With climate change looming, it seems so completely backwards to go back to using it again.
Is it coal miners pushing to keep their jobs? Fear of nuclear power? Is purely politically motivated, or are there genuinely people who believe coal is clean?
Edit, I will admit I was ignorant to the usage of coal nowadays.
Now I’m more depressed than when I posted this
In my country, because of a decades long fearmongering and disinfomation campaing that destoyed the nuclear energy industry. So now we’re stucked with coal to keep the power running at night and during winter.
Let’s be honest though, rivers running low in summer so plants had to shut down, core material being bought from Russia and overwhelming costs for dismantling old plants together with no solution at all for final storage also did their part in it.
But we could have worked on these issues for years by now. Abandoning the entire industry also lead to slowdown in research and inovation in the field. Of course now we’re hopelessly behind.
Oor the ressources could be better spent in renewables, which are available as long as the sun exists, while nuclear will run out of fuel within the 22cnd century.
Also with nuclear Europe is entirely dependent on imports, primarily from Russia and russia-aligned countries. Being pro nuclear in Europe means being pro Putin.
Nuclear won’t run out of fuel. But if renewable are so good, why are so many countries mining coal?
False information. There is enough fissionable material to last humans 10s of thousands of years.
Do you all have a source for that?
https://whatisnuclear.com/nuclear-sustainability.html
Several other studies estimate 90 thousand years. All of this is Uranium alone.
I don’t think I buy it. Like, there is a lot of uranium around the world, but most of it is prohibitively expensive to mine, the mining itself is extremely destructive, Australia has the largest uranium reserves but most of the rest is in the hands of authoritarian fuckwits like China and Russia, society’s collapsing into wars and suffering climate catastrophes around the world so the safety of nuclear plants is increasingly in doubt, it takes decades to build them…
Honestly, if we’re gonna spend decades on clean energy megaprojects, wouldn’t it be better to go with something like a space solar power station which is a lot safer and the rectennas on the surface a lot easier to fix and replace?
You think mining for solar panels is free or something?
Oor we can do both so that in the middle of winter when there’s only 6 hrs of sun (less when cloudy) we can still have electricity without ridiculously sized batteries.
Also uranium is so energy dense it can be mined and refined in Canada or Australia and shipped so, so very easily.
Australia and Canada both have very large amounts of nuclear fuel that are currently unused because of short-sighted comments like this.
Uranium city is coming back baby!
And the feddit.de misinformation brigade has arrived.
I am quite sure i know a thing or two about politics that happened during my lifetime and i actively followed. Also i used to be a proponent for nuclear power when i was younger. But unlike the nuclear shills i am willing to accept when a technology is inferior and risky.
Funny, so do I.
Anyway, believe that “being pro nuclear in Europe means being pro Putin” or what ever absurd things you come up with.
I was here to give my response to OPs question. Discussing energy politics with the average German is as pointless as discussing biology with an anti-vaxxer and I have no interest in it.
Which is why you immediate derail the conversation by making ad himinen attacks, instead of interacting with the arguments… No suprise you cannot discuss things, because you don’t want a discussion in the first place.
It’s been discussed to death, check the most recent thread about Scholz’s comment on [email protected] if you want to read through all of the discussion AGAIN.
But you are right. I’m not willing to have a discussion about it with you. Just like I wouldn’t want to have a discussion about astronomy with a flat earther.
Your “nuclear = support russia” comment made it very clear where you stand on the issue and on what basis. So discussion is entirly pointless.
But it wasn’t really meant as a personal attack against you, if that comforts you. It’s a systematic problem, just like my other comparisons.
Why are you pro-coal?
i am pro renewables. It is the pro nuclear faction that tends to be pro coal too, just that they pretend they aren’t. But it is the same businesses, the same industries and the same lobbying against renewables that unit pro coal and pro nuclear.
If you are anti-nuclear you are pro-fossil fuels. 100% renewables is a pipedream that is pushed by the energy companies amongst sports ads with scenic pictures of windmills in the background, while you ignore the other 44% of energy generation.
They’re not wrong, I think initial estimates was 500 years, but that will change as more reactors get built.
That is indeed very wrong. With extracing Uranium from sea water and recycing fuel in breeder reacots, this goes up to like 90.000 years. And that’s just Uranium, other fuels can be explored.
Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as that. Theoretically, if everyone was using state-of-the-art designs of fast-breeder reactors, we could have up to 300,000 years of fuel. However, those designs are complicated and extremely expensive to build and operate. The finances just don’t make it viable with current technology; they would have to run at a huge financial loss.
As for Uranium for sea-water – this too is possible, but has rapidly diminishing returns that make it financially unviable quite rapidly. As Uranium is extracted and removed from the oceans, exponentially more sea-water must be processed to continue extracting Uranium at the same rate. This gets infeasible pretty quickly. Estimates are that it would become economically unviable within 30 years.
Realistically, with current technology we have about 80-100 years of viable nuclear fuel at current consumption rates. If everyone was using nuclear right now, we would fully deplete all viable uranium reserves in about 5 years. A huge amount of research and development will be required to extend this further, and to make new more efficient reactor designs economically viable. (Or ditch capitalism and do it anyway – good luck with that!)
Personally, I would rather this investment (or at least a large chunk of it) be spent on renewables, energy storage and distribution, before fusion, with fission nuclear as a stop-gap until other cleaner, safer technologies can take over. (Current energy usage would require running about 15000 reactors globally, and with historical accident rates, that’s about one major nuclear disaster every month). Renewables are simpler, safer, and proven ,and the technology is more-or-less already here. Solving the storage and distribution problem is simpler than building safe and economical fast-breeder reactors, or viable fusion power. We have almost all the technology we need to make this work right now, we mostly just lack infrastructure and the will to do it.
I’m not anti-nuclear, nor am I saying there’s no place for nuclear, and I think there should be more funding for nuclear research, but the boring obvious solution is to invest heavily in renewables, with nuclear as a backup and/or future option. Maybe one day nuclear will progress to the point where it makes more sound sense to go all in on, say fusion, or super-efficient fast-breeders, etc. but at the moment, it’s basically science fiction. I don’t think it’s a sound strategy to bank on nuclear right now, although we should definitely continue to develop it. Maybe if we had continued investing in it at the same rate for the last 50 years it might be more viable – but we didn’t.
Source for estimates: “Is Nuclear Power Globally Scalable?”, Prof. D. Abbott, Proceedings of the IEEE. It’s an older article, but nuclear technology has been pretty much stagnant since it was published.
If you are making a cost argument against nuclear energy, then you are supporting coal. If you are positioning renewables against nuclear, then you are supporting coal. Stop supporting coal and other fossil fuels. People like you have been hampering clean energy for 50+ years and are responsible for the fact that the world is burning more coal then ever before. Stop being a shill for coal.
Well, nuclear energy is expensive anyways and the amount of uranium on this world seems quite limited.
It’s just not the technology of the future. In the long term we should use regenerative energies that are way cheaper.
Right, but that’s why people are talking about nuclear as a bridge technology, not as a permanent solution. Whether or not we can make it pencil out before smashing through all of the critical tipping points in global temperature averages is not something I’m qualified to have an opinion on, but I’m credibly informed that we might at least want to give it a serious look.
At one point in the future I’m sure we can look back, do the calculations and see if that had been a good bridge or an expensive thing for the taxpayer to deal with the dismantling and long time storage.
As of now I think the time of that bridge technology has come to an end anyways. We now have efficient renewable energies available. And concepts for energy storage. I think we should invest in that instead of putting the money into a thing of the past.
Nuclear is no more expensive than renewable. The amount of uranium is limited, but it’s not the only fuel for nuclear.
Sure it is. The World nuclear status report 2021 for example says it’s five times more expensive than wind energy.
And sure there are other fuels for nuclear. But I think most of them are even more limited?!
The paper doesn’t account account for availability. Nuclear has over 90% availability, which means for 1MW of power installed, you get on average over 0.9MW of power to use. Renewable are far below that, between 40 and 60% iirc. Which means you need to double the cost for a defined output. And that doesn’t consider batteries.
Unless the document talks about that, please point me to the right chapter then.
Damn. I shouldn’t have linked auch a long PDF. What are you talking about? I’m referring to the diagram (and text) on page 293. The annual Levelized Cost Of Energy.
It’s not only calculated on sunny days. They take the annual energy output for the calculation. Availability and everything included or these numbers wouldn’t make any sense.
And yes, we need batteries. But the nuclear plants also need other (faster) plants alongside. And this match isn’t a close call. With a 5 fold increase in being economical, we have plenty of money to spare to afford some batteries and hydroelectric dams.
