The head of this year’s United Nations’ climate talks has called for governments and businesses to tackle global warming by reducing greenhouse gas emissions in all regions and sectors if they want to stop the planet from passing a key temperature limi...
This feels like one of those “heres a speech to make me look like the good guy” when in reality they have some ulterior motive. I am hoping the ulterior motive is that this dudes company has heavily invested in renewables and forcing a transition will help them financially and help the world.
To his point that we need to explore all options, nuclear included, i can not agree more. Nuclear is the safest and cleanest option that can power much more than wind or solar on a site by site basis. It just sucks that the general public has no understanding of nuclear tech and how much better and safer it is than in the past.
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Because digging up ore with lower energy density than coal that spreads heavy metals everywhere is totally safe. /s
When oil barons, Putin, far right grifters, and coal barons are all suddenly spouting the same lines about nuclear it’s definitely because they know it’s a good way to get rid of fossil fuels /s
Nuclear isn’t great long term, but of all the options that aren’t great long term, nuclear is the least not great. It can support the backbone of the energy grid for relatively cheap and in much safer conditions than other energy sources, even if we are led to believe otherwise by Chernobyl and Fukushima. Advances in nuclear reactor technologies means nuclear becomes safer and more maintainable over time, and it already has been the safest source of energy for a while. Also, Japan doesn’t shy away from nuclear; they’ve designed systems that heavily recycle nuclear waste to extract as much energy from it as possible, which also has the added effect of reducing the waste’s radioactive life.
It’s simple, really. We rely on it to support us while fusion gets off the ground, and even if it doesn’t get off the ground, we can still rely on fission to support us while we get more and more renewable sources up and running.
If anything it’s the fear of nuclear that’s been keeping us in such bad energy situations. For instance, France, being at the forefront of nuclear energy use, has not worked on new reactors up until recently after decades of underfunding and underdevelopment. Now the lack of maintenance and develoent of new reactors means that old reactors have begun showing signs of significant wear and tear, threatening the entire grid and part of the French economy; they’re energy exporters (green energy, at that), but are years away from having to phase out old reactors and become energy importers. That imported energy is almost guaranteed to be sourced from fossil fuels. If not even these nations are enticed to keep nuclear up and running, how are we ever to leave fossil fuels?
As for your mining comment, we’re going to have this issue even if we were to rely mostly on renewable. Demands for energy storage are only going up, and lithium batteries is where it’s at, currently. We just need to find the paths of least environmental damage, because there won’t be any path that doesn’t harm the environment.
It’s also not great short-term because building reactors (to proper standards, mind you) takes ages. Much longer than expanding renewables.
It’s also not great mid-term because, well, mid-term is too slow to have much of a climate impact, anyway, also, in that kind of time frame we’ll have fusion.
It’s also not great long-term because Uranium deposits are quite limited, especially if everyone were to switch to nuclear.
Then it’s also not great in general because no matter how safe you design the reactor, humans not prone to institutional failure have yet to be invented. Are you sure your country is able to be better at running plants than Japan. About the only country I actually trust with that stuff is Ukraine – because they have Chernobyl to remind them.
Then it’s more expensive than renewables, yes also those fancy new mini reactors, and that’s with the hidden subsidy of not actually having to insure against fall-out. States cover it because if operators had to buy insurance, well, they couldn’t operate because no insurer, or reinsurer, is willing to bankrupt themselves over a single claim.
Nope. The vast majority of storage necessary for my utility to provide energy is Scandinavian hydro dams, we pump them full of wind energy and then get it back. Not to mention that with proper wide-area transmission networks wind is baseload-capable (you can’t have no wind anywhere, physically impossible) and with proper overcapacity the need for seasonal storage shrinks.
Speaking of seasonal storage: Germany’s gas pipeline network can store three months of total(!) energy usage, and is generally hydrogen-capable – parts of it are currently switched over. Call Siemens they’ll sell you turn-key plants off the shelf.
The reason you see so many lithium installations is because it’s good short-term storage. Noone is going to use them for seasonal storage makes no sense at all they have quite high self-discharge rates.
Tell this to the Germans mate. :(
Probably got a piece of that Norway phosphor.
In theory, nuclear power generation may be safe. In practice it is not. There were two major catastrophes that killed thousands, first in Chernobyl and then in Fukushima. Fukushima wasn’t that long ago either. In practice, one should not underestimate the irrational greed of managers. There are calculations of how much damage insurance for nuclear power plants would cost. Since the risk, which can be calculated from the damage multiplied by the probability of occurrence, is very high because the damage in an accident would be so incredibly great that companies cannot afford it and always taxpayers have to save them, which shows the risk the taxpayers bear with nuclear power plants. Many nuclear power plants are very old and extremely expensive to maintain. So you would have to build new power plants in order to install the latest safety technology. Incidentally, the new security technology does not help against invaders either, as can be seen in the Ukraine. This super great security technology is enormously expensive. Renewable energy sources are simply unbeatably cheap because you get the energy from the earth and the sun as a gift. It is already the case that countries with many renewable energy sources, such as Denmark, are depressing the European energy market with their cheap electricity, and conventional energy sources are not getting prices that low. Then there is the biggest problem, nuclear waste. Uranium 235 and its fission isotopes are harmless after 1 million years. So the nuclear waste has to be guarded for 1 million years. Labor costs are bigger than money in the world exists and most countries don’t have repositories because it’s impossible to find a safe place for the next 1 million years. From the generated energy one also has to subtract the large amount of energy that is consumed firstly by the enrichment of uranium in gigantic centrifuges and secondly by the creation of uranium in mining. Only vehicles with combustion engines are used for this and the mining itself emits a lot of CO2. In addition, the uranium deposits are not that large given our high energy consumption. That is why India is researching thorium reactors, but none of them are productive yet. I think fusion reactors are a much better way to spend research money. Nuclear power plants need a lot of water for cooling. In view of the climate change, there were big problems in France last year to cool the nuclear power plants because the rivers did not deliver enough water due to little rain. As a result, many power plants had to be shut down and electricity had to be imported at great expense. By importing uranium from abroad, one also becomes extremely dependent on other countries and on their uranium prices. As you can see, given the huge advances in renewable energy sources, I think nuclear power plants are very poor options for generating energy.
