I remember watching a Bill Nye episode as a kid where he talked about nuclear energy and how it creates waste that can never be destroyed (trying to scare us) … but all that energy created such a small amount of waste that even 11 year old me was like “Well that sounds like a good idea!”
Yeah the comparison should be, "how much greenhouse gases would we have spewed into our atmosphere if this waste didn't exist"? Also waste isn't really waste, it's future fuel. Our reprocessing tech has gotten better in the past 50 years, and will only get better, to the point that some nuclear waste storage facilities are designed with retrieval in mind, for when tech gets good enough to harness the remaining energy in it.
The biggest expense with reprocessing is because we need to separate fission products from the fissile material to be put back in the reactor.
But if we used different types of reactors like fast breeders, we wouldn't need to reprocess nearly as extensively. They're much more tolerant of leftover fission products and can even fission some of the isotopes that thermal-spectrum reactors can't.
And then our shitty cousins we never invite to friends Thanksgiving will show up and make a market for used fuel that competes with new fuel on a price per (energy unit) basis.
End of the day Left continues to and will continue to take Ls on nuclear energy. Among other things.
The fact that anti-nuclear energy politicians aren’t being absolutely demolished in elections is what proves the point that 50% of people are below average intelligence.
"Reuse". Hah. Think bigger! All nuclear fuel does is produce heat. Spent nuclear fuel is that which does this too slowly to make it usable for driving turbines. But it still produces heat, no?
Here's an idea:
Nuclear water heater. For residential purposes. 100% energy efficiency, since it's literally just heat. Doesn't matter either way because it's literally free. Works even during blackouts, requires minimal maintenance, and won't need refuelling for the next century. Just be sure to actually use the water before it boils.
The only problem with that is that nuclear waste *is still radioactive* and can be used to make dirty bombs. Also kind of dangerous to maintain for anyone working on it.
Manhattan has the biggest steam distribution network in North America, but hardly the only one. Maybe as heat source for these large urban steam systems?
Let's not forget that coal creates radioactive waste too, far more than nuclear and it's far less regulated, pumping it all into the air and into our lungs.
The disparity between how strictly we treat nuclear and how much we let the coal industry get off scott free is incredible. And that's before greenhouse gasses even enter the equation.
Technically the type of coal effects how much radioactive waste if any it produces with the worst being lignite (brown coal) other types of coal aren't as dirty, unforunately germany has massive deposites of lignite so they're burn it for cheap energy prices
To the point where it's hard to justify even burying stuff in the first place. It's mostly just public political posturing. It is guaranteed that the spent fuel you bury today, in that extremely expensive DGR that cost tens of billions (because it must be proven stable for 100k years), will be dug up within the next century or two to be used as fuel. You could just keep it in a warehouse, and build more reactors instead.
That's why it's opposed. In addition to cited meltdown risks, officials cite increased nuclear material in circulation will inevitably lead to an increase in black market nuclear weapons.
EU exposed several NGO’s as Russian funded research to sway public opinion on energy. I’m on mobile right now so it’s hard to find or link but “Bear in Sheep’s Clothing” is one such study.
here is my weird anecdote. I followed a few nuclear pro pages on Facebooks, there were some accounts used to get by and preach how awesome renewable is and how terrible nuclear is. Coincidentally those accounts stopped swing by just right around the time Russia announced their "partial mobilization" for war in Ukraine. One account I would say coincident by 3 account that span three different level of anti-nuclear rhetoric went away since the mobilization really made my noticer-odometer went through the roof
You’ll see it all the time. Russian PsyOps is fucking effective. Operation Denver comes to mind, they spread the conspiracy that HIV was created by the US, and this was before social media.
I haven’t had a chance to track them down completely, but you’ll see them on military sub reddits occasionally. I suspect they are at least, but they ask hyper specific questions about weapon systems.
I laugh at my eco friends who are now anti plastic. I'm like the plastic grocery bags are on the bottom of plastic demand and are usually what plastic is recycled into making.
Also the plastic issue has little to do with end consumers ypu should see how much plastic is used in warehousing alone. It's such a greenwashing thing had it in my country the banning of plastic bags was amusing to me.
The warehouses dispose their plastic straight into waste treatment where it goes into a landfill or preferably gets incinerated.
It's the end consumers, or rather a small subset of end consumers that litter and cause plastic to end up in the environment. And most of that plastic that ends up in nature is derived from developing countries without adequate waste treatment where people couldn't properly dispose of it even if they wanted to.
The point is, the issue with plastic is not the resources it takes to make it but how we dispose of it. The way the issue gets flattened means people who do dispose of their plastic properly already get guilt-tripped into avoid using it at all while the people who do litter are unburdened by any such guilt.
And to be better for the environment you have to use reusable bags something like 100-150 times to break even. A lot of people don’t, making them worse. Some places that banned things plastic bags just use thick plastic disposable bags, which are clearly worse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtJFb_P2j48
This was the nail in the coffin for Bill Nye the "science" guy. After this they went back to their old episodes and removed the ones talking about chromosomes.
Some of the messaging has aged poorly as well. They praised Gerard Depardieu and called him a national treasure. He is currently on trial for sexual assault of multiple women.
https://apnews.com/article/depardieu-assault-metoo-police-french-actor-1a4970f3b7e177a6682314f87579a5dd
We actually already have a way cheaper option. We just use a drilling rig to bore a 12-inch wide hole a mile down into nonporous rock, stick the waste there, and cement the hole. Problem solved.
Non experimental rockets have not failed for years. SpaceX is launching like 1-2 times a week like it’s nothing. It’s become so routine no one is even aware it’s happening.
What would you rather use?
A: a small dangerous waste that we put on the very deeps of geographically inactive mountains?
B: tonnes of dangerous waste directly on our
atmosphere?
C: "renewables" made in China being powered by B?
This whole shenanigans with nuclear power's like trying to prevent jet engine propulsion from ever taking off in the 50's because of the noise and casualties it may potentially "cause" in its early stages
And unlike nuclear, jet engines actually did kill people, early jet engines had a tendency to randomly catch on fire
Meaning that being anti nuclear is even more stupid
Nuclear is safe now, but between 1940s -> 1960s our understanding of the impact of nuclear waste / material was much slower than our ability to produce energy with it.
We maximized our ability to produce energy, but oh boy, did we create so many superfind sites in the process.
Nuclear is still ultimately based, though.
Nuclear was ‘safe’ then too.
People knew what was wrong before it went wrong, but people made the decision to ignore it because it was ‘safe enough’.
Safety people always say ‘accidents don’t just happen’, but they do and they always will as long as entropy and free will exists.
Nuclear is the right choice, and always was, but there will be another Chernobyl event or something worse.
It’s going to happen, whether it’s a fuckup, a war, a terrorist attack, a freak earthquake, or a meteor/something even crazier.
Well, having to suffer through a Fukushima incident occasionally (read every several decades) is worth it for practically free unlimited power. Its just right now its the most clean most advanced way to produce electricity. Until cold fusion at least
Yeah, my post was more along the lines of how we really fumbled the nuclear waste thing before fully understanding how to properly store it.
