The irony of Homer Simpson representing safe nuclear energy…
Well, it took much effort for Homer to blow up NPP
Hi, I work in waste handling, and I would like to tell you about dangerous materials and what we do with them.
There are whole hosts of chemicals that are extremely dangerous, but let’s stick with just cyanide, which comes from coal coking, steel making, gold mining and a dozen chemical synthesis processes.
Just like nuclear waste, there is no solution for this. We can’t make it go away, and unlike nuclear waste, it doesn’t get less dangerous with time. So, why isn’t anyone constantly bringing up cyanide waste when talking about gold or steel or Radiopharmaceuticals? Well, that’s because we already have a solution, just not “forever”.
Cyanide waste, and massive amounts of other hazardous materials, are simply stored in monitored facilities. Imagine a landfill wrapped in plastic and drainage, or a building or cellar with similar measures and someone just watches it. Forever. You can even do stuff like build a golfcourse on it, or malls, or whatever.
There are tens of thousands of these facilities worldwide, and nobody gives a solitary fuck about them. It’s a system that works fine, but the second someone suggests we do the same with nuclear waste, which is actually less dangerous than a great many types of chemical waste, people freak out about it not lasting forever.
https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxguides/toxguide-8.pdf
I didn’t know that before but it appears cyanide does have a half-life that is a fraction of nuclear waste.
That doesn’t make it or the other compounds less dangerous, of course.
That’s uhh, not what that says. One of the two mentions of half life are your body converting cyanide into thiocyanate, which will kill you and depending on your last bowel movement, make your corpse into hazardous waste itself.
The other mention is hydrogen cyanide in air, which is lighter than air and will decompose back into cyanide eventually, scattering it over a large area. Which will technically make it go away from your site, but spreading toxic waste over the countryside is illegal for a reason.
Most cyanide in surface water will form hydrogen cyanide and evaporate.
As long as it has a surface to evaporate, it will degenerate.
Oh yeah, you could totally just leave it in a giant pool and ignore it. It’ll react, evaporate and eventually break down into cyanide again, rain down, subtly poison the area, react again, evaporate again, etc.
And that’s great for the owner of the big pool of cyanide, and very bad for everyone else. Stuff that evaporates doesn’t disappear, the cyanide doesn’t magically change into cookiedough. You’re just spreading it around more.
Hydrogen cyanide will turn into “cookie dough” in 1-5 years. Which is way shorter than “forever”.
The way you said it in your first comment made it seem longer lasting than radioactive waste. Which it isn’t according to the linked PDF. That is the only point I was trying to make.
Curious to hear you say this. I live in NZ and cyanide waste is always raised as an objection to gold mining.
An unfortunate reality is that while we CAN store things safely, that doesn’t mean they always will be.
Cyanide is used extensively in precious metal recycling too. So even reclaiming resources has a harsh chemical cost. Meeting workers from there I was surprised to say the least about how ‘casually’ they work with Cyanide. Clearly they have safty protocall but nothing like what I imagined something like Cyanide would call for.
In addition to hazardous materials regulations, I also do workplace safety, and this doesn’t surprise me at aaaaall. People get really casual around stuff that kills you slowly.
Yeah but how is the Kremlin going to control us with their gas & oil if we have nuclear?
Checkmate uh pro democratic people I guess?
Yeah but how is the Kremlin going to control us with their gas & oil if we have nuclear?
France is EU’s first importer of ‘Russian nuclear products’: study – Euractiv
New report shows Russia raking in revenue from state nuclear company | Fox Business
Russia faces threat of sanctions on nuclear power industry as Germany backs uranium ban – POLITICO
Bratislava to reject EU’s latest sanctions package if it includes ban on Russia nuclear fuel
Russia’s Rosatom Helps Putin Skirt Sanctions
Russia’s nuclear project in Hungary: France’s growing role | OSW Centre for Eastern Studies
https://www.greenpeace.de/publikationen/20220517-greenpeace-report-russland-taxonomie.pdf
They have more uranium than we do
There are downsides to nuclear these days. Incredibly high cost with a massive delay before they’re functioning. Solar + wind + pumped hydro + district heating is where it’s at in 2024.
This.
Also, tie together more countries’ power grids to even out production and demand of renewables, and reduce the need for other backup sources.
For a fraction of the cost of nuclear, increase the storage capacity as well. We’ve had days where the price per MWh was negative in many hours, because of excess production.
The barriers to carbon free energy aren’t technical, they’re purely political.
