Can somebody please explain why the world hasn't gone nuclear yet?
Can somebody please explain why the world hasn't gone nuclear yet?
I mean im guessing its because it may not be as profitable, or atleast at first, boycotts or directly just capitalism fucking everything up? i legit always imagine aliens seeing us still use coal while having DISCOVERED IN 1932
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Its a type of energy that gets more expensive
Hard to get insurance, so all costs fall to the states while all profits go to companies
Trash is not solved
A minor error can have a huge environmental impact, especially in densly populated areas like Europe
Plants need cooling, most use rivers and that does not mix well with rising temperatures, and have to be shut down in summer
No public backing
High initial costs, high costs so run, high costs to dismantle
Nuclear plants are not flexible and can't react to energy availability
Most fuel is produced by less reliable states. Renewable energy is produced in your home country.
No chance of decentralizing the grid, making it a target for single point of failures or attacks (State sponsored or terrorism)
Solar is cheaper, battery parks are cheaper, hydrogen is cheaper, wind is cheaper, hydro is cheaper.
All in all, there are cheaper ways to create and store more energy safely, more decentralized and with less ties to single big companies.
Money is no issue, because if we have billions to throw at one plant, we obviously have enough for a smarter grid with storage options.
Its a type of energy that gets more expensive
We choose to make it so. Constantly adding security features and not financing research. It could have gone down as well if we had pushed for small reactors, helped the EPR more, not shut down the research into plutonium as a fuel...
Trash is not solved
It is inert and a lot of it has the potential to be a future fuel. "Put it in a hole below the water table" is pretty close to a solution.
A minor error can have a huge environmental impact, especially in densly populated areas like Europe
It will be hard to be as impactful as coal or thermal engines, which are considered to be responsible for about 48 000 premature deaths yearly here in France. If nuclear energy allowed a country to decarbonate, it could "afford" a Chernobyl per year and still save lives.
Plants need cooling, most use rivers and that does not mix well with rising temperatures, and have to be shut down in summer
That's simply not true. Every year journalists fall for it but here is a breakdown:
- Every year some plants undergo planned maintenance in summer, not because it is too hot but because there is less consumption (winter heating is when the peak is)
- Some plants do lower their outputs, the most they had to do it so far was by 0.2% of the total output of the country because of environmental regulations that basically forbid any heating of the water above certain temperatures.
- It only touches plants that don't have the iconic cooling towers. Plants with cooling towers do not warm rivers, in some case they may even cool them down.
As long as there are liquid rivers, plants will be able to cool down. We will have much more serious problems before this becomes an issue.
Nuclear plants are not flexible and can’t react to energy availability
It can. As I am writing that, it is 1pm here, we are at 33GW of nuclear production, mostly because there is a lot of solar power and Germany is flooding us with electricity with negative price. At 4am, we were at 42GW of nuclear.
Most fuel is produced by less reliable states.
Minerals are fungible, therefore consumers go for the cheapest. It usually means countries where semi-slavery is the norm and environmental regulations are not a thing. They do tend to be shitty countries yes. Non-fossil mineral resources however are found pretty uniformly over the globe (having mountains helps). There are uranium mines in France that we shut down because of labor cost.
No public backing
That's the main problem. The above lies have been repeated ad nauseam and local opposition means that opening new nuclear plants is basically impossible. This is a policy and opinion problem mostly.
I am bitter about it. The sane plan was to go full nuclear in the 90s, double the electricity production, get rid of coal and thermal vehicles that way and slowly transition over 40 years into solar as we either get batteries costs down or develop space based solar power.
Now we are getting the transition but it was oil-fueled instead of nuclear-fueled and this choice was made by people misled into believing they defended the environment by fighting nuclear power.
Yes, wind/solar + batteries is the future (though I don't think these are cost competitive with nuclear yet. Solar alone is, batteries not) but opting out of nuclear was a very costly option for the climate.
f nuclear energy allowed a country to decarbonate, it could "afford" a Chernobyl per year
Or, you know, invest in renewables, better international grids and sodium-based storage instead of bring fine with turning part of your country into a wasteland...
It took 40 years to have solar energy and batteries up to the task, and we are not there yet. Yes, it could have been a choice to more massively invest in R&D in these fields, but you still need electricity while you shut down nuclear plants. Don't do it unless you are ready to replace them with something else than coal. We are not there yet. Germany relies on France's nuclear capabilities to import electricity at night.
