Young climate activist tells Greenpeace to drop ‘old-fashioned’ anti-nuclear stance
Young climate activist tells Greenpeace to drop ‘old-fashioned’ anti-nuclear stance
Swedish teenager Ia Anstoot says group’s ‘unscientific’ opposition to EU nuclear power serves fossil fuel interests
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Why go nuclear when renewable is so much cheaper, safer, future proof and less centralised?
Don't get me wrong. Nuclear is better than coal and gas but it will not safe our way of life.
Just like the electric car is here to preserve the car industry not the planet, nuclear energy is still here to preserve the big energy players, not our environment.
Renewable instead of nuclear, but nuclear instead of coal.
We need a mix. Centralization isn't the biggest problem. Literally anything we can do to reduce emissions is worth doing, and we won't be going 100% on anything, so best to get started on the long term projects now so that we can stop turning on new plants based on combustion.
Even if it takes 2 decades to get a new plant going, it's a nuclear plant's worth of fossil fuels we don't need any more, and therefore worth doing.
If it isn't fossil fuels, it's automatically better.
The main problem with nuclear power plants isn't the radiation or the waste or the risk of accident. It's that they cost so damn much they're rarely profitable, especially in open electricity markets. 70-80% of the cost of the electricity is building the plant, and without low interest rates and a guaranteed rate when finished it doesn't make economic sense to build them.
The latest nuclear plant in the US is in Georgia and is $17 billion over budget and seven years later than expected.
It’s that they cost so damn much
The cost of continued fossil fuel use is far higher.
rarely profitable
Profit should not be the motivation of preventing our climate disaster from getting worse. If the private sector isn't able to handle it, then the government needs to do so itself.
And besides, the only reason fossil fuels are so competitive is because we are dumping billions of dollars in subsidies for them. Those subsidies should instead go towards things that aren't killing the planet.
Would it be better to dump billions into nuclear power plants that won't come online for a decade at least, or to dump billions into renewables that can be online and reducing emissions in under a year?
We should worldwide be putting trillions into both. Renewables should be first priority, but not all locations have good solar, wind, and battery options.
That's your opinion. I think funding nuclear is just burning money and wasting time we don't have.
That's the exact argument people have been making for 60 years, and look where we are now. Around 80% of the world's energy is still from fossil fuels. Do you want to continue making the same mistakes as the previous generations?
No we don't, you can use only renewables and just cut the useless spending
The classic shortsighted point of view that has put us in the current situation in the first place.
Ask yourself what put us into current situation
We can and should be doing both. Use the money our governments are giving to fossil fuels in subsidies. $7 trillion PER YEAR (that's 11 million every minute) in public subsidies go to fossil fuels. Channel that to nuclear and renewables and there's more than enough to decarbonise the grids with both short- and long-term solutions.
What we definitely should not be doing is closing perfectly working nuclear power plants.
Because it gets dark and the wind stops blowing and industry still operates when those things happen. Nuclear is not a forever solution, but a necessary stop-gap.
Yes renewables need to come with storage.
Storage technology isn't there yet. Nuclear is. The only viable approach is "all of the above." Anything less is foolishness and oil industry propaganda.
50 yeas ago people couldn't think of a future without fossile fuel. 100 years ago people thought ships would run on coal for eternity and 200 years ago or in fact up until WW2 horses did most of the work when it came to transportation.
Things change fast. Stagnation of technology is not the norm.
There are urgent needs we can't wait 50 years for.
France started to build their new power plant in 2007 and hope to connect it to the grid next year.
I guarantee you that climate change and industrial loads will still be a thing in 16 years.
I can't imagine a future without solar, wind, and nuclear power.
not unless we find out we are wrong about thermodynamics.
Wind and Solar are "renewable" to a certain scale. If you dump gigantic wind farm in the middle of a jet stream, for example, you can impact downstream climate cycles.
that's why we could be aware of all the externalities.
solar could be deployed on the ocean but that will certainly lower sea temperatures.
let's terraform intentionally rather than just accidentally.
You don't need to imagine a future without nuclear in the mix - there are plenty of places doing fine with renewables and without coal or nuclear right now.
which country?
For example South Australia - no coal since 2016, no nuclear ever, runs mostly on a mix of renewables - solar and wind with batteries and transient gas for in-fill.
Edit: thanks to whoever downvoted my verified statement of fact (see below)
never heard of that country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coal-fired_power_stations_in_Australia?wprov=sfla1
Weird argument. "It's a place bigger than a bunch of EU countries put together but it's not a country so I'm going to use other places that aren't South Australia to counter your point which was about South Australia"
lol im not playing this shell game.
This doesn't seem to agree with that statement.
So I looked in the document and it agrees with my point. The most recent stats for South Australia are 8977 GWh of renewable energy and 5717 GWh non-renewable gas energy. You'll note the gas use is dropping pretty rapidly as they put more renewables on.
Ok, so from your point of view 40% fossil fuels is still doing fine? I interpreted your original comment to mean they were doing 100% or close to it in renewables. Then I misunderstood.
It's just a temporary measure while we transition to 100% renewables. You can see from the numbers that it's dropping year by year as new renewables are brought on.
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.
A big problem with solar and wind is that they are not as reliable as nuclear. In a worst-kaas scenario neither will produce energy because there is no sun or wind and there is no way to store enough electricity for these moments. Therefore we need a constant source that creates electricity for those moments. Of course, we do also need renewables, but nuclear is essential because it is reliable.
That's why places that use mostly renewables and no coal or nuclear often have gas fired generation which can start up in the rare cases when it's needed. These places already exist and do just fine with no nuclear.
I'm sorry but burning methane isn't doing just fine.
It's in-fill which is only used when needed and it's reducing every year as more renewable sources are added.
is only used when needed
Sure, but it's still GHG emissions, "only when needed" or not. The whole point we're making is those gas generators should have been nuclear generators in the first place.
And we continue building gas and coal power plants. Why? Build nuclear plants instead.
It's only temporary measure while other renewables come on board. It can be built, serve its purpose and then decommissioned before a nuclear plant could even have been built. As a stop-gap it's the "best worst solution".
This may be true, but I am not convinced that it is any better than nuclear. To start up regeneration quick the gas winning needs to be on a pilot light (dutch source: https://nos.nl/l/2485108). In Groningen there are (according to the same source) 5 places on pilot light that together must produce at least 2.8 billion cubic metres of gas a year. This is quite a lot of fossil fuels, so I would rather have a nuclear power plant than this gas winning (which comes with other disadvantages as well).
So it's more nuclear vs renewables and a ton of batteries. (Or other storage options)
What it really should be is nuclear plus renewables plus a ton of batteries (or other storage options) vs fossil fuels.
Yeah, the cost is the real downside to Nuclear. However, for every Nuclear plant running, that’s a lot of batteries it other energy storage that don’t have to be built today in order to have clean energy. Because even if we were utilizing nuclear like we should, we would still need to be building a shit ton of batteries to keep the cost of energy coming down.
The cost of electricity dropping is bad news for nuclear power plants because they'll be even less profitable when they're finished. Especially since they take decades to construct, during which time renewables and storage become even cheaper.
And we'll still need a way to store power from renewables when they overproduce.
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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.
You could build an entirely new solar, wind, and battery supply chain from the mines to the factories in a quarter of the time it takes to build a single nuclear plant.
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.
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.