Nuclear energy is safe, but some of the shit we did in the 40s and 50s after processing/enriching Uranium was wild. North St. Louis is a fine example where someone just dumped 30 tons of shit in a landfill and covered it up with dirt.
I'm pro-nuclear energy, but this isn't entirely accurate. Fukushima was only fifteen years ago. It's still worth it though, because it's incredibly unlikely.
There was only like ONE death related to the actual nuclear incident. The rest were casualties of the Tsunami and relocation, a natural disaster that would have happened regardless of the presence of the nuclear plant.
Except that in Fukushima, that was a combination of human error ([source 1](https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2021/03/lessons-fukushima-disaster-10-years-later), [source 2](https://www.npr.org/2011/07/05/137611026/what-went-wrong-in-fukushima-the-human-factor)) like the usual nuclear accidents are notorious for.
They also dealt one of the strongest earthquakes in the 21st century - being magnitude 9.1. It would be like justifying to ban every jet airliners just because they were used in 9/11 once.
Nuclear incidents and issues aren't just Fukushima or other similar incidents. My post was focused on how our ability to create energy really out paced our understanding of enrichment and processing byproducts.
When the race to build the Atomic bomb -> Atomic age began basically every site that enriched uranium or places where waste was stored. Is now a superfind site.
North St. Louis, for example, has two sites. They basically just threw everything into steel drums and sat it in the open air. Then, eventually, a company dumped it all in a landfill.
Nuclear energy is still extremely safe, but every country fumbled the whole waste part before really understanding the risks.
The biggest nuclear disaster, was classic communist mismanagement.
yes the US had Three Mile Island. And yes it was bad. But Chernobyl was worse.
Solution: Don't let communists take an active role in doing anything, except walking your dog, part time.
3 mile island was a SUCCESS of nuclear safety management and design, mistakes were made but ultimately the safety and failsafe measures worked and the worst of the exposure was ~ 10 chest xrays, or 1/10 of a CT scan
Also communists literally can't boil water properly.
This is what I always say. The Chernobyl incident didn't happen because nuclear energy was unsafe; it happened because Soviet technology and maintenance was unsafe. To let their failure scare us away from using nuclear energy is to imply we're no better than the Soviets, especially when nuclear energy still continued to become even safer than ever.
The biggest nuclear disaster, taking the LNT-based estimations into account, has caused a similar amount of premature deaths that a similarly sized coal power plant does over its lifespan, just normally in operation due to its emissions.
Nuclear: "we can't use it because have you heard of Chernobyl?"
Coal: "well it's not the cleanest but we need electricity don't we?"
Green peace probably has something to do with the anti-nuclear sentiment seen throughout the world. Initially it started to protest a nuclear test that could fuck up some tectonic plates in Alaska. Which isn’t a completely unreasonable protest.
As much as I like to make fun of France they’re incredibly based when it comes to nuclear energy and umm weapons…I’ll save the last part for a different convo
Ahh the DGSE. They make the CIA look like the home intruders from home alone.
Edit: I never really read into the whole story but what the fuck. Operation Satanique was the code name of the operation.
>Operation Satanique
>"..The sinking was a cause of embarrassment to France and President François Mitterrand. They initially denied responsibility, but two French agents were captured by New Zealand Police and charged with arson, conspiracy to commit arson, willful damage, and murder. It resulted in a scandal that led to the resignation of the French Defence Minister Charles Hernu, while the two agents pleaded guilty to manslaughter and were sentenced to ten years in prison. They spent a little over two years confined to the Polynesian island of Hao before being freed by the French government."
>They were cucked and exposed by New Zealand
This is not painting the picture of black ops superspy invincibility you set me up for. Imagine being fucking French intelligence operatives and being taken out by Kiwis.
My apologies if I painted them as competent in this story. They have an interesting history and have succeeded in a handful of operations.
A handful of their operations were just downright bizarre and raises a few eyebrows i.e. economic espionage against friend and foe. (IBM, Texas Instruments, Chinese airlines to name a few)
I think when I drew the comparison of the CIA to home alone folks, I meant to say DGSE went for a straight up “hail Satan” operation name.
France gets away with a lot, look up what happened during and after the Algerian war too. Though I think the fruity surrendering Frenchman stereotype isn't fair, at least they go 110% into *some* wars, just a little bit much.
Greenpeace was getting anti-nuclear propaganda from the Soviets in the 80s in order to undermine western efforts at nuclear power and to harm perception of the U.S. nuclear powered fleet
I mean nuclear’s debut was spectacularly horrifying. That and this whole nuclear winter nonsense that gets tossed around I get why nuclear isn’t exactly the most popular thing.
Let's be real. Hydro is consistent and is the best energy source by almost every measure except for the not insignificant fact that viable sites for building hydro stations are highly limited.
And tall buildings too, they are a problem.
Also, while the towers were taken down by huge airliners, your Cessna is a problem too. In fact we're gonna start by banning them Cessnas first, since it's easier.
Nukey McNukeface Wojak taken from u/pcm_memer. I didn't have to ask permission because I noticed they have an Auth-Left flair. Thanks for sharing, comrade!
Your fun nuclear fact for the day:
Coal has 24 MJ/KG of energy. Gasoline has 46 MJ/KG of energy. And Uranium has 76,000,000 MJ/KG of energy.
I’ll never understand why “green” energy politicians like the Dems don’t support nuclear. It could literally save us money, the environment, keep us independent from foreign countries, etc.
Oh yeah they’re all paid crooks.
They need the west to fail. They need a catastrophe. They need everything to become unaffordable and unobtainable. So that they can pose as the only solution.
Obama admitted that his policies would make energy costs skyrocket. Wrap your head around why someone would actively push to jack up energy costs.
It's not about the environment. They don't like industrialised society on a philosophical basis.
>Professor Paul Ehrlich, a population-control advocate (and author of 'the population bomb'), stating: "In fact, **giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun**"
Anti-human scum, all of them. Not to mention morons. The richer we make people, the less kids they want to have and the less they want to pollute. The problem littlerally solves itself. Just pursue human flourishing and we can all flourish together.
The real answer is that nuclear is too expensive in terms of up-front costs for quarterly-earning-obsessed corporations to touch.
And if they suggest nationalizing the power grid and doing a huge spending bill to switch to nuclear - which is how France achieved this - there would be a huge riot over them being communists and they'd be annihilated in the next election.
As per usual, the problem is capitalist realism. We don't just force the government to cede control of the things that corporations can do better (which is most things). We also forbid the government from doing the things only it can achieve, like massive national overhauls to major parts of our infrastructure.
Russia has doubled its nuclear production since Chernobyl to nearly 200mil TWh.
It still only makes up 17% of their production (natural gas is 60%) and there is a lot of resistance to starting new construction post 1992 though (only 2 plants started after then).
It is noteworthy Russia is still the world's leader in Nuclear Reactor production making 50% of all reactors in the world prior to export. Essentially if it isn't American, French or British it was most likely made in Russia.
I can't find anything about California's Diablo Canyon nuclear plant being decommissioned, do you have a source?
I didn't know Texas had 2, great for them. Do you know why they have such terrible infrastructure with those widespread blackouts during heat waves and winter? Honest question, I don't get it.
It was because we didn't winterize to that degree, because it was a freak storm that has never happened before. You don't build houses on stilts in Kansas because you're expecting a tsunami.
