions of tonnes of other far more dangerous material.
Nuclear is the best btw
Naw. I was once enrolled in an Energy/Climate-focussed Masters degree, and scientific consensus for the goal generally seemed to range from “mostly renewables + a tiny bit of nuclear” to “all renewables”. Nuclear feels like this amazing hack but it’s expensive, and the storage problem, while sometimes overstated, is also often understated or falsely misrepresented as solved.
Enrolled in an energy/“climate-focused” masters degree funded by British Petrol. The only downside in nuclear is plants being a sensitive target in warfare.
Ah yes bp famously wants to replace all fossil fuels with renewables. good point /s
And earthquakes, and tsunamis, and hurricanes, and floods, and any other unforeseen circumstance which will result in rising level of cancer and lowering life expectancy for generations in the centuries to come. But yes who cares?! Glowy thing go brrrrrrr!
It’s talking about ignorance honestly, hidro has killed way more people.
You realise that death isn’t the only bad thing that can happen to you? I’d say crippling you and future generations for life is worse than death.
And that’s why replacing coal with fission is a massive step forwards!
No it’s not! It’s a minuscule step forward which will achieve no change whatsoever for the average person except an INCREASE in the amount of carcinogenic compounds in the atmosphere!
The massive step forward would be not needing boiling water and not needing to burn any fuel whatsoever to produce energy. That would be a “massive” step forward, not nuclear.
And btw, water vapour is a greenhouse gas too.
TBF, historically most nations allow “temporary” storage of spent nuclear fuel cells in perpetually filled pools or running water, which have the potentially to run out and cause a nuclear apocalypse via irradiating everything on the surface of the earth. Currently millions of spent rods are stored “temporarily” in such pools which all together contain as much Cesium-137 as 30 Chernobyls in the USA alone.
It gets talked about a lot in “what if” scenarios about human extinction, because if Humanity died out then those pools will dry up and everything else will die alongside us.
some sources on this?
Thank you
This would have been a great meme 50 years ago[1]. We already knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that climate change was caused by human fossil fuel consumption. At the time, a hard pivot to nuclear power would have been a great way to kick the can down the road for a few decades until we figured out a better idea.
Well, it’s a few decades later now. We came up with a lot of better ideas since then. Solar, wind, and geothermal are ascendant. And they don’t have nearly as many downsides as nuclear and hydro.
Side-note: a Spongebob meme would have really fucked people up in 1976. ↩︎
Indestructible like the Runit dome?
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-15/cracks-appear-in-runit-dome-amid-sea-level-rise/106423684
Ah, that must be why first world countries like France are trying to export their nuclear waste into third world countries, after they were forced to stop exporting it into Russia…
If it’s so safe, why have they been closing down every single high level waste permanent storage site over the last decade?
because ppl act over irrational fear and lobby their politicians to close perfectly safe sites.
Riiiight people are protesting for no reason…
The French government has yet to authorize Cigéo’s construction, and now the French Nuclear Safety Authority (ASN) and the Institute for Radioprotection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN) have raised concerns about the design. Although it acknowledges overall progress, IRSN questions whether the sealing would be a strong enough barrier and says ANDRA needs to do more to reduce the risk of radioactive leaks. The agency also needs to improve its strategies to monitor risks and to rehabilitate the facility in case of radioactive spills, IRSN says. Perhaps the biggest problem, however, is medium-level radioactive sludge immobilized in bitumen, or tar, a technique introduced in the 1960s that has now been abandoned. IRSN says that in case of fire in a tunnel, bituminized waste could rapidly overheat and burn. “We would risk creating a phenomenon that we don’t know how to stop,” and trigger “a very substantial” release of radioactivity into the environment, says François Besnus, director of IRSN’s Environment Division in Fontenay-aux-Roses. Both agencies say ANDRA and the producers of nuclear waste need to study treatments that prevent overheating; if that fails, a major redesign of the facility may be needed.
…
Others say the risks are simply too high. Radiation will break down water in the rock and cause corrosion of metal structures, leading to the release of explosive hydrogen gas, says biologist and engineer Bertrand Thuillier, an associate professor at the University of Lille. ANDRA plans to ventilate the tunnels, but that could exacerbate fires by providing oxygen, he says. A failure could be catastrophic, Thuillier warns: The area around Bure helps provide eastern Paris with water and is close to one of the world’s most cherished wine regions, Champagne.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.357.6354.858
Edit: and just so we’re clear, this is “the biggest, most complex and costliest nuclear decommissioning and radioactive waste management programme on earth.” With planned cost between 23 and 54 bilion €
Trust me bro, nuclear power is clean, I read it on reddit or some shit idk
Bruh i saw this trash of a bait post yesterday already.