Yeah, back in 2010 and before nuclear was the way to go but with the incredible advancements in solar and wind it’s no longer the best option.
Still shame on Germany for decommissioning nuclear reactors and deciding to build Nordstream 2 and burn coal as a replacement.
You probably also didnt heard about Thorium based molten salt reactors, they are much safer than conventional nuclear, also cheaper, and you can have a 50MW installation in space not much larger than a shipping container. A 50MW solar installation is close to 1km2 and thats without any storage included. It even can be modified to run on spent fuel of conventional nuclear power plants.
No industry has quite so much vaporware technology as nuclear power. Any idiot can promise and never deliver. Look at Elon Musk.
You don’t need to tie grids to transfer energy between them.
Please understand that negative prices are the market for electricity breaking down! That is not a good thing. It should mean that if you have solar panels on your roof you have to pay to participate in the national grid because you are dumping energy into the grid when it can’t use it, but special rules have been made for renewable plants. Literally, imagine a contract-to-supply for wind or solar…
I understand very well the implications of the negative price, which is why I advocated NOT to spend trillions in nuclear, when issues of balancing demand and production can be solved for a fraction of what nuclear costs.
district heating is where it’s at in 2024.
You don’t have those in 2024? Commies built central heating in every city.
Iceland, where I’m from, has had it for ages in pretty much every house.
Still not a reason to not build them, the entire point is for nuclear to handle the load when solar/wind can’t provide due to weather. Other renewables will still be producing the bulk of the power we need, but at night nuclear will be handling any demand spikes, each of them would greatly reduce the number of batteries required to satisfy the demand. They can stay until our solar output is so high we can just start electrolyzing water into hydrogen as energy storage.
If you’re suggesting using Nuclear as a peaker plant or to turn it off and on whenever wind/solar is not up for it then I’m sorry to say that it’s not viable. Nuclear generators don’t handle well being turned off and on.
You can make Thorium reactors much smaller and cheaper, basically a 50MW unit is not much larger than a shipping container, while being much more safe than standard nuclear plants. The largest issue is over-regulation of the nuclear power in general.
A 50MW of solar installation is HUGE, and thats 50MW at the sunniest part of the planet: https://newsaf.cgtn.com/news/2019-12-15/Kenya-launches-Chinese-built-50MW-solar-power-plant-MqC575l6Te/index.html, We are basically talking about close to a square kilometer installation…
there is simply no way to call a 50MW solar plant cleaner than nuclear and its probably not even that much cheaper in the end. Compare that to a shipping container sized reactor… Only thing in the way, is the nuclear scare and government regulations.
The cost is less from the design and more from the safety regulations. Best case scenario the state just starts making nuclear power plants, it’s just not a good idea to mix profit incentive with nuclear.
If you’re interested in energy solutions and haven’t read the RethinkX report on the feasibility of a 100% solar, wind and battery solution, it’s definitely worth taking a look.
Whilst I agree that we need to decarbonise asap with whatever we can, any new nuclear that begins planning today is likely to be a stranded asset by the time it finishes construction. That money could be better spent leaning into a renewable solution in my view.
The materials needed to produce batteries and wind turbines and maintain them over time is the issue. Did your 62 page report discuss this?
Doesn’t seem to be including the land usage.
Does it cover everyone on the planet using the same amount of electricity as a North American? 8 billion people now. And usage is increasing too, gotta power EVs and AI (but not limited to that).
im fine with dropping AI for more humans right now, but apparently that wont generate shareholder value.
First it doesn’t matter because it’s going to happen whether we want it to or not.
Second the whole point is that electricity use per capita is always increasing.
Idk if people would drop AI… sad
Nah, they won’t. It goes bling-bling, has a couple of good use cases, but because it generates Market Hype, Companies will cram it into everything. And i hate it.
In Spain we are starting to get negative prices every weekend for electricity thanks to renewables. France is not even close to those prices with their bet for nuclear.
Don’t get me wrong, I love nuclear power. And I’m not a big fan ok what thousands of windmills made to our landscapes. But efficiency wise renewable is unbeatable nowadays.
I’m not a big fan
…
thousands of windmills
I see what you did there.
They don’t need to be exclusive. Power generation should be diverse. Otherwise prices will go through the roof on times without wind (happens in Germany). This can lead to higher energy prices in combination with high energy exports.
Nuclear power does not solve the issue here. Nuclear reactors take hours or even days to ramp up or down. They are not quick enough to react to such occasions.