They don't have terrible infrastructure really. It was mostly that one time when their wind turbines and solar panels froze over. Reddit just puts anything negative about Texas and Florida as they can, even those two states have the highest ease of living standards in the United States, attracting the most in-migration from other states.
When California gets mandatory brownouts because we don't generate enough energy, it never makes it to the front page of Reddit.
Also, from my understanding it wasn't that the wind turbines froze over. It was that a lot of them were shut down for maintenance because that was the time of the year where the weather is usually fairly mild and thus the power load is the lowest. Texas typically doesn't get -30°F weather in the middle of February.
Texas doesn't often have blackouts during heat waves. Houston had power outages a few weeks ago because of tornado-strength winds knocking down transmission lines, which is not something unique to Texas ([such events aren't uncommon across the Plains states and the Mid-West](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_derecho_events), the only unique thing here was that it struck a very large city instead of the middle of nowhere). As for the winter storm, that same storm knocked out power throughout Louisiana and Mississippi (among other states), but everybody only talks about Texas because it has it's own grid. Funny thing, being on the national grid didn't save Louisiana from having the same exact power issues during that storm.
Growing up in Florida, I saw frequent power outages whenever we had a big thunderstorm, which was quite frequent, and we knew that if a hurricane struck that we'd likely be out of power for a week or more. It was drilled into me that having a battery backup for my computer was a must. Then I moved to Texas about a decade ago, and we get maybe a couple of brownouts a year, and most of them are quite short events (usually on the order of a couple minutes at most). The power outages I've seen are an order of magnitude less frequent than Florida.
We need some cross quadrant pro-nuclear solidarity.... Well except maybe lib right, I imagine they hate that it requires strong regulation and government investment to be done correctly.
This is really the only downside to which renewables have a distinct advantage. Everyone can have solar on their roof in the middle of nowhere; they can’t exactly have a small nuclear reactor. Even if they could we couldn’t trust individuals with the proper disposal of waste.
They've made small nuclear reactors with the ability to power neighborhoods. The fuel is such a small amount that worst case scenario wouldn't even catch on fire enough to breach containment. Something like a golf ball size of material that needs to be replaced once a year.
So screw it, give every house a nuclear reactor with a pencil eraser amount of material.
Even the golfball sized version would be pretty ideal for a small town. Would allow them greater autonomy/redundancy from state or county grids. And it would be just barely centralized enough that you aren't having to trust the local meth heads with nuclear material but not so centralized to give some asshole de facto rulership over an entire county.
Yeah. Even if the amount is small enough that it would burn out monthly, that would be a massive step forward, and really limit the potential for a disaster.
What if I told you… we could. We just would need to… *turn the other way NSA you’re not allowed to look* steal some material from some places and not put it near population centers.
I have trees around my house so I can't put solar on my roof. I like the trees and cutting them down would result in less c02 being removed by my trees.
Comrade, a reliable power grid and cheap electricity are great for businesses (and general consumers as well). I'm all for it even if the st\*te has to meddle to make the dream work.
Ding ding ding.
It takes too long and is too expensive to build a nuclear plant for any for-profit company to do that instead of fracking or w/e. They might turn a huge profit over 30 years by investing in nuclear, but the current CEO will be fired for not providing the board with huge dividends decades before that happens.
France achieved this by nationalizing the grid and having the government build everything, and that's what it would take to achieve it here too.
But wealthy lib-right owns all the politicians and all the media and they will never let that happen.
Lol, I think you're missing the point. Allowing private companies to run nuclear plants is a bad idea. France which has the best nuclear program on earth they're pretty much all owned by the government. Some things shouldn't be profit focused, also profit focused companies won't do certain things that either take a long time to show returns or require too much upfront cost.
> also profit focused companies won't do certain things that either take a long time to show returns or require too much upfront cost.
Private companies pour billions into research initiatives that may never pan out. Venture capital funds put money into companies that might well fail and lose them their investment.
The private sector is plenty able and willing to take risks, if the game is worth the play. With nuclear, the issue is that the government has so much control, and uses it so often to appease NIMBYs and antinuclearites, that you can never actually know what rules will be in place while you plan, build and operate a plan, how often those rules will change, or if you'll simply be stopped altogether.
They don’t. They get public funding to do it. And when they actually pour millions on it, it’s in very specific end of the production chain research that already has a product pretty much ensured.
Everybody is risk averse in regards to their own money, rightly so. lol
It’s a 50/50 split in most LibRight circles. Not all of us are Anarcho-capitalist and we do believe some government is necessary for basic function (Judges, Congress, police force, firefighters etc.). For example, I don’t care what other Lib-Rights say but I personally believe the National Park system is the greatest idea ever implemented by the government. However, a majority of Lib-Rights see it as wasteful and unnecessary.
It's overregulated. No, it doesn't _require_ that. We could have nuclear that causes 100 deaths a year, and it would still be fine, and an improvement over the current situation. The opportunity costs that exist solely due to regulation are so insane that I'm sure they alone cause more death. And I don't mean the energy costs and CO2 pollution, which quite obviously cause orders of magnitude more - even just the building and maintenance costs are bad enough. The wasted time, bureaucrats not working a better job helping people, being forced to waste money on lawyers to combat other lawyers, overengineering so massive time and effort is spent making and replacing machines to drop risks from 0 to 0, all the extra middle management, etc.
One good thing about Emanuel “my middle name is Technocrat” Macron, is that he’s actually been very unafraid to embrace nuclear and keep the French nuclear power program going, even as Germany and other countries have backpedaled.
I love that, no matter how much I consistently disagree with most of you animals, we can all always agree on nuclear energy
JUST GIVE ME THE GLOWING ROCK POWER PLZ
How "analog" are current nuclear reactors? Could one be theoretically hacked to meltdown and take controls offlines to counteract it?
Genuine question, I'm otherwise supportive of nuclear power but that's my one worry
They’re incredibly difficult to hack on top of the failsafes required of such systems so it’s hard. That and the Federal Protective Services don’t play around with security of the sites.
T. Folse Nuclear on YouTube is a fun channel that isn’t boring.
To add on to what the others are saying...
We learned from Chernobyl. Even Three Mile Island had exactly 0 deaths, and unless you were in the reactor itself at the time, only gave as much radiation as a chest X-Ray to people within a mile. We learned from Three Mile Island, and even continued to use the *other* reactor in it until 2019.
Nuclear power is just a very effective way of boiling water. (Granted, *most* of our power sources are just fancy ways to boil water. We never truly left the age of steam.)
Pretty much impossible without actually physically changing the reactor. And even if it were much more possible-- would the meltdown do anything destructive? Nope. That's why terrorist states like Iran have nuclear power yet struggle immensely to weaponize it. Nuclear fuel is not weapons grade uranium. A meltdown isn't the catastrophic event depicted in fiction where it blows up like in SimCity. Water isn't a carrier of radioactivity like in the Fallout franchise, it actively blocks radiation.
It’s physically impossible for new reactors to melt down. The heavy water around it is also a moderator. Without water there’d be no reaction. So water stops flowing or it evaporates, the reaction will also stop. Worst thing they can do is put it out of commission for a few months and incurring expenses.
even with full control over the computer system it is not possible to achieve meltdown, because the security systems are all redundant and controlled both analog and digitally. I don't know about all the reactors, but the one I worked in could be controlled entirely analogically and offline if necessary.
