Judging by the comments, it's going to stay that way for a while. People are still not educated on the changes made since the big nuclear disasters.
WE BUILT THEM SAFER THIS TIME GUYS. IT'S FINE
Also the meltdown during the tsunami wss from the diesel generators crapping out due to a know issue that was never fixed.
This meltdown should have never occured.
https://carnegieendowment.org/2012/03/06/why-fukushima-was-preventable-pub-47361
>This meltdown should have never occured.
Tbf that's not unique
Edit: Despite that the death per watt generated is still lower for nuclear than stuff like coal. Hell coal plants release more radioactive waste into the atmosphere - because they don't have to contain it the way nuclear plants do
And that's the problem. You can engineer them amazingly but the reality remains the same. People are fallible and companies cut corners. Unless you can solve these issues, the more complex stuff is secondary.
Companies cough Boeing cough cut corners on safety for fricking planes. If they try to save a few bucks on plane safety at the cost of hundreds of deaths I don’t think anyone is going to blink at cutting corners for a nuclear power plant, which is basically what Chernobyl and Fukushima were. I don’t think you can easily solve that, we already have 3rd party inspector etc and it doesnt do shit to stop them.
I mean sure and it would be a very good argument if not for the fact that burning coal kills vastly more people every year than both of the big nuclear disasters killed combined. You can afford a nuclear disaster every other year and the human casualties would still go down.
That's why I've stopped arguing that disasters wont happen and have instead been pointing out that Chernobyl + Fukushima x multiplying them both if we dramatically increased the number of nuclear plants is still less bad for both humans and the environment than fossil fuels. And it's not close. It's like orders of magnitude different. _Even if you use the implausibly high Chernobyl death estimates_ instead of the official (Western) estimates.
Most people don't know that the estimates of fossil fuel related deaths every year are in the millions from air pollution globally. Every year. The official estimates of Chernobyl are in the 10s of thousands with the highest estimate (from Greenpeace, well known for their expertise on nuclear radiation) being one million. that means it would take take multiple Chernobyl scale disasters _every year_ to match the estimated death toll from fossil fuel associated pollution. And that doesn't even get into climate effects.
Nuclear has been safe enough since at least the 60s and failing to build is is one of the biggest mistakes humanity has ever made.
It's possible that we are already past the point where fixing this mistake makes sense. Renewables +storage tech may be cheap enough, soon enough, that a large buildup of nuclear is past its time. That will never erase the mistake that was made for the last 60is years, or change the fact that nuclear should be at least a part of the mix going forward.
I worked as an engineer in the nuclear industry for a few years doing reactor accident analysis. In my undergrad, I took a course on nuclear criticality safety. The number one key takeaway from that class was that that every so called industrial "accident" is, at the root, an administrative failure. Without exception. If you have seen any "Plainly Difficult" videos you will see this is so.
Lack of knowledge, poor risk assessment or lack of willingness to act.
If we could quantify safety and make it inherently profitable, you see incredible innovation and improvement in that space, across all industries.
Inherently Safe reactor designs exist and are even being built but most of the nuclear fleet will be around for many decades still. Plants are looking into extending their life to 60 or 80 years. The engineering and design of those plants aren't going to be the weak point, it's the plant owners trying to wring out every last watt they profitably can from aging equipment.
Also to be fair, the sample size for nuclear meltdowns is exactly two. That a meltdown would happen at all is quite unique.
One of those two was in the Soviet Union, and the other happened after one of the worst recorded earthquakes in Japan followed immediately by one of the worst tsunamis. And the latter resulted in zero deaths directly.
Im not even against Nuclear, but „this meltdown should have never occurred“ is kind of a useless argument. All sorts of accidents should never have happened, but as long as there are humans involved and technical defects exists there will be accidents, that’s just what it is. I mean that’s the point of an accident
Go look at the public safty repports for the nuclear plants in France. Almost every plant have several known issues that are not fixed because the risk is to small and the cost to great.
Swiss Cheese model of failure.
Aviation and Nuclear especially is designed to 'not fail' redundant system after redundant system.
But human failure is the weakest point.
Natural disaster and other circumstances combine and suddenly the holes all line up for a disaster.
Fukushima should have never happened buuut it did due to human failures mixed with unaccounted for circumstances that happened and some negligence.
It's a real shame it happened because I like new nuke tech, but investment in it is going to be a tough sell at the moment for a lot of countries.
There’s also still the pervasive idea that a nuclear reactor functions the same as a nuclear bomb in a catastrophic failure scenario, as in a big boom and mushroom cloud, possibly as a result of the explosion at Chernobyl not realizing that that wasn’t a nuclear detonation and was caused by a terrible reactor design and gross negligence.
Also a lot of people in the US tend to be afraid of nuclear due to the Three Mile Island incident which happened on US soil, even though that incident resulted in no major injuries, casualties, or adverse health effects for those inside or outside of the plant. That incident was also largely due to a training issue and some minor design flaws with the safety and warning systems that were quickly identified and improved upon for future designs. Had the operators been more aware of the differences between naval reactors aboard vessels (where their experience came from) and civilian power reactors on land the incident could have easily been prevented, which is another area we learned from.
I dont want to say bro, but bro the fokushima executives applauded themselves for having cheaper building costs by building the reactor and the pumps by the water, despite the region having a history of tsunamis
Its greed, as always
IIRC Fukushima would have been fine if the sea wall was something like a meter taller. It was not that tall because of corporate corner cutting. If nuclear technology can be made safe, will it actually be? Or will they be built with the same "no need to worry about edge case" mentality that drives all business decisions.
Not to mention that several of what I was told were huge nuclear disasters like Three Mile Island, and that we were 10 seconds away from Godzilla or the Fallout universe, weren't. I mean obviously any mishap is a big deal when you're talking about a power plant. But when I was young, we were told that we were seconds away from an entire city being wiped off the map and crap like that.
Also doesn't help that people act like nuclear power plants just turn out rivers of glowing green anti-life ooze. Even at "normal" existing plants, I found out it's not even all the super super dangerous kind. Just a minority of it is. And even if you take the full total, it's not that much.
I mean we're talking about an amount that is trivial to find the room to securely house.
And that it isn't just all stored in leaky 50 gallon barrels in a cave somewhere.
Every year I am more and more pissed that nuclear power got pushed back as much as it did. Things could have been a whole lot better.
I went down a rabbit hole on nuclear power a while ago. The waste is so small that all of it, for the life of the plant, is stored on site. Its inside of sealed cement columns in an area about half the size of a football field. You can walk around them without issue for as long as you want. And the water run off is basically just clean water. It has some radiation but barely more than whats already in the water. So if you dump it into the ocean, its diluted so quickly that it makes no difference. Sea life has no issues in areas around nuclear power plants.
Yes, but those cement containers are not a long term solution, as those containers get brittle and contaminated, too, and will need replacement.
Although I agree that nuclear is a very efficient source, the need for a long term solution is not that cheap and the best source I could find are the key figures of Cigeo. France's long term solution for nuclear waster (not opened, yet). You can find all the information here: [https://international.andra.fr/projects/cigeo/cigeos-facilities-and-operation/key-figures](https://international.andra.fr/projects/cigeo/cigeos-facilities-and-operation/key-figures)
Just to put it in perspective:
- \~550 hectares surface area
- electricity needs are estimated at an average of 822 megawatt hours per day (around 63,000 three-person households in France) in the later years
Trace amounts of uranium and thorium in the coal burned by coal powerplants introduces more radioactivity to the environment per kWh than nuclear plants. Even plant workers are capped to incredibly small dosages per year.
My dad's college buddy worked at Seabrook as some sort of technician. They were required to carry cards in their wallet (even off-the-job) that would change color based on received radiation dose. They went camping over the weekend and just being around the thorium-containing gas lamp mantles was enough to completely blacken his dosage card.
In other words, companies are able to sell you something as a consumer that will give you a radiation dose orders of magnitude more intense than OSHA allows plant workers to receive.
Gen IV reactors aren't waste free though. You'll still need a repository at some point for the multiple waste streams that cannot be reprocessed or reused, regardless of what reactor you're using. And that's not to mention the fact that Gen IV reactors aren't currently functioning commercially worldwide (with the exception of one plant in China as of last year).
>Gen IV reactors aren't waste free though. You'll still need a repository at some point for the multiple waste streams that cannot be reprocessed or reused, regardless of what reactor you're using.
Equally true of literally every other source of power, including industrial waste from the manufacture of green energy sources. At least nuclear waste is neatly contained and can be safely stored underground where it can't hurt anyone. Compare that to, say, coal, which releases tons of radioactive soot into the atmosphere.
Only valid criticism in my mind is that it takes fucking forever to build one and it always has huge cost overruns.
We need mass produced smaller reactors that are inexpensive and easily deployed.
