Well, you see, the "Anti Magic Rock" Lobby has immense amount of power because of the money of the still lucrative "burning stuff and pollute everything" business.
Yeah, oil oiled the "green" anti-nuclear protests.
You can tell that's how it was because the cops didn't beat them as much (or in some big cases at all) as they do even the most insignificant anti-oil protesters.
I feel like people are interpreting your comment with an American context. As a fellow European I agree, NGOs like Greenpeace are also to blame, and I don't think those are financed by fossil fuel lobbies.
Nuclear isn’t in competition with fossil fuels, it’s in competition with renewables. Renewables are better than nuclear by pretty much every conceivable metric. So fuck nuclear power, it’s a waste of money and time.
Both renewables and fossils produce a variable production line.
So within a rational production scheme the choice is nuclear+renewables or fossils+renewables. As renewables by themselves cannot work. Because there is months over the year when it's not sunny, not rainy and not windy enough, what do we do for those months? We close humanity during those months because some political dogma says so?
We’ve upgraded from burning our houses down to burning our atmosphere down which will absolutely poison humans for centuries to come. And since we now burn larger fires with black rocks, those release far more magic rock dust that poisons people than the magic rock water heaters do. Not to mention that fire has both killed more of us cave dwellers than magic rocks ever have (including the flying weaponry runes made from them) and have caused more ecological disasters, so fire is much worse.
Then we talk magic mirrors, they have evil rocks in them that get in our rivers and we don’t contain well. That aside, we show tradition to our ancestors by making much of them with slavery.
And the magic fans? The design is very human. They’d be a gift from the gods if only the spirit of the wind were always with us.
Summary: Magic rock still good, black rocks and black water make bad fire and hairless monkey make sick more.
Then we talk magic mirrors, they have evil rocks in them that get in our rivers and we don’t contain well. That aside, we show tradition to our ancestors by making much of them with slavery.
Sure, because mining uranium is total helaty and no problem at all.
We had magic mirrors and magic fans for centuries tho.
Yet we decided to release way more poison and even way more radiation by mining and burning fossil fuels. We just poison larger areas than any nuclear disasters. And with fossil fuels people actually get cancer, and with toxic byproducts, mutations and birth defects.
People in polluted areas die sooner. Except around nuclear disasters sights - the air gets cleaner once all the people are thrown out.
You say thousands of years, but it hasn't been even 70 years since Chernobyl and the surrounding area is a thriving forest with tons of animals, unbothered by humans.
Funny how building nuclear power plants that can only (if you have dipshits running them) kill a nearby city is taboo, but climate change that will kill everyone is acceptable to the moralists.
It's because there's no opposing corporate interest to building nuclear weapons. The way the world works is: profitable shit happens, no matter what the hippies think about it. See: every other environmental issue.
You're right to reject the logic behind that because it's nonsense. Its not making sense to them because they still presume some kind of good faith when it come to these sorts of things.
The reason we haven't built more nuclear power stations is because oil, gas and coal companies will make less money, if we build more nuclear power stations.
They have the means, the motive and they have a well recorded history of being that cartoonishly villainous. Nothing else makes sense.
Three Mile Island and Chernobyl really did change things. Prior to those incidents there were plans to build over 50 more nuclear plants in place which got canceled as a result. Currently oil and gas industries will do all they can to keep nuclear from making a come back, but for a long time they didn't have to do shit thanks to those catastrophes.
It’s sad that the coal lobby has convinced so many people that the most reliable clean energy source we’ve ever discovered is somehow bad.
Its bad in the sense that is a crazy expensive way to generate electricity. Its not theoretical. Ask the customers of the most recent nuclear reactors to go online in the USA in Georgia. source
"The report shows average Georgia Power rates are up between $34 and $35 since before the plant's Unit 3 went online. " (there were bonds and fees on customer electric bills to pay for the nuclear plant construction before it was even delivering power.
...and...
"The month following Unit 4 achieving commercial operation, average retail rates were adjusted by approximately 5%. With the Nuclear Construction Cost Recovery (NCCR) tariff removed from bills, a typical resident customer using 1,000 kWh per month saw an estimated monthly increase of $8.95 per month. This follows the previous rate impact in 2023 following Unit 3 COD of $5.42 (3.2%)."