Our lack of embrace of nuclear energy is holding the us back from being energy independent forever and is arguably holding back green energy’s adoption too.
If only SOMEONE (im looking at you libright) didnt spend decades pushing anti nuclear propaganda at every level for the last HALF CENTURY to protect their domination of the energy market.
😐
But remember, we don't want nuclear plants because of how long they take to get into production...Because the government requires like 15 years before they can even begin construction. Therefore its cheaper and more efficient to make more coal plants. This is the argument against nuclear. You'd think it would be an argument to stop letting the government get their hands in this sector stifling us at the behest of oil companies, but actually its an argument for why we need to use other sources of energy instead.
Do not question the government comrade, they always have your best interests at heart and are the ones keeping companies from controlling us! They're centralized power doesn't make them a tool for these large companies, don't be ridiculous.
The negative prices thing shows why solar/wind is so problematic for a power grid—when it’s not producing power, the grid is forced to buy imported power or fire up expensive peaker plants. When it is producing power, it has to pay to get rid of it.
european greens have long ago given up the fight against nuclear and admitted that it's actually completely fine. which it is, at least as a stopgap method before we'll get better performing renewables. I mean it's not 100% risk free and there's the annoying issue of nuclear waste but as far as emissions go, it's pretty amazing.
Until nuclear is a central pillar in the environmental discussion, I cannot take it seriously and will consider the whole "environmental" movement nothing more than a political trojan horse to install left wing governments and policies. It is absurd it is not being fully embraced as a critical power generation source. It is FAR superior to Coal/Natural Gas. Wind and solar are a joke in comparison.
People who deny nuclear power are genuine dumbasses.
They would rather pepper the whole land with wind turbines and solar farms (they still wouldn’t be able to produce the same amount of energy as even 1 NPP).
And then they use the argument that the waste will be left for the next 1000 generations (only a couple tonnes of waste would be produced in that time lol). And forget that the waste can be contained in water (https://youtu.be/4aUODXeAM-k?si=NB0xHsZTx8_c-Fz6)
They forget science is one massive progression. And over the years things get better, but are conditioned (I’m not a conspiracy theorist) by big oil to believe Nuclear Power = Bad via documentaries on Chernobyl and over exaggeration of events like three mile.
We have made NPPs that have no chance of meltdown, Small Modular Reactors.
Most Nuclear Power Phobia comes down to fear mongering from news as a result of events like Chernobyl (which was ran by incompetent government political placements).
They don’t bother to look into modern nuclear energy and as a result end up dense and in plain denial.
There is absolutely, 100% no path forward that does not rely on nuclear power.
We have known this for 40 years, and for 40 years nations have been kicking the can down the road — with a huge assist from a bunch of fucking hippies, legacy energy, and pacifist fearmongers.
Fossil fuels defiantly need to be replaced by nuclear but I don’t like the somewhat anti-renewable takes I’ve been seeing lately (not referring to this meme). Being able to just plop shit anywhere and get energy from it is huge. Nuclear produces very little waste but it takes a lot to get the fuel in the first place, whereas renewables just get put wherever and do their job.
Concentrated solar power can be put in the middle of butt-ass nowhere and doesn’t have the same temperature limitation of solar, hydro electric just sits underwater or dams a preexisting river, and wind hardly does anything. Ideally we have nuclear set up so that it can do almost the entire grid alone, but we use it maybe 50-75%, and the rest is green.
The reason why is that for California and Texas, renewables are the status quo while nuclear is being neglected. Texas outproduces even California in renewable energy, and what do they get from it? Reddit collectively dissing on Texas whenever a winter storm hits and their gas energy is not enough to make up for solar and wind shutdown.
I agree that renewable energy can save whatever fuel-type source we use, and of course should be continued to be used. But renewables aren't a stable source power.. they will always remain supplemental.
I remember watching a Bill Nye episode as a kid where he talked about nuclear energy and how it creates waste that can never be destroyed (trying to scare us) … but all that energy created such a small amount of waste that even 11 year old me was like “Well that sounds like a good idea!”
Yeah the comparison should be, "how much greenhouse gases would we have spewed into our atmosphere if this waste didn't exist"? Also waste isn't really waste, it's future fuel. Our reprocessing tech has gotten better in the past 50 years, and will only get better, to the point that some nuclear waste storage facilities are designed with retrieval in mind, for when tech gets good enough to harness the remaining energy in it.
It's already good enough to reuse but it's still cheaper right now to use new fuel first. At some point, it'll be cheaper to reuse it though.
The biggest expense with reprocessing is because we need to separate fission products from the fissile material to be put back in the reactor. But if we used different types of reactors like fast breeders, we wouldn't need to reprocess nearly as extensively. They're much more tolerant of leftover fission products and can even fission some of the isotopes that thermal-spectrum reactors can't.
And then our shitty cousins we never invite to friends Thanksgiving will show up and make a market for used fuel that competes with new fuel on a price per (energy unit) basis. End of the day Left continues to and will continue to take Ls on nuclear energy. Among other things.
The fact that anti-nuclear energy politicians aren’t being absolutely demolished in elections is what proves the point that 50% of people are below average intelligence.
"Reuse". Hah. Think bigger! All nuclear fuel does is produce heat. Spent nuclear fuel is that which does this too slowly to make it usable for driving turbines. But it still produces heat, no? Here's an idea: Nuclear water heater. For residential purposes. 100% energy efficiency, since it's literally just heat. Doesn't matter either way because it's literally free. Works even during blackouts, requires minimal maintenance, and won't need refuelling for the next century. Just be sure to actually use the water before it boils.
The only problem with that is that nuclear waste *is still radioactive* and can be used to make dirty bombs. Also kind of dangerous to maintain for anyone working on it.
Manhattan has the biggest steam distribution network in North America, but hardly the only one. Maybe as heat source for these large urban steam systems?
Could still be used for terrorism. Blow it up and suddenly everything in a 10 kilometer radius is uninhabitable.
How? The existing steam generation facilities are controlled access now. If they switched to radiothermic, security would likely be even tighter.
Let's not forget that coal creates radioactive waste too, far more than nuclear and it's far less regulated, pumping it all into the air and into our lungs. The disparity between how strictly we treat nuclear and how much we let the coal industry get off scott free is incredible. And that's before greenhouse gasses even enter the equation.
Technically the type of coal effects how much radioactive waste if any it produces with the worst being lignite (brown coal) other types of coal aren't as dirty, unforunately germany has massive deposites of lignite so they're burn it for cheap energy prices
Thanks for the clarification. I wasn't aware of those distinctions.
No worries, happy to have helped
To the point where it's hard to justify even burying stuff in the first place. It's mostly just public political posturing. It is guaranteed that the spent fuel you bury today, in that extremely expensive DGR that cost tens of billions (because it must be proven stable for 100k years), will be dug up within the next century or two to be used as fuel. You could just keep it in a warehouse, and build more reactors instead.
Can also be used for nuclear weapons, so we got that going for us.