I was looking at the building cost. Looking more into the Wikipedia article, it seems to account for availability. But the numbers are very speculative still, there is a crazy variation both for the specific data points and for the studies. Another big factor is the interest rate for investment which can double the cost of nuclear energy depending on the assumption.
Another thing that bother me is the speculative nature of these things. No photovoltaic power plant ever went through its whole lifespan. No significant energy production was made with variable renewable. Whereas nuclear was used for 70 years now. Yet the speculation makes it like nuclear will be expensive and unreliable and renewable will be cheap and reliable when the actual history is the exact opposite. Technology advances obviously, but still. I don’t consider renewable to be a tried and tested technology that scales while nuclear is.
Idk. Solar cells have been around for a while, too. Wind turbines are kind of simple devices. I bet an engineer can predict their maintenance cost and lifespan fairly accurate. Hydroelectric power plants have been around for more than 100 years. Electric cars have been invented before the combustion engine took off. Nuclear power has been around for some time. But you can’t use that as an argument and simultaneously argue about using thorium which large scale deployments are still hypothetical.
And I don’t think those numbers are 500% off. You can double some cost and were only at 200%. And they’re not complete speculation. They took the actual numbers of the previous year. And the years before that. These numbers are the ‘actual history’.
Pardon? Norway? New Zealand? Switzerland? Iceland? Sweden? Countless others I probably forgot because I’m bad at geography? The USA and China, Philippines, Indonesia all have major ‘variable renewable’. Thousands and thousands of megawatts of energy are generated this way as of today. Then there is biomass if you’re geologically not that favored by nature, but I barely know anything about that. And who says we can’t use the sun and wind? Of course we can also use those.
What proportion of those countries’ energy is renewable? Because that’s the big problem: when renewable are less than 50% of your energy, you can balance the load with the rest ; when it’s 80%, it’s a whole different story. No country has the most of its energy from renewables, and thus we don’t know if it can even work over time, it’s not proven. The scale matters. Producing a prototype is not the same as the whole industrial thing. That’s exactly what’s happening with nuclear btw: after 30 years of abandon, the construction is hard and more expensive and time-consuming than expected because we need to relearn how to do it. But prototype is not industrialisation. And that’s a problem renewable will run into: industrialisation. Where do you all the silicium you need for the batteries and solar panels? How do you deal with balancing the load? And there will be unexpected problems. Nuclear already dealt with these problems. Will renewable actually be able to expand everywhere? Because there isn’t wind and sun everywhere. I severely doubt Switzerland can power itself this way for example.
And then, isthere any solar or wind farm of more than 30 years? I’m pretty sure there isn’t because their lifespan is less than that and the last models that are so efficient are less than 10 years old anyway.
The experience also shows that all countries that went for renewables ended up using more fossile energy btw. Spain and Germany most notably. How do you answer this problem? This is not theory, this is what happened when countries decided to use renewable energy.
Thorium is one of the most abundant material on earth. Unlike lithium for example.
Yeah. But the technology is - at this point - more sci-fi than anything else. Probably nothing we need to worry about in the next few years.
And you still need to mine some non-renewable resource. It’s still nuclear and produces waste. And it seems super expensive.
There are working thorium reactor for 50 years or something. Hardly sci-fy.
Renewables need batteries to work. Which needs lithium.
Sure. Just use molten salt energy storage, hydroelectric dams or whichever of the dozens of technologies makes most sense where you are.
Combine different kinds of renewables so you get power at night and when the wind isn’t blowing. Build more then enough and if you got excess energy, maybe make some hydrogen.
Have your devices and industry ‘smart’ so it draws less power when there’s less supply.
You really don’t need to do everything with ‘normal’ batteries like in a smartphone.
The ‘working’ thorium reactors are for research. They don’t generate energy. At least if we’re speaking about generating energy for a whole country. The planned thorium reactors of the next many years also don’t generate any significant amount of energy. With that argumentation we also (almost) have nuclear fusion power plants.
A thorium power plant that contributes to the power grid and shows up in the numbers is sci-fi. I mean, it’s not impossible. It’s just lots of very expensive work left to do.
Thorium reactor that contribute to the power grid is as much sci-fy as all the technologies you describe to have a working renewable energy grid.
