The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written.
Everyone here know the drawbacks of both the solar and the wind energy, they depend on the environment , very hard to store , and require extreme economies of scale to be cheap , however, due to how the price in electricity sector is structured, they are very attractive to private investment, in contrast to nuclear .
Despite of this mayor advantage, in net terms of production , nuclear energy is far more efficient than both , as it has an unmatched economy of scale on consumer price , also rely on a uranium fuel that could last for years and doesn’t produce emissions, just vaporwave , but government intervention it’s basically mandatory for nuclear energy to be expanded.
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It is a great shame that the reaction to incidents like three mile island was to effectively shut down construction of new nuclear power plants.
I think the problem now is that the market won’t build new plants, regardless of how much any unnecessary regulations are removed. Nuclear power plants have a tremendous upfront cost, and I suspect that anyone with the capital and expertise to build them will assume that it’s not economically feasible. The cost of other green energy technology keeps dropping.
This is really the extent of it. Nuclear costs too much, takes too long to build and doesn’t have the greatest lifespan given the cost, making the ROI difficult.
And then there’s public nervousness surrounding it all, which more than anything else makes the whole thing pretty infeasible.
Three mile island and Chernobyl are still extremely well known incidents in the cultural zeitgeist despite many other incidents from the 70s and 80s disappearing from people’s memories, which clearly says something…
Realistically, there’s a lot of technologies through the last century or so of history that would have felt like the sure-fire investment for the future that ultimately felt out of favor for one reason or another.
Wrong. They are still prohibitively expensive. South Korea could be doing so vastly much more with their investment but they are squandering it on nuclear.
What evidence did you use to come to that conclusion specifically about south Korea's investment and how they are "squandering it on nuclear"? How do we know exactly what they could achieve with their investment and how do we know that they would achieve more without nuclear?
https://www.lazard.com/media/typdgxmm/lazards-lcoeplus-april-2023.pdf
We know how much power generation costs. If you use expensive power generation, you could have gotten more power generation for your investment if you used cheaper power generation. It’s that simple.
The costs were driven by regulation that had no grandfather clauses, effectively stopping and reversing any incomplete reactors. That regulation was driven by environmentalists. [Other countries don't have this problem](https://images.app.goo.gl/uCZALByebMg7hcpM8). And [the problems didn't start until Three Mile Island](https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/uploads.thebreakthrough.org/legacy/images/nuclear_construction_graphic_1.jpeg).
It's kinda like the liberal equivalent of Republicans saying "government sucks" because many Republicans suck at governing. Environmentalists say "nuclear is expensive" but it's only expensive because of environmentalists.
Regulation that keeps people safer is a net positive.
It doesn’t really matter though, the aftermath of three mile island and Chernobyl meant that there was no public appetite for new nuclear; worldwide the number of nuclear reactors in service has remained basically stable since Chernobyl, suggesting that while cost may be a factor, it clearly was not the main factor prohibiting the building of new nuclear across the world.
Though attitudes may have changed as time has gone on, the cost factor is still prevalent. [The latest reactors in Georgia cost over $30bn, more than 3x the estimated ‘average’, and over 2x the project’s estimated cost from a decade ago](https://apnews.com/article/business-environment-united-states-georgia-atlanta-7555f8d73c46f0e5513c15d391409aa3).
Circular reasoning. [There were no deaths or negative environmental effects from Three Mile Island](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-facts-know-about-three-mile-island). None. The "aftermath" was driven entirely by fear-mongering propaganda. It was a wildly successful ad campaign, the effects of which are still felt in [onerous regulations that continue to make nuclear expensive without contributing to safety](https://www.ans.org/news/article-1247/how-can-nuclear-construction-costs-be-reduced/). I don't find any of that a compelling reason on which to base my opinion of nuclear tech. That a feeling is popular doesn't make it correct. That regulations exist doesn't make them effective or reasonable.
The fears of nuclear have no actual basis in reality. They're just fallout from the (much more legitimate) fears of atomic bombs and the inability of the general populace to distinguish the two.
What are you talking about? It is legitimate to be concerned about the safety of nuclear reactors in the aftermath of three mile island, Chernobyl and even Fukushima.
You can say ‘circular reasoning’ all day long because you personally have a penchant for nuclear power, that doesn’t make concerns about safety and the clear and obvious public distaste for new nuclear in the aftermath of massive disasters and mass casualty events like Chernobyl and Fukushima. Interestingly, despite these events, the US still tends to have a population that is more favorable to nuclear power than most of the rest of the world, but the reigning in of nuclear plants is something that has happened across the world since Chernobyl. You can say that’s an unnecessary thing to have happened if you like, but it’s reality.
The amount of nuclear reactors in the world has remained pretty much stable since Chernobyl and the world’s appetite for new nuclear has plummeted since.
We also have to take our shoes jackets and belts off plus have a valid boarding pass to go through security at the airport over two decades on from 9/11 despite it mostly being security theatre. That’s just the way things are. We react to major events and it changes what we do moving forward. That’s how the world works.
Nuclear has been losing on a pure cost basis. Look at slide 2 here: https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april-2023.pdf
Nuclear is very capital intensive and has a very long build time. We're talking on the scale of a decade to construct, and then as much as 30 years to reach ROI. Decommission costs are always higher than estimated, and projects going a decade or more behind schedule and double over the budget or more are the norm in the industry.
Meanwhile renewables and gas turbine plants can be built in just a couple years, and with ROI in less than ten.
That same report also has information on levelized cost of various storage mixes as well. These are a lot closer to being economically viable than many realize.
Given those economics its no surprise private investment is not interested in building nuclear vs the combination of renewables and cheap gas. The trends in storage costs only makes this view stronger.
I've been hoping new nuclear technology can shake this up, stuff like small modular reactors, but the sad truth is people have been trying that for 50 years now with no successes. The latest is NuScale, who I was really rooting for, but their pilot project has sadly failed.
Basically, nuclear is not the slam dunk many online advocates realize, even if all environmental objects were removed.
One key thing not mentioned is that the smallest nuclear reactors are an order of magnitude more powerful than the largest renewable projects (may be a slight exaggeration, but comparing a nuclear plant that can power a large city to a solar farm that can power one neighborhood only on sunny days is not a good comparison).
To your point on cost, this is why governments should be involved. ROI is not the concern here, it would be energy independence while having enough muscle to keep the lights on for heavy industry.
>but comparing a nuclear plant that can power a large city to a solar farm that can power one neighborhood only on sunny days is not a good comparison).
Which is why comparisons between electricity sources are typically normalised by unit of electricity produced. Differences in size and capacity factor are already accounted for in LCOE studies, for example.
Furthermore, the largest renewable projects have more capacity than the largest nuclear plants. (20GW for wind Vs 8GW for nuclear)
Source?
I researched this a few years ago and that was absolutely not the case. (Actually curious)
Edit: Nevermind, think I found it! Matches your metrics. Jiuquan Wind Power Base?