Nobody with more than 3 brain cells is defending coal. But Nuclear is also shit (unless u have subs to run or nukes to build, and hence can use civil nuclear plants, refining, and mining to offload some of the military bill onto the backs of civilians).
THERE HAS NEVER BEEN A SINGLE NUCLEAR POWER PLANT THAT WAS PROFITABLE THUOUT ITS WHOLE LIFE CIRCLE.
Take your god damn bait meme and shove it up your reactor pressure vessel.
I used to live near a city that got nuclear power. When the plant closed our costs rose 200-300%.
I don’t care if it’s profitable, it’s cheap as fuck for residents.
“i dont care about anyhting but my own time slot” attitude
Because I don’t waste my time (well, much) on trolls, I had AI provide a response in the tone I would have used. I’m sure you’ll AI is BS yada yada but meh. I thought it was good.
Your post is peak “I read a Vox article from 2015 and now I’m an expert” energy. • Nuclear is not “shit.” It’s the only proven, scalable, carbon-free baseload power we have. • The problem isn’t nuclear—it’s Western governments treating it like a political football instead of an industrial project. • If you think coal is bad but nuclear is worse, you’re objectively wrong. Coal kills 8 million people/year from air pollution. Nuclear has killed ~5,000 in 70 years (Chernobyl + Fukushima, mostly from Soviet incompetence and a tsunami). • Your “no profitable plants” claim is like saying “no Tesla has ever been profitable”—ignoring that the Model 3/Y now print money, and existing reactors are cash machines. Final Verdict: Your Take is Hot Garbage • Accuracy Rating: 2/10 (generous). • Spice Level: 8/10 (points for passion, but you’re swinging at shadows). • Reality Check: Nuclear is the most cost-effective low-carbon power source if you build it right. The West doesn’t, but that’s our failure, not the tech’s. Now go shove that up your reactor pressure vessel. 🔥
“I had AI provide a response”
i stopped reading right there, dont waste my time.
The fuck you didn’t 🤣
What’s profit got to do with it?
Because people call nuclear cheap, when it in reality isnt, they just cherry pick a smol time slot while ignoring states pumping money into it before and after main run time.
Idc about profits man, I want a liveable biosphere.
Renewables it is then
GIMME
FUELSOLAR, GIMMEFIREHYDRO, GIMME THATWHICHWIND I DESIRE
Nuclear is dirt cheap if you level the playing field and also make all other sources pay to store waste eternally. The damage caused by climate change is ranging into the trillions, but no other fossil fuel pays for it.
Only nuclear power is expected to nearly package their waste, everyone else gets to spread it around the entire planet, slowly killing every living species.
Renewables are cheaper and also faster to build. Advocating for nuclear now is a delay tactic benefitting fossile fuels.
Renewables don’t create a permanent waste problem.(Also CO₂ is not as long-term as nuclear waste. It’s not easy or doable near-term, but you can let nature pull it out of the air and store the results. This can be done with none of the risks of failed nuclear storage.)
It’s the other way around. Nuclear is not competing against renewables’ spot, it competes with fossil fuels. Advocating for nuclear doesn’t try to use it instead of renewables, it tries to use it instead of fossil fuels. The opposition to nuclear is what benefits fossil fuels.
The choice is what you want renewables combined with, nuclear or fossil. Those are the choices.
There is a set amount of budget for replacing power infrastructure, and a set amount of capacity to be filled.
Any time a nuclear plant is starting to be built now, they could have instead already finished a renewable plant.
There is no longer any exclusive niche nuclear plants can fill, renewables and batteries beat it on all metrics now, even where stable baseload is needed.
If you need a GW of plants, you won’t build both a nuclear and a renewable GW plant, you pick one. If that GW replaces a coal plant, then nuclear will see the coal being burned for 10 more years while under construction.
The grid produces as needed, prices don’t vary enough anyone will use less power because low-emission sources are not yet available. Any nuclear power capacity under construction that could have been renewables will cause their equivalent capacity in fossile sources to be used an additional 10 years compared to if renewables had been built.Who is GW? And why do you bring him in?
