I am interested in hearing your opinions about nuclear power, what you know, if you have any fears, or ideas? Do you know if your country has any nuclear power generation?
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I am extremely pro. Hear me out. For instance in Scandinavia, we have some of the largest uranium deposits in the world. Yet we import most of our fissile material from Australia. By boat.
The Scandes (mountain range) happens to be one of the best places to store spent fissile material on the planet.
We also have a highly educated workforce, and some of the best universities and colleges in the world.
We also have regional depopulation in the areas where this would be relevant, and suffer from brain drain, because there is more money to be made abroad for the whole range of academic disciplines, so the smartest people, and a fair chunk of the lesser smart people, move abroad. Because lack of opportunities and money.
Furthermore we are addicted to not only fossil fuels like carbon and gas, we (Europe) import most of our energy from Russia (famously). And we are making a lot of geopolitical concessions for the privilege (Nordstream springs to mind).
My proposition is that we expand nuclear power in the nordics, massively. We mine our own uranium deposits, store the spent fuel in our own mountains (think Moria, Nords would make for great LOTR dwarves), create a massive surplus of energy, then sell it off to the rest of Europe, creating basically an energy export hegemony. The energy basket of Europe.
We’d be fucking kings.
Then we’d create a Nordic Union, and get nukes, but that’s a different story.
(Just as a fun fact, Sweden had one of the worlds most advanced nuke programs after WW2. They got talked out of it bc USA)
Reprocessing spent fuel is also a massive opportunity. But yea I am 100% in agreement with you.
Right? Let’s build world class long term storage, it’s like a parking garage, a scam old as time, just rent out space to whoever can’t or don’t wanna deal with their shit and cash that check monthly. And we can enrich and be lords, of course there are some political obstacles to say the least but what are we if we don’t dare to dream
Maybe I’m thinking about the whole thing in a SimCity 2000 kind of way but that’s just how I was brought up.
I’m skeptical, but not against it. It’s not an existential threat to humanity as the general populous believes, but it’s also not a silver bullet. Assuming we as a society wish to create more electricity (which is a pretty massive assumption, but a story for another time), nuclear power is the most appealing and effective option. Kyle Hill on YouTube has explained this in great depth. However, the wast disposal is still mildly problematic and always will be. What’s more, the mining is certainly not a solved problem, and brings with it a reasonably high risk of contamination.
Perhaps if I knew a government agency trustworthier than the DOE (or US government as a whole) was involved, I would feel differently. However, I have seen how they have operated currently and historically first hand, and I don’t find their methods satisfactory.
Personally, I think the better method is reduction of energy consumption. When I worked for the DOE, I was told that utilities were bleeding money, and ready to go bankrupt because household appliances had reduced demand that much. So they lobbied for electric vehicles, which has strained the grid in some ways, but that’s a complicated story for another time. But as many of you already know, an EV is a highly ineffective means of reducing carbon emissions in the long-term. While more effective than gas, public transit, bicycles, and changes to infrastructure as the more effective means of reducing carbon emissions long-term.
I am defintely not against nuclear power and I am also not afraid of any nuclear disasters seeing how safe nuclear reactors actually are. I still prefer solar and wind power over nuclear tho because we still deal with nuclear waste and not very well imo. I would also love having fusion reactors or helium-3 fission reactors which also combats the nuclear waste problem.
just don’t give it to Ghandi and everything should be fine
It would have been a good transition source of power away from fossil fuels 15 years ago with further development while we build out a renewable infrastructure. Now, best I can see it as backup for some areas of the country.
The nuclear everyone is afraid of were from an era where priorities 1-9 were making plutonium for nukes or justifying massive uranium centrifuge farms for making weapons grade material.
Priority #10 was making safe electricity. It honestly was more of a waste product from making nukes instead of the point of the plant…
Fast reactors and LFTRs are god awful for nuclear weapons (why they weren’t made beyond pilot plants or a few examples that exist purely to complicate my point) but are some of the safest designs for new gen IV reactors.
Fast reactors literally burn nuclear waste
Liquid core reactors can be built in two halves—the heat retaining high reactivity core, and the heat dissipating passively safe container you drain into in an emergency through a freeze plug. That plug works as long as gravity doesn’t go away.
Fast reactor waste is safe in 300-500 years, and they can actually be designed to run on existing nuclear waste as fuel. Even the stuff we can’t burn currently that has half lives in the hundreds of thousands of millions of years.
I agree to this.
And I will add a strategic note. Power on demand is very important as an asset. You can in fact blot out the sun, a volcano eruption of significant magnitude would do that naturally and no amount of storage would be enough. Wind isn’t always available. Strategically and experimentally we need to be able to go “okay now 10x it!” .
It’s too bad we don’t have great ways to get power from waves yet. I am all for spreading out our dependence over multiple sources, but to not have the means when they fail is to rely on diplomacy and even more infrastructure.
I’m curious how far along Rolls Royce is, are any of those smr’s running yet?
Yeah I agree. It is a shame about wave energy too but I think we’ll eventually figure it out. The downside is to get meaningful energy without beating the crap out of your equipment (using giant waves) you end up needing to cover huge areas with wave generators.
Ironically hydro power and nuclear are natural partners when combined with other renewables.
Nuclear covers the base load generation, and hydro trims up the remaining power production to perfectly meet demand and condition power on the grid. When renewables begin over producing the dam can ramp down to its minimum flow to meet its water license, allowing the reservoir to fill.
I think it’s going to be a constellation of solutions to replace our current energy sources. One of the most important I’ve been watching is soapstone thermal batteries. You can massively over build solar and wind if you know there’s a bunch of soapstone thermal batteries to act as demand for it.