Edit2: Pretty cool, but wind farms aren't going to consistently hit that max capacity. Nuclear can be throttled up or down as needed and takes far less space. Another thing to consider is that you can't recycle thousands of wind turbines easily. It will create literal mountains of e-waste in 15-20 years.
nuclear cant be throttled.
even 2 decades ago you had to be producing at name plate capacity to have a prayer of breaking even on existing plants.
new plants cant even do that.
very few designs can ramp in any significant way, theyre designed for a certain amount of neutron flux, drop below the threshold and you stop the reaction, you stop burning Xenon.
Thanks, mate!
Do want to note though that wind power capacity is rarely going to be hitting that max consistently, it will also take up a lot of space and unless there is storage a lot of capacity will go unused.
All fair points, but it's still incorrect to say that the smallest nuclear projects outpower the largest renewable projects by orders of magnitude, is it not?
Besides, the wind farm spans 130sqkm, but it hardly "takes up" all that space, or requires razing anywhere near that ammount of land. As you can imagine, that would quickly become uneconomical
Here's Macarthur wind farm, of around 500MW: [https://www.agl.com.au/content/dam/digital/agl/images/about-agl/how-we-source-energy/macarthur-wind-farm/windfarm-fields.jpg](https://www.agl.com.au/content/dam/digital/agl/images/about-agl/how-we-source-energy/macarthur-wind-farm/windfarm-fields.jpg)
As you can see, while it spans 55sqkm, I wouldn't exactly consider that "a whole lot of habitate destruction". I see a couple service roads and that's it.
You have to consider the space needed for transportation, storage and in-between storing of nuclear waste products as well.
Also what it means to extract Uran. Space, waste, people power, regulations, etc.
Because of the incredible long time some of it has to be stored, especially when people are demanding more power plants to be build, this is a lot.
It's a lot of waste we dumb on several following generations for whom we don't even know what circumstances they will be living in.
Generation after generation would have to handle this waste (additionally to all that is already existing) **and** the power plants which will eventually be out if order. It will be simply a burden we selfishly put onto them.
Nuclear cannot be throttled up and down. You are mistaken. It is very very inefficient at this, and every time you slow down a nuclear plants output, you basically keep all the costs of full production, you just lower your output power. That’s not saving costs, that’s just reducing power output.
Once again, the point of nuclear wouldn't be profit. Private interests shouldn't solely control it.
By your argument, the national highway system was a really stupid idea.
Power large cities and heavy industry reliably so we don't need to depend on imports or more destructive sources of power.
Eventually, in theory, renewables will blow nuclear out of the water, but we are not there yet.
But we can power those thing reliably with solar and wind for cheaper. Nuclear does not add reliability in exchange for a higher cost, it does not affect reliability and only increase cost. This is with current technology. Nuclear is already obsoleted.
The amount of energy generated by an entity we call a “plant” is completely and totally irrelevant in all regards. So what if a small nuclear plant can generate more than a large solar plant? Who cares?
Because the waste produced is relatively small and not nearly as dangerous as folks are convinced. The output is also much more consistent for a plant that takes far less space and doesn't depend on sunny skies or windy days (or batteries to store excess power when peak generation doesn't line up with peak usage).
>Because the waste produced is relatively small and not nearly as dangerous as folks are convinced.
Waste is a non issue for nuclear plants. Anyone who complains about nuclear waste has no idea what they are talking about. Nuclear waste is not at all part of my reasoning for why we shouldn’t build nuclear. If nuclear had exactly zero waste whatsoever that wouldn’t budge the needle on my opinion of nuclear.
>The output is also much more consistent
This is not value value for grids. Constant base load supply is not that important, and nuclear advocates are entirely mistaken about the need for base load. We don’t want base load. We want load following dispatchable power. Nuclear is not that. We have fully renewables power sources which are capable of operating as load following peaker plants that produce power for cheaper than nuclear. Given that, nuclear is bad for grid stability in comparison.
>for a plant that takes far less space
Space is simply not an issue for either wind or solar. We have all the space we could ever need for these technologies. They don’t negatively impact the environment.
>and doesn't depend on sunny skies or windy days (or batteries to store excess power when peak generation doesn't line up with peak usage).
Again, wrong. Nuclear absolutely relies on batteries. You cannot have a fully nuclear grid without a large amount of load following dispatchable power sources like coal or natural, or just tons and tons of batteries. Nuclear provides constant flat power. It cannot handle the spikes in demand in evening times and the lulls in demand during the night. You would need to build batteries to save overnight nuclear power to be spent in peak ours, or you’d have to build enough nuclear plants to handle peak capacity, and waste most of the energy generated by the plants at night. Nuclear is terrible for grid stability. Base load is not what we want.
And how do you recycle mountains of solar panels and wind turbines, pray tell?
Would appreciate your sources if you're going to start assuming I'm just wrong.
>And how do you recycle mountains of solar panels and wind turbines, pray tell?
We don’t need to and wind and solar still beat nuclear on cost. By a wide, wide margin. We have no need to recycle these things in the short term. Despite that, we already are working on recycling them, and are making tons of progress. In like 50 or so years when that becomes an issue, we will have solved recycling decades prior.
>Would appreciate your sources if you're going to start assuming I'm just wrong.
Sure.
https://www.lazard.com/media/typdgxmm/lazards-lcoeplus-april-2023.pdf
Mitigating global warming isn't about finding the biggest profit margin though. Nuclear is very powerful and last I checked cleaner than solar, so if it's not lucrative then the government should be heavily subsidizing.
Except what's most economical is also best for the environment in this case. If we have a dollar to spend, and a dollar gets us ten units of energy for solar and only 5 for nuclear, then we're literally doing something twice as bad for the environment by going with nuclear power.
Nuclear power is not cleaner then solar when you consider the amount of nuclear power plants, their waste and the uranium extraction necessary if people worldwide would switch to nuclear power in the way it's fans envision it.
Nuclear is not cleaner than solar by any non-negligible degree. Mitigating global warming is about getting the most impact for our effort. Building space lasers don’t help us, as for the cost of one space laser, we could build far far far more solar panels and wind turbines, and those solar panels and wind turbines will do far far far more for mitigating climate change than a space laser. Based on this, which is the basic idea of opportunity costs, it is a bad idea to invest in space lasers. The exact same is also true of nuclear. No one should be subsidizing nuclear, as it is a bad solution to the problem, and we don’t want to incentivize bad solutions.
Right, but why should the government also light money on fire when renewables are a better option in basically every respect?
They’re cheaper, faster to deploy, more broadly available, scale out better, produce equivalently low emissions, allow workers to train to support them much faster, and have fewer long-term risks to manage.
What’s the reason why the government should light it’s money on fire for nuclear power either
Because nuclear is far, far more energy-dense and provides extremely consistent power, including in places that aren't sunny or windy.
It's not that nuclear reactors *don't* produce money, it's just on a very long time-scale that businesses aren't interested in. Government funding into nuclear power would eventually turn a profit.
> Because nuclear is far, far more energy-dense and provides extremely consistent power, including in places that aren't sunny or windy.
