7ct per kwh vs ~50ct per kwh and a build time of 10 - 15 years just speaks for itself not even talking about the potential risk vs basically no risk with renewables
Oh no, the sun was too much and Mr Fancy Atom had to go to sleep because there was no water for the thirsty guy. Well, better asleep than leaking or blowing up again. Stupid sun throwing all this energy at the ground, so mean.
Well. This is a science meme community, but a science community nonetheless, so I’ll try to keep it somewhat scientific.
Like airplanes that crash, nuclear power plants get a bad rep, but in reality it’s one of the most reliable and safest forms of energy production. For example looking at deaths from power generation, it currently sits right near the bottom between solar and wind power and well below hydro power and the rest. And that includes the Chernobyl accident.
As for the water: yes, but when Mr. Sun is out the solar panels go vroom, so Mr. Fancy Atom’s hard work isn’t necessary as much. So they compliment each other nicely. And the current extreme drought in Europe is hopefully a rare occurrence 🤞🏻
current extreme drought in Europe is hopefully a rare occurrence
Oh boy, do I have news for you.
Maybe you missed the fingers crossed emoji?
Airplanes don’t have a bad rep, they are incredibly safe and if one occasionally crashes the death toll is generally limited to the passengers.
My issue with nuclear being presented as perfectly safe is that this is largely theoretical. In practice the list of nuclear and radiation accidents is quite long. If you dig a little into your deaths per terawatt-hour list you can find that they count 433 deaths from Chernobyl. The real death toll remains unknown, but ranges from the 30 officially reported by the Soviet government, the WHO estimate of 4000+, and the 35000 families receiving compensation for “owing to the loss of a breadwinner whose death was deemed to possibly related to the Chernobyl accident.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_disaster)
My point is, each of these nuclear accidents has the potential to kill tens of thousands and cause long-term increases in cancers and birth defects. And despite all the safety claims, we see a major incident about once a decade.
Additionally, we still don’t know where to store the nuclear waste and enriched uranium continues to bring cash to Russia, as we haven’t been able to shake dependance there either.
All in all, nuclear is another fossil fuel that has risks we can’t seem to manage properly and the price is much higher than most renewables. I’m not saying to shut all nuclear plants down immediately, especially if we then have to use coal or gas to make up for the loss in production. But let’s stop praising it as this amazing alternative by making safety and sustainability claims that are based on propaganda numbers.
All in all, nuclear is another fossil fuel
Just want to correct it is definitely NOT a fossil fuel.
Unless…
Hahaha, just NUKE IT!! QUICK!! It’s all perfectly safe.
What are you talking about? Airplanes do have a bad rep. More people are scared of getting into them because they think it will crash than there are people scared of getting into cars. It’s the same with nuclear. The events are big when they happen, but it’s overall very safe. What’s more, airplane crashes have killed many, many more people and they have crashed much more often than there have been NPP accidents or deaths. So, if you want to call airplanes
incredibly safe
you might want to reconsider your stance on NPPs.
if one occasionally crashes the death toll is generally limited to the passengers.
And if NPP accidents occur, the death toll is generally limited to the workers.
the list of nuclear and radiation accidents is quite long
The list for NPP accidents is actually not that long, especially when compared to airplane accidents, and it stops at 2011. That’s 15 years ago and Fukushima caused only one possible death. There have been no signs of increased cancer rates in the 15 years afterwards. What’s more, after each major event—after Chernobyl and again after Fukushima—measures have been taken to prevent these events from happening again.
As for Chernobyl, you can debate the numbers, but it doesn’t mean anything for modern nuclear power plants in the west, since the Soviets built a reactor with an inherently unsafe design that isn’t used anywhere in the west. So, using the airplane analogy again, that would be like saying flying on an airplane is unsafe because of the Hindenburg disaster.
As for uranium: Australia and Canada have uranium reserves that dwarf Russia’s. Storage of waste is not as much of an issue either. Old mines go down kilometers into the earth.
So while yes, nuclear powerhas its downsides, nuclear is the only form green energy that provides base load power. If you want to transition away from fossil fuel there is no way to provide base load power without nuclear. Battery storage scales very poorly and we already can’t mine enough lithium and cobalt to power all cars with electricity, let alone having battery storage for all electric grids worldwide.
It may seem scary and accidents happen, but like I said, it just has a bad rep like airplanes do.
The numbers are not propaganda and the only propaganda I am seeing is coming from you. You haven’t made a single valid point and have been fear mongering about deaths and accidents that rarely occur.