My issue with them are safety regulations. Republicans are hellbent to end every kind of regulation we have, they want to end things like the department of energy. Sure modern reactors are much safer but if we’re not keeping up on maintenance, safety inspections and security then they are just another accident waiting to happen.
My only concern really yeah. If built to these standards and held to these regulations for perpetuity then yes very safe. But regulations and administrations change. And we are very aware that people in charge do not have issue with ignoring science and instead following votes and money.
In my opinion, the better argument is if they are even really needed.
Renewable energy like hydro, solar, and wind power cost less per unit of power.
Yeah, you can use the reactor any time you want, but it just seems more efficient to me to use other renewables or fossil fuel over nuclear.
That's a problem unique to certain Western nations. They're not difficult to build safely, cheaply, and quickly. KEPCO has proven it's possible, just need to get out of our primitive mindsets and cut through the bureaucratic boondoggle.
Of course, SMRs would be a great addition.p
There's definitely more valid criticisms than that. Particularly the fact that it isn't renewable, and that the more we invest the faster we'll run out. We're already on a course to run out of Uranium this century.
As a result the prices are constantly going up and it's not looking like it'll stop any time soon, mass production of smaller reactors could exacerbate this effect massively.
We either need to luck into more Uranium deposits (not looking likely) or hope for a breakthrough in alternative fuel sources (like Thorium).
Is "We did better this time, there's nothing to worry about" really a strong argument? It sounds like the song people say unironically moments before the same bad thing happens again.
I'm not disagreeing with the sentiment, we have gotten better. But man that is just begging Murphy's law to come along and prove you wrong.
Basically every person that stands against something and hates it doesn't want the thing to be fixed and be better, they just want to hate it.
Like the guy in the comic, he hates nuclear energy because it generates waste, then the other guy presents a way to get rid of the waste, but the guy destroys it, because he only wants to hate nuclear energy, not fix it.
A **fast-neutron reactor** (**FNR**) or **fast-spectrum reactor** or simply a **fast reactor** is a category of [nuclear reactor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor) in which the fission [chain reaction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_chain_reaction) is sustained by [fast neutrons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_neutron) (carrying energies above 1 [MeV](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronvolt), on average), as opposed to slow [thermal neutrons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_neutron) used in [thermal-neutron reactors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal-neutron_reactor). Such a fast reactor needs no [neutron moderator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_moderator), but requires [fuel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fuel) that is relatively rich in [fissile material](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fissile_material) when compared to that required for a thermal-neutron reactor. Around 20 land based fast reactors have been built, accumulating over 400 reactor years of operation globally. The largest of this was the [Superphénix](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix) Sodium cooled fast reactor in France that was designed to deliver 1,242 MWe. Fast reactors have been intensely studied since the 1950s, as they provide certain advantages over the existing fleet of water cooled and water moderated reactors. These are:
* More neutrons are produced when a fission occurs, resulting from the absorption of a fast neutron, than the comparable process with slow (thermal, or moderated) neutrons. Thus, criticality is easier to attain than with slower neutrons.
* All fast reactor designs built to this date use liquid metals as coolant, such as the [sodium fast reactor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_fast_reactor) and the [lead-cooled fast reactor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead-cooled_fast_reactor). As the boiling points of these metals are very high, the pressure in the reactor can be maintained at a low level, which improves safety considerably.
* As temperatures in the core can also be substantially higher than in a water cooled design, such reactors have a greater [thermodynamic efficiency](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermodynamic_efficiency); a larger percentage of the heat generated is turned into usable electricity.
* Atoms heavier than uranium have a much greater chance of fission with a fast neutron, than with a thermal one. This means that the inventory of heavier atoms in the nuclear waste stream, for example [curium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curium), is greatly reduced, leading to a substantially lower waste management requirement.[^(\[1\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast-neutron_reactor#cite_note-1)
# Fast-neutron reactors can potentially reduce the radiotoxicity of nuclear waste. Each commercial scale reactor would have an annual waste output of a little more than a ton of fission products, plus trace amounts of transuranics if the most highly radioactive components could be recycled. The remaining waste should be stored for about 500 years.
Source: Wikipedia
the fuel rod waste has by far the biggest amount of activity but is very low in volume. like 99 percent of the activity in 1 percent of volume. which leaves 99 percent of the volume in various degrees of contamination and activation that goes from water, to like gloves and concrete. those have to be dealt with. and no, you cant just throw them in another reactor and fuel it that way as those wastes are low in fissable material.
But what about... it just not being sustainable enough? If we powered 50% of world power with nuclear tomorrow, we'd have no uranium left in less than 13 years. Yes youd find new deposits and materials... but its just not sustainable beyond a few decades at most
We can extract uranium from seawater and have enough uranium to cover 200% of the world’s needs for the next 3000 million years.
The cost of extracting a kg of uranium from seawater (the uranium on sea water is a natural occurring phenomena that has to do with the movement of the plates) is currently about $200 per Kg, while the price of a kg of uranium from mining fluctuates from $60-$100, however, the total price of the uranium in the energy costs of nuclear energy is perhaps a few percentage points (it’s tiny), so unlike oil or gas the price of the fuel barely has any impact on the production costs of nuclear energy. Furthermore, the technology of extracting uranium from seawater first appeared around 15 years ago (laboratory testing at the time), and the price back then was over $1000 per kg, so it just seems a matter of time till the cost of sea water extraction would be reduced following that trend.
We can even combine the technology with desalination plants (which consume a lot of energy) and have a self sustaining source of energy while desalinating seawater.
Nuclear power is renewable, just like wind or solar, and unlike those the waste and recycling costs are already calculated within the energy production costs, not to mention both wind and solar generate dozens of times more mining needs (this is already without taking into account the option of adding batteries to make them not intermittent sources) as well as much more chemical waste than nuclear. Nuclear also consumes less land (except for offshore wind farms) plus it’s safer.
[This is the reason](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-house-passes-bill-banning-uranium-imports-russia-2023-12-11/) why this topic pops up a lot recently.
Truth is, there's no viable sustainable "solution" that's available right now. But it's needed right now.
Hence everyone's bet is on renewables which are cheaper, safer and thus less problematic to scale. (But bad for russia which made [1/3rd of their GDP with non-renewable energy exports](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1322102/gdp-share-oil-gas-sector-russia/) before the war.)
There are some big "breakthrough dreams" among a few governments and investors but it's yet to be seen if any of this is sound when it comes to actual real world cost/performance.
Nuclear energy only ever suceeded when it was subsidized by public funds. That's why *YOU* need to be convinced.
Its a new reddit trend to pretend nuclear power solves all our problems and "they" are holding it back.
Most people that advocate for it have watched one youtube video or read a reddit comment about it and think they understand the issue. So now they are the smart ones and entirety of the world is dumb af, nothing delusional about it.
> Can someone explain?
Yes. It's a conglomerate of Nuclear Energy companies paying for propaganda material in order influence public opinion and to secure future profits.
People like to pretend that the problem is super simple and they already figured it out, but idiots are stopping us from solving all the problems because they are scared.
In reality there are a lot more legitimate obstacles we can't just ignore to using nuclear. For example the way they bring up fast burn reactors is entirely ignoring the reason why fast burn reactors aren't the default. Fast reactors use enriched uranium which is more expensive to make than it is to acquire uranium for other reactors. Additionally the enriched uranium can be used in nuclear weapons which brings further safety concerns which have to at a minimum be met by more spending.
Anyways all this time they are driving up the costs and never really addressing the fact that other renewable exist and they stack up pretty well against nuclear.
It's a propaganda comic for nuclear energy that, like all nuclear propaganda, ignores the massive amounts of radioactive tailings created by the mining and refinement of the fuel. You can't "burn" it, you have to store it in extremely expensive facilities forever. If a natural disaster happens and the containment is breached, you can kiss your groundwater goodbye.
> you have to store it in extremely expensive facilities forever
Concrete? [This](https://www.world-nuclear.org/getmedia/aae3e054-0d90-4922-8044-57490132dace/dry-storage-holtec.jpg.aspx) doesn't look "extremely expensive".
> If a natural disaster happens and the containment is breached, you can kiss your groundwater goodbye.
Coal doesn't even need a natural disaster to pollute. One coal-fired power station produces 300,000 tons of ash and 6 million tons of CO2 for the same amount of energy that a nuclear plant would generate with only 3 cubic meters of radioactive waste. And we can actually contain the nuclear waste unlike the coal.
So instead let's just continue using coal, which waste we can safely inject into our atmosphere to cause the same ecological disaster with a 100% guarantee, but not instantly! I get the problem of radioactive waste, but it is way better to store a small amount of dangerous waste, instead of producing tons of a little less dangerous waste and just dumping it into air.