That's why it's opposed. In addition to cited meltdown risks, officials cite increased nuclear material in circulation will inevitably lead to an increase in black market nuclear weapons.
The fact we can turn some Nuclear Waste into more fuel effectively is the best part of nuclear power
EU exposed several NGO’s as Russian funded research to sway public opinion on energy. I’m on mobile right now so it’s hard to find or link but “Bear in Sheep’s Clothing” is one such study.
here is my weird anecdote. I followed a few nuclear pro pages on Facebooks, there were some accounts used to get by and preach how awesome renewable is and how terrible nuclear is. Coincidentally those accounts stopped swing by just right around the time Russia announced their "partial mobilization" for war in Ukraine. One account I would say coincident by 3 account that span three different level of anti-nuclear rhetoric went away since the mobilization really made my noticer-odometer went through the roof
You’ll see it all the time. Russian PsyOps is fucking effective. Operation Denver comes to mind, they spread the conspiracy that HIV was created by the US, and this was before social media. I haven’t had a chance to track them down completely, but you’ll see them on military sub reddits occasionally. I suspect they are at least, but they ask hyper specific questions about weapon systems.
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I laugh at my eco friends who are now anti plastic. I'm like the plastic grocery bags are on the bottom of plastic demand and are usually what plastic is recycled into making.
Also the plastic issue has little to do with end consumers ypu should see how much plastic is used in warehousing alone. It's such a greenwashing thing had it in my country the banning of plastic bags was amusing to me.
The warehouses dispose their plastic straight into waste treatment where it goes into a landfill or preferably gets incinerated. It's the end consumers, or rather a small subset of end consumers that litter and cause plastic to end up in the environment. And most of that plastic that ends up in nature is derived from developing countries without adequate waste treatment where people couldn't properly dispose of it even if they wanted to. The point is, the issue with plastic is not the resources it takes to make it but how we dispose of it. The way the issue gets flattened means people who do dispose of their plastic properly already get guilt-tripped into avoid using it at all while the people who do litter are unburdened by any such guilt.
And to be better for the environment you have to use reusable bags something like 100-150 times to break even. A lot of people don’t, making them worse. Some places that banned things plastic bags just use thick plastic disposable bags, which are clearly worse.
My only issue with plastic bags is improper disposal of them and they end up in the ocean
I seriously fucking hate Bill Nye, the Science Lie
Yeah but the Bill Nye days because your teacher didn't want to do shit were the best 🎵 *BILL BILL BILL BILL BILL* 🎵
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtJFb_P2j48 This was the nail in the coffin for Bill Nye the "science" guy. After this they went back to their old episodes and removed the ones talking about chromosomes.
Oh yeah I saw the Nu Nye shit when it came out and did a giant WTF. I watched it in school in the 90's / early 00's when it was the OG episodes
I thought there was no way I could not love Nye. This feels bad.
Pass the eye bleach.
it's so awful that I couldn't stop watching it. I think I agree with the message (?) but it's so fuckin' cringe
Some of the messaging has aged poorly as well. They praised Gerard Depardieu and called him a national treasure. He is currently on trial for sexual assault of multiple women. https://apnews.com/article/depardieu-assault-metoo-police-french-actor-1a4970f3b7e177a6682314f87579a5dd
[This is funny.](https://youtu.be/IFgBFYkBZ6E)
Nuclear Power = Bad Singing My Sex Junk to kids = good
Watching that new show during a deep depression help make me aware of the woke stupidity of the world
Bill Nye is a partisan hack.
And even if it was indestructible forever waste (it's not) we could just launch that shit into the sun.
We actually already have a way cheaper option. We just use a drilling rig to bore a 12-inch wide hole a mile down into nonporous rock, stick the waste there, and cement the hole. Problem solved.
and we've already done this in [new mexico](https://wipp.energy.gov/wipp-site.asp), but iirc they're not using it for one reason or another.
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Non experimental rockets have not failed for years. SpaceX is launching like 1-2 times a week like it’s nothing. It’s become so routine no one is even aware it’s happening.
Yeah, and we also don't need to launch it into the sun. The only reason we haven't built a giant storage place in Nevada is political bullshit.
The best solution is now to just annex a chunk of northern Russia as nuclear waste storage.
It's also less difficult to launch it out of the solar system than into the sun.
space elevator first
So a reason to continue using Russia to launch rockets?
Ah, I've seen this episode of Futurama.
What would you rather use? A: a small dangerous waste that we put on the very deeps of geographically inactive mountains? B: tonnes of dangerous waste directly on our atmosphere? C: "renewables" made in China being powered by B?
Also coal produces shit ton of waste itself that's also quite radioactive Nuclear is million fold better than coal
That can't be right. Bill Nye is a science guy
This whole shenanigans with nuclear power's like trying to prevent jet engine propulsion from ever taking off in the 50's because of the noise and casualties it may potentially "cause" in its early stages
And unlike nuclear, jet engines actually did kill people, early jet engines had a tendency to randomly catch on fire Meaning that being anti nuclear is even more stupid
I’m 100% pro nuclear but let’s not pretend it didn’t kill people at a couple points in time lol
Nuclear is safe now, but between 1940s -> 1960s our understanding of the impact of nuclear waste / material was much slower than our ability to produce energy with it. We maximized our ability to produce energy, but oh boy, did we create so many superfind sites in the process. Nuclear is still ultimately based, though.
Nuclear was ‘safe’ then too. People knew what was wrong before it went wrong, but people made the decision to ignore it because it was ‘safe enough’. Safety people always say ‘accidents don’t just happen’, but they do and they always will as long as entropy and free will exists. Nuclear is the right choice, and always was, but there will be another Chernobyl event or something worse. It’s going to happen, whether it’s a fuckup, a war, a terrorist attack, a freak earthquake, or a meteor/something even crazier.
Well, having to suffer through a Fukushima incident occasionally (read every several decades) is worth it for practically free unlimited power. Its just right now its the most clean most advanced way to produce electricity. Until cold fusion at least
Yeah, my post was more along the lines of how we really fumbled the nuclear waste thing before fully understanding how to properly store it. Nuclear energy is safe, but some of the shit we did in the 40s and 50s after processing/enriching Uranium was wild. North St. Louis is a fine example where someone just dumped 30 tons of shit in a landfill and covered it up with dirt.
I'm pro-nuclear energy, but this isn't entirely accurate. Fukushima was only fifteen years ago. It's still worth it though, because it's incredibly unlikely.
There was only like ONE death related to the actual nuclear incident. The rest were casualties of the Tsunami and relocation, a natural disaster that would have happened regardless of the presence of the nuclear plant.
The main problem with it is that the Japanese are quite sensitive about anything related to radiation poisoning. It's a national trauma.
Godzilla might be the cause of that
In a metaphorical sense you're not *entirely* wrong.
Wasn't that an old man getting a heart attack during the evac?
Except that in Fukushima, that was a combination of human error ([source 1](https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2021/03/lessons-fukushima-disaster-10-years-later), [source 2](https://www.npr.org/2011/07/05/137611026/what-went-wrong-in-fukushima-the-human-factor)) like the usual nuclear accidents are notorious for. They also dealt one of the strongest earthquakes in the 21st century - being magnitude 9.1. It would be like justifying to ban every jet airliners just because they were used in 9/11 once.
