Nuclear Power

Fossil fuels produce terrible waste we store in the air that we breathe.

Terrible waste that we store in our lungs
Yes, but when things go wrong, the boom is relatively small and contained.
We can't run a regular coal or natural gas power plant here without fucking it up and getting people killed. Despite the safety of modern plant designs, I do NOT trust the people in charge here with fissile material.
- Go lookup CANDU reactors, we have designs already that can't steam explode themselves and instead will fail safe. Also just to be clear nuclear reactors don't perform a nuclear explosion if they fail, the Chernobyl explosion was a steam explosion that threw nuclear material into the air.
- You know, the beautiful thing about being a society is we can all just agree to regulate them. I think that's called a government.
- Yes, but when things go wrong, the boom is relatively small and contained.
  Not so: https://daily.jstor.org/the-tragedy-at-buffalo-creek/
- That's why people prefer driving over flying, right? If something goes wrong, the boom is small and contained.
  Never mind that planes are much safer and efficient at travelling long distance.

I don't think even one of those fast fission reactors is still in operation. Wonder why that is.

They're politically unpopular, more expensive than fossil fuels, and most of them are prototypes.
India and China each have one. Russia has 3.
I blame Nixon for why nuclear power in the US sucks. He axed research on any reactor types that didn't produce plutonium for weapons, including thorium reactors. Hope he's rotting in hell.
- According to the future-documentary Futurama, his head is in a jar somewhere, waiting to assume the presidency once again with the headless body of Spiro Agnew.
According to Wikipedia there are a few, with more planned. But not nearly enough. IMO, we should switch over to Fast Reactors as standard.
Canada has CANDU breeder reactors, still in use. They also produce the majority of medical isotopes.
- CANDU reactors are pressurized heavy-water reactors not Fast-neutron reactors.
It's not really needed. Waste is a boogeyman, but not really a problem. It takes an incredibly small volume to store the waste, and it can be reduced with reprocessing to run in the exact same reactors.
At some point in the future when there actually is a huge amount of waste causing issues, then it might make sense to build a reactor to use it.
- when there actually is a huge amount of waste
  Over 60,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel are stored across Europe (excluding Russia and Slovakia), most of which in France (Table 1). Within the EU, France accounts for 25 percent of the current spent nuclear fuel, followed by Germany (15 percent) and the United Kingdom (14 percent). Spent nuclear fuel is considered high-level waste. Though present in comparably small volumes, it makes up the vast bulk of radioactivity.
  ~ 2019 https://worldnuclearwastereport.org/
  Last "brilliant" plan I heard was dumping it in a hole deep enough we'd never need, nor be able to recover it.
- Have a look at the size of the Finnish waste repository.
  "They'll hold a total of 5,500 tonnes of waste," says Joutsen. "So Onkalo will take all the high-level nuclear waste produced by Finland's five nuclear power plants in their entire life cycles."
  https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230613-onkalo-has-finland-found-the-answer-to-spent-nuclear-fuel-waste-by-burying-it
  The Finnish repository is designed with a life of 100,000 years. Homo sapiens (i.e us) have existed for about 300,000 years.
  Article about the problems warnings that will comprehensible in 10,000 years https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200731-how-to-build-a-nuclear-warning-for-10000-years-time
Since there are economic, ecological, conceptual and engineering problems, only five Fast-neutron reactors are operational at the moment. Three in Russia, one in India and one in China. Not surprisingly these are countries that also have an interest in producing weapons grade Plutonium, which FNRs are capable of.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2968/066003007
https://spectrum.ieee.org/china-breeder-reactor
https://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs15glaser.pdf
https://energypost.eu/slow-death-fast-reactors/
https://sussex.figshare.com/articles/report/
And while nuclear energy production peaked 1996 at 17% and was nowhere near overtaking fossil energy production in it's 70(!) year long existence, Renewables will overtake fossil fuel power production in 2025, with only minute risks for the biosphere.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/renewable-power-set-to-surpass-coal-globally-by-2025/
https://www.renewable-ei.org/pdfdownload/activities/REI_NuclearReport_201902_EN.pdf
So why cling to an outdated technology when there are viable solutions at hand, which are nowhere as complicated and dangerous as nuclear fission? It's the monetary interest of a dying nuclear industry and its lobbyists.

So nuclear plants of the future won't be run by companies who cut important corners on safety to maximize shareholder profits while offloading the consequences to the government and public?

I mean that's how things work in China with state owned companies. I don't see why everybody shouldn't be doing that.
- Good news: America already does it too!

Nuclear power is still the most expensive way to produce electricity by a large margin.