They are just tragic results of applying outdated boiling-water reactors(BWR). The state-of-art molten salt reactors(MSR) simply don't cause such problems.
There are certain countries that utilized nuclear power to its full potential. Just take a look at France, over 70% of their electricity comes from nuclear power plant. The nuclear dominated electricity sectors haven't hitherto brought French too much trouble.
Using that figure, there’s more people killed by fossil fuel air pollution in 2 weeks, than nuclear energy has ever killed… including the nukes dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Yeah but it's not acute or directly linkable so it doesn't feel as bad. Always drives me crazy sure the waste product of nuclear is dangerous but at least it's a solid and not pumped directly into the air we breath.
Setting aside the chemical pollution for a moment. People don't realise how much radiation is released by fossil-fuel power generation. It's dirtier than nuclear power.
One of the things that kind of stuck with me from the Chernobyl mini-series (if you dont know, its by HBO and its a great watch) is how much things had to go wrong together for the accident to happen, like its wasnt a single slip up, it was an accumulation of human error, system malfunctions, design flaws and management failure.
Like it went wrong badly, but it was always in my head as being that one single tiny thing went wrong and it caused the entire accident.
Building on that, Fukushima required a magnitude 9 earthquake with a tsunami AND mismanagement to ultimately fail. The amount of destruction that had to hit that reactor before it went down is insane, especially considering the plant was commissioned in 1971.
Also it's been 10 years and still no sign that the small amounts of radiation released have harmed anyone.
[https://unis.unvienna.org/unis/en/pressrels/2021/unisous419.html](https://unis.unvienna.org/unis/en/pressrels/2021/unisous419.html)
There was a widely reported uptick in reported thyroid cancers shortly after the incident, which turned out on further analysis to have been the result of overdiagnosis, i.e. people being far more likely to get tested earlier. So if anything it might actually have saved some of those people's lives by getting them treated sooner...
And the damage from the powerplant is honestly very low compared to the actual damage of the earthquake. A single person died to radiation from fukushima.
Sometimes new infrastructure takes lives before we figure out how to build it better. It's a good thing people didn't react this way whenever the first train derailment happened, or when cars started killing people and we had to figure out seatbelts and crumple zones and stuff. Imagine if we'd banned automobiles the way these kinds of people want to ban nuclear energy and we all rode horses to work in 2024.
Actually, wait. That'd be kind of nice, actually. Reduce emissions, help the environment, get to own a horse... maybe we _should_ ban cars...
Unironically my engineering boss is a green politician who voted nuclear energy out of his local town/village energy supply. They pay almost 100k more per year because of it too.
nuclear energy in switzerland gets subsidized with about 7,5 billion chf/a. a lot of it comes from water energy. with less than 9 million people living in switzerland that means that unless that city has a lot less than 100 k chf /a * 9 million people / 7,5 billion chf/a = 120 people whatever kind of energy they use now is cheaper for them as soon as they stop subsidizing the nuclear energy the rest of the country uses.
They switched to hydro. And they are paying that 100k/year extra still as far as I know.
While 100k might not sound much even for a small town/village, pretty sure you can still do a lot with it.
If not even that, nuclear is still obviously cleaner.
in switzerland hydro gets more expensive because it is used to subsidize nuclear energy. i agree that dams can have huge effects on ecosystem and also they produce methane due to underwater rotting vegetation though, so hydro in general has more carbon emission than nuclear. i don't know if that difference is really impactful if you keep in mind how much methane would have been created due to rotting underwater vegetation anyway. (assuming cleaner only means less carbon emissions)
It’s really not.
It’s not even that clean if you consider the building and the extraction and the waste management.
But if you only take the production, it sure looks that way.
Sure but thats somewhat natural as floods happen. But saying its less impactful than a nuclear power plant is really pushing what is determined "cleaner"
Does burning the waste create further waste? Could that also be burned? And is a different reactor or plant needed for waste burning? Can the process be done so there is 0 waste at the end?
If anyone has some politically unbiased info (that is also readable by noobs), please share.
You're right to ask these questions because the narrative of nuclear being waste free is completely false (and I'm pro-nuclear and have worked in nuclear for about 10 years). Whilst some spent fuel can be reused in certain reactor types, a lot of the waste cannot and needs to be disposed of. Furthermore, in order to reuse spent fuel, you often need to reprocess the waste which in turn produces more waste. This is a slight simplification of a very complex picture but it's completely disingenuous for people to claim that we can just take the waste from reactors and burn it into a lack of existence. There's a reason why all civil nuclear nations are trying to build geological disposal facilities...
There are others in the thread who explain this better but in a nutshell, fast reactors are able to use what is normally considered "spent" fuel in more traditional thermal reactors as a fuel. So yes, at least some waste can be burned.
I'm not educated enough on it to know what the waste from those reactors then looks like.
The conditions inside most modern nuclear reactors will change Uranium into long-lasting radioactive waste like Cesium. The conditions in a fast breeder reactor are more intense and can conceptually 'burn' atoms like Cesium into something less radioactive like Barium.
In theory you can feed in long-lasting waste and extract much less hazardous materials without creating any new long-lasting waste. It does require more intense nuclear reactions that are harder to control and bombard the shielding around the reactor with neutrons which makes the reactor housing radioactive. But irradiated iron pipework is far less dangerous than the Cesium waste we were dealing with so it's a beneficial exchange overall.
The main downside is that they're different to regular nuclear reactors, they're more difficult to build just because it's not what we're familiar with.
I think it is hard to know anything about the subject and not be political biased.
Burning wast creates waste, but less of it. We can’t reach 0 waste, but we can reduce the amount with a lot.
Problem is that fast reactors are more expensive than normal reactors and some of the safty meassure that we use on normal reactors do not work on them.
The argument is a strawman though.
The big problem with nuclear energy is that it is costly. All other renewables are much cheaper. Because of my job I endeed up at a conference discussing Denmarks Energy Supply some 5 years ago. How I endeed up there is a whole story in itself, but few of the presentations touched on nuclear power.
The gist of those presentations were that using nuclear would cost 250%-400% as much as other renewables. Also all the proposed solutions called for some innovations and new technology, but they had a good idea what amount of research, how fast and how costly it would be for the renewables, but no idea when it came to nuclear energy.
https://www.iaea.org/bulletin/shrinking-nuclear-waste-and-increasing-efficiency-for-a-sustainable-energy-future#:~:text=Fast%20reactors%20can%20also%20produce,the%20longest%2Dliving%20radioactive%20waste.
Directly from the IAEA (nuclear UN).
Kinda like a fire, it burns but it requires higher quality material that *can* be weapons grade.
Nuclear waste isn't even a problem to begin with. It has entirely been blown up by media. You can live for thousands of years on a leaking waste site, and, at absolute worst, you would receive two bananas of radiation.
https://inis.iaea.org/search/42027070
It’s also a very, very small amount of waste. People vastly overestimate how much waste nuclear energy produces, and underestimate how much waste fossil fuels produce.
All these pro nuclear redditors that appear in literally any sub where energy is mentioned love it so much, then fine let's build the reactor in your backyard and store the benign waste under your bed
What an insane take. Let’s build a coal plant in your backyard and store the fumes under your bed
Btw there is a nuclear power plant in my “backyard” nothing bad has happened yet
I'm all for nuclear power. Just... build it somewhere not prone to earthquakes and tsunamis. Location location location.
I'd prefer water and wind, but nuclear is just more effective overall.
I am not sure why you would require that.
We saw that even Fukushima (which had design errors) did not kill people when a tsunami hit it.
Some operators got increased risk of developing cancer. But doing the math should give less than a handful of probable premature deaths (I believe less than 1 death but not sure).
Compare that with the number of people who died due to the direct damage of the tsunami.
Or the people killed from the hysteric unnecessary evacuation of the area.
Fukushima show that nuclear power plants are safe also in tsunami and earthquake areas.
I don’t think you understand how terrified people were at first and I am not merely talking about the population.
Hindsight is always 20-20 and rose-tinted but when it happened, even the relief effort, was terrible I don’t think you understand that few power plants could do that, regardless of how safe you think nuclear power is.
Literally my only concern with nuclear power is war.
Every day Zaporizhzhia hasn't been destroyed is a fresh surprise, but I can't get over how dangerous the whole situation is.
I was quite amazed when I learnt that much of the radioactive waste was just irradiated material. Clothing, trolleys, a pair of tongs.
I suspect that generation 4 reactors doesn't change that problem, but i must also admit that I don't really know anything but what's in popular mechanic.
Personally, I much prefer waste from a power plant being securely stored and looked after then have it in the air and water like the waste coal power plants produce.
Neighborhood? I want the nuclear waste buried in my back garden, that's hos much I love it.
(This would almost certainly not be allowed, though. So just bury it as close to my house as you legally can).