So another $5.42/month for the first reactor built on top of the $35/month, then another $8.95/month on top of all that for a rough total of $49.37/month more just to buy electricity that is generated from nuclear.
Maybe the power company is greedy? Nope, they're even eating more costs and not passing them on to customers:
"Georgia Power says they're losing about $2.6 billion in total projected costs to shield customers from the responsibility of paying it. Unit 4 added about $8.95 to the average customer's bill, John Kraft, a spokesman for the company said."
So that $49.37/month premium for electricity from nuclear power would be even higher if the power company passed on all the costs. Nuclear power for electricty is just too inefficient just on the cost basis, this is completely ignoring the problems with waste management.
The next biggest problem with nuclear power is where the fuel comes from:
"Russia also dominates nuclear fuel supply chains. Its state-owned Rosatom controls 36 percent of the global uranium enrichment market and supplies nuclear fuel to 78 reactors in 15 countries. In 2020, Russia owned 40 percent of the total uranium conversion infrastructure worldwide. Russia is also the third-largest supplier of the imported uranium that fuels U.S. power plants, accounting for 16 percent of total imported uranium. The Russian state could weaponize its dominance in the nuclear energy supply chain to advance its geostrategic interests. During the 2014 Russia-Ukraine crisis, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin threatened to embargo nuclear fuel supplies to Ukraine." source
So relying on nuclear power for electricity means handing the keys of our power supply over to outside countries that are openly hostile to us.
Yes, of course. Because oil has never depended on outside countries that are openly hostile. No sire, thank goodness we rely on a power source that no war has ever been fought for, ever in history.
Anon is dumb. Anon forgets the nuclear waste. Anon also forgets that the plants for the magical rocks are extremely expensive. So much that energy won by these rocks is more expensive than wind energy and any other renewable.
Anon isn't dumb, just simple. Nuclear energy can be the best solution for certain situations. While renewables are the better choice in every way, they're effectiveness isn't equally distributed. There are places where there just isn't enough available renewable energy sources year round to supply the people living there. When energy storage and transmission methods are also not up to the task, nuclear becomes the best answer. It shouldn't be the first answer people look to but it is an answer. An expensive answer but sometimes the best one.
Also nuclear waste doesn't have to be a problem. If anyone was willing to cover the cost of burning it in a breeder reactor for power or burry it forever. It just is because it's expensive.
Also nuclear waste doesn't have to be a problem. If anyone was willing to cover the cost of burning it in a breeder reactor for power or burry it forever. It just is because it's expensive.
But it is a problem. Finding a place that can contain radioactive waste for millions of years is incredible difficult. If you read up on it, you get disillusioned pretty fast.
When energy storage and transmission methods are also not up to the task, nuclear becomes the best answer.
Obviously, the best answer is to improve energy storage and transmission infrastructure. Why would we waste hundreds of millions on a stupid toy power plant when we could spend 10% of that money on just running decent underground cables.
Nuclear waste is pretty tame. Compare gloves that were used once to turn valve on pipe in reactor room to shit from coal in your lungs. Even most active kind of waste everyone thinks of - spent fuel - consists from about 90% of useful material.
EDIT: 95-98% of useful material.
Anon also forgets that the plants for the magical rocks are extremely expensive.
Actually not. Especially cost of energy compared to one of coal.
Compare gloves that were used once to turn valve on pipe in reactor room to shit from coal in your lungs.
No shit, Sherlock... The reactor room is shielded by the water. Something you had in there once shouldn't be overly radioactive and the fact that it isn't doesn't say anything about the dangers of radioactive waste.
Even most active kind of waste everyone thinks of - spent fuel - consists from about 90% of useful material.
What does that even mean? How is that saying anything about the dangers of radioactive waste?
new nuclear power costs about 5 times more than onshore wind power per kWh [...]. Nuclear takes 5 to 17 years longer between planning and operation and produces on average 23 times the emissions per unit electricity generated [...].