That’s simply not true. Every year journalists fall for it
Direct quote from Axpo:
Eine übermäßige Erwärmung des bereits warmen Gewässers soll in heißen Sommerperioden verhindert werden, um Flora und Fauna nicht zusätzlich zu belasten
Translation: Excessive warming of the already warm water should be prevented during hot summer periods so as not to put additional strain on flora and fauna
Source: https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/europa/atomkraftwerke-hitze-kuehlung-abgeschaltet-100.html
Yes, it is not a problem for the power plants, it is a problem for the fauna and it only impacts reactors without cooling towers (which I repeat, can actually cool down rivers). And I may add, this is a problem for the fauna caused in big part by the global warming which nuclear plants help prevent.
From the (translated article)
The measures were intended to protect the ecosystem of the Aare River and comply with strict environmental regulations.
...
According to EDF, throttling or shutting down nuclear power plants during heat waves has led to an average reduction in annual electricity production of 0.3 percent since 2000.
To summarize: it's being suppressed to keep the fossil industry alive.
It's the opposite, convincing governments to invest in totally uneconomic nuclear reactors that will take 15-20 years to build, ensures that these countries will continue to depend on fossile fuels for the next 15-20 years.
They do not take that long to build. At all. Besifes, most of the build time is because of red tape, like requiring a plant to be FULLY DESIGNED, reviewed, and approved by multiple bodies before they can even break ground on one in the US.
It is red tape and fear mongering, not an actual feature of nuclear power itself.
It's the current reality in both the US and Europe. And looking at the various serious construction defects that are surfacing in French plants that were build at a time when the government waived much of the red tape, these extra precautions save a lot of costs over the lifetime of the plants.
Nuclear plants are very complex machines and government contractors are well known to cut corners and do shoddy work when not supervised well. This has nothing to do with fear mongering 🤷
No you're just ignorantly wrong. New plants, even ones built around the same time as Chornobyl, are LITERALLY INCAPABLE of breaking in the same ways. This entire discussion is filled with ignorant people speaking confidantly.
No one talked about Chernobyl like disasters, please don't argue silly strawmans.
A large part of the French plants had to be recently shut down for very expensive repairs, because their containments developed serious cracks due to shoddy construction.
I am not generally against nuclear reactors, and the ones already running should be kept online for the time being, but building new ones is complete economic nonsense and way better alternatives exist.
Yes it has been mentioned multiple times across the entire discussion. Besides, most people imagine containment breach when they think of nuclear disaster anyways, so it is absolutely not hyperbole to point out that it literally cannot happen.
Your attitude is similar to the fools who freaked out when they heard Fukushima was releasing yons of "contaminated" water in to the ocean. Water that is less radioactive than many natural places around the planet. Water you could swim in every day of your life and still live just fine.
The fear mongering is absolutely real and the ignorance about newer technology is staggering.
Again you are arguing a strawman. I am talking about costly repairs and cost / time overruns when constructing them. Nuclear reactors are just not making any economic sense 🤷
You're using ONE example to say the entire industry is full of shoddy work and overruns, when I've already described several mechanisms that artificially balloon the costs in the first place. You can continue to pretend you're correct, but you're simply not.
There are endless examples. Just look up recent delays in the reactor under construction in the UK, or the hugely delayed and overly expensive one recently completed in Finland.
There is no artificial balooning, quite the contrary. These contracts always go to the lowest bidder who then proceeds doing shoddy work and later blackmails the government for more money to complete the works.
Renewables are best for sure. I guess if the required logistics are not in place to get them online faster, I guess waiting for fusion is better.
I would have thought it could be done faster. Thanks for the info!
hmmmmmmmmmm u do have a point, but i mean lithium is running out and we need a constant influx of power (power grid, no batteries) like with nuclear, we could never afford to use batteries for all the energy in the planet. also i THINK that hydro disturbs the ecosystem (fish n stuff cant get through) but im not sure how true that is considering that they can always just open a gate for fish to pass, like with that online dorbell.
In Germany we already often have more energy than we can use and wind turbines have to be shut down so the power grid doesn't get overwhelmed. What we need most right now (here in Germany) is more grid expansion and not necessarily more energy production. Also, not every store of energy has to be lithium batteries.
In fact, sodium batteries seem to be taking off and the only downside they have compared to lithium batteries is energy density, which isn't a problem for grid storage.
im not sure how true that is considering that they can always just open a gate for fish to pass
That's not how that actually works. Damming has huge impacts on downstream, now much drier, ecosystems. Even if there were a way to "open a gate for fish", that wouldn't solve the problem that their habitat is now gone. This is among reasons people have fought for dam removal. This also ignores the flooding of the environment that becomes the reservoir.
Why do you think Lithium is running out? There is enough Lithium that could be mined if there was enough political will (and sometimes price signals).
Besides, we might also use other battery types, such as Redox-Flow for long term storage.
The current "backup" plan is to produce Hydrogen or P2G continuously, store it, and use it in cheap, inefficient gas turbines for the week every few years (without large grid interconnectivity) where there is a prolonged Dunkelflaute.
