this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2023
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Do you want to argue, that the construction of a nuclear power plant causes significantly less ecological stress and pollution than solar panels and windturbines?
Think about if you really want to claim that as a thing you actually believe in.
I'm just gonna throw some words in a pool.
concrete, steel, space, deforestation, river, 10+ Years construction time, heavy machinery, dust, natural habitats, fuel, mining, waste, noise, cost, france...
Thank you. i rest my case.
Half of those aren't even relevant.
The actual construction takes about 4 years, but legal issues such as rules changing and politics, legal issues, and additional planning tend to push this up to 6-15 years in extreme cases. To draw a parallel: building a 1GW windmill farm, such as the Thorsminde off shore windmill farm is estimated to take 5 years of pure construction time, and politics and legal issues have so far added 4 years to this from the day it was announced, giving a total construction time of about 9 years without delays.
Cost wise, Thorsminde is projected to cost 2.1 billion USD, and that's without running costs, possible delays, or deconstruction costs at its 30 year end of life. The construction of a nuclear plant usually ( as in the projects that have been finished and we know the total construction costs of) costs anywhere from 6 to 9 billion USD. So yes, nuclear is more expensive, as you said.
Of course windmills don't just pop out of the ground, so heavy machinery will also be required, and the sound of the hammers building the foundation will likely drive away any sound sensitive life in a 100-200 km radius, such as whales. This can be partly mitigated by running the hammers at lower power, adding about 30-50% (might be more, foundations take a long time to build) additional construction time and driving up the price.
The windmills will also change the life of the area dramatically throughout its life, VS nuclear, which requires mines that cause decent damage, but do not pollute in any significant way at the reactor site (unless you pump the waste water from the usually closed first loop directly out to the rivers and sea, or swear on running the power plant without cooling towers during droughts).
Also the resources needed to make a 1GW wind farm are immense, and contrary to nuclear, we can't currently reuse the waste from deconstruction, which there also is quite a lot more of. Furthermore, maintenance will be hell, as you have much more moving parts (not per windmill, but per farm, which has multiple windmills) as a nuclear plant.
Do you realise that you can also build windmills... where you would put the Power Plant? On Land? And that would reduce the time and cost of construction?
You could also fill barren fields with solar panels and use space that not even a solar plant could use, this in turn also gives animals shade and helps biodiversity and bug species.
And doesnt have a third of its construction cost as running costs forever.
You can also scale wind turbines in minutes. Look at France how much it costs to have nuclear plants not running.
In what way can we reuse the nuclear waste?
You do realise how much space windmills would need to produce as much power as a single nuclear plant, right? That is also the reason we try to build them in the water.
And when did I write anything about nuclear waste? I specifically pointed out that I was talking about deconstruction waste, where cooling towers turbines, and general facilities can be reused, and only the core shielding of the nuclear reactor has to be specially disposed of, versus the wings and foundation of windmills, which we don't really know what to do with right now, so we kinda just bury them wherever and hope it doesn't come back to bite us later.
You didn't. I did. What about nuclear waste? It doesnt go away and if we build so much nuclear we also have so much more waste.
The blades can be recycled btw. we just dont do it because we dont have capacity for them.
Which brings me back to the nuclear waste. Oh and Fukushima. Chernobyl. When are we getting rid of those?
The amount of waste produced is extremely small for how much power you get, and is dealt with in exactly the same we we deal with literally all of our garbage: put it under ground and call it a day.
Those wind turbines and solar panels also get constructed, and affect a much larger area. It's not an obvious comparison
Duh, Yes things have to be built. A Windmill is built in a few weeks by way less people and has no risk of exploding into a huge cloud of death.
Obviously building one wind turbine is less disruptive, but you need hundreds to get the same output, and they only work when it's windy.
It's always windy. We live on a spinning planet.
Solar needs sun. Nuclear needs water to cool. Hydro needs water.
If you combine solar and wind you can replace many nuclear plants by just using the space we are already using.
There are a lot of good arguments for wind, and I'm not arguing against it, but density and consistency are well known issues. You absolutely cannot replace a nuclear plant with a wind farm of the same size and get the same output. That's not necessarily a bad thing, wind farms can often coexist with other land uses, but that's still a disruptive environment.
It's good to put pressure on nuclear, the reason it's so incredibly safe is because it's highly regulated, but to completely ignore it is throwing the baby out with the bath water.
The question isn't "are nuclear plants perfectly safe", the question is "will adding nuclear plants to our energy portfolio reduce the risks from climate change enough to offset the risks they introduce."