There is no longer any exclusive niche nuclear plants can fill, renewables and batteries beat it on all metrics now, even where stable baseload is needed.
I would love to see a source on that, and how much overdimensioning it would take to achieve.
Any time a nuclear plant is starting to be built now, they could have instead already finished a renewable plant.
And every time they build a train, they could have easily built 10.000 bicycles instead. Not saying bikes aren’t incredibly useful, because they are. Not saying you shouldn’t build bikes, but I am saying they are very different things. If you try to replace cars with bikes, you’ll fail every time someone wants to travel more than 20km. If you try to replace cars with trains, you’ll fail ever times someone wants to travel less than 20km and not spend a billion bucks.
What you need to do is replace cars with trains AND bikes. But if you oppose trains “in favour of bikes”, you’re actually promoting cars. And vice versa.
But solar and nuclear aren’t the same thing. You can’t compare a solar kWh with a nuclear one. If you want to guarantee the same constant output from solar as you get from nuclear, you need immense battery storage or hugely oversized solar.
The choice isn’t “Solar/Wind OR Nuclear”, the choice is “Solar/Wind AND fossil fuels” or “Solar/Wind AND nuclear”. Every time someone opposes nuclear power in favour of something else, that something else is fossil fuels, even if you personally think you’re promoting renewables.
That is priced in yeah. Until recently that would have made it more expensive, but we now have the tipping point where overbuilt solar and batteries beat nuclear in price so finally there are no more caveats. Solar is cheaper, even at high latitudes like in northern europe, even for baseload application with big battery buffers right next to the solar farm.
I see a ton of them being spammed out like that now, solar fields with batteries in a small house in the middle, or in boxes along one side of the field.Solar itself is so cheap, that overbuilding or latitude hardly factor in, it’s mostly about the batteries.
The solar costs are also mainly the land and the construction of the frames.Solar is cheaper, even at high latitudes like in northern europe, even for baseload application with big battery buffers right next to the solar farm.
Honestly, that sounds extremely unlikely. I don’t live that far north in europe, and while I manage about 0kWh on my residental panels on a yearly basis. Thanks to seasonal changes, I would either need 4 more rooftops to keep the power on during january, or I would need to bank something like 700kWh to make it through 3 winter months. That’s not counting the electric car, or heating. Heating would roughly quadruple the numbers (being almost entirely clustered when solar isn’t producing), and the car would add roughly another house on top (assuming 50% is charged away from home).
Quick maths that I did because I wanted to try going off-grid: I would need ~100m2 of solar panels, and 2500kWh of battery storage. Or on a national level, 63 TWh of storage as well as just under a 1000km2 of solar panels if everyone lived as low-footprint as we do. And that’s just housing, it doesn’t include commercial buildings or industry.
The big buffers next to the solar farm are actually quite tiny. The largest under-construction battery park in the netherlands banks about 1200 MWh. With an average househould consumption, that’s just about enough to carry some ~4000 2-person households through the 3 winter months, assuming you put down enough solar to meet your yearly energy household energy demands (which we don’t have). They’re obviously not meant for long-term storage, but long-term storage is exactly what you need to make solar work.
And nuclear doesn’t have any of these issues. The only issue is that it’s expensive, because we stopped building them.
ah yeah tell me more how neat uranium mines are cleaned up and how they not spread radioactive dust over the landscape. tell me more about how solar pannels cant be recycled and have to be watched for millions of years so nobody touches em
Nobody is saying we should build coal plant instead of nuclear, that’s the strawman. Every godamm nuclear defender always uses.
“but there are worse energy sources”
Yes we fckin know, doesn’t make your energy good.
Keep you strawman false arguments to yourself until nuclear has less cost and less contamination then renewables (forever).
1 - stop being so angry.
2 - Nuclear and renewables are the way to go. Renewables are the bicycles of energy, cheap, clean, easily to make and you can put em anywhere. But sometimes a bike won’t work. Nuclear are the trains, expensive to build and requiring lots of effort… but without trains, people will drive cars every time a bike won’t work.
If you oppose Nuclear, you’re promoting coal. If you oppose solar, you’re promoting coal.