True, it wouldn’t be enough, This is why Germany still has a lot of coal-fired power station and natural gas power stations, despite huge investments into renewables, and is also investing a lot into wood-fired power stations (imo a really terrible idea). The nuclear plants could still ease the situation by giving a stable basic load that has some planable variability (wind models are getting also better every year and aren’t that bad as it is). For now renewables cannot really provide a very stable basic load (at least not here, might be different for other areas).
There are great concepts to improve all of this with stuff like pumped-storage hydroelectricity, but those cannot be build everywhere and take up a lot of space. It is going forward and I think nuclear power will come to an end eventually. For now, I think they still have their place (and imo Germany acted irrationally by shutting them all down).
I mean, we’ve been lucky that France completly fucked their energy sector up (hints towards that nuclear plants probably also won’t be the ultimate solution), otherwise we’d have lost a loooot of money and would have had energy prices even worse.
Here an imo interesting read: https://gemenergyanalytics.substack.com/p/capture-price-of-importsexports-in
The Spanish government is now petitioning its public for ideas on how to waste power.
time to start mining for crypto and running LLM AI servers.
Mine bitcoins. Or ditch capitalism. Wait, last one is opposite of wasting. Feed capitalism.
Look. Bitcoins might be useless at a societal level. But if we’re going to use excess renewable energy to drive out of business the crypto-miners who get their power from coal…
They should have public fridges that are left open to help cool the planet.
Meanwhile in Georgia (USA) they completed a new nuclear power plant and they have to raise rates because it went 100% over its $14 billion budget.
Like every other nuclear power plant ever built
Negative energy prices are a bad thing! That means that someone is dumping energy into the grid (you should be paying the grid if you have solar panels!!) In the UK all renewable energy had to be called ‘experimental’ so that the pricing was fixed and the government picks up the tab - that’s not good. Check this map - right now the wind isn’t blowing and solar hasn’t got out of bed - so most of the countries using renewables are looking shit - later today solar will kick in, but tonight it will be bad again. That isn’t a solution.
It’s definitely not the best we have
Deep level irony that you used a Simpsons meme, which takes place in a city that suffers from a Nuclear Power Plant that doesn’t dispose of nuclear waste properly.
Every form of energy generation is problematic in the hands of capital. Security measures can and are often considered unnecessary expense. And even assuming that they will respect all safety standards, we still have the problem of fuel: France, for example, was only able to supply its plants at a cheap cost because of colonialism in Africa. Therefore, nuclear energy potentially has the same geopolitical problems as oil, in addition to the particular ones: dual technology that can and is applied in the military, not necessarily but mainly atomic bombs.
__
Also, I thought memes were supposed to be funny…
I’d argue it’s almost qualifies as an antimeme
It’s not completely unfunny because of the unintentional irony. Tough it definitely belongs to that specific category of “meme” commonly seen on r/politicalmemes or any of its variants on the feedverse: usually a frame from The Office with text written on a whiteboard, with the ubiquity of the complete absence of a joke.
Just because it’s safe doesn’t mean it’s the best we have right now.
- It’s massively expensive to set up
- It’s massively expensive to decommission at end of life
- Almost half of the fuel you need to run them comes from a country dangerously close to Russia. (This one is slightly less of a thing now that Russia has bogged itself down in Ukraine)
- It takes a long time to set up.
- It has an image problem.
A combination of solar, wind, wave, tidal, more traditional hydro and geothermal (most of the cost with this is digging the holes. We’ve got a lot of deep old mines that can be repurposed) can easily be built to over capacity and or alongside adequate storage is the best solution in the here and now.
The problem with these arguments and the focus of debates is that they are based on nuclear energy from uranium, not thorium. Thorium is ubiquitous in nature, power centers are much easier to set up and can be small and the waste, while initially (a bit) more radioactive than uranium waste, loses it’s radiation level much faster
Edit:typo
Where are the thorium reactor ? We currently have none. Are we allowed to throw speculative energy source in the debate ?
Already India and chine have had working ones for many years. It’s not speculative and I recommend you to research the tech. It’s unfortunately not very present in western nuclear energy debates. Could be a political reason but that’s just a dirty guess
I thought all thorium based reactor were still at the research stage. I made a quick search to see if there was any in actual use but couldn’t find a source. If you have one please send it I’m really interested.
If they are still at the research stage then I’ll wait until one is built at scale to decide whether they are a better alternative.
You realise you don’t need to decomission entire building at EOL?
What about the storage for the used fuel? This is a massive problem for any country not occupying half a continent.