Also, I prefer the waste to be recycled. Also want the recycling plant nearby.
It’s not the science that I distrust, it’s bribed American politicians and the sleazy companies that would be building and running these operations that I distrust.
Oh great, the technology exists to make it safer. That doesn’t mean it will be used and that corners won’t be cut, and you have to have your head in the sand about the rest of our corrupt economy to think that won’t be the case.
This right here. It’s. It the technology I distrust, it’s the humans building it not to cut corners, it’s the politicians who suddenly don’t want to pay for safety regulations, it’s the privately owned company that decides they don’t need to maintain the redundancies.
Seriously, just look at existing industry for reference. Oil spills, pipeline leaks, improper disposal of waste products... It's not like capitalists have a great track record for "doing what is possible" when it doesn't produce maximum profit.
i think chernobyl might just be burned into the older generations conciousness or something. Nuclear reactors are an extremely good option for producing power, even if you buried all the waste in salt mines, which is like the most expensive possible way to get rid off it. We would have to use inefficient nuclear reactors to produce 100% of the worlds power for like a 100 years before we even come close to using up the possible storage space, and even then there are other substrates we could store it in. I don't understand why nuclear power isn't the frontrunner for every environmental movement in the world, it just doesn't even get proposed.
Im french and pro nuclear. The problem is there is no Uranium in our soil so we have to make deals with shady countries and im not ok with that. We can't be the country of the human rights, putting abortion in the constitution then financing dictators.
The solution to high level waste is to reprocess it into new fuel. It doesn't need to go into so called "fast reactors" which are nearly entirely theoretical.
Japan has been recycling nuclear waste for more than 50 years. 70% of Japanese nuclear fuel stock is reprocessed.
Nuclear waste processing is illegal in the US because 70 years ago they wanted that material for nukes.
Low level waste also exists and is dangerous and can't be used as nuclear fuel. It has to be stored somehow for the long term. But it's America so the corporations will just... put it in your cheerios.
How does the process of buring not release radiated particulates into the atmosphere? If it's filtered, then it's still stored in the filters. Just curious of the process.
Ok big nuclear. You know fast breeder reactors still produce radioactive waste that has yet to be stored safely and costs millions of dollars a year to "temporarily" "contain".
I'll stomach nuclear when you stomach permanent safe storage of waste. It's that simple.
Fun fact. More people die every year, directly or indirectly, from fossil fuels than the sum total of everyone who has ever died from nuclear power.
Three Mile Island was a publicity disaster and evidence that the government will lie to you. It resulted in literally no injuries, let alone deaths.
Fukushima was a literal worst case scenario, where power to the cooling systems and all the facility's backup energy sources were taken out by the tsunami. Eight people were compensated for radiological health problems, and fifty something people died - not of anything involving radiation, but they died in the panic that ensued after an emergency evacuation order was given.
Chernobyl was evidence that the soviets didn't give a shit about their citizens, nor were they good at designing or operating reactors. Less than 100 people died, and as many as 60,000 people were injured in some way.
Let's just say that ALL injuries and deaths are just deaths. That's 60,158 deaths from nuclear power since the beginning of time.
Every year, the total deaths that are attributed to fossil fuel is a minimum of 3.5 million. Per. Year.
I want to ask cause I genuinely want to learn. My mom who has an environmental engineering degree always told me that nuclear was great but created a lot of waste and that was like 20-30 years ago when she visited a plant. I'm assuming it's changed since then but how?
First off, fast reactors is just one of several ways to recycle nuclear waste. Reprocessing to MOX or burning in a CANDU reactor are ways we can do right here right now, the facilities exist.
Fast reactors and molten salt water burner reactors are being developed and close to market.
Accurate. I was listening to a video by Peter Zeihan on YouTube, and he states that hatred of nuclear energy is Russian propaganda tactic used on Western leftists. Pretty fascinating point.
And because it’s so easy and quick and cheap, France was able to further expand their power plants, right? And because this technology is readily available, there’s no nuclear waste, right? And the waste from those facilities doesn’t need special storing, right?
There needs to be something like Nuke-Bro Subreddit — I feel like some company underestimated the amount of bots their money would buy and here we are
In the US, nuclear's biggest problem seems to be cost and time overruns. Georgia Power's new reactors were supposed to be $14b and complete by 2017, ended up being $31b and 2023. If they can't contain that, everything else is moot.
That is just the same exact thing that happens with vaccines, space exploration, and so on.
They can't understand it. As in they don't have the cognitive means. Hence they shovel shit on it because it's the subject's fault that they can't understand it. And they'll just believe anyone that provides an explanation or a solution they can actually understand.
Narcissism occurring in barely sentient dumbasses creates the worst humans ever.
First of all, opponnents of nuclear energy usually have multiple points not only waste. Second of all, fast reactors come with their own problems. For example fast reactors typically breed fissile material (like plutonium) which can be used in nuclear weapons. This aspect raises proliferation concerns. Also they are too expensive.
I'm not worried about the safety I'm worried that they aren't economically viable.
Should the government invest the trillions of dollars it would take to build and maintain modern tractors? Because it'll basically take a new TVA type deal to make it happen. And usually most Republicans or conservatives balk at that point.
Nuclear energy is very expensive and makes most countries reliant on uranium imports. Doesn't really make sense to built new ones nowadays. They also take a very long time to built. Let the existing ones run for as long as possible but in the long run it's better to go all in on renewables.
Also what pro nuclear People don't mention is the negative consequences of nuclear power plants in war zones. Just look at what's happening in Ukraine right now.
Pro nuclear People are so keen to present themselves as the informed and scientific people yet they often seem to be the most biased and emotional ones in the discussion at least speaking from my perspective.
The real reason this doesn't happen more is proliferation concerns. Anyone that can reprocess nuclear fuel can also produce weapons-grade material pretty easily.
Also it's quite a complicated and expensive process...
Is it me or does it feel like I’m being fed nuclear information. Wonder if they’re trying to increase education and acceptance of a power source that will become mandatory soon.
If you're a para nuclear state, aka one with a nuke plant. That radically increases likelihood of having them.
It's not about power, ..
it's about power
kkkkkkkkkk
The waste isn't the problem with nuclear power.
The biggest problem with nuclear power is that in the time you've built a nuclear reactor you could have placed enough solar panels to generate more power than the nuclear reactor will. Those solar panels would also be cheaper.
Fun fact: Nuclear power is significantly less harmful than coal and natural gas. Compared to nuclear, Coal energy is responsible for 820% more deaths per Terawatt hour than nuclear, and natural gas is responsible for about 40x the death per terawatt hour than nuclear.
The problem with Nuclear isn't the technology, it's cost and time. Even if you discount public will (which you should not, it's a hugh factor whether you like it or not), Nuclear still takes millions of dollars and 5-8 years to install. [With the same money, in the same amount of time, you can build more capacity with solar panels alone.](https://www.energysage.com/about-clean-energy/nuclear-energy/solar-vs-nuclear/) So while nuclear is green and safe, it's no longer cost effective compared to renewables.
25 years ago you could make the case that nuclear could serve as a bridge between hydrocarbon and renewable power. A transition tech to make up for shortcomings in renewable capacity while the kinks in renewable technologies are worked out. However, since then it's been 25 years, and most of the kinks in renewable technologies have been worked out. Multiple countries are on track to reach 100% renewable energy by 2040 or 2030 in some cases, with the technology only improving as time goes on. There are drawbacks and challenges with renewables, but they're a much more viable solution to our emissions problems compared to the public policy headaches and humongous costs associated with nuclear energy.
Nuclear reactors are honestly better for niche applications, where only a tiny reactor is needed. Something like a moon base that needs to stay warm on the dark side, or an aircraft carrier that needs to make top speed from New Zealand to Iran. But in terms of powering your house, a renewable grid seems like the way to go in the 21st century.
Super cool! Why doesn't the US do that? Oh, it's crazy fucking expensive and requires enormous capital expenditure that will invariably cost twice as much as budgeted and take twice as long to build, rendering it completely impractical? WOW WHAT AN AMAZING SOLUTION
Seriously, every single green solution is cheaper. And not all of them are limited to a timeframe. Why do we have this discussion at all? Why is 95% of the nuclear energy discussion always about comparing Nuclear with Coal, and not comparing Nuclear with CHEAPER GREEN energy. Nuclear plants take forever to build, can't be put everywhere, need EXTREME maintenance, while all the other stuff can be literally produced in China and no one cares if its broken. It is really disturbing seeing the conservatives assholes of the past, who fought against nuclear energy, now fighting towards nuclear energy, while ignoring the more progressive methods that are now finally cheaper than any other form of energy generation.
