What's wrong with nuclear energy?

[chazus]

And it works - an example being Denmark, where 43% of the energy demand is filled by wind energy.

While wholly applaudable.... That's Denmark, a nation with a population almost half the size of New York. It isn't something that you can plop anywhere else and have it work. Economies of scale do not function like that. It simply isn't feasible.

Tiny, rich nations can do stuff like that.

[Garnier Fructis]

it's not safe. you're allowed to go to the place, but you're told to not stay long.

And the government telling you not to stay too long is a measure of safety?

Nooooope.

[chazus]

it's not safe. you're allowed to go to the place, but you're told to not stay long.

Yes, it is safe. There are a few bad areas (mostly certain buildings), but for the most part, 90% of the area around it are perfectly safe.

They just don't want people wandering around, unmonitored, to the unsafe areas. Those unsafe areas could easily be cleaned/removed, but that costs money, but there's no money, and no reason to.

FYI, PEOPLE STILL LIVE THERE. Perfectly fine.

[Inequs]

Fukushima was a mix of bad luck & bad placement of the backup generators & switchgear.
The reactors themselves dispite being built in the 70's did exactly what it says on the tin, they scrammed the moment the quake hit.
problem with backup generators & switchgear being in the basement on the coast spoke for itself when the tsunami poured in and destroyed it all.
that was pretty much the reason those 3 reactors melted down and popped due to the decay heat.

[Zogarth]

While wholly applaudable.... That's Denmark, a nation with a population almost half the size of New York. It isn't something that you can plop anywhere else and have it work. Economies of scale do not function like that. It simply isn't feasible.

Tiny, rich nations can do stuff like that.

I can also say that this wind energy did not come cheap. And we are also lucky that two of the worlds biggest manufactures of windmills are right around us, being Vestas (a danish firm) and Siemes (german). And our politicians pushed for it big time. It is nice and all, but when it is not windy, it kinda sucks. There is also currently no good way to store the energy. Often the windmills produce more energy than we use during the night, but no proper way to store it.

[Thontor]

Saw a documentary on Netflix called Pandora's Promise.

"Former antinuclear activists and groundbreaking scientists speak out in favor of the much-maligned energy source in this provocative documentary."

I found it very interesting, and came out of it wondering if we had embraced nuclear power, if we would be in the dire climate change situation we are in today.

[Skroe]

We shall see, Considering how for example scientists never thought we would find the Higgs boson and they did it, with moore's law and quantum computing around the corner fusion is also around the corner.

Scientists were confident that the Higgs would be found. I'm not sure what you're referring to there. The biggest problem in detecting the Higgs was the money involved in building the Large Hadron Collider, which is significantly smaller and less energetic than the Superconducting Supercollider would have been had that been completed in the 1990s. The scentific basis of the Higgs Boson was sound, but the stickershock at a $15 billion science experiment was real over the years.

Quantum Computing has been "around the corner" for twenty years.

[krunksmash]

well first the cost to build and start one op is extremely high, second dealing with the waste rods is a serious challenge, we have no good way to dispose of the rods, lastly, its not renewable, and because of that other cheaper non-renewable sources of power are preferred.

[alexw]

France did something extremely smart in the 1970s and 1980s. It recognized that the costs of constructing a nuclear power plant were immense, but would benefit from economies of scale and would free France from it's dependence on Middle Eastern fossile fuels. So it picked one design and built it a lot. With some modest variation, every nuclear power plant in France is identical.

France is also a unitary state. Approval and directives came from the National Government.

The United States by contrast, relied upon Market Forces to produce the most economic design, but Chernobyl and Three Mile Island disrupted that precisely at the time that mid-late Generation II reactors would have ideally competed on a construction cost basis. New safety features drove costs up. The huge diversity of design and regulation saw the economics of such reactors turn against them.

The problem with nuclear energy was and remains economics, and they've only modestly gotten better in time. It's taken more modern plants, like the AP1000, to simplify and standardize designs and drive down costs. This is something that's been basically delayed by 20 years.

In the western world, if we want more nuclear power plants, the French model is the model model. There needs to be a competition on design - a standarized, simple, economic design - and then competitive bidding to build that design. Now this raises a key problem in that what if that one design has a systemic design flaw, identified years later. But that's not uncommon to big projects and risks like that can be mitigated.

But there is no real Nuclear renaissance coming so long as every plant is treated like a one-off science project.

Exactly this. Its why every plant ends up having such huge cost over-runs. Its a one off (or nearly so) so they don't get to work out the kinks and apply what they learn to multiple new plants to streamline and optimize the whole process. Economies of scale don't apply and there is no incremental improvement over time on a standardized design. Contrast that with solar power where millions of panels are manufactured and installed every year, enabling incremental improvements across the whole chain to drive down the price some % every year.

It does look like nuclear power has lost whatever chance it had to be the dominant power generation technology. If it were going to happen the world would have had to lock itself into that iterative improvement process starting decades ago. It hasn't happened and renewables have filled the void it could potentially have filled.

[Axelond]

Very complicated, requires a lot of safety and highly educated staff. The cost of keeping nuclear up to date is very expensive. Mass producing Solar power is starting to become cheaper so nuclear is about to be phased out I think.

[Skroe]

I know I say this jokingly... But this misconception might be placed on the fact that so any adults (now) were raised on playing Sim City 2000 in school, where you did in fact replace many power plants with a handful of fusion plants.

Hey when I was like, 17 I posted in threads exactly like this, fantasizing about big Fusion Reactors the size of cities powering the entire United States, protected by massive Anti-Air defenses. All from as you say, games or other fiction depicting exactly that.

