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this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2024
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We really should be using nuclear. I know people are concerned about the longevity of the waste but it's not much different than any other waste like you'd find with mining. There is enough arsenic trioxide at a mine in the NWT to kill everyone on the face of the planet 7x over. It's all underground. Their plan for it? Keep it frozen in perpetuity.
Waste rock dumps from mining can have tremendous amounts of metal that can easily leach out for a very long time given that these dumps are hundreds of millions of tonnes of rock. They are usually covered and left once monitoring indicates they are stable.
There is tons of modelling and engineering that can go into waste mgt. It shouldn't deter us when we are literally staring down the barrel or extinction
The main reason you don't see a lot of new nuclear power plants going up is that it's more expensive than any other way to generate electricity, and the recent experience in the US has involved massive budget overruns for nuclear.
There's massive budget over-runs for just about every mega project. I concede that nuclear is at the top of the list that I link. I actually heard a good talk about how doing field trials can really help reduce overruns for a major project (e.g. mining). Hard to do with a powerplant, I suppose, but easier to do with nuclear storage.
In the past, even recently, I was an advocate for nuclear. I still would suggest any plants still operating continue to do so for as long as possible, and any plants already under construction should be completed.
But at some point, the evidence in favor of overbuild with solar and wind became too much to ignore. Your link about over-runs, which I'd never seen before, only adds to that body of evidence. Solar and Wind's over-runs are a fraction of Nuclear's.
Solar and wind have simply become so cheap, and nuclear so difficult due to the required generational knowledge being lost, that by the time you trained up enough people to relearn what the old builders knew, and built a sizeable amount of them, it's simply too likely that we could've built double the generational capacity with solar in the same amount of time with far less cost.
A major blocker of solar going even faster (In the us) is simply politics; how slow and understaffed the queue is to become connected with the grid, how terrible the system of who pays to expand the grid's carrying capacity is (the project that pushes it over the edge into needing an upgrade foots the bill, which often makes the project unprofitable, which makes them give up and not build), and how private power companies themselves push back due to a perceived loss of profit potential. But compared to Nuclear's hurdles, those seem relatively easy to overcome.
Maybe someday some company will figure out a way to make modular reactors affordable and quick to build, but I wouldn't bet the farm on it.
My dear Froggie (and silence!) I don't know who is downvoting you, but they can fuck right off.
You make great points. I particularly like this one:
I'm not a staunch nuclear advocate by any stretch. I want green power however we can get it, provided the environmental costs aren't abhorrent. You're very right about the brain drain part, too.
There's mining involved in any energy transition. One part that I like about the Nuclear option, however, is that the deposits are generally high grade (v.s. copper, and rare earth) which result in less surface disturbances. For instance, Cameco (northern Saskatchewan) has uranium ore deposits that are ~20% w/w. Their deposits are so rich, that they have to dilute them with inert waste rock before running through the mill. These deposits are just sitting there, ready to be used for green energy, but as you point out, there's too many hurdles.
Solar and wind seem like they're really picking up speed, and that is wonderful. I know there's still some issues to iron out about excess generation/power storage/power fluctuation. I could see small batch reactors helping with that potentially. I don't think an energy transition is going to be a one size fits all thing. It's going to be based regionally, on what makes sense.
That's the thing about wind and solar; they look like a series of smaller projects instead of a mega-project. So you don't have that problem in the same way.
All of that is true but there are entire genres of science fiction that people grew up on telling them that nuclear waste is scary green stuff that will do everything from melt your skin off to turn you into the toxic avenger. A major chunk of the population only knows about nuclear waste from that and doesn't care what experts say.
Modern nuclear facilities and storage devices ARE safe but when you bring it up, people will just go "Yeah but Fukushima/Chernobyl, happened, I don't want that to happen in my neighborhood" completely ignoring the fact that the soviet design was flawed from the start, and the Japanese one was located in a Tsumnami zone.
As for other industrial waste, its not visible to the average person so it doesn't exist. We are finally coming to the realization of how pervasive in the environment some of these chemicals are. PFAS/PFOS is basically everywhere, coal fly ash leaks all the time, creosote is essentially on every railroad track, leachate is entering ground water from old land fills, dioxin and mercury so prevalent on the gulf coast that eating the seafood is harmful. But again, none of that is visible. The East Palestine derailment was visible and nothing changed afterwards.
Humanity in general but industrialists in particular destroyed the planet and got paid go do it, then put the bill on the average person when cleanup came.
Nuclear is going to be needed 100% but it is an uphill battle. I hope the battle gets easier and the safety record continues to get better.
I think Frog and silence are right. The amount of time, effort, and money that is required to set up nuclear plants at this point in time has far passed the equivalent in solar or wind projects. Add the fact that the sooner any project is finished, the less CO2 and CH4 is potentially released from nearby coal and gas plants; and since we're already in passing up goals for global warming, the earlier the better.
I diagree, at current tech/time energy storage is the problem with peaky production methods like wong and solar.
You need capacity and quick spinup capacity for when demand occurs off peak production. Nuclear is the only green option with current tech for large scale. Fuel cells would be ideal when powered with electrolyzed h2 created by excess solar generation capacity but the tech isn't there yet and we need something now.
Thermal energy storage and pumped hydro are both viable but spatially problimatic or expensive in the long term. IMO, micro grids with local solar as the source are where we should be going but local storage is an issue even where sun is abundant.
NIMBY is a real thing, and you're right: the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters weigh heavy in the public's mind. Donning my tinfoil hat, I'd almost wager that the oil industry did a smear job on nuclear, similar to how marijuana was smeared by cigarette companies.
Not a stretch at all given they killed public transit in a number of American cities.