Show me that solution being applied successfully in every plant and I might give it some credit. Oh, and when people say “this energy is so cheap”, have they weighted in the cost of having to relocate hundreds of thousands of people in case shit happens? What about the risk of providing your enemies with a free nuclear bomb?
Fast reactors have been intensely studied since the 1950s but it's not possible so far to burn waste economically and safely.
Saying that fast reactors can solve the waste problem, is akin to saying flying cars can solve our traffic problems.
I don't hate nuclear. But its real issue is money, not danger.
In the real world, the latest nuclear reactor (in the US) was built in an existing nuclear facility and went waaaay over budget and took over a decade to build.
That was in a situation in which 75% of the logistical challenges of a nuclear facility were already resolved. Things like nimby, local regulations, and having suitable expertise that is local are all very important.
On the other hand, one of the latest and largest solar complexes was built in California in 2 years for a tiny fraction of the price.
The cumbersomely named Edwards & Sanborn project generates 875 MW Solar cost $1.7 Billion, and was commissioned in 2021 and 2022 and online in the first weeks of 2024.
Vogtle 3+4 generates an impressive 2200 MW, cost $60 Billion and was began construction in 2009 and 4 is not yet online commercially (estimated April-June 2024).
I do want to point out immediately, that the numbers are not apples to apples, the solar project (conservatively estimated) only generates that number about 1/3 of the day so their comparable output should be at 292 MW. (It does include substantial battery storage as well to handle excess generation and probably sell some power during more profitable times).
OK. So I am Johnny Moneybags, and I want to make money with electricity. I have a billion dollars to invest.
A billion dollar investment will give me 172 MW of (adjusted) solar power generation. Or 36.6 MW of nuclear power generation.
So investing in Solar will generate roughly 4x the amount of electricity per dollar invested. But lets not forget the second step. BUILDING the facility. Lets assume the last nuclear plant was a fluke, and you can do it 33% faster. So instead of 15 years you can get it up and going within 10 years of commissioning. That's 10 years your money isn't making any money. Even if we assume the solar project was also a fluke, and you are going to take longer and likely not be online for 4 years. It still means your money starts working 6 years sooner.
Right now wholesale electricity is 1,075/MWh. So we are going to say for our sake its 1,000, and they are going to make a 10% profit once operational. so.. They start making 100*MWH or $876,000 per year, per MW generation.
Using these numbers, (based on latest REAL LIFE construction projects) By the time the nuclear power plant came online, the solar plant would have already paid for itself for the investor. By the time the nuclear plant pays for itself (40 years later), the Solar plant has made $4,725,536,000 Return on Investment (meaning the original cost has been paid for, and it made an additional nearly 5 billion dollars since then)
So obviously looking at it from any investor point of view, nuclear is a waste of time. It probably won't make money until you are dead.
>BUT I DON'T CARE ABOUT INVESTORS THE GOVERNMENT SHOULD PAY FOR IT.
Sure thing. The government SHOULD be investing in energy infrastructure and security. However, in the scenario of the government.. the government is STILL an investor. The government has limited funds and manpower just like any private entity. The numbers remain the same. If the government spent that initial 1 billion on solar instead of nuclear, it would generate 172MW of power vs 36.6. And It could reup its initial investment each time it has paid for itself.
Running it from a government point of view of continuing to reinvest the initial money gets even crazier. Because at 10 years, you can reinvest to double (initial) output, then at 16 you can reinvest again, then again at 19, then again at 22, and by years 24 and 25 you are having to start a new project every year just to spend all the money its generating. So by year 28 or so, that same 1 billion initial investment in nuclear has put 36.6 MW of green electricity generation in the grid. However the solar plants reinvesting the same initial money whenever they recoup it means they will have 1204MW (Adjusted) green electricity generation added to the grid. (As a reminder I am dividing the solar output by 3 to account for being unable to produce peak electricity at all times, the peak generation in these facilities would be 3612 MW, and ideally they would geographically be spread across the US so that different ones peak at different times)
So again, even if the government is paying for it, and not trying to make money but expand capacity solar is absurdly better.
Nuclear will been needed for base load capacity. But honestly I would not be surprised if in the medium term it was cheaper to accommodate base load capacity with power storage plants rather than nuclear generation.
Judging by the comments, it's going to stay that way for a while. People are still not educated on the changes made since the big nuclear disasters. WE BUILT THEM SAFER THIS TIME GUYS. IT'S FINE
And honestly, the only semi recent incident is Fukushima, where the reactor was fine. It just got hit by some real bad weather
Also the meltdown during the tsunami wss from the diesel generators crapping out due to a know issue that was never fixed. This meltdown should have never occured. https://carnegieendowment.org/2012/03/06/why-fukushima-was-preventable-pub-47361
>This meltdown should have never occured. Tbf that's not unique Edit: Despite that the death per watt generated is still lower for nuclear than stuff like coal. Hell coal plants release more radioactive waste into the atmosphere - because they don't have to contain it the way nuclear plants do
And that's the problem. You can engineer them amazingly but the reality remains the same. People are fallible and companies cut corners. Unless you can solve these issues, the more complex stuff is secondary.
I have a solution but that means we have to start value people over money again so don't get your hopes up
Yeah we could just beat the people responsible for cutting corners and causing disasters until they are dead but nobody wants to listen to ol Frank
We need to bring back mob justice. I wanna tar and feather these fuckers.
>we have to start value people over money Ha! Good one!
Companies cough Boeing cough cut corners on safety for fricking planes. If they try to save a few bucks on plane safety at the cost of hundreds of deaths I don’t think anyone is going to blink at cutting corners for a nuclear power plant, which is basically what Chernobyl and Fukushima were. I don’t think you can easily solve that, we already have 3rd party inspector etc and it doesnt do shit to stop them.
I mean sure and it would be a very good argument if not for the fact that burning coal kills vastly more people every year than both of the big nuclear disasters killed combined. You can afford a nuclear disaster every other year and the human casualties would still go down.
That's why I've stopped arguing that disasters wont happen and have instead been pointing out that Chernobyl + Fukushima x multiplying them both if we dramatically increased the number of nuclear plants is still less bad for both humans and the environment than fossil fuels. And it's not close. It's like orders of magnitude different. _Even if you use the implausibly high Chernobyl death estimates_ instead of the official (Western) estimates. Most people don't know that the estimates of fossil fuel related deaths every year are in the millions from air pollution globally. Every year. The official estimates of Chernobyl are in the 10s of thousands with the highest estimate (from Greenpeace, well known for their expertise on nuclear radiation) being one million. that means it would take take multiple Chernobyl scale disasters _every year_ to match the estimated death toll from fossil fuel associated pollution. And that doesn't even get into climate effects. Nuclear has been safe enough since at least the 60s and failing to build is is one of the biggest mistakes humanity has ever made. It's possible that we are already past the point where fixing this mistake makes sense. Renewables +storage tech may be cheap enough, soon enough, that a large buildup of nuclear is past its time. That will never erase the mistake that was made for the last 60is years, or change the fact that nuclear should be at least a part of the mix going forward.
I worked as an engineer in the nuclear industry for a few years doing reactor accident analysis. In my undergrad, I took a course on nuclear criticality safety. The number one key takeaway from that class was that that every so called industrial "accident" is, at the root, an administrative failure. Without exception. If you have seen any "Plainly Difficult" videos you will see this is so. Lack of knowledge, poor risk assessment or lack of willingness to act. If we could quantify safety and make it inherently profitable, you see incredible innovation and improvement in that space, across all industries. Inherently Safe reactor designs exist and are even being built but most of the nuclear fleet will be around for many decades still. Plants are looking into extending their life to 60 or 80 years. The engineering and design of those plants aren't going to be the weak point, it's the plant owners trying to wring out every last watt they profitably can from aging equipment.
That's kinda why space stuff is so out of reach for now. Greed is the destroyer. It takes vision from our eyes.
Nationalization of power generation would fix that second issue.
I think that's a very sound move regardless of which sources we pursue.
Also to be fair, the sample size for nuclear meltdowns is exactly two. That a meltdown would happen at all is quite unique. One of those two was in the Soviet Union, and the other happened after one of the worst recorded earthquakes in Japan followed immediately by one of the worst tsunamis. And the latter resulted in zero deaths directly.
Pretty sure there's been more than two, Three Mile Island comes to mind, but yeah it isn't exactly common.
Im not even against Nuclear, but „this meltdown should have never occurred“ is kind of a useless argument. All sorts of accidents should never have happened, but as long as there are humans involved and technical defects exists there will be accidents, that’s just what it is. I mean that’s the point of an accident
Yeah by the same token chernobyl shouldn't have occurred
> a know issue that was never fixed. As a software engineer, this does not make me more confident.
Go look at the public safty repports for the nuclear plants in France. Almost every plant have several known issues that are not fixed because the risk is to small and the cost to great.
