Source - The colors of the grids represent CO2 emissions
The title is a reference to the 2021 Texas power crisis
this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
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To stir up some more shit, nuclear power has the same hidden emissions as lithium and the same political problems as oil, nuclear waste excluded.
Accounting for mining, construction, operation, decommission and disposal, nuclear has less emission that Solar.
The political problems are entirely artificial, fabricated by the fossil fuel competitors and have been soundly disproven.
Nuclear waste is no where near the problem people assume it is. A single plant doesn't produce more than it can store onsite during it's entire operation and 100% of all the waste can actually be recycled and ran through newer generation breeder reactors to 'burn' the radioactivity and render the resulting 'waste' safe as background radiation within a decade or so in a cooling pool. The only reason this isn't already common practice is nuclear fuel is so abundant it's not as profitable to do this, It'd be the equivalent of a coal power plant halting using coal for a few weeks so they could shovel in trash from a nearby landfill until it was empty. Less overall power output for less profit.
This is spot on. The economics is what really kills nuclear. The cost to build and operate a plant vs the revenue you get out of it won't break even until 25/30 years. Compare that to a natural gas plant that'll be profitable in ~5 years.
You'd think this is the kind of thing where governments would step in with subsidies, but that gets halted due to oil and gas lobbyists.
Neoliberal capitalism is bad at long-term projects. That's why we're struggling so much with climate change mitigation. A lot of the gigantic power projects that required such long-term planning were built in the New Deal era and the postwar industrial boom. During this time, corporate tax rates and workers' salaries were high because the government was genuinely afraid of worker power.
Building a modern nuclear power plant requires subcontracting it out into what is essentially a builders' market in which companies compete with each other for pieces of state-level building grants. None of these companies want to undertake risky long-term ventures like a new nuclear reactor because they want to maximize their short-term revenue (profit). So they jack up the prices until the project budget is overrunning already in the planning stage, and it's doomed from the start.
you don't even really need to subsidize it, you just need to front the cost for the plant, build it, and the produce power. Might be time for a nationalized US power company.
not quite, since you have to reprocess the fuel, and the problem is that it's cheaper to just manufacture new fuel, so it doesn't make any financial sense. What's more likely is modern lead/salt cooled reactors using new fuel, and burning it past what we burn existing fuel. And potentially subsidizing waste reprocessing to burn it as well.
This is also ignoring the refueling operation being standard procedure. So it's more like a coal plant shipping in trash, which requires finding a source of trash, and one in a large enough quantity, and then burning it through the coal plant (without having to shut it down) and then having to find a source for coal, afterwards. It's just tedious.
It's also not "less overall power output" because again, the nuclear plants are simply designed with refueling in mind. So that's just an unfair comparison.
even if it was fair, nuclear plants have a capacity factor SIGNIFICANTLY higher than most fossil based production plants, and as a result, produce energy more efficiently and reliably over their lifetime.
same hidden emissions as lithium, but at a vastly smaller scale, because compared to something like coal mining, a dude with a pickaxe could supply what an entire nation dedicated to coal mining could do.