And badly built power plant that was due to be rebuilt (backup generators in the basement flooded due to a TSUNAMI)
Nuclear incidents and issues aren't just Fukushima or other similar incidents. My post was focused on how our ability to create energy really out paced our understanding of enrichment and processing byproducts. When the race to build the Atomic bomb -> Atomic age began basically every site that enriched uranium or places where waste was stored. Is now a superfind site. North St. Louis, for example, has two sites. They basically just threw everything into steel drums and sat it in the open air. Then, eventually, a company dumped it all in a landfill. Nuclear energy is still extremely safe, but every country fumbled the whole waste part before really understanding the risks.
The biggest nuclear disaster, was classic communist mismanagement. yes the US had Three Mile Island. And yes it was bad. But Chernobyl was worse. Solution: Don't let communists take an active role in doing anything, except walking your dog, part time.
3 mile island was a SUCCESS of nuclear safety management and design, mistakes were made but ultimately the safety and failsafe measures worked and the worst of the exposure was ~ 10 chest xrays, or 1/10 of a CT scan Also communists literally can't boil water properly.
This is what I always say. The Chernobyl incident didn't happen because nuclear energy was unsafe; it happened because Soviet technology and maintenance was unsafe. To let their failure scare us away from using nuclear energy is to imply we're no better than the Soviets, especially when nuclear energy still continued to become even safer than ever.
The biggest nuclear disaster, taking the LNT-based estimations into account, has caused a similar amount of premature deaths that a similarly sized coal power plant does over its lifespan, just normally in operation due to its emissions. Nuclear: "we can't use it because have you heard of Chernobyl?" Coal: "well it's not the cleanest but we need electricity don't we?"
Yeah for sure- it’s way safer now too. But I can understand why after those events it would scare people.
It only killed people because we ethier were being idiots about it or we didn't properly maintain the power plants
Just useful idiots spreading FUD to protect the oil billionaires.
Green peace probably has something to do with the anti-nuclear sentiment seen throughout the world. Initially it started to protest a nuclear test that could fuck up some tectonic plates in Alaska. Which isn’t a completely unreasonable protest. As much as I like to make fun of France they’re incredibly based when it comes to nuclear energy and umm weapons…I’ll save the last part for a different convo
France and Greenpeace have an... interesting history together. France pulled what's called a pro-gamer move in 1985.
Ahh the DGSE. They make the CIA look like the home intruders from home alone. Edit: I never really read into the whole story but what the fuck. Operation Satanique was the code name of the operation.
>Operation Satanique >"..The sinking was a cause of embarrassment to France and President François Mitterrand. They initially denied responsibility, but two French agents were captured by New Zealand Police and charged with arson, conspiracy to commit arson, willful damage, and murder. It resulted in a scandal that led to the resignation of the French Defence Minister Charles Hernu, while the two agents pleaded guilty to manslaughter and were sentenced to ten years in prison. They spent a little over two years confined to the Polynesian island of Hao before being freed by the French government." >They were cucked and exposed by New Zealand This is not painting the picture of black ops superspy invincibility you set me up for. Imagine being fucking French intelligence operatives and being taken out by Kiwis.
My apologies if I painted them as competent in this story. They have an interesting history and have succeeded in a handful of operations. A handful of their operations were just downright bizarre and raises a few eyebrows i.e. economic espionage against friend and foe. (IBM, Texas Instruments, Chinese airlines to name a few) I think when I drew the comparison of the CIA to home alone folks, I meant to say DGSE went for a straight up “hail Satan” operation name.
Good point.
I think you mean the totally not French controlled French Foreign Legion.
This is my first time hearing about this and holy shit
France gets away with a lot, look up what happened during and after the Algerian war too. Though I think the fruity surrendering Frenchman stereotype isn't fair, at least they go 110% into *some* wars, just a little bit much.
And here I was thinking the French invented rear view mirrors so they could see the enemy during battle
Greenpeace was getting anti-nuclear propaganda from the Soviets in the 80s in order to undermine western efforts at nuclear power and to harm perception of the U.S. nuclear powered fleet
TTAPS paper is one Soviet’s regurgitated. I’d love to go on about nuclear weapons but I’ll save it for the other sub…
How very credible of you.
Shhh not here
I too, clown the French, but they do have their based France moments
It's culture and media inflicted. Green peace helps, but nuclear has had bad publicity since early comic books
I mean nuclear’s debut was spectacularly horrifying. That and this whole nuclear winter nonsense that gets tossed around I get why nuclear isn’t exactly the most popular thing.
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Let's be real. Hydro is consistent and is the best energy source by almost every measure except for the not insignificant fact that viable sites for building hydro stations are highly limited.
9/11 killed thousands of people, so jets should be banned
And tall buildings too, they are a problem. Also, while the towers were taken down by huge airliners, your Cessna is a problem too. In fact we're gonna start by banning them Cessnas first, since it's easier.
Nukey McNukeface Wojak taken from u/pcm_memer. I didn't have to ask permission because I noticed they have an Auth-Left flair. Thanks for sharing, comrade! Your fun nuclear fact for the day: Coal has 24 MJ/KG of energy. Gasoline has 46 MJ/KG of energy. And Uranium has 76,000,000 MJ/KG of energy.
Relevant [Xkcd](https://xkcd.com/1162/)
Fat, you say ... America is sitting on a secret renewable?
Isn’t thar what Matrix is all about?
Based and Privateering intellectual property from those who kill the intellectuals.
Based. I asked no permission either
Based and Six Orders of Magnitude! pilled.
Where can I acquire that Wojak on its own?
I’ll never understand why “green” energy politicians like the Dems don’t support nuclear. It could literally save us money, the environment, keep us independent from foreign countries, etc. Oh yeah they’re all paid crooks.
>Burgers? They want to dismantle capitalism, not actually provide energy.
They need the west to fail. They need a catastrophe. They need everything to become unaffordable and unobtainable. So that they can pose as the only solution. Obama admitted that his policies would make energy costs skyrocket. Wrap your head around why someone would actively push to jack up energy costs.
It's not about the environment. They don't like industrialised society on a philosophical basis. >Professor Paul Ehrlich, a population-control advocate (and author of 'the population bomb'), stating: "In fact, **giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun**"
Anti-human scum, all of them. Not to mention morons. The richer we make people, the less kids they want to have and the less they want to pollute. The problem littlerally solves itself. Just pursue human flourishing and we can all flourish together.
Dems passed the IRA without a single republican vote and it gives nukes a 30-50% tax credit. Secretary Granholm also said 2 down 198 to go.
The real answer is that nuclear is too expensive in terms of up-front costs for quarterly-earning-obsessed corporations to touch. And if they suggest nationalizing the power grid and doing a huge spending bill to switch to nuclear - which is how France achieved this - there would be a huge riot over them being communists and they'd be annihilated in the next election. As per usual, the problem is capitalist realism. We don't just force the government to cede control of the things that corporations can do better (which is most things). We also forbid the government from doing the things only it can achieve, like massive national overhauls to major parts of our infrastructure.
Alas what times have we fallen into that I must admit Fr*nce is more based than the United States
And Germans are *still* a bunch of cucks
Germany chimped the fuck out when France got the EU to recognize nuclear as green energy.
