this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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Loads of people love to pretend an NPP is just a hut with a magic gem inside delivering an endless amount of power for free. In reality they are huge, highly complex, high-security facilities that take decades and billions to build and need to be operated and maintained by loads of highly trained staff in 24/7 shift operations. This isn't to downplay their merit of providing CO2 emission free power, but for the love of god please appreciate the enormous effort and expense this is achieved with, especially when comparing it to renewables.
It's almost like many things operate exactly like that but don't have people spreading disinformation or fearmongering to the point where people are so pants shittingly terrified of them they won't even consider it.
Yeah, fossil fuel companies have spent the last 70 years propagandizing against nuclear because it's their largest threat.
Sure, but hopefully you have no trouble believing that simultaneously, nuclear power companies and governments wanting to use nuclear, despite the risks, have been propagandizing for nuclear.
Pro-nuclear folks are often completely unaccepting of there being risks and externalized costs, which feels to me like they're subject to propaganda (notwithstanding that I'm likely subject to different propaganda).
Nuclear power companies are rare, and badly funded. Most civilian nuclear programs are/were state-sponsored. Throughout the cold war, the main financial driver was a need for enriched plutonium and uranium for obvious applications.
Now that we have been (mostly) in an era of nuclear deproliferation for over 30 years, there is little to no money behind nuclear lobbying (though nuclear-armed powers are much less likely to scale back civilian nuclear production, they also don't have a military need to increase it). Weapons programs aside, "Big Atom" does not exist (unlike Big Oil or Big Coal who have billions of dollars to spend on lobbying annually).
Countries like Belgium or Germany even shuttered perfectly serviceable and economically viable NPP on ideological grounds FFS.
Now green field nuclear might not be a sound investment anymore (arguable, and depending on unreliable predictions about our future ability to do grid-scale battery storage to overcome intermittency issues as well as our willingness to rely on fossil gas instead).
But as someone living in a country whose nuclear program got fucked by stupid panicky rhetoric, I can tell you from experience that until the energy crisis of last year, "nuclear good" was a fringe "right wing" opinion held almost exclusively by people for who economics matters more than ecology (because traditional ecologists truly believe that nuclear waste is always worse than GHG emissions).
Yoyoing gas prices and the threat of an infrastructure collapse recently brought nuclear back into a more mainstream appeal, but unfortunately far too late to seriously consider building new NPPs.
Not quite. They initially did, but these days they fund the pro-nuclear groups more because it causes discussion between the pro-nuclear groups and the pro-renewables groups. This means nothing of substance really gets done. Moreover, they prefer nuclear over renewables because nuclear takes a lot longer to build. They don't mind another 15-20 years of fossil fuels that a nuclear-heavy strategy gives them, whereas renewables can be deployed right now which hurts their bottom line more.
From what I understand, the costs and time needed to build a reactor would be far less if the constructions crews actually had experience building them.
Hell yeah they bring high quality jobs as well as clean power
Things that don't exist yet aren't a solution for problems we have now.
It's not like we could now just build a thorium reactor that makes economic sense without decades of serious prototyping. And by that time we might have found that there are more pbolems with it than we thought.
I mean, China is doing it right now, and we'll have answers in a lot less than decades.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Operating-permit-issued-for-Chinese-molten-salt-re
Not sure which unit MWt is. Anyway, let's see how far they are in 7 years.
Strange source aside I've been hearing were on the edge of a breakthrough for thorium reactors and cold fusion for 40 years now.
If China had it working already then we would have heard it a lot louder from them.
Don't forget about the environment cost of extracting unprocessed uranium ore.
Unfortunately renewables have nasty costs like this of their own.
Solar panels require a specific grade of silicone as a rare(ish) raw material input that requires extraction and heavy processing. Wind turbines don't really use anything that is not readily available (steel, aluminum, fiber glass, etc.)
The technology to recycle solar panels still needs to be developed. The technology to recycle solar panel blades exists, but has not scaled up yet.
I'm not saying solar/wind have no material cost. I am saying the process for refining uranium requires extracting a lot of uranium ore.
You don't actually need that much uranium though. Yeah it's a big operation, but that stuff goes a long way.
Even wind power needs rare earth elements like neodymium and dysprosium, which pretty much only come from China and the mining operations there are kind of horror shows.
Sighs in thorium LFTR reactor noises.
That technology is nowhere near mature enough to provide a solution to the mentioned problems in the next decade or two.
Well of course not, now. I never said it would fix the now problems we face. Had we started in the 1950s, or even the 70s, the impact of climate change would have been negligible and likely mitigated entirely by changes to society that we can't possibly speculate given our current world. Unfortunately, money and greed played yet another part in destroying our futures by those who won't be around to see what they've done or simply don't care.