1 if we stop debating the same dumb ideas for decades maybe my anger will fade
2 I really hope you are ragebaiting, comparing nuclear to trains is sooo out there. A train is good for the climate, good for socioeconomic fairness (cheap), easy to build, easy to change and has basically no waste at all. Nuclear is bad for the climate, has the worst waste humanity can produce, is socioeconomically bad for everyone near the waste or working in the mines under inhumane coditions, the waste will last longer than the oldest human made structure, we do not have the tools to plan for that kind of timespan AT ALL, everyone saying he can build structures safe for that time is lying or mislead. And nuclear is hard and expensive to build.
No, we dont need nuclear, no matter what your personal experience with bicycles is. No, opposing nuclear is not promoting coal, dunno who told you this, but its wrong. Renewables are the way to go. We already have ways to store renewable energy, and we have just started researching it there is a lot more to come, fission is basically optimized and still way worse. Even in unicorn situations where our storage is not sufficient there are better alternatives than nuclear, bio-gas for example.
The only reason someone would want nuclear is to offload costs of building bombs and submarines to the public otherwise needed to be played for by military budget.
There is not a single reason someone to build reactors, especially not trains and bikes.
Nuclear is bad for the climate
Nuclear has basically no CO2 output, so that’s wrong.
has the worst waste humanity can produce (…) we do not have the tools to plan for that kind of timespan AT ALL, everyone saying he can build structures safe for that time is lying or mislead.
There’s one super simple method. We just don’t use it, because it flies in the face of regular waste disposal and remediation methods: Grind up the waste, pour it in concrete pellets, mix it with the mining tailings and chuck it back into the hole you found it. You’re basically restoring the status quo if you do that. The only reason we don’t do this is because legal frameworks don’t allow this. In a way, long term geologic storage is exactly this. Drill holes in the ground, stuff the spent fuel inside, cap the hole. You can do that far easier, but it’s legally not allowed because people like greenpeace (and you) think radiation is magically dangerous.
And nuclear is hard and expensive to build. There is not a single reason someone to build reactors,
There are 62 nuclear plants in china right now, most from the past 10 years, and there are 34 being built now, with 150 planned. They are basically disproving every “Expensive and slow” stereotype, simply by doing what nuclear proponents have been saying since the 50’s: “Build more, and it’ll get cheaper”. It’s the exact same way solar, wind and batteries are getting cheaper. China builds nuclear because it hugely improves air quality, because the alternative is coal.
We used to be able to build nuclear plants quickly and affordably in the west too, but eeeeeveryone stopped doing it when chernobyl happened, which was basically specifically built to explode.
The goal of this technology is to reduce the volume of radioactive waste that requires deep geological disposal. Rosatom indicated that eliminating minor actinides could allow nuclear waste to reach radiation equivalence with the original uranium feedstock hundreds of times faster than natural decay.
I’m surprised by all the angry comments of people on this thread, people don’t realize the true potential modern nuclear energy has, to produce a lot of energy and just right besides where that energy is needed, one of the biggest problems of renewables is that you don’t get to choose where they are produced, so in most cases it implies transmission lines, very high capacity ones and very long ones, my country recently had a country wide outage caused by the failure of one of those that caused a cascading failure.
I’m not saying that renewables aren’t incredible tech, they are, they really do, like they’re one of the best sources of energy available, but they aren’t perfect, and them being complemented with nuclear would do a big deal of good, as I said before nuclear has it’s own unique strengths that can help out a lot.
And also I see a lot of people here talking from outright ignorance about the state of the arts of the tech, it has advanced a lot since the 1950’s lol, and repeat the same arguments, forever debunked, people do about nuclear that frustrating, Fukushima and Chernobyl were both plants with stupidly old tech, run by clowns and ignoring really well known risks for the sake of the lulz, even when all nuclear accidents combined, the tech has killed a fraction of people than what hidro has killed, modern tech is heaps more advanced and has included everything needed for that sort of accident to be impossible, even nuclear waste is a solved problem, the only thing stopping it from fully materializing is political will (Altough is kind of a blessing in hiding because now tech to use spent fuel seems to be the future also).
IDK, people do disappoint on their ignorance.
Which country was that? I am only aware of the large outage in southern Europe which was due to fossil plants not following regulations.
chile lol, it was a crazy experience it lasted long enough for the cell network to fail, I was fortunately in home but it was chaotic for people going home at the time, the goverment ordered a curfew to be had at night so people also were in a hurry, and it was quite a thing lol, I only had the radio left to inform myself on what was happening and it was crazy stuff hearing how they talked about the efforts to cold start the grid back again, they had to do like 3 attempts before success, “the Rapel dam is on maximum power, trying to provide energy to x power plan who then may be able to provide energy to…”
I’m surprised by all the angry comments period.