As first step separate useful isotopes from used fuel. Most of used fuel are them. The rest won’t be as big.
Ok. What’s your point? Did I argue that nuclear was unsafe?
Cost billions and have 10 year lead times?
Yes. Should have started more 10years ago, but doesn’t mean don’t start now.
Wdym 10 year lead times?
lol nuclear is really uneconommical, way too expensive and therefore really inefficient. You need 10-20 years to build a plant for energy 3 times more expensive than wind. For plants that still require mining. That produce waste we cannot store and still cannot reuse (except for one small test plant). For plants that no insurance company want to insure and energy companies dont like to build without huge government subsidies.
I know lemmy and reddit have a hard on for nuclear energy because people who dont know anything about it think its cool. But this post is ridiculous even for lemmy standards.
Nuclear lobby really tries to sell us to the fact, that it’s better to have control over power by a few big players. Must be terrifying to think about people creating their own power eventually.
People are kind of missing the point of the meme. The point is that Nuclear is down there along with renewables in safety and efficiency. It’s lacking the egregious cover up in the original meme, even if it has legitimate concerns now. And due to society’s ever increasing demand for electricity, we will heavily benefit from having a more scalable solution that doesn’t require covering and potentially disrupting massive amounts of land before their operations can be scaled up to meet extraordinary demand. Wind turbines and solar panels don’t stop working when we can’t use their electricity either, so it’s not like we can build too many of them or we risk creating complications out of peak hours. Many electrical networks aren’t built to handle the loads. A nuclear reactor can be scaled down to use less fuel and put less strain on the electrical network when unneeded.
It should also be said that money can’t always be spent equally everywhere. And depending on the labor required, there is also a limit to how manageable infrastructure is when it scales. The people that maintain and build solar panels, hydro, wind turbines, and nuclear, are not the same people. And if we acknowledge that climate change is an existential crisis, we must put our eggs in every basket we can, to diversify the energy transition. All four of the safest and most efficient solutions we have should be tapped into. But nuclear is often skipped because of outdated conceptions and fear. It does cost a lot and takes a while to build, but it fits certain shapes in the puzzle that none of the others do as well as it does.
Some personal thoughts: My own country (The Netherlands) has despite a very vocal anti-nuclear movement in the 20th century completely flipped now to where the only parties not in favor of Nuclear are the Greens, who at times quote the fear as a reason not to do it. As someone who treats climate change as truly existential for our country that lies below projected sea levels, it makes them look unreasonable and not taking the issue seriously. We have limited land too, and a housing crisis on top of it. So land usage is a big pain point for renewables, and even if the land is unused, it is often so close to civilization that it does affect people’s feelings of their surroundings when living near them, which might cause renewables to not make it as far as it could unrestricted. A nuclear reactor takes up fractions of the space, and can be relatively hidden from people.
All the other parties who heavily lean in to combating climate change at least acknowledge nuclear as an option that should (and are) being explored. And even the more climate skeptical parties see nuclear as something they could stand behind. Having broad support for certain actions is also important to actually getting things done. Our two new nuclear powered plants are expected to be running by 2035. Only ten years from now, ahead of our climate goals to be net-zero in 2040.
My own country (The Netherlands) has despite a very vocal anti-nuclear movement in the 20th century completely flipped now to where the only parties not in favor of Nuclear are the Greens, who at times quote the fear as a reason not to do it. As someone who treats climate change as truly existential for our country that lies below projected sea levels, it makes them look unreasonable and not taking the issue seriously.
I’m not from Netherlands, but very much belive this.
Most greens are very wierd. They claim to be against malnutrition and vitamin deficiency, but when it comes to solutions, they are against them(see golden rice). They are also mostly vegans, but when it comes to insulin, they would rather kill lots of pigs instead of scary-scary GMO yeast. Or when it comes to energy production, they rather would choose one with guaranteed dangers(coal has very nasty byproducts of burning) instead of potential.
I heard some greens in landlocked municipality(or whatever they call it in Britain) ruled against solar in favour of tidal. While same party in costal municipality ruled against of tidal.
I see biggest problem not in production, not in is it nuclear, but in is it buisness as usual. Capitalism knows no end to greed.
Most greens are very wierd. They claim to be against malnutrition and vitamin deficiency, but when it comes to solutions, they are against them(see golden rice). They are also mostly vegans, but when it comes to insulin, they would rather kill lots of pigs instead of scary-scary GMO yeast. Or when it comes to energy production, they rather would choose one with guaranteed dangers(coal has very nasty byproducts of burning) instead of potential.
