I totally agree that current nuclear power generation should be left running until we have enough green energy to pick up the slack, because it does provide clean and safe energy. However, I totally disagree on the scalability, for two main reasons:

1. Current nuclear power generation is non-renewable. It is somewhat unclear how much Uranium is available worldwide (for strategic reasons), but even at current production, supply issues have been known to happen. And it goes without saying that waiting to scale up some novel unproven or inexistent sustainable way of nuclear power production is out of the question, for time and safety reasons. Which brings me to point 2.

2. We need clean, sustainable energy right now if we want to have any chance of fighting climate change. From start of planning of a new nuclear power plant to first power generation can take 15 or 20 years easily. Currently, about 10% of all electricity worldwide is produced by about 400 nuclear reactors, while around 15 new ones are under construction. So, to make any sort of reasonable impact, we would have to build to the tune of 2000 new reactors, pronto. To do that within 30 years, we’d have to increase our construction capacity 5 to 10 fold. Even if that were possible, which I strongly doubt, I would wager the safety and cost impacts would be totally unjustifiable. And we don’t even have 30 years anymore. That is to say nothing of regulatory checks and maintenance that would also have to be increased 5 fold.

So imho nuclear power as a solution to climate change is a non-starter, simply due to logistical and scaling reasons. And that is before we even talk about the very real dangers of nuclear power generation, which are of course not operational, but due to things like proliferation, terrorist attacks, war, and other unforseen disruptions through e.g. climate change, societal or governmental shifts, etc.

I don’t know natural disasters and war causing it to screw up also tends to worry people. Last time I checked wind and solar don’t create massive damage to the environment when destroyed.

Nuclear power is the ONLY form of clean energy that can be scaled up in time to save us from the worst of climate change.

Long term nuclear is great…

But building new plants uses a shit ton of concrete. So we’re paying the carbon cost up front, and it can take years or even decades to break even.

So we can’t just spam build nuke plants right now to fix everything.

30 years ago that would have worked.

We’ve had the cure for climate change all along

Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this simply isn’t true with established nuclear technologies. Expanding our currently nuclear energy production requires us to fully tap all known and speculated Uranium sources, nets us only a 6% CO² reduction, and we run out of Uranium by 2100. We might be able to use Thorium in fuel cycles to expand our net nuclear capacity, but that technology has to yet to be proven at scale. And all of this ignores the high startup cost, regulatory difficulties, disposal challenges and weapons proliferation risks that nuclear typically presents.

emphasis mine:

Anti-nuclear is like anti-GMO and anti-vax: pure ignorance, and fear of that which they don’t understand.

First of all anti- #GMO stances are often derived from anti-Bayer-Monsanto stances. There is no transparency about whether Monsanto is in the supply chain of any given thing you buy, so boycotting GMO is as accurate as ethical consumers can get to boycotting Monsanto. It would either require pure ignorance or distaste for humanity to support that company with its pernicious history and intent to eventually take control over the world’s food supply.

Then there’s the anti-GMO-tech camp (which is what you had in mind). You have people who are anti-all-GMO and those who are anti-risky-GMO. It’s pure technological ignorance to regard all GMO equally safe or equally unsafe. GMO is an umbrella of many techniques. Some of those techniques are as low risk as cross-breeding in ways that can happens in nature. Other invasive techniques are extremely risky & experimental. You’re wiser if you separate the different GMO techniques and accept the low risk ones while condemning the foolishly risky approaches at the hands of a profit-driven corporation taking every shortcut they can get away with.

So in short:

• Boycott all U.S.-sourced GMO if you’re an ethical consumer. (note the EU produces GMO without Monsanto)
• Boycott just high-risk GMO techniques if you’re unethical but at least wise about the risks. (note this is somewhat impractical because you don’t have the transparency of knowing what technique was used)
• Boycott no GMO at all if you’re ignorant about risks & simultaneously unethical.

Ahh… no. New solar and wind generation can be spun up much faster than nuclear.

What provides me trepidation is the economic system means slack jawed corpos with MBAs will be working tirelessly to skirt safety.

Now if the government was to run … Wait, that is communism and is therefore the bad thing to do /s

And people’s age and background has so weirdly much to do with how they internalize nuclear safety risk. My best german friend is very opposed to fossil fuels and believes in much stronger renewable focus, but is absolutely opposed to nuclear and basically laughs about how stupid he thinks that risk is. It’s wild.

Especially when you realize how little impact Chernobyl and Fukushima really had. Even including those two accidents, coal plants have emitted vastly more radioisotopes (which occur naturally at low levels in coal, but since we burn such vast quantities of coal…) and vastly more carcinogens.

Can you explain how we handle waste safely into the next milenia?

Funfact: РБМК-1000(same model as in Chernobyl) was used on all four blocks in St. Petersburg(Leningrad). Currently 2 out of 4 are still in use, another two were replaced with ВВЭР-1200.

I am a huge fan of nuclear power, but I wouldn’t say fearing it is ignorance.