It is not.
And there is no large margin.
Referencing several sources that consider a vast array of power generation technologies, from offshore wind to biomass, terrestrial wind, solar, gas, coal and nuclear, and nuclear energy has high start up costs and it's also not the cheapest per megawatt of power. It's basically middle of the road on most of the stats I've seen.
Solar, by comparison, has had a much higher LCOE as recently as 5-10 years ago. Most power construction projects take longer than that to plan and build, then operate for decades. Until the last few years, solar hasn't even be a competitor compared to other options.
Beyond direct cost nuclear has been one of very few green energy sources, the nuclear materials are contained and safely disposed of. Unless there's a serious disaster, it's one of the most ecologically friendly forms of energy. The only sources better are hydroelectric, and geothermal. The only "waste" from nuclear is literal steam, and some limited nuclear waste product. A miniscule amount compared to the energy produced.
Last time I checked, all of the nuclear waste that's ever been produced can fit in an area the size of a football field, with room to spare. For all the energy produced, it's very small.
Yet, because of stuff like Chernobyl and Fukushima, everyone seems to hate it.
I live in Ontario, Canada, our entire power infrastructure is hydroelectric and nuclear. I'm proud of that.
Nuclear isn't the demon that people believe it is.
- LCOE of solar is lower than nuclear for eleven years now. Wind has had lower LCOE than nuclear for 14 years now. See figure 52.
  Building a new nuclear power plant takes 9-12 years on average. Hinkley Point C in southeast England was announced in 2008 (16 years ago) and is projected to be finished in 2028, with costs now being estimated around $40 billion. These long realisation times are not a european issue alone, as Korea's Shin-Hanul-1-2 faces similar problems.
  Safely storing nuclear waste is expensive, too.
- Yet, because of stuff like Chernobyl and Fukushima, everyone seems to hate it.
  Is that a bad reason really? When nuclear goes bad it goes really bad and it can go bad due to human error which is something that will always be present. When a solar panel catastrophically fails it doesn't render the surrounding environment uninhabitable for decades.
- No. And pretending it is longer for solar is false too. https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april-2023.pdf
You got downvored for truth. That's pretty sad tbh
- Yeah, sometimes the pro nuclear bubble feels a bit like crypto bros lol
- It's common in pseudo-social media sites. Take commentless downvores as a badge of honour. Take fallacious-comment downvores as a hot badge of honour.

If nuclear stops getting outstripped by renewables on cost I might be more interested in it.

Or just bury it miles underground in the desert, but for some fucking reason a state is as likely to store it upstream in a concrete shack as they are to ship it to the mojave where the pit is literally already dug out and designated.

Just remember that Low level Radioactive Waste is a thing, unless there’s a fast reactor that runs on smocks and used syringes

This meme is nonsense. Fast reactors do not alleviate the problem; if that were the case, waste would not accumulate around the world, to the point that no one knows what to do with it. There are no geologically safe storages for millennia.

A nuclear power plant has a useful life of about 40, at most 50 years, after which there remains a ruin that must be eliminated, a deconstruction that can last decades to eliminate thousands of tons of debris with medium and high radioactivity. This, adding to the storage problems, is a tremendously expensive process that is also carried out with public money, not by the owner company. In the event of an accident, see Harrisbourg, Chernobyl, Fukushima and some more, large areas of the country remain contaminated for many years.

The statement spread by nuclear companies that nuclear power plants do not pollute during their operation is a lie. They produce almost as much CO2 as carbon plants, since they require transportation from third countries, if they do not have a Uranium mine nearby, apart from the energy requirements in the enrichment processes in centrifuge plants. The warming of surrounding aquifers due to cooling, with important impacts on local fauna due to the proliferation of algae and lack of oxygen in them. Not to mention the risk of a meltdown due to lack of refrigeration, when the aquifer disappears due to a drought, which precisely now with global warming is a real risk.

The promotion of nuclear power plants has pure economic reasons for certain companies and in some cases weapons reasons to justify the production of the necessary Uranium and Plutonium.

Nuclear energy is only acceptable in medical applications with short half-life isotopes and in space probes. A nuclear alternative will only exist with fusion plants, the current fission plants are not an option.

The reason for rejection is not hate, but rather knowledge of the cause and consequences.

Do they actually produce as much CO2 as carbon plants? Do you have a source for that claim?
In terms of nuclear waste storage, the IAEA claims 390,000 tonnes were generated between 1954 and 2016, and a third has been recycled.
The US EPA claims the US generated 6,340 million metric tons of CO2, and 25% were for the electric power economic sector.
The nuclear waste is stored on site, but I imagine carbon waste is stored mostly in our atmosphere...
The narrative I have heard is that nuclear energy waste is much more manageable than fossil fuel waste, but if nuclear energy has emissions or scaling problems I'm not aware of, I'd be happy to revise my preconceptions about it.
You might need to back up some of your statements with a source there. Lots of words, none of which make sense.
- Pretty much everything OP said is backed up by mountains of evidence, especially in the case of France. Looking it up is trivial. Without proving anything to the contrary, your own comment is lazy and useless to this conversation.

This comic is pretty bad. It oversimplifies both positions to the point of complete triviality, then uses it to mock a group of people. The comic is not insightful, or funny, or representative or any real people in any sense. It's basically just a jab at some people that the author doesn't like.

Here's some reading material: https://www.bmk.gv.at/en/topics/climate-environment/nuclear-coordination/fairy-tales.html

here's some more reading material from a country that actually knows what it's talking about https://www.caea.gov.cn/english/n6759365/n6759369/c6792804/content.html

then why aren't we already doing that? Probably it's not as cost-effective? nuclear power is already crazy expensive.

That being said a very small amount of nuclear I'm fine with, just to make up for renewable fluctuation until we figure out power storage

China is doing it, but I can't tell you why the west is so backwards.

my opinion on nuclear power is that: it should be used for transitioning from fossil fuels, and we should begin phasing it out when we phase out fossil fuels completely.