Then I grew up and realized how incredibly dumb it would be to hook say, the entire North East United States' energy generating capability into a Fusion Reactor in upstate New York or Central Pennsylvannia.

Distributed, diverse solutions almost always beat monolithic ones.

[Tradewind]

well first the cost to build and start one op is extremely high, second dealing with the waste rods is a serious challenge, we have no good way to dispose of the rods, lastly, its not renewable, and because of that other cheaper non-renewable sources of power are preferred.

Storage is only a problem in the US really, ever since Carter banned the recycling of spent nuclear fuel in the 70s, policy driven by the fear of its potential proliferation for nuclear weapons. Meanwhile countries like France, the UK, Japan etc. have been recycling spent fuel into MOX for decades, using it in their existing plants to this day.

[Deleted]

Antimatter reactors will be used to generate energy during the next century. It will be the cleanest form of energy, but if something goes wrong with it, the size of the crater will be massive.

[alexw]

that was after a literal natural disaster. also can't forget the ineptitude of the Japanese government.

The problem with that argument is that the Japanese gov foresaw it. Japan has had tsunami's like this periodically over its history (which is where we get the word tsunami from) and risk engineers involved with these powerstation's had warned that if one hit there would be severe consequences. That however would have driven costs up so officials ignored those warnings. Ergo it wasn't a natural disaster so much as human incompetence, just as happened at chernobyl, and which is what will make the next nuclear accident inevitable at some point.

[Skroe]

Exactly this. Its why every plant ends up having such huge cost over-runs. Its a one off (or nearly so) so they don't get to work out the kinks and apply what they learn to multiple new plants to streamline and optimize the whole process. Economies of scale don't apply and there is no incremental improvement over time on a standardized design. Contrast that with solar power where millions of panels are manufactured and installed every year, enabling incremental improvements across the whole chain to drive down the price some % every year.

It does look like nuclear power has lost whatever chance it had to be the dominant power generation technology. If it were going to happen the world would have had to lock itself into that iterative improvement process starting decades ago. It hasn't happened and renewables have filled the void it could potentially have filled.

I think the US is too big and too distributed for nuclear to ever had a real chance to be be the dominant power generating technology. Nuclear makes a lot of sense in a place like North East. But a place like California, it is probably better to go Solar.

Of course, for the exact same reasons it's impossible to lay new rail lines for AmTrack up here, it is unlikely we'll be in the business of building new Nuclear Power plants where we need them most.

Maybe offshore nuclear energy on re-purposed oil rigs or barges is a solution. Russia had some plans for such designs.

[Auxora]

In the US at least it's because of an abundance of cheap energy right now. It sounds ironic since energy was always such a concern. But new natural gas discoveries and fracking, loads of wind farms, etc. have made nuclear energy relatively expensive by comparison. And since energy companies are not gov't owned, their #1 concern is supplying the cheapest energy possible to maximize profits (clean or not). So nuke plants in the US are being shut down left and right, or in some cases plants that were built sit idle. The only way nuclear energy is very viable right now is with large government subsidies, and more and more state governments are saying no to that.

[Tradewind]

I found it very interesting, and came out of it wondering if we had embraced nuclear power, if we would be in the dire climate change situation we are in today.

Indeed. Ironic isn't it, how the braying and neighing of the hippies and environmentalists of the past, have done a significant amount of harm long term by basically forcing/shaming nations to rely on fossil fuels for power this whole time.

[Shakadam]

Exactly. While nuclear energy is certainly better than fossil fuels, renewable energy really is the way to go. It's cheaper and way less risky. And it works - an example being Denmark, where 43% of the energy demand is filled by wind energy. And wind is only one type of renewable energy source.

While that may work for Denmark and it's great that it does, it's a rare exception rather than a rule.
Let's take my country, Finland, as another example. Like Denmark it's in northern Europe and has a small population. Yet wind power, or really any other current source of renewable energy, doesn't really work here. Why? Several reasons:

First of all, even though Denmark and Finland have the same total population, Finland has a total energy consumption more than twice that of Denmark due to much more heavy industry and generally having a colder climate and being larger and more spread out.

Let's look at the sources of renewable energy available:

1. Wind power. In order to reach near that 40% mark like Denmark, we'd have to build more than twice the amount of wind turbines because of the higher energy consumption, and ofc Finland does not have access to the Atlantic where it's pretty much always windy like Denmark has, so each turbine has a lower efficiency which means even more of them have to be built. It's just not economically possible and it would take up vast stretches of land. And ofc whenever it's not windy they're worthless.
2. Hydro power. Already tapped out to its maximum like in all developed nations.
3. Solar power. Not feasible economically in a country that receives as little sunlight as Finland does. During the darkest and coldest days of winter when the energy needs are the greatest, solar power is at its worst.

Any other sources I forgot? I know about wave power and such but even at their best in optimal locations they're marginal at best.


And ofc the main issue with current sources of renewable energy is that they can't deal with spikes in energy demand. You can't "dial up" the output of a wind turbine or a solar panel, it produces as much as it produces at a given time and given conditions and there's no way to change that.
Which means a nation will still have to rely on other sources, where you can increase the output of a reactor or fire up another coal plant to deal with sudden power demands.

[Bathory]

Nice copy paste. Do you have any opinions of your own? Also why copy paste a text that is total BS?

As I said in my followup post, I left out the author on purpose. I wanted some responses to her words without her name or party bias influencing the topic.

Also no I don't agree with her.

[Jakisuaki]

Because when something goes wrong it usually goes really wrong.

Fusion is fine, current fission reactions? Not so much.