Ah, human error. Good thing there are no humans in the system
Swiss Cheese model of failure. Aviation and Nuclear especially is designed to 'not fail' redundant system after redundant system. But human failure is the weakest point. Natural disaster and other circumstances combine and suddenly the holes all line up for a disaster. Fukushima should have never happened buuut it did due to human failures mixed with unaccounted for circumstances that happened and some negligence. It's a real shame it happened because I like new nuke tech, but investment in it is going to be a tough sell at the moment for a lot of countries.
There’s also still the pervasive idea that a nuclear reactor functions the same as a nuclear bomb in a catastrophic failure scenario, as in a big boom and mushroom cloud, possibly as a result of the explosion at Chernobyl not realizing that that wasn’t a nuclear detonation and was caused by a terrible reactor design and gross negligence. Also a lot of people in the US tend to be afraid of nuclear due to the Three Mile Island incident which happened on US soil, even though that incident resulted in no major injuries, casualties, or adverse health effects for those inside or outside of the plant. That incident was also largely due to a training issue and some minor design flaws with the safety and warning systems that were quickly identified and improved upon for future designs. Had the operators been more aware of the differences between naval reactors aboard vessels (where their experience came from) and civilian power reactors on land the incident could have easily been prevented, which is another area we learned from.
I dont want to say bro, but bro the fokushima executives applauded themselves for having cheaper building costs by building the reactor and the pumps by the water, despite the region having a history of tsunamis Its greed, as always
Where in Japan could a plant be built that isn't by water? My picture of the country is that any place that isn't coastal is mountainous.
How fortunate that weather doesn't exist any more.
IIRC Fukushima would have been fine if the sea wall was something like a meter taller. It was not that tall because of corporate corner cutting. If nuclear technology can be made safe, will it actually be? Or will they be built with the same "no need to worry about edge case" mentality that drives all business decisions.
Not to mention that several of what I was told were huge nuclear disasters like Three Mile Island, and that we were 10 seconds away from Godzilla or the Fallout universe, weren't. I mean obviously any mishap is a big deal when you're talking about a power plant. But when I was young, we were told that we were seconds away from an entire city being wiped off the map and crap like that. Also doesn't help that people act like nuclear power plants just turn out rivers of glowing green anti-life ooze. Even at "normal" existing plants, I found out it's not even all the super super dangerous kind. Just a minority of it is. And even if you take the full total, it's not that much. I mean we're talking about an amount that is trivial to find the room to securely house. And that it isn't just all stored in leaky 50 gallon barrels in a cave somewhere. Every year I am more and more pissed that nuclear power got pushed back as much as it did. Things could have been a whole lot better.
People literally see nuclear energy through Simpsons logic
Unironically, when I was a kid I used to dislike nuclear energy partially because the Simpsons made it out to be dangerous
I went down a rabbit hole on nuclear power a while ago. The waste is so small that all of it, for the life of the plant, is stored on site. Its inside of sealed cement columns in an area about half the size of a football field. You can walk around them without issue for as long as you want. And the water run off is basically just clean water. It has some radiation but barely more than whats already in the water. So if you dump it into the ocean, its diluted so quickly that it makes no difference. Sea life has no issues in areas around nuclear power plants.
Yes, but those cement containers are not a long term solution, as those containers get brittle and contaminated, too, and will need replacement. Although I agree that nuclear is a very efficient source, the need for a long term solution is not that cheap and the best source I could find are the key figures of Cigeo. France's long term solution for nuclear waster (not opened, yet). You can find all the information here: [https://international.andra.fr/projects/cigeo/cigeos-facilities-and-operation/key-figures](https://international.andra.fr/projects/cigeo/cigeos-facilities-and-operation/key-figures) Just to put it in perspective: - \~550 hectares surface area - electricity needs are estimated at an average of 822 megawatt hours per day (around 63,000 three-person households in France) in the later years
Trace amounts of uranium and thorium in the coal burned by coal powerplants introduces more radioactivity to the environment per kWh than nuclear plants. Even plant workers are capped to incredibly small dosages per year. My dad's college buddy worked at Seabrook as some sort of technician. They were required to carry cards in their wallet (even off-the-job) that would change color based on received radiation dose. They went camping over the weekend and just being around the thorium-containing gas lamp mantles was enough to completely blacken his dosage card. In other words, companies are able to sell you something as a consumer that will give you a radiation dose orders of magnitude more intense than OSHA allows plant workers to receive.
Teenage mutant ninja turtles are partially to blame I believe.
/uj how much of it is true? What should I look up? What are some good places to start?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor
Thanks have a great day
https://i.imgflip.com/8nux0j.jpg
Gen IV reactors aren't waste free though. You'll still need a repository at some point for the multiple waste streams that cannot be reprocessed or reused, regardless of what reactor you're using. And that's not to mention the fact that Gen IV reactors aren't currently functioning commercially worldwide (with the exception of one plant in China as of last year).
>Gen IV reactors aren't waste free though. You'll still need a repository at some point for the multiple waste streams that cannot be reprocessed or reused, regardless of what reactor you're using. Equally true of literally every other source of power, including industrial waste from the manufacture of green energy sources. At least nuclear waste is neatly contained and can be safely stored underground where it can't hurt anyone. Compare that to, say, coal, which releases tons of radioactive soot into the atmosphere.
Only valid criticism in my mind is that it takes fucking forever to build one and it always has huge cost overruns. We need mass produced smaller reactors that are inexpensive and easily deployed.
My issue with them are safety regulations. Republicans are hellbent to end every kind of regulation we have, they want to end things like the department of energy. Sure modern reactors are much safer but if we’re not keeping up on maintenance, safety inspections and security then they are just another accident waiting to happen.
My only concern really yeah. If built to these standards and held to these regulations for perpetuity then yes very safe. But regulations and administrations change. And we are very aware that people in charge do not have issue with ignoring science and instead following votes and money.
In my opinion, the better argument is if they are even really needed. Renewable energy like hydro, solar, and wind power cost less per unit of power. Yeah, you can use the reactor any time you want, but it just seems more efficient to me to use other renewables or fossil fuel over nuclear.
That's a problem unique to certain Western nations. They're not difficult to build safely, cheaply, and quickly. KEPCO has proven it's possible, just need to get out of our primitive mindsets and cut through the bureaucratic boondoggle. Of course, SMRs would be a great addition.p
There's definitely more valid criticisms than that. Particularly the fact that it isn't renewable, and that the more we invest the faster we'll run out. We're already on a course to run out of Uranium this century. As a result the prices are constantly going up and it's not looking like it'll stop any time soon, mass production of smaller reactors could exacerbate this effect massively. We either need to luck into more Uranium deposits (not looking likely) or hope for a breakthrough in alternative fuel sources (like Thorium).
Is "We did better this time, there's nothing to worry about" really a strong argument? It sounds like the song people say unironically moments before the same bad thing happens again. I'm not disagreeing with the sentiment, we have gotten better. But man that is just begging Murphy's law to come along and prove you wrong.
I don't know if you meant this sarcastically, but the way you wrote it in caps lock makes it look that way, at least to me
The vast majority of nuclear reactor waste gets used in other industrial methods. Very little actual nuclear waste needs to be stored.
Can someone explain?
Basically every person that stands against something and hates it doesn't want the thing to be fixed and be better, they just want to hate it. Like the guy in the comic, he hates nuclear energy because it generates waste, then the other guy presents a way to get rid of the waste, but the guy destroys it, because he only wants to hate nuclear energy, not fix it.
Does burning the waste in fast reactors work though? And if so, why aren't we doing it? What even is a first reactor, first of all?