I think, in that framework, replacing existing coal power plants with modern nuclear reactors is a huge overall benefit.
Wind and solar are great but there's still a lot of work needed on storage and transmission before they can be viable grid scale. Realistically, saying no to nuclear doesn't mean more wind, it means more natural gas. And those LNG tankers really are floating bombs.
A dam has a higher probability of exploding than a Nuclear Reactor. A WIND TURBINE has a higher probability of exploding than a Nuclear Reactor.
I havent heard of a Wind Turbine causing Fukushima. I think it was Nuclear.
What was the other one... Chernobyl Wind and Solar Farm?
Wow two whole accidents in a hundred years? One of them didn't hurt a single person? The other only killed 30 people? Crazy! That's SO dangerous?
What...? Coal mining killed a hundred thousand people in the last century? In the US alone? Wind turbines kill a few dozen a year in just the UK alone?
Aren't you forgetting something?
Liquidators also died way after the explosion from having to clean up all the rubble.
You can still not live in the area and will probably not be able to in many lifetimes.
Oh man one whole accident from obvious negligence which is easily resolved by the absolute most basic of regulation. Are you implying we're as bad as the USSR when it comes to basic safety? There have been hundreds of thousands of reactors going perfectly fine since then. Modern reactors can literally not fail in the same way that caused Chernobyl.
i didnt know that ~440 with 60 being constructed is equal to hundreds of thousands.
And i also don't understand why an incident such as chernobyl or fukushima is just "not a problem" at all to you.
It's also not been one...
You're forgetting Kyshtym,Windscale,Three Mile Island,Church Rock and again, Fukushima.
And those were just the bad incidents.
I meant to type "or" not "of."
Kyshtym was not a nuclear reactor and was also in the USSR.
Windscale had nobody be injured or die in the moment, but POSSIBLY a hundred due to long term radiation, though this is disputed.
Three Mile Island had zero injuries and zero deaths. The issues it had were entirely due to badly designed control panels and multiple human errors in succession, which has been addressed. Every single one of its safety systems worked perfectly as designed, but one stupid dude did the wrong things at the wrong times and fucked it up. Even then, again, it was an incredibly benign accident.
Church Rock isn't even a nuclear reactor.
Fukushima, again, was quite benign. Nobody died and (iirc) nobody was injured. Its safety systems worked exactly as designed and the only issue was bad placement and not being built to survive the possible tsunamis that it may face, which is easily resolved through the most basic of regulation.
Yeah, there's some cleanup in these, but in everything but Chernobyl the surrounding area is perfectly fine. If these are your "bad incidents" then I really wonder what you think of the thousands of people that are actively dying per year putting up and maintaining windmills.
Time and time again nuclear proves to be the safest form of energy production on every single metric.
No it's an uranium mine and a Plutonium Plant. What do you need those specific things for?
Do you want me to list notable deaths in nuclear maintenance?
You guys are all so dense...
More people have died working in Wind than Nuclear. And Nuclear has lower carbon emissions than Wind Turbines to boot. I'm not arguing we shouldn't be using Wind Turbines, we absolutely should, but the best, cleanest energy grid human kind can hope for right now is a combination of Solar, Wind and Nuclear, because each of three has very distinct advantages and disadvantages that complement each other while doing the least ecological and environmental damage compared to other alternatives.
Building dams literally kills whole ecosystems. Reduce biodiversity and razes woodland. They also do tend to take 10+ year of construction, just like nuclear power, while taking several times more materials. Your point is really stupid, nuclear power plants do not cause any more ecological stress than a moderate building in any city. They do consume vasts amounts of water, which can be an ecological issue, but not to the level that a dam creates. Wind turbines, for example, are not recyclable (materials used are too complex and use a lot of plastic) and they disrupt birds population. Just like solar panels, they have a very very short lifespan. Windturbines must be replaced every 5 years or so. So does solar panels but for different reasons. A nuclear power plant can create power for several decades if well maintained.
The thing is, no human intervention in any place is sustainable. Our mere mode of existence is so energy intensive that we are going to destroy the planet's habitability no matter what we do. The time to change to 100% nuclear was 5 decades ago. The time to stop using fossil fuels was 4 decades ago. The time to change to sustainable energy was 3 decades ago. We lost the train. The planet won't support us in any form in the long run. Hell, mammals might also be fucked within the next million years. The planet will never ever be the same it was during the past 2 million years. And it's because of us.
Look at France to see how 100% nuclear would have gone.