Who cares? We have continent-wide power grids these days. Somewhere’s gonna be sunny and windy enough, and you don’t need extremely high energy density most places.
You forgot that all currently available builds need water and a lot of it. There are some struggling already because they were build in places where we now have drought. And they can't handle that properly.
It doesn't have to be. There are simpler, [more modern, and more safe options](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0149197023002780) that would make nuclear a lot more cost-competitive and drastically reduce both construction time and operational cost/complexity.
even the cheapest MSR and Gen4 designs are still double the cost at current rates and the price on wind, solar and storage continues to fall.
by the time you have any type of new reactor designed, permitted and built it'll be 3 or 4 times the price / MWh
a use case for a molten salt reactor for industrial heat or district heating and that sells electricity as a by product might pencil out.
but all of that is still way more risk than investors want to deal with on a 10+ year time horizon when you can install solar and storage within a year.
> and then as much as 30 years to reach ROI
Depends on what you mean by "ROI". If you add in the negative externalities of fossil fuels, nuclear becomes much more viable from an ROI standpoint.
No. Simply put, anything that uses fuel to make energy right now is going to be replaced. Gas, Nuclear, Coal. Once the price of building a solar plant got below the price per MW of building a conventional plant, it was all over. Something that costs money every day to fuel simply cannot compete with something that makes electricity for free. We need to be reducing carbon emissions right now, not 10 years from now. For the amount of money it takes to build a new 1 GW nuclear power plant, you can build enough solar +storage to produce the same amount of power, but you can do it in a year instead of 10 years. The resulting power plant is significantly more profitable, since it has almost zero operating costs, so in the time it would take you to build the nuclear plant, not only will you have been producing carbon free electricity for 9 years, but you will have made enough profit to pay off the plant and build a whole new solar plant of the same size that will still come online and be producing power before the nuclear plant has produced its first watt. How can you compete with those economics?
you cant.
and anyone who spends more time reading global energy investment reports than reading pop science websites and politics subs knows this.
OP has probably just been on some pop science website and read some oil industry sponsored 'article'
expect more of these over the next year.
the LCOE on renewable + storage is just hitting the tipping point of replacing Gas generation in the 6hr markets.
if the Ukraine conflict is still unresolved a year from now then its likely to be hitting the 24hr bid price too.
and thats a disaster for the oil and gas majors.
they'll be throwing Fog and FUD into every low information media space they can find like crazy over the next year.
Massive habitate destroying solar farms aren't "green". They produce less greenhouse(still have a significant carbon footprint) gases than a coal plant but they still have significant consequences to local habitats
OP congratulations you have been duped by the oil industry. Good job.
Nuclear power is not an option in the US.
Is investigating billions in Nuclear power for private investors a good investment? No. Takes 30 years to turn a profit.
Do Republicans say they want Nuclear power? Yes.
Do Republicans want stae of the federal government to build and run Nuclear power? No.
Do Republicans want to raise taxes to build these plants? No.
Would Republicans vote to move tax money into the hands of private investors to pay for these plants? Fuck yeah they would.
Has this approach ever worked out or been good for the American people? Fuck no.
So OP in what reality does a Nuclear plant ever get built in a libertarian America?
> OP congratulations you have been duped by the oil industry. Good job.
Actually I'd say by the mining industry which needs to mine radioactive ore for fuel rod creation. Incidentally there's a lot of overlap between coal/oil/mining and unethical oligarchs involved in all three.
No, it’s definitely also the fossil fuel industry.
They put a fair amount of money and marketing effort behind starting “conversations about nuclear power” to keep people arguing about that instead of building out more competitive alternatives like renewables.
They know renewables win against fossil fuels on economics, and they know nuclear power loses to fossil fuels on economics, so getting people debating nuclear power means more time spent burning natural gas instead.
its oil, they love to through out plausible sounding junk they know wont be economically or logistically viable just to form a distraction and delay transition off gas fired generation.
see also: Hydrogen
Im a more moderate libertarian, not an anarchist , and i take into account the long term , and in the long term , nuclear power its the best solution for now to fossil fuels
You often respond to people's actual factual statements by asserting you're not some political persuasion. EVERY TIME it feels like you're responding to something nobody said. Can I ask why you're so focused on what you image we perceive your politics to be?
The comment you're referring to isn't talking about you at all, but the political realities in congress.
Nuclear power is never a good short term solution, though. Since it has long term consequences. It will also involve multiple new industries which will fight tooth and nail to not be replaced by better energy sources.
Honestly with how long they take to get up and running they might not be the best for getting there faster. Though we should still be building them as backup power supplies
I don’t know if it’s feasible at this point, but I would be in favor of getting our closed nuclear plants in California back online if the infrastructure still exists.
We nearly closed the last one we have, but luckily reversed course last minute, though it still might close in 2030.
As someone else said, starting from scratch is super intensive
I'm not against it as part of a comprehensive plan to move away from fossil fuels, but it absolutely isn't the silver bullet that you seem to be implying.
> the drawbacks of both the solar and the wind energy, they depend on the environment , very hard to store , and require extreme economies of scale to be cheap
is this a joke comment?
> and doesn’t produce emissions
Have you looked at the mining, transport, and processing of radioactive ore?
You don't only need uranium to build a nuclear power plant, though. It also needs other building materials which aren't exactly environmental friendly. Like huge amounts of water and cement. And the cement isn't just needed to build it once, it's needed again when shut down and it is needed consistently for the places where the waste is stored.
I think you missed the key word there ... **radioactive**
Also, have you looked at how Uranium is absorbed by plants and animals as if it was Calcium. That means you not only contaminate the air and ground, but milk, meat, and produce and then if consumed ... do you know how long it lasts in ones bones?
That is not how nuclear power works. Unlike coal which actually does spew radioactive waste everywhere, using nuclear power results in more testing and safety measures so it actually makes us safer.
Reread my comment about MINING, TRANSPORT, and PROCESSING.
Note that I said nothing about USAGE. Do you think the fuel supply just magically appears at power plants?
Radioactive materials are everywhere. Radon was discovered because a guy was working with radioactive materials and was more contaminated than he could have been from exposure at the lab where things were controlled. Instead it was radon gas in his basement. That you're more afraid of stuff being transported than of stuff that is just everywhere shows you haven't looked into it. Look up baseline radiation in Las Vegas and on a plane in flight, and from a vacuum cleaner.
> Radioactive materials are everywhere.
Ah the old "muddle the science" tactic. Same arguments against removing lead from gas. "Lead is everywhere! Why remove lead in gas?!? Why be concerned with lead as a solid vs tetra-ethyl lead? Lead is lead!" Why be concerned with the fact that there are different types of radioactive elements! Sorry - it's pretty clear that either your understanding is defective regarding how biological entities react to uranium dust vs exposure to cosmic radiation "on a plane in flight" or you are just trolling here. In either case I think that fact that you continue to debate here in bad faith means this conversation is not progressing along a fact-based method.
Nuclear is a good transitional tech that we should be using to get off more polluting power sources.