The costs used for wind/solar energy never included the cost of the required buffer storage, and even the rare few people who include that never factor in frequency stability which to this day is maintained by the giant steam turbines everyone wants to get rid of. It will not be trivial to solve the frequency stability problem; it will likely require massive investment in pumped water storage, flywheel storage, or nuclear energy, and these costs once finally included in the real cost of wind/solar will hurt its value prospect considerably.
As for nuclear waste: the overwhelming majority of nuclear waste generated over the lifetime of a reactor is stored onsite. Only the smallest amount of material is what will actually remain dangerous for a long time, and many countries have already solved this problem. It's a seriously overstated problem repeated by renewable-purists who usually haven't even considered how much frequency stability and grid-level storage have and will add to the cost of renewables, meaning they have not given a full accounting of the situation.
We need a fitting location to safely bury it in. Otherwise it can pollute the ground and water. In Germany for example we dont have such a location. That and the issue of cost, no one wanting to build it, no one wanting to insure it, no state wanting to offer the space and no energy company wanting this energy led to us making the correct decision in moving away from it
And the people were taught to talk about the horrible nuclear accidents that killed a few but completely glance over the unimaginable millions perished in the name of oil, mustn't even mention the mass extinction events we launched with oil.
We even spread exaggerated bullshit about radiation mutation (wtf? thats superhero comic books fiction!!) and cancer rates (only one really), ignoring how much overwhelmingly more of the both we get from fossil fuel products.
We are like prehistoric people going extinct bcs of the tales how generations ago someone burned down their house so fire bad. Well, actually not like that - we are taking with us a lot of species & entire ecosystems too.
It has some interesting discussion, although it also shows how US-centric Lemmy is. Much of the EU has understood why nuclear energy is inherently incompatible with renewable energy and has therefore rightfullly dismissed it.
I'm sure the other rock/liquid/gas burning plants have had no issues along their lifetime and had no hand in demonizing the "new" slowly exploding rock technology after extreme negligence let the one big one happen. /s
I'd take the band aid of nuclear in my backyard vs what we rely on now after learning all of the insider knowledge of someone who personally worked in energy generation that did all of this plus renewables almost their entire professional life.
A hydro damn breaking has killed more people than Chernobyl before, and probably will again. Renewables are not perfect either unfortunately. Though some are slightly safer than nuclear.
Most are safer than nuclear, but until the environmental cost of manufacturing them is outweighed by the benefit of their use then nuclear is the least intolerable stopgap.
Most of those didn't involve the magic rocks, and most didn't hurt anyone.
More people die creating the building materials for a powerplant (or a windmills, or a solar panel) than ever during operation. The numbers really don't matter.
I honestly don't care what we do, as long as we stop burning coal, oil and gas. The way I see it, every nuclear plant and windmill means we all die a little later.
This is the way. Nuclear is actually one of the safer energy sources, and one of the more reliable. It's also more expensive than most renewables. As always it comes down to local conditions and situations that favor one power source over another - like countries with lots of geothermal that can be exploited or solar probably won't go nuclear.
Just put it somewhere noone lives like the Dakotas or places people who don't matter live, like west Virginia. All the coal miners getting cancer anyway, why not double tap?
Yet it still has much lower deaths per energy generated than fossil fuels, and even less than some renewables. A single hydro accident can kill more people than even the worst nuclear disasters. It's not fair to pretend that all the other sources are perfectly safe.
Who's pretending they're safe? The only pretending I see in the meme is about nuclear. But if you want to argue with something I didn't say, have at it I guess.
I always wonder where we would actually be at as a civilization if it weren't for fuckass lobbyists and money hoarding greedy assholes. This is a perfect example. If we'd learned from our mistakes and actually improved on nuclear energy there's no telling where we'd be at this point.
Except the retard didn't just burn his house down, he burned thousands of people's houses down in such a way that nobody could ever live there again, and came very close to burning down the whole continent in the same way.
Or to put it another way, we almost ruined a large swath of land and learned from that mistake, but chose not to use it so when we do have to switch to nukes because destroyed our planet we will have forgotten all those lessons and do it again.
There was never any real risk of ruining an entire continent. Stop watching TV shows like Chernobyl for accurate information. Perhaps some people thought that at the time, but we now know that kind of thing is impossible. It could have been a worse accident for sure if there was another steam explosion and it would have effected a wider area, but not even close to a continent lol.