Meanwhile there are whole countries powered from nuclear energy, and switching to thorium makes no difference for the grid itself.
Finally if ecofanatics didn’t shut down or sabotage research on thorium reactors we would be closer from a working tech.
Well you didn’t google any of that.
Nuclear power plants are expensive to build but the cost of running one especially when adjusted to the amount of electricity it produces is not significantly more than running any other power plant. Also uranium is not considered to be a gobally scarce resource.
That’s also what I believed. But turns out nuclear is the most expensive kind of energy.
Here’s a good summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kahih8RT1k
(Seriously, watch it)
The high cost is largely explained by the fact that there’s no “standard model” for nuclear power plants but instead they’re all designed and built from scratch which can make them really expensive. Olkiluoto 3 nuclear power plant in Finland is the world’s 8th most expensive building at whopping 12 billion dollar cost to build. The original price estimate was 3 billion. Many of the buildings on that list ahead of Olkiluoto 3 are also nuclear power plants.
This however isn’t some inherent probem about nuclear power itself but rather the way we do it. It doesn’t need to be that expensive.
Yeah, I’m still not convinced. If current state of the art makes it 5 times more expensive than current state solar or wind. Your explanation needs to be more than ‘but we choose to build it more expensive than it needs to be’.
Sure theoretically this might not be an inherent problem. But the same applies to renewable. I’m not sure if solar or wind are close to something limiting their efficiency or cost of production. There might be new technology advancing both of them. We can talk about this and look for more information. But it’s a very hypothetical discussion. As of now in the real world, there are real-world power plants and if no-one can demonstrate to bridge that big gap in economic efficiency… Maybe there’s something to it…
And apart from that. I’d argue that there are some inherent problems. For example mega-projects having issues with their budget. That’s a very interesting topic but inherent to big and complex projects for several reasons. Also a nuclear plant and all the infrastructure around it is inherently more complex and more expensive than for example a wind turbine and what we need to assemble a bit of steel tubing, wings and a bit of copper. (Broadly speaking.) I think it’s a combination of factors. But I’d be surprised if the future holds something increasing the economic efficiency of nuclear (fission) power plants by that factor.
(Edit: Those numbers from the video are for the US. But 5 times more expensive is huge.)
We don’t choose to build it more expensive than it needs to be. It’s by nature always going to be more expensive to build one of something instead of what the cost per unit is going to be when you make many.
Wind and solar isn’t going to solve the issue untill we come up with a way to store energy on large scale. When you plug in an appliance that electricity is not taken from a reserve but it’s produced for you in real time. Wind doesn’t blow and sun doesn’t shine according to how much electricity is needed at each moment. Finland produces all its electricity basically by hydro, wind and nuclear power. When it’s windy we have excess electricity and the prices drops to negative and we got to sell it abroad but when it’s calm the opposite is true. This wouldn’t be the case if we could somehow store that excess energy.
We’re talking about effective cost of the resulting power, altogether. All things included. (Except for nuclear waste, which is a topic for a different discussion and difficult to quantify.) Just comparing one aspect wouldn’t be fair.
Yeah, and science and investors are way ahead of politics. There are several concepts already available or already in place somewhere. Several promising ideas and projects that need funding. Storage facilities that aren’t able to store energy because Bavaria is not willing to run cables across the country. It is a complex topic that also needs individual solutions. For example depending on geography you could have dams and pump water. Or one of the concepts that work everywhere. Infrastructure and cunsumer get more advanced/intelligent. You could charge your car automatically during periods where renewable is abundant. You can fine-tune factories, maybe have the large heat pump of an office building vary temperature a bit when there is a Dunkelflaute. Some countries just get geothermal power for free because of their location… You can put those storage facilities close to energy generation or close to the consumer. And as supply and demand changes prices, it’s also well aligned with the way our economy (and capitalism) works.
We should really hurry up and put in the effort this needs. Because we really need those storage facilities. And I’d like energy costs to come down again, and CO2 emissions also.
And if I remember correctly, the current natural gas power plants are the ones that can react to supply and demand the most quickly. But this seems not to be a good idea anymore, now that we have enough problems with the natural gas in central europe. I (personally) would be happy if there was an alternative.
I haven’t heard any scientist in the last years tell something different from renewable plus storage is the way. Not unless some miracle happens and we get fusion reactors or something. But it’s still unclear it that’s going to happen.
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