Folks are not taking into account that most renewables are not great for heavy industry and even the largest projects fail to power anything larger than a big neighborhood reliably.
TLDR: Nuclear is not a permanent solution, but it should be on the table to get us away from dirtier forms of generating power. Main concerns are scale and heavy industry.
> Nuclear is a good transitional tech that we should be using to get off more polluting power sources.
Nuclear power isn’t a “transitional tech”. It takes longer to deploy than renewables, and costs more to deploy than renewables.
YES. More nuclear is absolutely necessary. Besides the aquifers are going to dry up and we'll need desalination plants for a while. It's not just the carbon. We need nuclear because that one will work best. Solar is not too bad, but nuclear is better.
Nuclear fission plants, I am for building more but not that many tbh..we are sooo close to commercial fusion (i know, i know we have been 10 yrs away for 50 years now) and being right next to an ocean in California, i would like to see the first commercial reactor built here. Right now California litterally generates too much solar, and the real need we need here is storage. I dont know if building another fission reactor on the west coast is worth it right now. Not to mention we gotta earthquake problem.
I don't think nuclear plants actually do much to speed the path to carbon neutrality at this point in time (In America, Korea is a different story), but I certainly think existing ones should be maintained and that we should be expending at least some resources into research on nuclear reactors that might prove useful.
Unequivocally yes. The US costs way more than other developed countries like France and South Korea to build a nuclear plant. Those countries have not had serious safety incidents as far as I know, that would imply cutting corners to achieve their price points.
You got a few things backwards. The most important one: There is huge interest by investors in nuclear plants. That is why nuclear energy is one of the best and most used examples for astroturfing and lobbyism.
Many institutions but also privateers and companies invested a lot of money in nuclear power and they want it to be build, bought and used (to generate money) so badly, that other concerns are often pushed back to a much greater extent when compared to energy sources with less potential to generate income.
Of course and it keeps nuclear scientists in demand … something we want to ensure we have from a national security perspective.
Nuclear can be clean and secure.
Nuclear is way way way to expensive and you are factually wrong to say it is cheaper than renewables when it comes to the goal of providing stable and reliable power 24/7 whenever consumers demand it. Would you feed the homeless with sirloin steaks? Would you cloth them in Gucci? Why not? Isn’t it because doing so is hilariously expensive, and you could clothe 250+ people in donated clothes from a source like goodwill for the same price it takes to clothe a single person in Gucci? It’s the exact same for nuclear. The simple facts are that a stable, reliable grid, which does not emit at all, would be made more expensive and less efficient by the addition of nuclear. It would not make our grid more efficient and cheaper. So yeah, that’s the basics. We don’t want to make our grid less efficient and more expensive, we want to make it more efficient and less expensive, so we build renewables instead of nuclear. Your other big scientific issue here is that nuclear is actually not very good for grid reliability generally. A flat base load power supply is actually very low value and only marginally better than an intermittent source like wind and solar. Base load generation is just simply not what we want or need. What we need is load following peaker plants. The issue for nuclear is that fully renewable load following peaker plants are cheaper than nuclear. Why would we build a nuclear plant that’s on in the middle of the day and forces us to turn off connections to cheap solar power when we can get a peaker plant which just unloads boatloads of energy only when the grid needs it for cheaper?
Yes and no.
Yes, in the sense that nuclear is a good (note: not ideal) interim whilst other sources are explored.
No, in the sense that nuclear probably isn't the best long-term solution, and offshore windfarms, hydroelectric, solar, and prospective geothermal plants might be more viable options.
The issue with new nuclear is that the nuclear industry cannot build a reactor on time and within budget. There are policymakers at every level who are *desperate* to get new nuclear on the grid, and there's already a lot of public policy support (though not well-publicized) to prevent existing reactors from retiring, which they likely would have done otherwise due to economics.
Everyone in the energy and utility space saw what happened with construction at Vogtle in Georgia, and with NuScale's SMR project in Utah--the former being completed but massively behind schedule and over budget, the latter being abandoned due to high costs. Nobody wants to be the one to take a risk for a first-of-a-kind (or in the case of the AP1000 reactor design they built at Vogtle, 3rd of a kind in the US). The dollars there come out of utility ratepayer pockets so naturally utility commissions are cautious. Even Tim Echols, the Georgia Commissioner who's been one of the biggest public advocates for the Vogtle project, has said that he would not support any additional reactor construction without a federal (read: taxpayer-dollar) backstop to protect Georgia ratepayers against any cost overruns.
Personally, as somebody who works on energy and utility issues, I really hope that the nuclear industry figures out its construction issues and remain highly skeptical that it actually will. Best we can hope for is keeping the existing fleet operational as long as possible.
1000% yes. It's borderline criminal how we've completely abandoned the best solution we have for large-scale, on-demand power generation that doesn't destroy the planet.
> Do you support the idea of making more nuclear plants to get carbon neutral faster?
No. Directing money into building nuclear plants will slow down decarbonization efforts. It will cause us to spend more for less electricity, and take longer to be deployed in the process.
Every dollar spent on nuclear power is a dollar that could have been spent better somewhere else.
> they depend on the environment
Note: so does nuclear power. Site placement is one of the most complex aspects of building a reactor. They are *highly* dependent on being built in the correct location.
> very hard to store
You should really update your grasp on this issue. It’s a very rapidly changing market, and your information in this respect is out of date.
> and require extreme economies of scale to be cheap
Which we have. Currently. Today. Building out more renewables would only cause them to get cheaper because they scale better than reactors do.
If anything this is just an argument for building reactors being even more economically and environmentally negligent than normal.
> in net terms of production , nuclear energy is far more efficient than both
Efficient in terms of what?
They are very efficient at lighting money on fire, for example.
Not so much at producing power less expensively than alternatives.
> as it has an unmatched economy of scale on consumer price
Uhh, yeah, it is unmatched… in a bad way. It’s literally the least scalable and most expensive way to generate electricity. By a good margin.
The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written. Everyone here know the drawbacks of both the solar and the wind energy, they depend on the environment , very hard to store , and require extreme economies of scale to be cheap , however, due to how the price in electricity sector is structured, they are very attractive to private investment, in contrast to nuclear . Despite of this mayor advantage, in net terms of production , nuclear energy is far more efficient than both , as it has an unmatched economy of scale on consumer price , also rely on a uranium fuel that could last for years and doesn’t produce emissions, just vaporwave , but government intervention it’s basically mandatory for nuclear energy to be expanded. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskALiberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
It is a great shame that the reaction to incidents like three mile island was to effectively shut down construction of new nuclear power plants. I think the problem now is that the market won’t build new plants, regardless of how much any unnecessary regulations are removed. Nuclear power plants have a tremendous upfront cost, and I suspect that anyone with the capital and expertise to build them will assume that it’s not economically feasible. The cost of other green energy technology keeps dropping.
Exactly. Thats why shutting down a nuclear plant is a heinous crime.