I thought this was a meme instance lol, I never took it as a prompt for serious debate on fossil fuels vs nuclear energy (as if there are zero clean alternatives)
I did not read your full post.
But I am pro nuclear energy, IF(that is a big IF) IF it is cheaper than renewable alternatives.
Currently not even buying the uranium is really cost efficient in comparison.
BREATHE*
More and more words are apparently becoming to hard to use correctly for a big part of people online. This is one that I almost never saw anyone getting wrong until a couple of years ago and it’s becoming more and more common, same with writing “cloth/cloths” instead of “clothe/clothes”. It’s infuriating.
Only for grammar Facists. You know what people mean,
The advantage of spelling correctly is people actually do understand you. When you use the wrong word it moves focus from your joke and onto the word that is hard to parse
Sometimes, yeah. Other times I have to re read the sentence two or three times before I figure out what it’s supposed to say.
So yeah, basically fuck off with your “gRaMaR fAsCiSt” shit if you actually want to be understood.
I think the average person vastly over estimates how much waste is produced. If I recall the stat was that the entire world’s nuclear waste could fit in a football field. That’s really tiny.
Now find a football field sized area in a dry geologically stable location that is willing to take the waste.
Australia :)
I didn’t realize anti nuclear was so widespread. You are all propagandized to such a degree that I’m surprised you aren’t defending clean coal.
no u
Calling us propagandised while pro-nukes are the ones saying shit like “solar panels are expensive and require specialised maintenance” (both lies)
Tbf I feel like we’re reaching a point now where you do have to look at reality and accept it just isn’t happening. Consider the spiralling budgets and schedules of recent nuclear build outs and compare to what’s been happening in the renewables/batteries space.
To be as generous as possible, maybe, with absolutely perfect project management, nuclear could compete. Maybe. But we just don’t have that. This is capitalism, and there is no way to make nuclear viable under this system.
“Indestructible”?
HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!
Thanks for the laugh, pal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY446h4pZdc
Pretty much, yeah
That video is strange marketing nonsense. Running a train doesn’t apply the same forces and wear-down as nature will, just ask your mother.
My momma doesn’t work in hazardous materials handling, I do. So maybe your mom can ask me?
so a train will be less terrible than to be stored in seismically inactive rock?
yes, see: https://lemmy.cafe/comment/17134894
When you run a test, you want to minimize variables and keep as many things constant as possible between tests if you want to prove something.
Amazingly there are not a lot of constants between seismically inactive rock and a fucking train
In the 1990s, the NRC had to “take repeated actions to address defective welds on dry casks that led to cracks and quality assurance problems; helium had leaked into some casks, increasing temperatures and causing accelerated fuel corrosion”.[11]
With the zeroing of the federal budget for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada in 2011, more nuclear waste began being stored in dry casks. Many of these casks are stored in coastal or lakeside regions where a salt air environment exists, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology posited that corrosion in these environments could occur in 30 years or less, while the NRC was studying whether the casks could be used for 100 years as some hoped.[12]
Impervious to absolutely anything, except a little helium, or slightly salty air.
Or budget cuts, corrupt management, lazy employees, bad training etc…
And the “seismically inactive geology” that somehow always funnels into a local aquifer.
Nuclear is the best btw.
What’s the LCoE of new nuclear? What’s the LCoE when you add the cost of the storage mentioned in your meme?
Nuclear has been artificially made way more expensive than it should be.
For one part, why is it the only energy source that has to take care of its waste? (LCOE includes this cost, and I’m not saying they shouldn’t, I’m saying other sources should too.) Coal can spew waste out (including radioactive waste) and they don’t have to handle it. Wind just throws out blades and doesn’t have to deal with them. Etc.
The insane strictness on designs and safety are also far higher than they should be. A lot of its based on a linear no threshold model of radiation safety, which has been disproven., which dramatically increases costs.
Even still, LCOE for nuclear is pretty competitive in the US, and the US is one of the worst places for nuclear, as our dirty energy companies have easily been able to purchase laws to increase the cost of nuclear, so they can’t compete as much. Sort this by LCOE and see how many cheap nuclear is for most nations.