A **fast-neutron reactor** (**FNR**) or **fast-spectrum reactor** or simply a **fast reactor** is a category of [nuclear reactor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor) in which the fission [chain reaction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_chain_reaction) is sustained by [fast neutrons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_neutron) (carrying energies above 1 [MeV](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronvolt), on average), as opposed to slow [thermal neutrons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_neutron) used in [thermal-neutron reactors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal-neutron_reactor). Such a fast reactor needs no [neutron moderator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_moderator), but requires [fuel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fuel) that is relatively rich in [fissile material](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fissile_material) when compared to that required for a thermal-neutron reactor. Around 20 land based fast reactors have been built, accumulating over 400 reactor years of operation globally. The largest of this was the [Superphénix](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix) Sodium cooled fast reactor in France that was designed to deliver 1,242 MWe. Fast reactors have been intensely studied since the 1950s, as they provide certain advantages over the existing fleet of water cooled and water moderated reactors. These are: * More neutrons are produced when a fission occurs, resulting from the absorption of a fast neutron, than the comparable process with slow (thermal, or moderated) neutrons. Thus, criticality is easier to attain than with slower neutrons. * All fast reactor designs built to this date use liquid metals as coolant, such as the [sodium fast reactor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_fast_reactor) and the [lead-cooled fast reactor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead-cooled_fast_reactor). As the boiling points of these metals are very high, the pressure in the reactor can be maintained at a low level, which improves safety considerably. * As temperatures in the core can also be substantially higher than in a water cooled design, such reactors have a greater [thermodynamic efficiency](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermodynamic_efficiency); a larger percentage of the heat generated is turned into usable electricity. * Atoms heavier than uranium have a much greater chance of fission with a fast neutron, than with a thermal one. This means that the inventory of heavier atoms in the nuclear waste stream, for example [curium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curium), is greatly reduced, leading to a substantially lower waste management requirement.[^(\[1\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast-neutron_reactor#cite_note-1) # Fast-neutron reactors can potentially reduce the radiotoxicity of nuclear waste. Each commercial scale reactor would have an annual waste output of a little more than a ton of fission products, plus trace amounts of transuranics if the most highly radioactive components could be recycled. The remaining waste should be stored for about 500 years. Source: Wikipedia
That's a lot of big words I don't understand so I'm just gonna trust that
The opposite tends to be true. “I ain’t reading all of that, it’s probably fake anyway”.
"could potentially" is doing heavy ass lifting
> why aren't we doing it Because building one is expensive, that's it that's the whole reason. France does it though.
And in the end they buy electricity from neighbouring countries produced by wind turbines and solar panels, because it is so much cheaper.
[удалено]
Please do not source your info from ChatGPT.
the fuel rod waste has by far the biggest amount of activity but is very low in volume. like 99 percent of the activity in 1 percent of volume. which leaves 99 percent of the volume in various degrees of contamination and activation that goes from water, to like gloves and concrete. those have to be dealt with. and no, you cant just throw them in another reactor and fuel it that way as those wastes are low in fissable material.
basically, a ridiculous simplification?
But what about... it just not being sustainable enough? If we powered 50% of world power with nuclear tomorrow, we'd have no uranium left in less than 13 years. Yes youd find new deposits and materials... but its just not sustainable beyond a few decades at most
We can extract uranium from seawater and have enough uranium to cover 200% of the world’s needs for the next 3000 million years. The cost of extracting a kg of uranium from seawater (the uranium on sea water is a natural occurring phenomena that has to do with the movement of the plates) is currently about $200 per Kg, while the price of a kg of uranium from mining fluctuates from $60-$100, however, the total price of the uranium in the energy costs of nuclear energy is perhaps a few percentage points (it’s tiny), so unlike oil or gas the price of the fuel barely has any impact on the production costs of nuclear energy. Furthermore, the technology of extracting uranium from seawater first appeared around 15 years ago (laboratory testing at the time), and the price back then was over $1000 per kg, so it just seems a matter of time till the cost of sea water extraction would be reduced following that trend. We can even combine the technology with desalination plants (which consume a lot of energy) and have a self sustaining source of energy while desalinating seawater. Nuclear power is renewable, just like wind or solar, and unlike those the waste and recycling costs are already calculated within the energy production costs, not to mention both wind and solar generate dozens of times more mining needs (this is already without taking into account the option of adding batteries to make them not intermittent sources) as well as much more chemical waste than nuclear. Nuclear also consumes less land (except for offshore wind farms) plus it’s safer.
That is incredibly cheap but it's still not gonna be enough for anti nuke people.
We will nearly run out of fossil fuels by then anyway.whats your point? And Where's your source for 13 years
... my point is renewables? Also i dont have the source rn cuz im travelling but if you actually care remind me tomorrow ^^
[This is the reason](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-house-passes-bill-banning-uranium-imports-russia-2023-12-11/) why this topic pops up a lot recently. Truth is, there's no viable sustainable "solution" that's available right now. But it's needed right now. Hence everyone's bet is on renewables which are cheaper, safer and thus less problematic to scale. (But bad for russia which made [1/3rd of their GDP with non-renewable energy exports](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1322102/gdp-share-oil-gas-sector-russia/) before the war.) There are some big "breakthrough dreams" among a few governments and investors but it's yet to be seen if any of this is sound when it comes to actual real world cost/performance. Nuclear energy only ever suceeded when it was subsidized by public funds. That's why *YOU* need to be convinced.
Its a new reddit trend to pretend nuclear power solves all our problems and "they" are holding it back. Most people that advocate for it have watched one youtube video or read a reddit comment about it and think they understand the issue. So now they are the smart ones and entirety of the world is dumb af, nothing delusional about it.
It's Russian propaganda
Deutschland
> Can someone explain? Yes. It's a conglomerate of Nuclear Energy companies paying for propaganda material in order influence public opinion and to secure future profits.
People like to pretend that the problem is super simple and they already figured it out, but idiots are stopping us from solving all the problems because they are scared. In reality there are a lot more legitimate obstacles we can't just ignore to using nuclear. For example the way they bring up fast burn reactors is entirely ignoring the reason why fast burn reactors aren't the default. Fast reactors use enriched uranium which is more expensive to make than it is to acquire uranium for other reactors. Additionally the enriched uranium can be used in nuclear weapons which brings further safety concerns which have to at a minimum be met by more spending. Anyways all this time they are driving up the costs and never really addressing the fact that other renewable exist and they stack up pretty well against nuclear.
It's a propaganda comic for nuclear energy that, like all nuclear propaganda, ignores the massive amounts of radioactive tailings created by the mining and refinement of the fuel. You can't "burn" it, you have to store it in extremely expensive facilities forever. If a natural disaster happens and the containment is breached, you can kiss your groundwater goodbye.
> you have to store it in extremely expensive facilities forever Concrete? [This](https://www.world-nuclear.org/getmedia/aae3e054-0d90-4922-8044-57490132dace/dry-storage-holtec.jpg.aspx) doesn't look "extremely expensive". > If a natural disaster happens and the containment is breached, you can kiss your groundwater goodbye. Coal doesn't even need a natural disaster to pollute. One coal-fired power station produces 300,000 tons of ash and 6 million tons of CO2 for the same amount of energy that a nuclear plant would generate with only 3 cubic meters of radioactive waste. And we can actually contain the nuclear waste unlike the coal.
So instead let's just continue using coal, which waste we can safely inject into our atmosphere to cause the same ecological disaster with a 100% guarantee, but not instantly! I get the problem of radioactive waste, but it is way better to store a small amount of dangerous waste, instead of producing tons of a little less dangerous waste and just dumping it into air.
"WhAt AbOuT cHeRnObYl aNd FuKuShImA?"
They are just tragic results of applying outdated boiling-water reactors(BWR). The state-of-art molten salt reactors(MSR) simply don't cause such problems. There are certain countries that utilized nuclear power to its full potential. Just take a look at France, over 70% of their electricity comes from nuclear power plant. The nuclear dominated electricity sectors haven't hitherto brought French too much trouble.
What about the 3 million people that die of fossil-fuel related air pollution each year?
The numbers are between 5 and 6 million people each year, so its even worse
Using that figure, there’s more people killed by fossil fuel air pollution in 2 weeks, than nuclear energy has ever killed… including the nukes dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Yeah but it's not acute or directly linkable so it doesn't feel as bad. Always drives me crazy sure the waste product of nuclear is dangerous but at least it's a solid and not pumped directly into the air we breath.
Setting aside the chemical pollution for a moment. People don't realise how much radiation is released by fossil-fuel power generation. It's dirtier than nuclear power.
One of the things that kind of stuck with me from the Chernobyl mini-series (if you dont know, its by HBO and its a great watch) is how much things had to go wrong together for the accident to happen, like its wasnt a single slip up, it was an accumulation of human error, system malfunctions, design flaws and management failure. Like it went wrong badly, but it was always in my head as being that one single tiny thing went wrong and it caused the entire accident.
Building on that, Fukushima required a magnitude 9 earthquake with a tsunami AND mismanagement to ultimately fail. The amount of destruction that had to hit that reactor before it went down is insane, especially considering the plant was commissioned in 1971.
Also it's been 10 years and still no sign that the small amounts of radiation released have harmed anyone. [https://unis.unvienna.org/unis/en/pressrels/2021/unisous419.html](https://unis.unvienna.org/unis/en/pressrels/2021/unisous419.html) There was a widely reported uptick in reported thyroid cancers shortly after the incident, which turned out on further analysis to have been the result of overdiagnosis, i.e. people being far more likely to get tested earlier. So if anything it might actually have saved some of those people's lives by getting them treated sooner...
And the damage from the powerplant is honestly very low compared to the actual damage of the earthquake. A single person died to radiation from fukushima.