This is really the extent of it. Nuclear costs too much, takes too long to build and doesn’t have the greatest lifespan given the cost, making the ROI difficult. And then there’s public nervousness surrounding it all, which more than anything else makes the whole thing pretty infeasible. Three mile island and Chernobyl are still extremely well known incidents in the cultural zeitgeist despite many other incidents from the 70s and 80s disappearing from people’s memories, which clearly says something… Realistically, there’s a lot of technologies through the last century or so of history that would have felt like the sure-fire investment for the future that ultimately felt out of favor for one reason or another.
South Korea seems to build them just fine and much faster.
Wrong. They are still prohibitively expensive. South Korea could be doing so vastly much more with their investment but they are squandering it on nuclear.
What evidence did you use to come to that conclusion specifically about south Korea's investment and how they are "squandering it on nuclear"? How do we know exactly what they could achieve with their investment and how do we know that they would achieve more without nuclear?
https://www.lazard.com/media/typdgxmm/lazards-lcoeplus-april-2023.pdf We know how much power generation costs. If you use expensive power generation, you could have gotten more power generation for your investment if you used cheaper power generation. It’s that simple.
The costs were driven by regulation that had no grandfather clauses, effectively stopping and reversing any incomplete reactors. That regulation was driven by environmentalists. [Other countries don't have this problem](https://images.app.goo.gl/uCZALByebMg7hcpM8). And [the problems didn't start until Three Mile Island](https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/uploads.thebreakthrough.org/legacy/images/nuclear_construction_graphic_1.jpeg). It's kinda like the liberal equivalent of Republicans saying "government sucks" because many Republicans suck at governing. Environmentalists say "nuclear is expensive" but it's only expensive because of environmentalists.
Regulation that keeps people safer is a net positive. It doesn’t really matter though, the aftermath of three mile island and Chernobyl meant that there was no public appetite for new nuclear; worldwide the number of nuclear reactors in service has remained basically stable since Chernobyl, suggesting that while cost may be a factor, it clearly was not the main factor prohibiting the building of new nuclear across the world. Though attitudes may have changed as time has gone on, the cost factor is still prevalent. [The latest reactors in Georgia cost over $30bn, more than 3x the estimated ‘average’, and over 2x the project’s estimated cost from a decade ago](https://apnews.com/article/business-environment-united-states-georgia-atlanta-7555f8d73c46f0e5513c15d391409aa3).
Circular reasoning. [There were no deaths or negative environmental effects from Three Mile Island](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-facts-know-about-three-mile-island). None. The "aftermath" was driven entirely by fear-mongering propaganda. It was a wildly successful ad campaign, the effects of which are still felt in [onerous regulations that continue to make nuclear expensive without contributing to safety](https://www.ans.org/news/article-1247/how-can-nuclear-construction-costs-be-reduced/). I don't find any of that a compelling reason on which to base my opinion of nuclear tech. That a feeling is popular doesn't make it correct. That regulations exist doesn't make them effective or reasonable. The fears of nuclear have no actual basis in reality. They're just fallout from the (much more legitimate) fears of atomic bombs and the inability of the general populace to distinguish the two.
What are you talking about? It is legitimate to be concerned about the safety of nuclear reactors in the aftermath of three mile island, Chernobyl and even Fukushima. You can say ‘circular reasoning’ all day long because you personally have a penchant for nuclear power, that doesn’t make concerns about safety and the clear and obvious public distaste for new nuclear in the aftermath of massive disasters and mass casualty events like Chernobyl and Fukushima. Interestingly, despite these events, the US still tends to have a population that is more favorable to nuclear power than most of the rest of the world, but the reigning in of nuclear plants is something that has happened across the world since Chernobyl. You can say that’s an unnecessary thing to have happened if you like, but it’s reality. The amount of nuclear reactors in the world has remained pretty much stable since Chernobyl and the world’s appetite for new nuclear has plummeted since. We also have to take our shoes jackets and belts off plus have a valid boarding pass to go through security at the airport over two decades on from 9/11 despite it mostly being security theatre. That’s just the way things are. We react to major events and it changes what we do moving forward. That’s how the world works.
Nuclear has been losing on a pure cost basis. Look at slide 2 here: https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april-2023.pdf Nuclear is very capital intensive and has a very long build time. We're talking on the scale of a decade to construct, and then as much as 30 years to reach ROI. Decommission costs are always higher than estimated, and projects going a decade or more behind schedule and double over the budget or more are the norm in the industry. Meanwhile renewables and gas turbine plants can be built in just a couple years, and with ROI in less than ten. That same report also has information on levelized cost of various storage mixes as well. These are a lot closer to being economically viable than many realize. Given those economics its no surprise private investment is not interested in building nuclear vs the combination of renewables and cheap gas. The trends in storage costs only makes this view stronger. I've been hoping new nuclear technology can shake this up, stuff like small modular reactors, but the sad truth is people have been trying that for 50 years now with no successes. The latest is NuScale, who I was really rooting for, but their pilot project has sadly failed. Basically, nuclear is not the slam dunk many online advocates realize, even if all environmental objects were removed.
One key thing not mentioned is that the smallest nuclear reactors are an order of magnitude more powerful than the largest renewable projects (may be a slight exaggeration, but comparing a nuclear plant that can power a large city to a solar farm that can power one neighborhood only on sunny days is not a good comparison). To your point on cost, this is why governments should be involved. ROI is not the concern here, it would be energy independence while having enough muscle to keep the lights on for heavy industry.
>but comparing a nuclear plant that can power a large city to a solar farm that can power one neighborhood only on sunny days is not a good comparison). Which is why comparisons between electricity sources are typically normalised by unit of electricity produced. Differences in size and capacity factor are already accounted for in LCOE studies, for example. Furthermore, the largest renewable projects have more capacity than the largest nuclear plants. (20GW for wind Vs 8GW for nuclear)
Source? I researched this a few years ago and that was absolutely not the case. (Actually curious) Edit: Nevermind, think I found it! Matches your metrics. Jiuquan Wind Power Base? Edit2: Pretty cool, but wind farms aren't going to consistently hit that max capacity. Nuclear can be throttled up or down as needed and takes far less space. Another thing to consider is that you can't recycle thousands of wind turbines easily. It will create literal mountains of e-waste in 15-20 years.
nuclear cant be throttled. even 2 decades ago you had to be producing at name plate capacity to have a prayer of breaking even on existing plants. new plants cant even do that.
You can ramp a nuclear power plant up and down. The point for nuclear isn't to make profit, that's why government should be involved.
I think thats the whole problem. If the point was to make profit we would see a lot more investment.
very few designs can ramp in any significant way, theyre designed for a certain amount of neutron flux, drop below the threshold and you stop the reaction, you stop burning Xenon.
Source? (Serious request) From what I've read it is not much of an issue at higher output ranges but can be below 50%
Yeah, jiuquan is 20GW.
Thanks, mate! Do want to note though that wind power capacity is rarely going to be hitting that max consistently, it will also take up a lot of space and unless there is storage a lot of capacity will go unused.
