this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2024
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Nuclear power is literally more expensive at this point than renewables. No, you can't keep using the shitty, cracking, deadly waste producing nuclear plants of the past, not even the power companies want that, and building new ones takes over 10 years, not counting all the planning and beaurocracy you have to go through. And to become CO2 neutral after all the excavation, construction and mining necessary takes another decade. Nuclear power plants are MASSIVE engineering undertakings.
Meanwhile modern windmills can be mass-produced right now and take like 5 years depending on their placement to be both cost and CO2 neutral. After that it's LITERALLY free energy for a good 30 years. And they become cheaper and bigger and more efficient every single year. And btw if you ever pull out an article or a calculation that is older than a year for any comparison, you are dealing with OLD data. They have become far more efficient and flexible in their placement and will likely continue to do so.
The anti-nuclear protests were completely right. Stop playing the people who wanted a safer world without nuclear waste and incidents against the modern climate movement.
TL;DR: Wheels on windmill go brrrr, nuclear power is not a short term solution and never has been.
Nuclear and renewables are complementary technologies, renewables are a much more volatile source of energy. Also, when people say renewables are cheaper they're not counting the total lifecycle of things like wndmills and solar panels.
Yeah the LCOE of solar is likely ridiculously low because they still work decades after th started 25 year life used in levelised cost calculations
Nuclear in the west is so tremendously expensive we may as give up until China makes SMRs cheap
I mean China is already making all the solar panels at this point, so we might as well wait for them to role out nuclear globally.
Good news, the Chinese artificial sun has reached 403 seconds of stability. Up from 100 seconds 7 years ago. Once it reaches 1000 seconds at 50,000,000 Kelvin, it would mean it produces more energy than igniting the "sun" would cost.
Jesus Christ you're so uneducated it's ridiculous.
So you've got a point nuclear power is considerably more expensive than renewables but that was never the argument. It has always been more expensive than renewables, who possibly thought it wasn't, that's literally never not been the case, even 30 years ago.
The reason to use nuclear power is a base load. Renewables cannot generate the necessary level of energy demand in their entirety with the reliability that we need. It's called base load Google it.
So you need something to provide constant reliable sources of energy, so you've got two options either we build a Dyson sphere and have solar panels all over it, or we have nuclear power stations. And I think you'll agree that a dysons sphere might be a bit beyond us at this point.
If one thing is more expensive by some criteria guaranteeing something necessary and another thing cheaper by the same criteria not guaranteeing that, then the latter just doesn't exist.
So nuclear energy is cheaper than alternatives for the same purpose.
Just like an active volcano may suddenly let out a lot of magma which is going to be quite warm, but one can't just project as if that amount of heat is distributed over the average period between eruptions, while considering it for heating houses.
Pump water to height when it's windy , let it down when it's not. Load balanced. Not so hard eh?
Sure that would work in theory but you would struggle to get any kind of capacity with that system, and of course reservoirs are actually quite damaging to the environment, since you have to flood large areas of land.
If you ignore the other environmental costs, you mean. Just like solar, which causes untold damages from the disposal of mining refuse, but that gets conveniently ignored by first world nations, because most of the mining doesn't happen where you live.
They can be safely renovated, just informing you.
Don't think people are stupid. That deadly waste naturally becomes less deadly over time. There are procedures for nuclear waste processing and burial sites and when those can be reused. The cycle takes many years, but that'd be the same with keeping forests, for example.
I don't think that's true. We will have to store our nuclear waste safely for geological timescales: possibly millions of years. Currently only two working reprocessing plants exist in France and Russia and they can be employed to produce weapons-grade plutonium. In France currently only 10% is recycled.
Sources: https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinero/2019/11/26/the-staggering-timescales-of-nuclear-waste-disposal/?sh=58d3d09f29cf
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing
Ah, I've just mixed up things a bit. I was thinking of fast-neutron reactors. Waste from these is less cumbersome, and the existing waste can be partially reused with them.
The issue is battery storage. Our current battery technology is terrible both ecologically and in terms of what it does to the people mining it and living in those countries.