Na it's dumb. The issue with the magic rocks isn't the direct consequences like with the fire. The issues with these rocks are long terms with the consequences on humans and the environment thousands of years later.
Yeah, the environmental issues that are orders of magnitude less problematic than literally pumping the toxic chemicals into the atmosphere like with fossil fuels, vs comparatively miniscule amount of solid waste to store inert.
What consequences?
There are no consequences for animals in Chernobyl, they are thriving in all aspects, even mammals living underground (mutations are fiction).
People that didn't leave the exclusion zone died of old age there.
Life on Earth had to deal with all sorts of radiation.
What caused mass extinction was ecosystem change, eg via global climate change.
Dams can also produce a lot of hydroelectric power, and a catastrophic failure could also destroy an entire town or more. We just don't build dams upstream of a large town.
No it's about nuclear waste and where to store it, it's about how expensive it is to build a nuclear power plant (bc of regulations so they don't goo boom) and it's about how much you have to subsidize it to make the electricity it produces affordable at all.
Economically it's just not worth it. Renewables are just WAY cheaper.
And much of the PR problem is related to waste. The main push towards alternative energy sources comes from people worried about the long term consequences of burning fossil fuels. These same people worry about the long term consequences of nuclear waste production, so nuclear sabotages itself on this front.
Just because burning fossil fuels is bad doesn't magically make nuclear good, or somehow no big deal. The chance for a catastrophic accident mentioned in the meme is only one drawback (which is bad enough--get real, denial is not a strategy here). Just a few other issues:
the problem of what to do with the waste: no permanent solutions have yet been implemented and we've been using costly-to-maintain "temporary" methods for decades. Not to mention the thermal water pollution to aquatic ecosystems
the enormously out of proportion up front costs to construct the plants, and higher ongoing operation and maintenance costs due to safety risks in proportion to amount of power generated
the fact that uranium is also a limited resource that has to be mined like other ores, with all the environmental negatives of that, which then has to go through a lot of processing involving various mechanics and chemicals just to make it usable as fuel.
Anyway I'm not going to try and go into more detail on a forum post, but all this advocacy for a very problematic method of producing power as if it's a simple solution to our problems is kind of irritating. At least I hope the above shows we should stop pretending it's "clean energy". We should be focusing on developing renewable and sustainable energy systems.
I don't get this advocacy either, makes me wonder why? Constructing a nuclear power plant usually takes decades, they are not a solution for the more immediate problem climate change. They also introduce lots of new problems, and it's not sustainable either.
What takes decades is the bureaucracy, it can take as little as 3-5 years without the constant attempts to slow it down. We know the plant can then run for the next 50+ years. It needs to be part of the solution because power demand is constantly growing and we need to phase out other sources. Solar and wind aren't enough and can't get built fast enough alone.
The alternative option is to just force China, India, and every African nation to stop developing. That would reduce power needs enough that solar and wind would be sufficient.
there are millions being poured into propaganda against using anything but fossil fuels, much of it stems from there. But i wonder if its better this way or the alternative way where we would use more nuclear energy but since there would be so much money to be made, the rich would use their money to make all safety regulations null. I wish we could just get rid of the source problem.
That's a crazy oversimplification almost all German party's had a part in the phase out and shut down of German nuclear energy. To point at the Greens and say it was them, is a right wing talking point pushed by Springer media.
If there was a way to make good money with nuclear we would have it all around. To say a grass roots movement was able to push this through is laughable, if we look how everything else works in this world. While surely way better to handle securely it's simply not easy to build and operate. Just look at all the plants currently under construction in Europe, they all struggle to get finished, take years to decades longer then planned and are way more expensive to build then initially estimated. Why is France struggling so hard when they have a population that is definitely way more open minded towards nuclear?
But it's not done well. Just look at the new built plants, which are way over budget and take way longer to build then expected. Like the two units in Georgia that went from estimated 14bn to finally 34bn $. In France who are really experienced with nuclear, they began building their latest plant in 2007 and it's still not operational, also it went from 3.3bn to 13.2bn €. Or look at the way Hinkley Point C in the UK is getting developed. What a shit show: from estimated 18bn£ to now 47bn£ and a day where it starts producing energy not in sight.
only antimatter could provide more energy density, it’s insanely powerful.