Your premise is specious
Firstly you are just picking up on my first point and secondly no one would have been harmed in either disaster if a wind farm had been set up.
Does that mean wind power kills fewer people per kWh than nuclear?
And on which timeline? Nuclear power has come a LONG way since 3MI, let alone Chernobyl.
One human has died from failures of a modern nuclear plant in the last 15 years.
I don’t know the stats, but it’s quite likely that a non-zero number techs have died servicing and installing the wind facilities.
In which case, they’re about even - or wind is worse. But in the grand scheme, it’s a non issue either way.
In your argument as to when a nuclear power plant kills people, as I see it, you consider the period too short. It may be that few or no one dies from the direct explosion, but the worst thing about the accidents is the immense amount of gamma radiation. Radiation deaths often do not occur immediately, but only after some time. It is therefore difficult to estimate how many deaths are due to radiation from nuclear catastrophes, but to estimate it with one death is definitely too low in my opinion. The number of deaths from nuclear power is certainly not comparable to solar or wind power due to its magnitude.
What is that magnitude?
“Overall, based on statistical modelling of the radiation doses received by workers and local residents, a total of 4000 deaths will eventually be attributable to the Chernobyl accident”(Pflugbeil, S. (2006). Chernobyl – Looking back to go forwards: the September 2005 IAEA Conference. Medicine, Conflict and Survival, 22(4), 299–309. https://doi.org/10.1080/13623690600945230) “Environmental fallout from the accident affected cropland, forests, rivers, fish and wildlife, and urban centres. In the three countries most affected, nearly 800 000 ha of agricultural land was removed from service, and timber production was halted on nearly 700 000 ha of forest.”(Pflugbeil, S. (2006). Chernobyl – Looking back to go forwards: the September 2005 IAEA Conference. Medicine, Conflict and Survival, 22(4), 299–309. https://doi.org/10.1080/13623690600945230) “Studies have found that exposed populations had anxiety levels twice as high as normal, with a greater incidence of depression and stress symptoms.”(Pflugbeil, S. (2006). Chernobyl – Looking back to go forwards: the September 2005 IAEA Conference. Medicine, Conflict and Survival, 22(4), 299–309. https://doi.org/10.1080/13623690600945230)
I’m sorry but I didn’t have the time to find the values for Fukushima as well. There are a lot of different numbers, but I think these are also validated by the UN and WHO and are pretty informative
You’re not arguing in good faith. Full stop.
I love you. Reddit has that weird cult of nuclear energy bros and I never once saw someone actually successfully stand up to them. I’m never leaving lemmy. 😭
You cannot run a society solely on renewables. You can run a society with zero emissions.
Your first statement is manifestly untrue. We ran societies solely on renewables for over 5000 years. But we certainly can’t run our present society solely on renewables. Actually, I think nuclear energy has an important role in creating a zero emission society; there are places its just too difficult to get renewable energy to with current technology. But it’s not a silver bullet; we can’t run our present society solely on nuclear energy either. We need to be clear-headed about the limitations and, yes, risks of using nuclear energy, so that we can make smart decisions about how to use it and not create another huge environmental problem for our great-grandchildren to deal with.
Many internet nuclear enthusiasts seem to imagine that we could just swap fossil fuels for nuclear energy and carry on our merry way with nothing much changing in society; but that’s not any more realistic than doing that by swapping fossil fuels for renewables. We are never going to be able to maintain our society as it is now without fossil fuels; things will have to change in a very big fundamental way. I’ve observed that nuclear energy enthusiasm on reddit has tended to act as a form of climate quasi-denialism. Misguided faith in a tech solution that will just fix everything without major social repercussions ultimately prevents us from acknowledging the difficult and unpleasant reality that large structural change is necessary, change that will inevitably impact the standard of living of people in wealthy countries for the worse.
With all due respect you’re ignoring the fact that we’re doing immeasurabley more damage now by refusing to accept nuclear as our baseline source of electricity. You cannot run today’s society without a predictable and reliable source such as nuclear, geothermal, hydro or ff.
The fact is that we SHOULD have been using the tech available to us the entire time to avoid ruining the ecosystem in the ways that we have been. We should be using geothermal and hydro where applicable but that’s not going to work for every scenario, for all other scenarios we would be better off with non-privately owned nuclear power until the day comes when we can store enough renewable energy that nuclear is no longer necessary.
Erm.
Of course Iceland has a natural advantage but geothermal will probably have a renaissance with those fancy new plasma drills. This is not a matter of possibility or even cost but political will. Unless you’re literally Saudi Arabia renewables will be cheaper in the long run.
Try telling that to the renewables bros.