Ask Lemmy

It's good and has few downsides, but I feel like we kind of missed the boat and solar is the move now.

It was worth it 30-50 years ago. But we wasted too much time fucking around.

At this point any money spent is better spent on wind and solar.

I used to think it was the way to go for base load generation, but now I'm more excited about sodium batteries because they seem safer and cheaper.

Nuclear energy is expensive to generate compared to its green competitors. Therefore, it's a waste of time and money to focus on it at a time when renewable energy is currently cheaper to produce, knowing that the gap between nuclear and energy is projected to widen even more.

Powerful, but also nonsensical in a world where nuclear reactors have to be stopped because the water used to cool them isn't cold enough. Several reactors in France are powered down or nerfed during heatwaves, for instance. Also, when nuclear goes wrong, it goes catastrophically wrong, with consequences for generations. It doesn't sound reasonable.

I personally feel safer with wind, solar, water, etc, but pragmatism will probably ask of us to use a mix of both renewable and nuclear, especially if AI data-centers hog enough power for us all to live in the tech-surveillance world desired by our genocidal, children-r*ping Epstein classes.

Hm. I guess some technazis ought to get luigied. For ecological reasons, of course, nothing personal. We could also upcycle them to compost.

Safety issues aside, I don’t like the power grid topology they create—where power is distributed radially from a single centralized source. Systems like that are fragile and inflexible, with a single point of failure; and they promote similar institutions to control them.

Networks are more robust when they’re distributed and redundant, with lots of interconnected local sources. Solar and wind are a lot more amenable to that kind of structure.

Most countries would rely on other countries for the fuel, like european plants rely on russia. Being sovereign for your power generation is very important in my opinion.

Where nuclear plants have been built to a safe standard, sweat them for their useful life. The costs are paid down, and the energy is cheap to produce, creating only a truckload or so of waste (which can be reprocessed into fuel) for a year’s power.

Where there aren’t usable nuclear plants, you’re probably better off building renewables and/or energy storage. The upfront costs of nuclear are steep. (Also, some nuclear plants built when the climate was cooler are having to shut down on hot days due to the temperature of water used to cool them being too high.)

In either case, I’d rather have modern nuclear power than coal.

I don’t think the technicals even matter.

What matters now is:

• Popular public perception.

• Incentives for decision makers.

• And lobbying funds to sway both.

And this makes it tricky:

• Fission looks bad to a layman. It’s scary, and failures and the waste feel dangerous no matter what the reality is. It’s a perfect fit for social media clickbait too.

• New fission plants are a long term investment. They’re expensive, up front. In other words, they don’t yield any political points before a governor’s or mayor’s or or CEO’s term ends, basically, while even renewables like solar or wind are faster to set up.

• There is a sizable nuclear lobby. This is a plus. But Oil will crush it like a bug if it gets “too big” and appreciably threatens petro power.

So as much as I love it, I thinks the best we can hope for in most regions is “recommissioning old plants.”

And to be clear, fusion is a completely different category to me.

I think it’s a waste of precious funds, and is “hopium” for the public. It’s theoretically interesting, but even with a breakthrough, in best-case scenarios, it’s still gonna be expensive to maintain and have many drawbacks. Some are even worse than fission (like more extreme neutron radiation irradiating and eroding components, and stupendously high up-front costs).

I think the funds would be better allocated towards maser drilling for geothermal and cheaper solar cells. And these would yield quicker political points, too, like coal/gas plants quickly converted to geothermal, or mass produced, cheap “backyard solar” the average person can buy and make money with.

It would have been great if there was not the questions of;

• costs: to operate and to build one.
• safety (unfortunately, the times are less and less safe and having a big target that can devastate a huge are isn't ideal).
• there is no real plan for what to do with the nuclear waste. => shipping everything to and old salt mine is no longer viable.
• yes it's C02 neutral, but the impact on the enviroment to enrige the materials and later cool the radiactive material is also considerable.
• are there even enough people that can operate one?
• you still have realiance on others for the radiactive materials.
• Just like other renewable energies the nuclear power plants are often not operating and out of the grid. (During this haat wave for example to river water was too hot to be used as coolant and the nclear powet plants had to be put of the grid.

For all this I think it's a waste of resources to invest on an old technology thats sounds cool but has been proven to have many major drawbacks, compared to what it has to offer. So I'm all for using these resources in renewable energy sources, how to be more efficient with them, how to improve the accumulation capacities and how to have grids that are cimpatible with them.

I assume you are talking about fission. We (Germany) somewhat famously don't have nuclear power anymore and I think that is a good thing. IMO the risks overweigh the benefits, and I don't only mean the risk of a nuclear power plant blowing up. Aside from that there are two mayor downsides.

First they are fucking expensive to build at least any recent projects I have heard of are billions over cost.

Second is the waste problem which specifically is a hot topic in germany, there just doesn't seem to be a good way to get rid of it. I have read some comments saying that there are ways to deplete them even more but never heard of such a system being actually used.

A minor point for me is also that I think, that less centralised infrastructure using wind and solar energy is a better way to go.

Some proponents (especially online) love to talk about "small" reactors, but I've never heard of one actually being in use, at most there were tests of it is actually feasible (as far as I know at least, and I am not an expert)

I recently watched this video and learned so much!

Yes, my country has at least three nuclear power plants.

It's expensive and unnecessary and doesn't work when it's hot out.

Germany literally had to help France and its nuclear power stations out with its renewables because they couldn't cool down the nuclear power stations during the heatwave.

From the US:

Nuclear power represents the intermediate stage between hydrocarbon/petrochemical/fossil fuels and fully renewable (solar/wind/geothermal) energy; an eventual full transition to nuclear power, even as a de facto stopgap until renewable energy infrastructure can handle the power demands of today, is ultimately the correct course of action, especially if the intention is to reduce and ultimately eliminate CO2 & other greenhouse gas emissions to slow global warming & climate change.