Reservoir hydro, geothermal and concentrated solar with thermal storage are actually green and could provide base load energy.
You’re free to continue ignoring my points with linked sources in favour of your airplane tangent and theoretical possibilities. As I also said, nuclear sounds all great in theory, but the human factor of cutting corners and prioritising immediate profits are nor giving me the confidence that I’d like to embrace nuclear today.
They are either not feasible everywhere (flat terrain) or wildly expensive and take up a lot of space. Nuclear is also actually green.
I’m not ignoring any of your points, or your sources. I addressed them in multiple sections of my comment. Have you even read it? Your points and sources simply aren’t as good as you think. Nuclear is not just great in theory, it’s great in reality. It is the most reliable source of power and we have had functioning nuclear power plants worldwide for decades. It seems more like you are ignoring my sources for your own scaremongering. And ignoring reality is not the same as making a point.
You don’t need to “embrace” nuclear for it to be a good and viable source of energy. It’s okay to admit you think it’s scary, but it’s not based on reality. This is why the airplane analogy works.
And the current extreme drought in Europe is hopefully a rare occurrence
aaahahahhahahahahahahahaahahahha
I do love your optimism, tho
Fingers crossed!
At this point we should just accept we’re basically asking a trillion dollar industry with lobbyists to stop making money in a capitalist for profit driven world.
then the world needs to stop asking and start stabbing
Ugh, all the nuclear nonsense popping up lately… such nonsense, and now with the “but it’s so clean” bullshittery too… 🙄
Nuclear power is a toppic dripping with nuance… which we’re totally great at dealing with these days…
With renewables being branded as “woke” (or “western degeneracy” for the few people in Russia with access to Lemmy), political LLMs being rampant, misinformation being spread as efficient as never before, the industrial interest of certain nations to either sell their Uranium or being able to build nukes, Nuclear Power being kinda more clean than Coal, Gas and Oil at least (but hellishly expensive and water-gobbling like hell, which apparently most people didn’t get the memo of), the price of refined oil products going through the roof, data centers making energy almost scarce…
I don’t know what you’re talking about, sounds like a great foundation for civilized discussions! 🥴
The fossil fuel industry wants more nuclear because it takes a lot of money and a lot of time to build. It gives them more time to make more money. Renewables are too fast and too cheap.
Also decentralised. Everyone can install some PV panels and a battery.
Possible. Though I’d wager there’s also a lot of culture war and actual war involved (Russia sells both Oil and Uranium, Iran also sells Oil).
The costs associated with nuclear are so overwhelmingly everything other than fuel that selling fuel isn’t going to be a big business, nowhere near the global markets for fossil fuels in actual dollars, even if the market one day approaches the same amount of useful energy in joules or kWh.
You forget another cost: hard dependency (= “Soft Power”). Sure, selling uranium rods might not be as lucrative as other things. But e.g. France is completely dependent on uranium rods for their grid not to go dark, so the very few countries who sell those have a lot of political influence over them. Like Russia.
Russia had Europe at their balls with energy almost completely (Uranium, Oil, Gas) which is one reason why they thought they could get away with even starting the invasion of Ukraine. The price shock for energy in Europe was brutal in 2022, one of my best friends here in Germany had their heating bill quadruple because it was Gas, thereby lost their home and “temporarily” lived on my couch (for 2.5 years). Meanwhile France ALSO had to scramble finding another provider of Uranium rods, which are quite rare. This caused them having even more issues than Germany over a longer period of time, which sounds absurd given Germany famously made themselves almost completely dependent from Russian gas.
Right now nuclear only goes up in price, running cost and thereby electricity costs. The idea of building some new ones can really only be justified in terms of CO² output in a combined strategy with renewables, nothing else. And at least in regards to the awful dependency thing and crystal clear cost calculations every politician of any country should be on the same boat. Unfortunately a lot of them replaced their brain with various other stuff.
From memory, the issue with France is specifically that they use a russian design for the fuel rods that only russia makes.
I wanna say that is hexagonal rods, vs the us standard of round.There are projects running to make these hexagonal ones in western supply chains, but that is at least 10 years away, and there are not enough rods in storage to bridge that.
And for new plants you’ll see initial prospects for the cheap russian format, and then either the plant sees a massive cost overrun when they build the way more expensive more available rod design, or it’s dependent right from the start.
Last month I read somewhere, that having solar and batteriecapacity of same proportions are cheaper then nuclear
Russia has a lot of control over all layers of nuclear power, so this gives them political leverage.