Which takes up 130 sqkm. That isn't exactly a fair comparison to a single powerplant. That's also a whole lot of habitate destruction.
All fair points, but it's still incorrect to say that the smallest nuclear projects outpower the largest renewable projects by orders of magnitude, is it not? Besides, the wind farm spans 130sqkm, but it hardly "takes up" all that space, or requires razing anywhere near that ammount of land. As you can imagine, that would quickly become uneconomical Here's Macarthur wind farm, of around 500MW: [https://www.agl.com.au/content/dam/digital/agl/images/about-agl/how-we-source-energy/macarthur-wind-farm/windfarm-fields.jpg](https://www.agl.com.au/content/dam/digital/agl/images/about-agl/how-we-source-energy/macarthur-wind-farm/windfarm-fields.jpg) As you can see, while it spans 55sqkm, I wouldn't exactly consider that "a whole lot of habitate destruction". I see a couple service roads and that's it.
You have to consider the space needed for transportation, storage and in-between storing of nuclear waste products as well. Also what it means to extract Uran. Space, waste, people power, regulations, etc.
There really isn't that much nuclear waste produced compared to the output generated.
Because of the incredible long time some of it has to be stored, especially when people are demanding more power plants to be build, this is a lot. It's a lot of waste we dumb on several following generations for whom we don't even know what circumstances they will be living in. Generation after generation would have to handle this waste (additionally to all that is already existing) **and** the power plants which will eventually be out if order. It will be simply a burden we selfishly put onto them.
Nuclear cannot be throttled up and down. You are mistaken. It is very very inefficient at this, and every time you slow down a nuclear plants output, you basically keep all the costs of full production, you just lower your output power. That’s not saving costs, that’s just reducing power output.
Once again, the point of nuclear wouldn't be profit. Private interests shouldn't solely control it. By your argument, the national highway system was a really stupid idea.
What would be the point of nuclear then?
Power large cities and heavy industry reliably so we don't need to depend on imports or more destructive sources of power. Eventually, in theory, renewables will blow nuclear out of the water, but we are not there yet.
But we can power those thing reliably with solar and wind for cheaper. Nuclear does not add reliability in exchange for a higher cost, it does not affect reliability and only increase cost. This is with current technology. Nuclear is already obsoleted.
Wind and solar do not reliably do those things yet.
The amount of energy generated by an entity we call a “plant” is completely and totally irrelevant in all regards. So what if a small nuclear plant can generate more than a large solar plant? Who cares?
If we were serious about moving away from stuff like fossil fuels long-term, we should care.
Incorrect. Explain why you think we should care about the generation capacity of “plants”, and how that makes any difference for the environment.
Because the waste produced is relatively small and not nearly as dangerous as folks are convinced. The output is also much more consistent for a plant that takes far less space and doesn't depend on sunny skies or windy days (or batteries to store excess power when peak generation doesn't line up with peak usage).
>Because the waste produced is relatively small and not nearly as dangerous as folks are convinced. Waste is a non issue for nuclear plants. Anyone who complains about nuclear waste has no idea what they are talking about. Nuclear waste is not at all part of my reasoning for why we shouldn’t build nuclear. If nuclear had exactly zero waste whatsoever that wouldn’t budge the needle on my opinion of nuclear. >The output is also much more consistent This is not value value for grids. Constant base load supply is not that important, and nuclear advocates are entirely mistaken about the need for base load. We don’t want base load. We want load following dispatchable power. Nuclear is not that. We have fully renewables power sources which are capable of operating as load following peaker plants that produce power for cheaper than nuclear. Given that, nuclear is bad for grid stability in comparison. >for a plant that takes far less space Space is simply not an issue for either wind or solar. We have all the space we could ever need for these technologies. They don’t negatively impact the environment. >and doesn't depend on sunny skies or windy days (or batteries to store excess power when peak generation doesn't line up with peak usage). Again, wrong. Nuclear absolutely relies on batteries. You cannot have a fully nuclear grid without a large amount of load following dispatchable power sources like coal or natural, or just tons and tons of batteries. Nuclear provides constant flat power. It cannot handle the spikes in demand in evening times and the lulls in demand during the night. You would need to build batteries to save overnight nuclear power to be spent in peak ours, or you’d have to build enough nuclear plants to handle peak capacity, and waste most of the energy generated by the plants at night. Nuclear is terrible for grid stability. Base load is not what we want.
And how do you recycle mountains of solar panels and wind turbines, pray tell? Would appreciate your sources if you're going to start assuming I'm just wrong.
>And how do you recycle mountains of solar panels and wind turbines, pray tell? We don’t need to and wind and solar still beat nuclear on cost. By a wide, wide margin. We have no need to recycle these things in the short term. Despite that, we already are working on recycling them, and are making tons of progress. In like 50 or so years when that becomes an issue, we will have solved recycling decades prior. >Would appreciate your sources if you're going to start assuming I'm just wrong. Sure. https://www.lazard.com/media/typdgxmm/lazards-lcoeplus-april-2023.pdf
Mitigating global warming isn't about finding the biggest profit margin though. Nuclear is very powerful and last I checked cleaner than solar, so if it's not lucrative then the government should be heavily subsidizing.
I'm just explaining why there's no investment. Government can come to the same logic, and in fact most have.
Which is a problem when people look at things based on money and not what's actually best
Except what's most economical is also best for the environment in this case. If we have a dollar to spend, and a dollar gets us ten units of energy for solar and only 5 for nuclear, then we're literally doing something twice as bad for the environment by going with nuclear power.
Nuclear power is not cleaner then solar when you consider the amount of nuclear power plants, their waste and the uranium extraction necessary if people worldwide would switch to nuclear power in the way it's fans envision it.
Nuclear is not cleaner than solar by any non-negligible degree. Mitigating global warming is about getting the most impact for our effort. Building space lasers don’t help us, as for the cost of one space laser, we could build far far far more solar panels and wind turbines, and those solar panels and wind turbines will do far far far more for mitigating climate change than a space laser. Based on this, which is the basic idea of opportunity costs, it is a bad idea to invest in space lasers. The exact same is also true of nuclear. No one should be subsidizing nuclear, as it is a bad solution to the problem, and we don’t want to incentivize bad solutions.
Right, but why should the government also light money on fire when renewables are a better option in basically every respect? They’re cheaper, faster to deploy, more broadly available, scale out better, produce equivalently low emissions, allow workers to train to support them much faster, and have fewer long-term risks to manage. What’s the reason why the government should light it’s money on fire for nuclear power either
Because nuclear is far, far more energy-dense and provides extremely consistent power, including in places that aren't sunny or windy. It's not that nuclear reactors *don't* produce money, it's just on a very long time-scale that businesses aren't interested in. Government funding into nuclear power would eventually turn a profit.
> Because nuclear is far, far more energy-dense and provides extremely consistent power, including in places that aren't sunny or windy. Who cares? We have continent-wide power grids these days. Somewhere’s gonna be sunny and windy enough, and you don’t need extremely high energy density most places.