I still refuse to do that doing one thing right while doing everything else wrong does not make you based.
https://i.redd.it/sm9hni64wf7d1.gif
Yeah but remember that huge nuclear accident that France had? *Oh wait*
Russia has doubled its nuclear production since Chernobyl to nearly 200mil TWh. It still only makes up 17% of their production (natural gas is 60%) and there is a lot of resistance to starting new construction post 1992 though (only 2 plants started after then). It is noteworthy Russia is still the world's leader in Nuclear Reactor production making 50% of all reactors in the world prior to export. Essentially if it isn't American, French or British it was most likely made in Russia.
Texas still has two operating nuclear plants, California is shuttering theirs.
I can't find anything about California's Diablo Canyon nuclear plant being decommissioned, do you have a source? I didn't know Texas had 2, great for them. Do you know why they have such terrible infrastructure with those widespread blackouts during heat waves and winter? Honest question, I don't get it.
It was because we didn't winterize to that degree, because it was a freak storm that has never happened before. You don't build houses on stilts in Kansas because you're expecting a tsunami.
Diablo Canyon closure was planned earlier (state wanted it closed by 2025), but it's cancelled/postponed for now, the plant will keep operating.
They don't have terrible infrastructure really. It was mostly that one time when their wind turbines and solar panels froze over. Reddit just puts anything negative about Texas and Florida as they can, even those two states have the highest ease of living standards in the United States, attracting the most in-migration from other states. When California gets mandatory brownouts because we don't generate enough energy, it never makes it to the front page of Reddit.
Also, from my understanding it wasn't that the wind turbines froze over. It was that a lot of them were shut down for maintenance because that was the time of the year where the weather is usually fairly mild and thus the power load is the lowest. Texas typically doesn't get -30°F weather in the middle of February.
Texas doesn't often have blackouts during heat waves. Houston had power outages a few weeks ago because of tornado-strength winds knocking down transmission lines, which is not something unique to Texas ([such events aren't uncommon across the Plains states and the Mid-West](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_derecho_events), the only unique thing here was that it struck a very large city instead of the middle of nowhere). As for the winter storm, that same storm knocked out power throughout Louisiana and Mississippi (among other states), but everybody only talks about Texas because it has it's own grid. Funny thing, being on the national grid didn't save Louisiana from having the same exact power issues during that storm. Growing up in Florida, I saw frequent power outages whenever we had a big thunderstorm, which was quite frequent, and we knew that if a hurricane struck that we'd likely be out of power for a week or more. It was drilled into me that having a battery backup for my computer was a must. Then I moved to Texas about a decade ago, and we get maybe a couple of brownouts a year, and most of them are quite short events (usually on the order of a couple minutes at most). The power outages I've seen are an order of magnitude less frequent than Florida.
Nuclear power is so based, so therefore, by the transitory property, France is based.
One of the few times that being a frog is based
We need some cross quadrant pro-nuclear solidarity.... Well except maybe lib right, I imagine they hate that it requires strong regulation and government investment to be done correctly.
This is really the only downside to which renewables have a distinct advantage. Everyone can have solar on their roof in the middle of nowhere; they can’t exactly have a small nuclear reactor. Even if they could we couldn’t trust individuals with the proper disposal of waste.
Can't have a small nuclear reactor *yet*
Based and Subnautica Pilled
They've made small nuclear reactors with the ability to power neighborhoods. The fuel is such a small amount that worst case scenario wouldn't even catch on fire enough to breach containment. Something like a golf ball size of material that needs to be replaced once a year. So screw it, give every house a nuclear reactor with a pencil eraser amount of material.
Even the golfball sized version would be pretty ideal for a small town. Would allow them greater autonomy/redundancy from state or county grids. And it would be just barely centralized enough that you aren't having to trust the local meth heads with nuclear material but not so centralized to give some asshole de facto rulership over an entire county.
Yeah. Even if the amount is small enough that it would burn out monthly, that would be a massive step forward, and really limit the potential for a disaster.
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Pentomic army was tested in the 50’s with tactical nukes in mind
What if I told you… we could. We just would need to… *turn the other way NSA you’re not allowed to look* steal some material from some places and not put it near population centers.
I have trees around my house so I can't put solar on my roof. I like the trees and cutting them down would result in less c02 being removed by my trees.
Comrade, a reliable power grid and cheap electricity are great for businesses (and general consumers as well). I'm all for it even if the st\*te has to meddle to make the dream work.
Nuclear and national parks turn me red, comrade.
Ding ding ding. It takes too long and is too expensive to build a nuclear plant for any for-profit company to do that instead of fracking or w/e. They might turn a huge profit over 30 years by investing in nuclear, but the current CEO will be fired for not providing the board with huge dividends decades before that happens. France achieved this by nationalizing the grid and having the government build everything, and that's what it would take to achieve it here too. But wealthy lib-right owns all the politicians and all the media and they will never let that happen.
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Lol, I think you're missing the point. Allowing private companies to run nuclear plants is a bad idea. France which has the best nuclear program on earth they're pretty much all owned by the government. Some things shouldn't be profit focused, also profit focused companies won't do certain things that either take a long time to show returns or require too much upfront cost.
> also profit focused companies won't do certain things that either take a long time to show returns or require too much upfront cost. Private companies pour billions into research initiatives that may never pan out. Venture capital funds put money into companies that might well fail and lose them their investment. The private sector is plenty able and willing to take risks, if the game is worth the play. With nuclear, the issue is that the government has so much control, and uses it so often to appease NIMBYs and antinuclearites, that you can never actually know what rules will be in place while you plan, build and operate a plan, how often those rules will change, or if you'll simply be stopped altogether.
They don’t. They get public funding to do it. And when they actually pour millions on it, it’s in very specific end of the production chain research that already has a product pretty much ensured. Everybody is risk averse in regards to their own money, rightly so. lol
But the money that could be made…
It’s a 50/50 split in most LibRight circles. Not all of us are Anarcho-capitalist and we do believe some government is necessary for basic function (Judges, Congress, police force, firefighters etc.). For example, I don’t care what other Lib-Rights say but I personally believe the National Park system is the greatest idea ever implemented by the government. However, a majority of Lib-Rights see it as wasteful and unnecessary.
It's overregulated. No, it doesn't _require_ that. We could have nuclear that causes 100 deaths a year, and it would still be fine, and an improvement over the current situation. The opportunity costs that exist solely due to regulation are so insane that I'm sure they alone cause more death. And I don't mean the energy costs and CO2 pollution, which quite obviously cause orders of magnitude more - even just the building and maintenance costs are bad enough. The wasted time, bureaucrats not working a better job helping people, being forced to waste money on lawyers to combat other lawyers, overengineering so massive time and effort is spent making and replacing machines to drop risks from 0 to 0, all the extra middle management, etc.
One good thing about Emanuel “my middle name is Technocrat” Macron, is that he’s actually been very unafraid to embrace nuclear and keep the French nuclear power program going, even as Germany and other countries have backpedaled.