Really well, with the lowest carbon emission dependence index and the cleanest air in Europe? France has also never had a nuclear incident ever. As they are actually one of the rarest events of all the known forms of energy creation. Actually, a joke amongst wind turbine installers is that wind power has killed more people than nuclear power. Because of how frequent incidents with cranes and helicopters are.
"French electricity group EDF said Thursday that shutdowns of four nuclear reactors would be extended for several weeks because of corrosion problems, potenti..."
"France has pledged to reduce its reliance on nuclear power by shutting down 12 nuclear reactors by 2035"
"The country relies on nuclear energy for 70% of its electricity"
Doesn't seem to be going so well, does it?
If it's going so well, why are they shutting down reactors at all?
Because Greenpeace actively protested to prevent maintenance to some of them, lol. Use your brain, stop zealously repeating catch phrases and actually think critically.
Let me give you some examples, you said:
And all of that power is provided by 59 moderately sized buildings. 34 of them were built in the 70's and have been refurbished and maintained to this day, because mad irrational regulation doesn't let them just tear the damn things down and build newer ones that are more efficient and use recyclable fuel. You won't find a single wind turbine or solar panel that lasts over 50 years, none.
Ok, that wasn't this Thursday, that was some Thursday in 2021. Guess what? it was a design flaw only present on the N4 model. They closed those four, because there are only four of them. And they figured out how to fix them and now they fix them regularly and today all those four reactors are operational. They learned a lot and are now applying the same good practices to all the nuclear reactors to avoid corrosion issues in any of the plants.
Again, that was in 2014. A policy that originally aimed to reduce nuclear power reactors to 50% of the country's energy generation by 2025 amid the push of fossil fuel funded anti-nuclear activism. This was delayed in 2019 to 2035. But this year it was completely reversed. They plan to build 6 more instead and potentially expand that to 8 later this year. Because it turns out, they're really not that much more expensive than other sustainable sources and just as good at reducing fossil dependency now that Russia, the main oil exporter for EU, decided to blow their neighbor to smithereens.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/03/edf-to-reduce-nuclear-power-output-as-french-river-temperatures-rise
So this reocurring thing due to global warming will totally never be a problem anymore.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/business/nuclear-power-france.html
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-europe-energy-crisis-updates-france-nuclear-outage/#xj4y7vzkg
You must be fuming to how this could happen when Nuclear is so awesome and has no problems and is cheap and safe and the most effective.
Except when it isnt.
Wow, you're exceptionally irrational about this. Bye.
~~Are you this dense and uninformed on purpose, or are you just trolling us?~~ I'll apologies for that remark, it does not contribute to the discussion, though your points are rather misinformed.
France has a lot of old plants who will be at their end of life after some 50 years of service.
The exact same thing you just said also counts for windmills. Contrary to popular belief, windmills do not last forever and will need to be rebuilt or deconstructed at the latest after some 30 years.
Does this mean that windmills do not work because they aren't perpetual machines? No! There's a myriad of problems with wind and solar, but them having a finite lifespan is very normal.
France has a lot of nuclear plants not producing electricity and is importing electricity like crazy.
It's not 4 plants being shut down because they are old. Its plants shut down because they have corrosion. And the Water required for cooling isnt sufficient.
Windmills dont need to be completely replaced. they are not shut down forever after 30 years. they will just have their parts replaced. For a tiny fraction of the price of a new nuclear plant.
False, France has been a net exporter of electricity for over four decades. They had to import electricity, once, in 2022. Because of the corrosion issue that, as I said in another comment, is already solved. Because of the war on Ukraine, just like every single country in Europe. And because, guess what? there was a drought and hydroelectric dams were dry!
Do you do this all day, just go around telling lies? Are you just ignorant, someone brainwashed you or is someone paying you? You are truly irrational about this. Just accept that maybe your worldview is not accurate and update your existence to something other than black and white thinking.
Goddamnit France. Classic France.
Microreactors aren't that big. The one in the picture is from terrapower, the nuclear company Gates is funding, but they aren't that close to production. The ones that have or are close to have DOE approval, are the size of a garden shed, and can power something like a couple of neighborhoods, or a datacenter. Might need two for a datacenter. They are self-sufficient, small, clean, and take almost no hand holding.
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-nuclear-microreactor
The article is talking about small modular reactors, which is basically taking hte micro reactor concept and scaling it just a little larger, and creating a power plant, that you can add more modules on to increase the size and power output. It's kind of a hybrid concept between a standard power plant and a classic nuclear plant. They don't take 10 years to build, you're not bulding that giant containment building, because the reactors are small and easy to replace and manage. China has already done this in several places while we dwaddle and waste time being scared of old ways of thinking.