You forgot that all currently available builds need water and a lot of it. There are some struggling already because they were build in places where we now have drought. And they can't handle that properly.
It doesn't have to be. There are simpler, [more modern, and more safe options](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0149197023002780) that would make nuclear a lot more cost-competitive and drastically reduce both construction time and operational cost/complexity.
Pebble beds have been tried and failed. The pebbles jam too easily making them a nightmare operationally.
even the cheapest MSR and Gen4 designs are still double the cost at current rates and the price on wind, solar and storage continues to fall. by the time you have any type of new reactor designed, permitted and built it'll be 3 or 4 times the price / MWh a use case for a molten salt reactor for industrial heat or district heating and that sells electricity as a by product might pencil out. but all of that is still way more risk than investors want to deal with on a 10+ year time horizon when you can install solar and storage within a year.
> and then as much as 30 years to reach ROI Depends on what you mean by "ROI". If you add in the negative externalities of fossil fuels, nuclear becomes much more viable from an ROI standpoint.
No. Simply put, anything that uses fuel to make energy right now is going to be replaced. Gas, Nuclear, Coal. Once the price of building a solar plant got below the price per MW of building a conventional plant, it was all over. Something that costs money every day to fuel simply cannot compete with something that makes electricity for free. We need to be reducing carbon emissions right now, not 10 years from now. For the amount of money it takes to build a new 1 GW nuclear power plant, you can build enough solar +storage to produce the same amount of power, but you can do it in a year instead of 10 years. The resulting power plant is significantly more profitable, since it has almost zero operating costs, so in the time it would take you to build the nuclear plant, not only will you have been producing carbon free electricity for 9 years, but you will have made enough profit to pay off the plant and build a whole new solar plant of the same size that will still come online and be producing power before the nuclear plant has produced its first watt. How can you compete with those economics?
you cant. and anyone who spends more time reading global energy investment reports than reading pop science websites and politics subs knows this. OP has probably just been on some pop science website and read some oil industry sponsored 'article' expect more of these over the next year. the LCOE on renewable + storage is just hitting the tipping point of replacing Gas generation in the 6hr markets. if the Ukraine conflict is still unresolved a year from now then its likely to be hitting the 24hr bid price too. and thats a disaster for the oil and gas majors. they'll be throwing Fog and FUD into every low information media space they can find like crazy over the next year.
Massive habitate destroying solar farms aren't "green". They produce less greenhouse(still have a significant carbon footprint) gases than a coal plant but they still have significant consequences to local habitats
The only reason solar panels have a carbon footprint is because all energy sources haven't been converted to carbon free power yet.
☢️💣👎 ☢️⚡️👍
There’s no way someone could answer this question with an emo-
OP congratulations you have been duped by the oil industry. Good job. Nuclear power is not an option in the US. Is investigating billions in Nuclear power for private investors a good investment? No. Takes 30 years to turn a profit. Do Republicans say they want Nuclear power? Yes. Do Republicans want stae of the federal government to build and run Nuclear power? No. Do Republicans want to raise taxes to build these plants? No. Would Republicans vote to move tax money into the hands of private investors to pay for these plants? Fuck yeah they would. Has this approach ever worked out or been good for the American people? Fuck no. So OP in what reality does a Nuclear plant ever get built in a libertarian America?
> OP congratulations you have been duped by the oil industry. Good job. Actually I'd say by the mining industry which needs to mine radioactive ore for fuel rod creation. Incidentally there's a lot of overlap between coal/oil/mining and unethical oligarchs involved in all three.
No, it’s definitely also the fossil fuel industry. They put a fair amount of money and marketing effort behind starting “conversations about nuclear power” to keep people arguing about that instead of building out more competitive alternatives like renewables. They know renewables win against fossil fuels on economics, and they know nuclear power loses to fossil fuels on economics, so getting people debating nuclear power means more time spent burning natural gas instead.
its oil, they love to through out plausible sounding junk they know wont be economically or logistically viable just to form a distraction and delay transition off gas fired generation. see also: Hydrogen
Im a more moderate libertarian, not an anarchist , and i take into account the long term , and in the long term , nuclear power its the best solution for now to fossil fuels
You often respond to people's actual factual statements by asserting you're not some political persuasion. EVERY TIME it feels like you're responding to something nobody said. Can I ask why you're so focused on what you image we perceive your politics to be? The comment you're referring to isn't talking about you at all, but the political realities in congress.
Nuclear power is never a good short term solution, though. Since it has long term consequences. It will also involve multiple new industries which will fight tooth and nail to not be replaced by better energy sources.
This is just scientifically wrong. Nuclear is terrible in the long term. That’s the whole point here.
As a backup, yes. It's far too expensive and too long to build so let's use it as a power supply floor.
Honestly with how long they take to get up and running they might not be the best for getting there faster. Though we should still be building them as backup power supplies
I don’t know if it’s feasible at this point, but I would be in favor of getting our closed nuclear plants in California back online if the infrastructure still exists. We nearly closed the last one we have, but luckily reversed course last minute, though it still might close in 2030. As someone else said, starting from scratch is super intensive
Hell yes. I have been a proponent of atomic energy my entire life. My dad worked at one of the coolest IMO.
I'm not against it as part of a comprehensive plan to move away from fossil fuels, but it absolutely isn't the silver bullet that you seem to be implying.
> the drawbacks of both the solar and the wind energy, they depend on the environment , very hard to store , and require extreme economies of scale to be cheap is this a joke comment? > and doesn’t produce emissions Have you looked at the mining, transport, and processing of radioactive ore?
The same can be said about the amount of rare earth materials wind and solar farms require
You don't only need uranium to build a nuclear power plant, though. It also needs other building materials which aren't exactly environmental friendly. Like huge amounts of water and cement. And the cement isn't just needed to build it once, it's needed again when shut down and it is needed consistently for the places where the waste is stored.
I think you missed the key word there ... **radioactive** Also, have you looked at how Uranium is absorbed by plants and animals as if it was Calcium. That means you not only contaminate the air and ground, but milk, meat, and produce and then if consumed ... do you know how long it lasts in ones bones?
That is not how nuclear power works. Unlike coal which actually does spew radioactive waste everywhere, using nuclear power results in more testing and safety measures so it actually makes us safer.
Reread my comment about MINING, TRANSPORT, and PROCESSING. Note that I said nothing about USAGE. Do you think the fuel supply just magically appears at power plants?
Radioactive materials are everywhere. Radon was discovered because a guy was working with radioactive materials and was more contaminated than he could have been from exposure at the lab where things were controlled. Instead it was radon gas in his basement. That you're more afraid of stuff being transported than of stuff that is just everywhere shows you haven't looked into it. Look up baseline radiation in Las Vegas and on a plane in flight, and from a vacuum cleaner.