I think this is probably because they represent a more dangerous and legitimate opposition to the powers that be, and, as a result, tend to be one of the most astroturfed groups on the planet. Couple that with a kind of extremism, where they will oppose golden rice or GMO yeast on the basis of evergreening IP laws (a fair complaint, imo), and then you can kind of see why they keep opposing things that are presented as solutions and keep getting hit with the terminally annoying “well, why don’t you have any solutions, then?” style of criticism.
on the basis of evergreening IP laws (a fair complaint, imo)
Hard to disagree. Nature isn’t something to be patented.
It’s interesting watching the discussion in this thread evolving and polarizing. Yesterday the discussion started as ‘nuclear is one solution in a portfolio of solutions to combat climate change. vs. nuclear is always bad.’ and developed into ‘nuclear is good and you’re dumb. vs. nuclear is bad and you’re evil’.
It’s also really weird because discussing a topic like this is heavily impacted by where you come from. For exemple the discussion about nuclear energy cannot be the same in France, China, USA or Russia and I see almost everyone here talking the thing like the choice between Nuclear Energy or not (because it’s should never be about Nuclear Energy or Renewable Energy) was the same everywhere on the planet.
So here we are, a lot of people talking to themselves instead of talking with each other, hammering their idea on the topic without even once considering that others living in others places and living in others conditions will approach the subject differently (and than it should be normal and comprehensible)
I hate to say it, but regardless of one’s stance, on his back should be “Public perception of Fukushima, Chernobyl, and 3-mile Island.”
I say regardless of one’s stance, because even if the public’s perceptions are off…when we remember those incidents but not how much time was in between them or the relative infrequency of disasters, they can have outsized effects on public attitude.
Didn’t you hear about that about that wind turbine that exploded and spread wind all over a dozen farmer’s fields? /s
It’s not a great idea from the risk. If future governments let the windmills fall into disrepair, all that happens is windmills are useless. They can never accidently summon centuries of nuclear winter.
The sheer quantity of stupid people that exist is staggering.
And really depressing.
Because I want to be like ‘who gives a shit what those frothing retards perceive as scary’ but… There are just so many.
And they are so easy to steer with fear.
Maybe that’s the trick?
Try something like “Coal causes abortions and makes white baby Jesus cry!” with a dash of ‘Muslim folks can’t use Nuclear power!’
Yeah that really convinces me. I’m stupid so ill switch to your point of view
It’s not clear what your trying to stay, but if you’re saying that coal is very bad and nuclear power is better, that’s not untrue, but it’s important to remember that the economic pressure right now is against coal and for renewable energy, even in coal country businesses won’t build in a state that won’t explicitly commit to only building renewable energy exclusively for all new ot replacement energy sources. The situation isn’t perfect, there should be more aggressive removal of dirty energy, granted, but nuclear power isn’t the only clean option, and it comes with a lot of risks.
I would rather see more investment on better renewable tech then relaying on biohazard.
You would be surprised to know the amount of scientific research with actual solutions that aren’t applied cause goes against the fossil fuel companies and whatnot. Due to the fact that they have market monopoly.
I would rather see more investment on better renewable tech then relaying on biohazard.
Modern nuclear energy produces significantly less waste and involves more fuel recycling than the historical predecessors. But these reactors are more expensive to build and run, which means smaller profit margins and longer profit tails.
Solar and Wind are popular in large part because you can build them up and profit off them quickly in a high-priced electricity market (making Texas’s insanely expensive ERCOT system a popular location for new green development, paradoxically). But nuclear power provides a cheap and clean base load that we’re only able to get from coal and natural gas, atm. If you really want to get off fossil fuels entirely, nuclear is the next logical step.
Economicaly might be viable, but there is so much unused experimental tech that has higher potential and scales better (higher scientific development as well).
Nuclear is the best and most sustainable energy production long term. You get left with nuclear waste which we are still figuring out how to deal with, but contemporary reactors are getting safer and more efficient. Not to mention breeder reactors can use the byproducts of their energy production to further produce energy.
I mean renewables are just cheaper…
And don’t produce enough energy?
What are you talking about? In 2023, solar power alone generated 1.63 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity. Twice as much as was generated by coal, and more than half as much as was generated by nuclear. Solar plus wind out performed nuclear by hundreds of gigawatts.
The only thing holding back renewable power is grid level energy storage, and that’s evolving rapidly.