During overproduction you turn resistive heaters inside those soapstone batteries on progressively until the grid stabilizes. Germany actually had (has? I’m not sure if they still do it) something like this for water heaters using frequency sensitive relays to help stabilize grid production. If the grid frequency started to climb relay after relay would activate adding more and more heating load to soak up demand to stabilize the grid.
If we did the same for industrial users who currently burn natural gas, or even a thermal battery to provide district heating for towns and cities using cheap overproduced renewables, you can replace a huge amount of natural gas for nuclear, hydro, and renewable peak shaving.
Thanks for your addition and insights
It’s such an interesting field, infrastructure and power management. One of the best things I look forward too in life is to see how far we can get as a species before I kick the bucket. And I don’t have to to anything, it keeps evolving. I hope we never see war.
Have a good weekend
It won’t save us from climate collapse.
Nuclear power is probably good, but my country has decided that we’re not using it (Austria)
It was worth it 30-50 years ago. But we wasted too much time fucking around.
At this point any money spent is better spent on wind and solar.
I’ve seen this mentality too many times. The fact is China is actively building many nuclear power plants. The idea that it’s “too late” is ridiculous. There is growing demand for nuclear power. You can have solar, wind, AND nuclear.
With unlimited resources, yes it would make sense to keep building nuclear.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
But wind and solar have outpaced nuclear. You can get way more power way quicker with wind and solar than you can nuclear.
And what we need right now is maximum speed. We don’t have time. This transition should be happening overnight, but we’re dragging our feet.
In reality it makes sense to keep building nuclear, the resources required to build nuclear are mostly different than building solar and wind, so you can definitely do both to increase carbon free energy rapidly. I agree we need to rapidly scale solar and wind, but we also need to be advancing nuclear power technology.
Also solar and wind need batteries because of their variable generation, again which are different materials/knowledge than nuclear mostly.
They may take different materials, but until we escape capitalism the only thing that will matter is the literal monetary cost.
In a perfect world, we would be doing both side by side because of the different materials needed. But in the current world the opportunity cost exists due to monetary limits.
Like you keep saying “we”. China is currently doing what you mention “in a perfect world”. Why can’t we do the same? Why is it that Illinois stopped at around exactly 50%? They ACTIVELY constructing these.
We as in humanity. The majority of nations are capitalist nations, and all nations use currency, which means opportunity cost.
Every state and power utility that is considering what to allocate their money on is going to choose the bare minimum it takes to keep the lights on. That means going the cheapest, not doing the most.
China may have a lower opportunity cost due to the tighter control over the economy, but they’re still paying it. China is not in the perfect world situation either. They’re just sacrificing the opportunity cost.
I’m confused, do the Chinese not count as a part of humanity? The entire world is losing to China when it comes to nuclear power increases.
Nuclear energy is expensive to generate compared to its green competitors. Therefore, it’s a waste of time and money to focus on it at a time when renewable energy is currently cheaper to produce, knowing that the gap between nuclear and energy is projected to widen even more.
I think that’s a somewhat narrow view on how energy works.
How so? Shouldn’t our societies aim to produce the most cost-beneficial energy? Also, my opinion is based on a range of economic indicators, including Australia’s CSIRO’s calculations for nuclear energy prices in kWh vs other renewable prices per kWh. I am of course excluding fossil fuels (obviously nuclear energy beats that with respect to GHGs, but drops the ball when matched against scalable renewables like solar and wind).
Cost effectiveness isn’t the only consideration. My area isn’t how they move the power around but I know that plays a role too.
We have some aging reactors from the 1980s.
Generally favourable views. It was a mistake to stop building them.
If you find the cooling water you can build one in my back yard if you like if the town I live in gets a few cents per kWh you produce.
Every country that’s able should have some nuclear power if for no other reason than creating radioisotopes used for medicine.
I think wind/solar first priority. Nuclear wherever it makes sense. I may trust Canadians to run them properly and in places not prone to natural disasters like Earthquakes and Tsunamis, but we live on a planet full of assholes. Downside is potential invaders bombing nuclear power plants in the future.
It would have to be a pretty big bomb. After 9/11 they did a bunch of research and it turns out a reactor building can take a hit from a 747.
Renewables are absolutely the future, but people really don’t get how the nuclear industry handles safety. If we could regulate every industry as well as the nuclear industry has been since 1980 (which the current administration is trying to strip away, of course) we would eliminate a heckuva lotta risk in our society.
It takes billions and almost a decade to spin up a reactor. Current reactors are a generational risk. One bomb at Diablo Canyon and an area the size of New Jersey becomes uninhabitable for 1000 years.
Had Fukushima gone slightly differently you would have lost Tokyo and the 125 mile stretch of the island nation would be uninhabitable for a generation.
That’s not even considering the spent fuel concerns…
Meanwhile you could build plenty of solar and wind gen with none of the risk.
Most things have already been said, but here my personal list:
- No way to get properly rid of waste jet
- Quite unreliable (AFAIK one of the French ones only operated half the time it should in 2024)
- Recourses for it are generally supplied by oppositional nations
- If they blow up it’s bad, even if they don’t by themselves they might through third party influence
- Generally positioned by politicians as an excuse to not build renewables, not replace fossil fuels
- They are a entry point for building nukes, their existence making anti nuke treaties hard to control
Most importantly: they don’t make financial sense. Renewables provide the cheapest energy and even the required energy storages can compete on the market. The French Court of Auditors published a statement after one of the more recent power plants were openened that basically just: stop building fucking nuclear power plants they cost way to much