You need to make sure it is regulated, secure, well-engineered, and above all, we need a place to store the waste.

Yet, congress and others, at least in America, have done nothing. We should mainly be powered by nuclear and it is rare for a plant to be built. If done correctly you get safe, clean, power.

imagine how much farther ahead we would be in safety and efficiency if it was made priority 50 years ago.

we still have whole swathes of people who think that because its not perfect now, it cant be perfected ever.

It’s crazy you got over a hundred down votes, most which are just anti nuclear reactions brainwashed into them by corporations who knew they could make more money off coal, and made nuclear out to be the enemy.

Honest question: why shouldn’t we be afraid?

but fear that we’d do another Chernobyl has scared us away from it.

Chernobyl turned an entire city into a radioactive wasteland for the next 10k years. Same goes for 3-mile island and Fukushima. The last of which was just over 10 years ago.

Are we so arrogant to think that that could never happen again? What’s changed?

That’s an oversimplification to the point that it is wrong. Nuclear power is not the only form of clean energy like that at all. It can not be scaled in this situation to save us, because it takes too long to build them.

It also doesn’t help that people got brainwashed that solar energy and heat pumps will solve all our problems. I don’t have enough space to install so many solar panels to provide power to heat pump during the Eastern European winter and even if I did, ROI will be longer than their expected lifetime. And we still use lead during production, and no one wants to recycle them. These geniuses here import broken solar panels and dump them into the ground and cover them, call that recycling. FFS, nuclear waste disposal is less scary than this uncontrolled shit.

Especially when you start counting the number of people that have died either directly or indirectly from coal, oil and every fossil fuel.

If your extrapolate the data into the next hundred years … fossil fuels will have responsible for the deaths of billions.

Compared to nuclear energy … fossil fuels is killing us slowly and will kill us all if we don’t stop using them.

I spoke with a far left friend of mine about this. His position essentially boiled down to the risk of a massive nuclear disaster outweighed the benefits. I said what about the known disastrous consequences of coal and oil? Didn’t really have a response to that. It doesn’t make sense to me. I’ll roll those dice and take the .00001% chance risk or whatever.

I think you’re misreading the room. People are against nuclear because they’re for renewables, not because they’re for fossil fuels.

Looking at you, Germany…

For real, God forbid we keep the actual safe, clean nuclear plants running

My understanding is that they eventually become unserviceable as they age, because of mechanical/structular reasons, or because the costs of servicing them is so prohibitive that they are unserviceable economically.

That they definitely have a life cycle of begin, middle, and end.

I completely agree with everything you said except for ONE little thing:

You are grossly misrepresenting how far that can is kicked down, for the worse. It doesn’t kick it down a couple thousand years, it kicks it down for if DOZENS of millennia assuming we stay at the current energy capacity. Even if we doubled or tripled it, it would still be dozens of millennia. First we could use the uranium, then when that is gone, we could use thorium and breed it with plutonium, which would last an incomprehensibly longer time than the uranium did. By that point, we could hopefully have figured out fusion and supplement that with renewable sources of energy.

The only issue that would stem from this would be having TOO much energy, which itself would create a new problem which is heat from electrical usage.

Why is it supposed to be easier to get people onboard with nuclear (which is decreasing) than wind and solar (which are increasing at triple the rate of the nuclear construction peak in the 80s and growing at 20% p.a.)?

People are on board with VRE. Some of the are on board with nuclear too, but it’s not working.

I really cannot stand that phrase because it’s commonly used as poor rationale for not favoring a superior approach. Both sides of the debate are pushing for what they consider optimum, not “perfection”.

In the case at hand, I’m on the pro-nuclear side of this. But I would hope I could make a better argument than to claim my opponent is advocating an “impossible perfection”.

Some of the biggest blunders of all time come across because too many people let perfect be the Nemesis of good

The problem with Nuclear’s “good enough” is that Nuclear is currently worse than other technology we have in almost every way.

1. Higher total lifetime cost per kwh than solar or land-based wind (and hydro, but that’s niche), even after factoring in capacitors for weather and time of day/year
2. Awkwardly front-loaded TCO. You basically pay a huge percent of that ugly TCO up front, making Nuclear more prohibitively expensive than its modest total lifetime cost would imply.
3. Long life. This is a terrible thing. TCO’s of solar and wind plants are predicated upon a 20 year obsolescence. That means, the TCO includes the cost to build, tear down, and make way for the inevitable better tech in 20 years. Nuclear plants are priced at 50+ year lifetimes. You can’t easily retrofit a nuclear plant with better technology if/when it starts to catch up.

It is absolutely true that solar and wind are better because more money has gone into their research. But because of that, they are better options in almost all real world power situations.

The problem with focusing on nuclear is… why waste all that political capital just to spend 100x the money or more that you could spend to be 100% renewbles in the short term? The front-loaded TCO is the real issue with that one. If you wanna hit 0 emissions tomorrow with Solar/Wind, you’re just paying the up-front costs, knowing there are per-year costs (still cheaper than fossil fuels) to keep it going. If you want to do the same with nuclear, you’re paying for almost all of it out of the gate for 50 years worth. Suffice to say, that’s a budgeting nightmare.