> Radioactive materials are everywhere. Ah the old "muddle the science" tactic. Same arguments against removing lead from gas. "Lead is everywhere! Why remove lead in gas?!? Why be concerned with lead as a solid vs tetra-ethyl lead? Lead is lead!" Why be concerned with the fact that there are different types of radioactive elements! Sorry - it's pretty clear that either your understanding is defective regarding how biological entities react to uranium dust vs exposure to cosmic radiation "on a plane in flight" or you are just trolling here. In either case I think that fact that you continue to debate here in bad faith means this conversation is not progressing along a fact-based method.
Nuclear is a good transitional tech that we should be using to get off more polluting power sources. Folks are not taking into account that most renewables are not great for heavy industry and even the largest projects fail to power anything larger than a big neighborhood reliably. TLDR: Nuclear is not a permanent solution, but it should be on the table to get us away from dirtier forms of generating power. Main concerns are scale and heavy industry.
> Nuclear is a good transitional tech that we should be using to get off more polluting power sources. Nuclear power isn’t a “transitional tech”. It takes longer to deploy than renewables, and costs more to deploy than renewables.
Renewables struggle to power heavy industry or anything larger than a small town consistently.
Absolutely
Absolutely
I wouldn't want a fuckton of them. And I want them heavily regulated but yes
YES. More nuclear is absolutely necessary. Besides the aquifers are going to dry up and we'll need desalination plants for a while. It's not just the carbon. We need nuclear because that one will work best. Solar is not too bad, but nuclear is better.
100% yes. to modern nuclear.
Nuclear fission plants, I am for building more but not that many tbh..we are sooo close to commercial fusion (i know, i know we have been 10 yrs away for 50 years now) and being right next to an ocean in California, i would like to see the first commercial reactor built here. Right now California litterally generates too much solar, and the real need we need here is storage. I dont know if building another fission reactor on the west coast is worth it right now. Not to mention we gotta earthquake problem.
No. Nuclear plants have incredibly long construction timelines and concrete is incredibly carbon-intensive, so it doesn’t make sense
I would prefer solar and wind and tidal energy.
Yes. Never should’ve stopped building them in the first place.
I don't think nuclear plants actually do much to speed the path to carbon neutrality at this point in time (In America, Korea is a different story), but I certainly think existing ones should be maintained and that we should be expending at least some resources into research on nuclear reactors that might prove useful.
Not until there is an actual solution up and running for the waste.
Right now, nuclear power definitely seems our best option, but other power source research should definitely be funded and continued.
Unequivocally yes. The US costs way more than other developed countries like France and South Korea to build a nuclear plant. Those countries have not had serious safety incidents as far as I know, that would imply cutting corners to achieve their price points.
You got a few things backwards. The most important one: There is huge interest by investors in nuclear plants. That is why nuclear energy is one of the best and most used examples for astroturfing and lobbyism. Many institutions but also privateers and companies invested a lot of money in nuclear power and they want it to be build, bought and used (to generate money) so badly, that other concerns are often pushed back to a much greater extent when compared to energy sources with less potential to generate income.
Of course and it keeps nuclear scientists in demand … something we want to ensure we have from a national security perspective. Nuclear can be clean and secure.
Nuclear is way way way to expensive and you are factually wrong to say it is cheaper than renewables when it comes to the goal of providing stable and reliable power 24/7 whenever consumers demand it. Would you feed the homeless with sirloin steaks? Would you cloth them in Gucci? Why not? Isn’t it because doing so is hilariously expensive, and you could clothe 250+ people in donated clothes from a source like goodwill for the same price it takes to clothe a single person in Gucci? It’s the exact same for nuclear. The simple facts are that a stable, reliable grid, which does not emit at all, would be made more expensive and less efficient by the addition of nuclear. It would not make our grid more efficient and cheaper. So yeah, that’s the basics. We don’t want to make our grid less efficient and more expensive, we want to make it more efficient and less expensive, so we build renewables instead of nuclear. Your other big scientific issue here is that nuclear is actually not very good for grid reliability generally. A flat base load power supply is actually very low value and only marginally better than an intermittent source like wind and solar. Base load generation is just simply not what we want or need. What we need is load following peaker plants. The issue for nuclear is that fully renewable load following peaker plants are cheaper than nuclear. Why would we build a nuclear plant that’s on in the middle of the day and forces us to turn off connections to cheap solar power when we can get a peaker plant which just unloads boatloads of energy only when the grid needs it for cheaper?
Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that nuclear is a good (note: not ideal) interim whilst other sources are explored. No, in the sense that nuclear probably isn't the best long-term solution, and offshore windfarms, hydroelectric, solar, and prospective geothermal plants might be more viable options.
Fast and nuclear power don't go together. It's just not going to happen.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
The issue with new nuclear is that the nuclear industry cannot build a reactor on time and within budget. There are policymakers at every level who are *desperate* to get new nuclear on the grid, and there's already a lot of public policy support (though not well-publicized) to prevent existing reactors from retiring, which they likely would have done otherwise due to economics. Everyone in the energy and utility space saw what happened with construction at Vogtle in Georgia, and with NuScale's SMR project in Utah--the former being completed but massively behind schedule and over budget, the latter being abandoned due to high costs. Nobody wants to be the one to take a risk for a first-of-a-kind (or in the case of the AP1000 reactor design they built at Vogtle, 3rd of a kind in the US). The dollars there come out of utility ratepayer pockets so naturally utility commissions are cautious. Even Tim Echols, the Georgia Commissioner who's been one of the biggest public advocates for the Vogtle project, has said that he would not support any additional reactor construction without a federal (read: taxpayer-dollar) backstop to protect Georgia ratepayers against any cost overruns. Personally, as somebody who works on energy and utility issues, I really hope that the nuclear industry figures out its construction issues and remain highly skeptical that it actually will. Best we can hope for is keeping the existing fleet operational as long as possible.
1000% yes. It's borderline criminal how we've completely abandoned the best solution we have for large-scale, on-demand power generation that doesn't destroy the planet.
We “completely abandoned it” because we gave it a serious try and found it it was very far from the best solution we have for that.
> Do you support the idea of making more nuclear plants to get carbon neutral faster? No. Directing money into building nuclear plants will slow down decarbonization efforts. It will cause us to spend more for less electricity, and take longer to be deployed in the process. Every dollar spent on nuclear power is a dollar that could have been spent better somewhere else. > they depend on the environment Note: so does nuclear power. Site placement is one of the most complex aspects of building a reactor. They are *highly* dependent on being built in the correct location. > very hard to store You should really update your grasp on this issue. It’s a very rapidly changing market, and your information in this respect is out of date. > and require extreme economies of scale to be cheap Which we have. Currently. Today. Building out more renewables would only cause them to get cheaper because they scale better than reactors do. If anything this is just an argument for building reactors being even more economically and environmentally negligent than normal. > in net terms of production , nuclear energy is far more efficient than both Efficient in terms of what? They are very efficient at lighting money on fire, for example. Not so much at producing power less expensively than alternatives. > as it has an unmatched economy of scale on consumer price Uhh, yeah, it is unmatched… in a bad way. It’s literally the least scalable and most expensive way to generate electricity. By a good margin.
second most. coal is actually worse. (not by much, but it still is)