Nuclear energy indeed has very high energy per mass of fuel. But so what? Solar and wind power doesn't even use fuel. So the energy density thing is a bit of a distraction.
Who gives a fuck about energy density beyond some physics nerds? Unless you're planning on building a flying nuclear-powered airplane, energy density is irrelevant. This is why solar is eating fission's lunch.
Energy density is a useless bullshit metric for stationary power.
Produces more waste than almost all of the renewables.
Reliable compared to... ... ... ok, I'm out of ideas, they need shutdowns all the time. Seems to me it's less reliable than anything that isn't considered "experimental".
And it can't work with renewables unless you add lots and lots of batteries. Any amount of renewables you build just makes nuclear more expensive.
They are an interesting technology, and I'm sure they have more uses than making nuclear weapons. It's just that everybody focus on that one use, and whatever other uses they have, mainstream grid-electricity generation is not it.
Sometimes the sun doesn't shine, sometimes the wind doesn't blow. Renewables are great and cheap, but they aren't a complete solution without grid level storage that doesn't really exist yet.
Thats a chicken/egg peoblem. If enough renewables are build the storage follows. In a perfect world goverments would incentivice storage but in an imperfect one problems have to occure before somebody does something to solve them. Anyway, according to lazard renewables + storage are still cheaper than NPPs.
Let's be clear, the only reason grid-level storage for renewables "doesn't exist" is because of a lack of education about (and especially commitment to) simple, reliable, non-battery energy storage such as gravitational potential, like the ARES project. We've been using gravitational potential storage to power our mechanisms
since Huygens invented the freaking pendulum clock. There is simply no excuse other than corruption for the fact that we don't just run a couple trains up a hill when we need to store massive amounts of solar energy.
He should, reason they ditched them for coal and gas was because big daddy Exxon and BP are pushing for it so they don't go out of bussiness. FUCK BP AND EXXON!
"are we retarded?" yes, Trump got re-elected, which is proof most of us really are retarded. I'm pro nuclear, just not the form we widely use now, and not in the hands of retarded people. And again, most of us clearly are, and one of the worst is going to be president, again.
So I think the best thing we could do is start a nuclear war which will wipe out the human race. Nature will hopefully recover in about 100.000 to 1 million years. Hopefully dolphins will develop less retarded then us dumb monkeys.
I feel this is all moot. When we run out of fossil fuels and go off the energy cliff, the nuclear facilities will basically build themselves, assuming there will be anyone around that will even know how to build a nuclear reactor
The problem is that nuclear reactors can't be built fast. We've also lost a lot of the expertise to age and retirement.
Nuclear should have been a major factor in dealing with climate change. Unfortunately, we no longer have time for it to take up the slack. It will need to catch up with other renewable energy sources, we can't wait for it.
But we blew up a solar system and wiped out a developing race one time and we stopped using it.
Imagine if hunters had stopped using fire?!?
Fukushima showed us the truth, Nuclear Safety is incompatible with capitalism. I don't care to find out what other time bombs we build into future plants.
If you listen to the people on Lemmy, everything is incompatible with capitalism. So do we cower in the corner and hope the problems away?
The amount of death and destruction attributable to all nuclear accidents since we figured out fission is barely statistically significant when compared to fossil fuel consumption.
Regulatory agencies can and do keep accidents from happening. Not always, because people are both stupid and corrupt. But mostly.
Capitalism isn't going away any time soon. Maybe in a post fusion world, we'll cross the threshold of post-scarcity too. Until that happens, we do the best we can with the tools at our disposal.
You could make the same argument about literally anything. Capitalism caused the 737Max disasters. You want to give up planes?
But honestly, the profit motive doesn't fit everywhere. It can certainly fit in places like retail, with good safety nets. (Like basic government food available at cost or less for people who need it)
In infrastructure where cost cutting costs more maintenance money, at best? It really doesn't belong.