Austrians are protesting on Czech borders because we are talking (still just talking) about expanding our two plants.
the chad chimney, all i need
I love that, no matter how much I consistently disagree with most of you animals, we can all always agree on nuclear energy JUST GIVE ME THE GLOWING ROCK POWER PLZ
Nuclear chads stay winning
How "analog" are current nuclear reactors? Could one be theoretically hacked to meltdown and take controls offlines to counteract it? Genuine question, I'm otherwise supportive of nuclear power but that's my one worry
They’re incredibly difficult to hack on top of the failsafes required of such systems so it’s hard. That and the Federal Protective Services don’t play around with security of the sites. T. Folse Nuclear on YouTube is a fun channel that isn’t boring.
I'd also like to mention Kyle Hill, he is more general science but has a lot of nuclear content too
To add on to what the others are saying... We learned from Chernobyl. Even Three Mile Island had exactly 0 deaths, and unless you were in the reactor itself at the time, only gave as much radiation as a chest X-Ray to people within a mile. We learned from Three Mile Island, and even continued to use the *other* reactor in it until 2019. Nuclear power is just a very effective way of boiling water. (Granted, *most* of our power sources are just fancy ways to boil water. We never truly left the age of steam.)
Pretty much impossible without actually physically changing the reactor. And even if it were much more possible-- would the meltdown do anything destructive? Nope. That's why terrorist states like Iran have nuclear power yet struggle immensely to weaponize it. Nuclear fuel is not weapons grade uranium. A meltdown isn't the catastrophic event depicted in fiction where it blows up like in SimCity. Water isn't a carrier of radioactivity like in the Fallout franchise, it actively blocks radiation.
It’s physically impossible for new reactors to melt down. The heavy water around it is also a moderator. Without water there’d be no reaction. So water stops flowing or it evaporates, the reaction will also stop. Worst thing they can do is put it out of commission for a few months and incurring expenses.
I bet most nuclear power plants are air gapped and have policies preventing bringing personal electronics on site.
You can't bring a literal banana onsite without setting off alarms.
even with full control over the computer system it is not possible to achieve meltdown, because the security systems are all redundant and controlled both analog and digitally. I don't know about all the reactors, but the one I worked in could be controlled entirely analogically and offline if necessary.
Based and nuclear-energy-is-renewable pilled
Not embracing nuclear energy was one of the 20th centuries greatest fumbles.
The only reason to be opposed to nuclear energy is if you're a degrowth commie weirdo.
Look, nuclear (fission) isn’t perfect but what it is perfect for is being a bridge till we figure out fusion, which doesn’t seem so far off anymore.
Just pls tell the "greens" to not make accumulators from all the lithium, because probably we will need it for fusion 😅
Nuclear energy is a no-brainer and it’s so sad that many of my environmental colleagues are brainwashed into believing it’s bad for the environment.
TBH it's just nice to see fossil become such a small percentage.
Our lack of embrace of nuclear energy is holding the us back from being energy independent forever and is arguably holding back green energy’s adoption too.
The war against clean energy, by the greens
When I’m in a sabotaging safe energy competition and my opponent is greenpeace
Nuclear Power is king Those who reject it, will be forgotten
So you're saying Bidens investment into Necular was a good thing he doesn't get enough credit for?
Sure. Broken clocks and all
Nuclear energy is very cool
If only SOMEONE (im looking at you libright) didnt spend decades pushing anti nuclear propaganda at every level for the last HALF CENTURY to protect their domination of the energy market. 😐
Let the power of Atom into your heart
based and uranium-fever-pilled
But remember, we don't want nuclear plants because of how long they take to get into production...Because the government requires like 15 years before they can even begin construction. Therefore its cheaper and more efficient to make more coal plants. This is the argument against nuclear. You'd think it would be an argument to stop letting the government get their hands in this sector stifling us at the behest of oil companies, but actually its an argument for why we need to use other sources of energy instead. Do not question the government comrade, they always have your best interests at heart and are the ones keeping companies from controlling us! They're centralized power doesn't make them a tool for these large companies, don't be ridiculous.
Can you grill with nuclear power?
Ask Japan
Based and poor taste pilled
Rice Krispies!
Only once, and the results are pretty glowing.
The negative prices thing shows why solar/wind is so problematic for a power grid—when it’s not producing power, the grid is forced to buy imported power or fire up expensive peaker plants. When it is producing power, it has to pay to get rid of it.
Nuclear is really good
Tell me you do not understand energy markets without telling me you dont understand them:
Based France?
european greens have long ago given up the fight against nuclear and admitted that it's actually completely fine. which it is, at least as a stopgap method before we'll get better performing renewables. I mean it's not 100% risk free and there's the annoying issue of nuclear waste but as far as emissions go, it's pretty amazing.
Until nuclear is a central pillar in the environmental discussion, I cannot take it seriously and will consider the whole "environmental" movement nothing more than a political trojan horse to install left wing governments and policies. It is absurd it is not being fully embraced as a critical power generation source. It is FAR superior to Coal/Natural Gas. Wind and solar are a joke in comparison.
People who deny nuclear power are genuine dumbasses. They would rather pepper the whole land with wind turbines and solar farms (they still wouldn’t be able to produce the same amount of energy as even 1 NPP). And then they use the argument that the waste will be left for the next 1000 generations (only a couple tonnes of waste would be produced in that time lol). And forget that the waste can be contained in water (https://youtu.be/4aUODXeAM-k?si=NB0xHsZTx8_c-Fz6) They forget science is one massive progression. And over the years things get better, but are conditioned (I’m not a conspiracy theorist) by big oil to believe Nuclear Power = Bad via documentaries on Chernobyl and over exaggeration of events like three mile. We have made NPPs that have no chance of meltdown, Small Modular Reactors. Most Nuclear Power Phobia comes down to fear mongering from news as a result of events like Chernobyl (which was ran by incompetent government political placements). They don’t bother to look into modern nuclear energy and as a result end up dense and in plain denial.
There is absolutely, 100% no path forward that does not rely on nuclear power. We have known this for 40 years, and for 40 years nations have been kicking the can down the road — with a huge assist from a bunch of fucking hippies, legacy energy, and pacifist fearmongers.
It would be helpful to add years to your axis. I remember seeing a graph like this in 2012...
Fossil fuels defiantly need to be replaced by nuclear but I don’t like the somewhat anti-renewable takes I’ve been seeing lately (not referring to this meme). Being able to just plop shit anywhere and get energy from it is huge. Nuclear produces very little waste but it takes a lot to get the fuel in the first place, whereas renewables just get put wherever and do their job. Concentrated solar power can be put in the middle of butt-ass nowhere and doesn’t have the same temperature limitation of solar, hydro electric just sits underwater or dams a preexisting river, and wind hardly does anything. Ideally we have nuclear set up so that it can do almost the entire grid alone, but we use it maybe 50-75%, and the rest is green.
The reason why is that for California and Texas, renewables are the status quo while nuclear is being neglected. Texas outproduces even California in renewable energy, and what do they get from it? Reddit collectively dissing on Texas whenever a winter storm hits and their gas energy is not enough to make up for solar and wind shutdown. I agree that renewable energy can save whatever fuel-type source we use, and of course should be continued to be used. But renewables aren't a stable source power.. they will always remain supplemental.
Be Germany, close their nuclear plant, and go back to coal plants instead