And what’s left is space. Nuclear creates a lot of power in a small area. But wind and solar are both far more easily/efficiently integrated into the space we are already using.

Buying time isn’t a great argument for nuclear when it takes so much longer than wind or solar to build a plant - median time of 88 months to build a nuclear plant compared to 8-14 for solar.

People will get on board when they see the cost per kwh.

But this is my argument against those who complain about Solar and Wind – those won’t kill you or destroy a location for hundreds of years if they break down and once they’re installed they don’t have to be fed by more mining, or anything else. Just wind and sun.

I fail to understand how managing wastes remotely toxic to all forms of life for 500K years would be economicaly viable. This just calls for increasingly more power demand. It is hard to sell when there are alternatives that are cheaper, cleaner, more scalable, easier to build (eg offshore wind).

There are plenty of safer, quicker technologies available. Repairing the US grid would give us 20% more power.

The oil and coal lobby is pushing nuclear in markets it’s losing - both to slow the transition to renewables with endless debate, and because nuclear takes so damn long to build.

Well, before it was totally unimportant but now that a British Newspaper (i.e. from the nation in Europe with the most “opinion forming” - aka propagandistic - press) published an article were a “young danish climate activist” said it, it’s suddenly important. /s

Mind you, I’m not attacking nuclear or saying that it shouldn’t be part of the future energy mix in Europe, I’m just a little fed up with the overuse of this kind of theatrical spin in opinion articles by newspapers which are very open about their objective being to “form opinion”.

I actually think this relentless use of the slease-sale rather than actual well argumented logical analyses that looks at pros & cons plus risks & opportunities is actually damaging the cause of nuclear, or in fact any cause these types take up, as the slease-sale is often associated with them having some kind profit interest for somebody: The Guardian is a center-right neoliberal mouthpiece that only seems “left” in the UK context because British politics has an overtoon window moved so far to the right that the government is very openly ultra-nationalist and anti-immigrant, and almost all of The Guardian’s writers and editors hail from the British Middle-Class.

The UK has quite the history of doing the wrong kind of nuclear power plants with massive delays and cost overruns, and those white elefant projects are always outsourced to the private, so demands for nuclear from British high-middle-class “opinion makers” as sadly manipulative “selling the book” and hypocrisy is pretty standard in the upper classes over there.

The arguments of Greenpeace against nuclear power have nothing to do with age though. It’s too expensive, which takes money away from e.g. wind and solar, with less carbon-free energy in the end for the money spent and more fossil fuels being used as a consequence. And still produces nuclear waste. Just develop batteries, hydrogen and the likes for storage. And ban or tax the use of fossil fuels. This debate is not over yet, not by a long shot, and climate will remain in the news as long as we live, I’m afraid.

Media just seems random sometimes…

It seems Finland looked at EU and USSR and said “I want that, but better”.

Alsu Russia has its own reprocessing for a long time, but yeah, not until Putin dies.

Power generation and power use need to be synchronous. Renewables generate power at rates outside of our control. In order to smooth out that generation and bring a level of control back to power distribution we would need a place to store all the energy. Our current methods are not dense enough and are extremely disruptive/damaging to the environment. Nuclear gives us a steady and predictable base level of generation that we can control. Which would make it so we don’t need to pump vast quantities of water into massive manmade reservoirs or build obnoxiously large batteries.

I can’t imagine a future without solar, wind, and nuclear power.

not unless we find out we are wrong about thermodynamics.

For what I’ve read, it’s beats nuclear tech exists and is ready to be built at scale now. Renewables are intermittent in nature and need energy storage to work at scale. We don’t have the tech for a grid wide energy storage.

Nuclear is a much more reliable power source, barring a breakdown, you know exactly how much a nuclear reactor will produce at any given time.

Renewables are much more finnicky, and you really need something like hydro, that has a large amount of energy storage, to back it up.

If renewables are an option you should definitely go for them, but we as a species are pretty much at manufacturing capacity for them. That capacity is being increased, but for now it makes sense to do nuclear in parallel.

Renewables also have the issue of storage, and not all locations are as suitable for wind or solar.

There are cases where nuclear makes more sense, and especially in the short term we need anything that will get us away from fossil fuels.

Scalability problems. We need to make as many solar wind and battery installations as we can, but there’s only so much production and installation capacity. And eventually we’ll run short on materials, especially for batteries. Nuclear uses a different system, so we can scale that even as we have issues with other systems.

safety and efficiency will be improved by investment in nuclear. storage needs are dramatically reduced because we now have reactors that can run off of the waste of other reactors, “recycling” it and massively improving efficiency while reducing waste. yes, there are concerns with nuclear, but opposing nuclear is a losing battle. we need nuclear, and yes, the tech needs to develop further, but we won’t get that without investing in it today.