A nuclear accident with 1 attributed death and studies showing no discernable increase in cancer rates for residents in the surrounding regions that happened alongside a tidal wave with thousands of deaths is clearly evidence nuclear is bad.
There is a huge lobby of pro-nuclear think tanks who try to astroturf pro-nuclear shit onto social media. We, scientifically literate, rational people, need to counteract these harmful narratives with some facts.
FACT: Renewable sources of energy are as cheap or cheaper per kwh than nuclear.
FACT: Renewables are faster to provision than nuclear.
FACT: Renewables are as clean, or cleaner, than nuclear.
FACT: Renewables are much more flexible and responsive to energy fluctuations than nuclear.
FACT: Renewables will only get cheaper. Nuclear will only get more expensive, because uranium mining will get harder and harder as we deplete easily accessible sources.
Fact: renewables take more land, that could be used for other purposes.
Fact: renewables by themselves cannot, and I mean CANNOT, be used alone. Unless you are willing to have a ridiculous over-provision. They depend on weather and have massive seasonal divergences. You need a base line power production to have a rational generation scheme.
Fact: nuclear have a higher cap for total production than renewables. As humanity needs more and more and more energy renewables (even destroying all our usable land) won't be enough.
Fact: no everyone that doesn't share your opinion is an "astrosuftist lobby" some of us can also think by ourselves. And some of us can ever think above the dogma of our political school of choice.
if 15% of the land used for parking spaces in the USA was instead used for renewables, that would generate enough electricity to power the whole country.
a report from the IEA showed that renewables CAN, and I mean CAN fully power the entire world. So take that one up with the experts. thanks!
You don't actually need to mine more uranium though. You can run certain nuclear designs on Thorium, Plutonium from weapon stocks, or even waste from other reactors. Current generation nuclear designs are laughably inefficient at using the nuclear fuels we have available, and I fully understand why people don't support them.
Realistically though I don't ever expect nuclear fission to be as cheap as renewables in most areas. In some places nuclear or another power source is always going to be needed though just because renewables are not practical in certain conditions.
In the long term the answer is almost certainly going to be nuclear fusion or another future power source like neutrino voltaic. Solar and wind power are ultimately just offshoots of fusion, and so is fission if you think about where uranium, thorium and so on come from. In fact all power we know of seems to come from either gravity or some kind of nuclear reaction (inc. geothermal and fossil fuels).
Notice how pro-nuclear people always point towards a bunch of fictional technology as the solution? Oh, we just need fusion, or breeder reactors, or a bunch of other shit that doesn’t exist. No, bro, we just need to build renewables and proper energy grids. It’s really not that complicated. If it’s not sunny where you live, then you just get electricity from where it is sunny. It’s really really simple
Nuclear energy is a solution looking for a problem. Total tech bro bullshit. Like crypto.
Anon is so dense that he will surpass the Poincaré recurrence time of the Universe, and will exist forever. This also means that for every iteration of the current universe he passes through, another iteration of anon will be produced, such that there will eventually be enough idiot anons to form its own entire universe.
Those same countries that found space for all the rest of their industrial waste?
Nuclear waste has a tiny footprint. Fence off a couple square km for security, dig a small but deep hole, and there ya go.
Obviously oversimplifying, but the point is that nuclear waste is a tiny issue. The entire world's waste could be stored in a single warehouse if we wanted to (we don't).
iirc nuclear waste isn't really that big of an issue anymore, they just drill a really deep hole that's like a foot across and nobody will ever see it again
Storage isn't that much of a problem, even in smol Europe countries.
Also it's contained in specific areas, some nerds are bound to wanna reuse what we now think of as trash/spent fuel. If it's still radioactive after it just means it radiates energy, we just didn't commercially learned how to harness it. There are ongoing studies into that too.
And radiation isn't as problematic as we are taught by media - humans lived in Chernobyl exclusion zone until death by old age, mammals there are thriving. The dangers of radiation are immediate tissue damage or thyroid cancer (again via tissue damage) if iodine isn't taken by exposed people.
arent we out of uranium by 2040 anyway? op can have our "nucular" waste anytime. why even waste time on a resource that we cant use in 15 yrs from now? super stupid.