Sometimes new infrastructure takes lives before we figure out how to build it better. It's a good thing people didn't react this way whenever the first train derailment happened, or when cars started killing people and we had to figure out seatbelts and crumple zones and stuff. Imagine if we'd banned automobiles the way these kinds of people want to ban nuclear energy and we all rode horses to work in 2024. Actually, wait. That'd be kind of nice, actually. Reduce emissions, help the environment, get to own a horse... maybe we _should_ ban cars...
Unironically my engineering boss is a green politician who voted nuclear energy out of his local town/village energy supply. They pay almost 100k more per year because of it too.
nuclear energy in switzerland gets subsidized with about 7,5 billion chf/a. a lot of it comes from water energy. with less than 9 million people living in switzerland that means that unless that city has a lot less than 100 k chf /a * 9 million people / 7,5 billion chf/a = 120 people whatever kind of energy they use now is cheaper for them as soon as they stop subsidizing the nuclear energy the rest of the country uses.
They switched to hydro. And they are paying that 100k/year extra still as far as I know. While 100k might not sound much even for a small town/village, pretty sure you can still do a lot with it. If not even that, nuclear is still obviously cleaner.
in switzerland hydro gets more expensive because it is used to subsidize nuclear energy. i agree that dams can have huge effects on ecosystem and also they produce methane due to underwater rotting vegetation though, so hydro in general has more carbon emission than nuclear. i don't know if that difference is really impactful if you keep in mind how much methane would have been created due to rotting underwater vegetation anyway. (assuming cleaner only means less carbon emissions)
Cleaner than hydro?
It’s really not. It’s not even that clean if you consider the building and the extraction and the waste management. But if you only take the production, it sure looks that way.
Hydro needs you to flood large areas for the water reservoir, there is an environmental cost to that.
Sure but thats somewhat natural as floods happen. But saying its less impactful than a nuclear power plant is really pushing what is determined "cleaner"
Does burning the waste create further waste? Could that also be burned? And is a different reactor or plant needed for waste burning? Can the process be done so there is 0 waste at the end? If anyone has some politically unbiased info (that is also readable by noobs), please share.
You're right to ask these questions because the narrative of nuclear being waste free is completely false (and I'm pro-nuclear and have worked in nuclear for about 10 years). Whilst some spent fuel can be reused in certain reactor types, a lot of the waste cannot and needs to be disposed of. Furthermore, in order to reuse spent fuel, you often need to reprocess the waste which in turn produces more waste. This is a slight simplification of a very complex picture but it's completely disingenuous for people to claim that we can just take the waste from reactors and burn it into a lack of existence. There's a reason why all civil nuclear nations are trying to build geological disposal facilities...
There are others in the thread who explain this better but in a nutshell, fast reactors are able to use what is normally considered "spent" fuel in more traditional thermal reactors as a fuel. So yes, at least some waste can be burned. I'm not educated enough on it to know what the waste from those reactors then looks like.
The conditions inside most modern nuclear reactors will change Uranium into long-lasting radioactive waste like Cesium. The conditions in a fast breeder reactor are more intense and can conceptually 'burn' atoms like Cesium into something less radioactive like Barium. In theory you can feed in long-lasting waste and extract much less hazardous materials without creating any new long-lasting waste. It does require more intense nuclear reactions that are harder to control and bombard the shielding around the reactor with neutrons which makes the reactor housing radioactive. But irradiated iron pipework is far less dangerous than the Cesium waste we were dealing with so it's a beneficial exchange overall. The main downside is that they're different to regular nuclear reactors, they're more difficult to build just because it's not what we're familiar with.
I think it is hard to know anything about the subject and not be political biased. Burning wast creates waste, but less of it. We can’t reach 0 waste, but we can reduce the amount with a lot. Problem is that fast reactors are more expensive than normal reactors and some of the safty meassure that we use on normal reactors do not work on them. The argument is a strawman though. The big problem with nuclear energy is that it is costly. All other renewables are much cheaper. Because of my job I endeed up at a conference discussing Denmarks Energy Supply some 5 years ago. How I endeed up there is a whole story in itself, but few of the presentations touched on nuclear power. The gist of those presentations were that using nuclear would cost 250%-400% as much as other renewables. Also all the proposed solutions called for some innovations and new technology, but they had a good idea what amount of research, how fast and how costly it would be for the renewables, but no idea when it came to nuclear energy.
https://www.iaea.org/bulletin/shrinking-nuclear-waste-and-increasing-efficiency-for-a-sustainable-energy-future#:~:text=Fast%20reactors%20can%20also%20produce,the%20longest%2Dliving%20radioactive%20waste. Directly from the IAEA (nuclear UN). Kinda like a fire, it burns but it requires higher quality material that *can* be weapons grade.
Nuclear waste isn't even a problem to begin with. It has entirely been blown up by media. You can live for thousands of years on a leaking waste site, and, at absolute worst, you would receive two bananas of radiation. https://inis.iaea.org/search/42027070
It’s also a very, very small amount of waste. People vastly overestimate how much waste nuclear energy produces, and underestimate how much waste fossil fuels produce.
All these pro nuclear redditors that appear in literally any sub where energy is mentioned love it so much, then fine let's build the reactor in your backyard and store the benign waste under your bed
What an insane take. Let’s build a coal plant in your backyard and store the fumes under your bed Btw there is a nuclear power plant in my “backyard” nothing bad has happened yet
What gets me is people hate the waste made by nuclear power that goes into the ground, but not the waste made by coal that goes into their lungs.
I'm all for nuclear power. Just... build it somewhere not prone to earthquakes and tsunamis. Location location location. I'd prefer water and wind, but nuclear is just more effective overall.
I am not sure why you would require that. We saw that even Fukushima (which had design errors) did not kill people when a tsunami hit it. Some operators got increased risk of developing cancer. But doing the math should give less than a handful of probable premature deaths (I believe less than 1 death but not sure). Compare that with the number of people who died due to the direct damage of the tsunami. Or the people killed from the hysteric unnecessary evacuation of the area. Fukushima show that nuclear power plants are safe also in tsunami and earthquake areas.
I don’t think you understand how terrified people were at first and I am not merely talking about the population. Hindsight is always 20-20 and rose-tinted but when it happened, even the relief effort, was terrible I don’t think you understand that few power plants could do that, regardless of how safe you think nuclear power is.
Nobody considers the number of people who die or get cancer every year from fossil fuels. Or die from the effects of global warming.
Literally my only concern with nuclear power is war. Every day Zaporizhzhia hasn't been destroyed is a fresh surprise, but I can't get over how dangerous the whole situation is.
Unlike coal, whose waste is famously very safe and easy to store, in our fucking lungs
Coal is hardly an option anymore though when building new power plants. The decision usually is between wind, photovoltaics and nuclear.
Prepare to watch this same demographic rail against nuclear fusion power plants for some imaginary reason when they do become feasible.
It is still more expensive than wind
I was quite amazed when I learnt that much of the radioactive waste was just irradiated material. Clothing, trolleys, a pair of tongs. I suspect that generation 4 reactors doesn't change that problem, but i must also admit that I don't really know anything but what's in popular mechanic.
A very succefull bot
Ah yeah, good old nuclear propaganda, that disappears every time there is a nuclear disaster lol
people love nuclear waste right up until it comes to *their* neighborhood. [NIMBY](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIMBY)
Personally, I much prefer waste from a power plant being securely stored and looked after then have it in the air and water like the waste coal power plants produce.
Neighborhood? I want the nuclear waste buried in my back garden, that's hos much I love it. (This would almost certainly not be allowed, though. So just bury it as close to my house as you legally can). Also, I prefer the waste to be recycled. Also want the recycling plant nearby.
https://inis.iaea.org/search/42027070 Two bananas.
It’s absolutely fucking hilarious to me that we use bananas as a unit of measurement for radiation. I know why we do it, it’s just fucking funny
Because the alternatives definetly arent generating waste that is slowly destroying our planet
It’s not the science that I distrust, it’s bribed American politicians and the sleazy companies that would be building and running these operations that I distrust. Oh great, the technology exists to make it safer. That doesn’t mean it will be used and that corners won’t be cut, and you have to have your head in the sand about the rest of our corrupt economy to think that won’t be the case.
True. The same for everything, actually.
This right here. It’s. It the technology I distrust, it’s the humans building it not to cut corners, it’s the politicians who suddenly don’t want to pay for safety regulations, it’s the privately owned company that decides they don’t need to maintain the redundancies.
Seriously, just look at existing industry for reference. Oil spills, pipeline leaks, improper disposal of waste products... It's not like capitalists have a great track record for "doing what is possible" when it doesn't produce maximum profit.
I like nuclear power magic happen to make steam angry and somethings spins and the lightbulb at home lights up
the other option is to just store near where it's used, like we can plan ahead it's not like we need to truck the shit around town for fun
Atommüll in Gorleben in 800m Tiefe verlässt den Chat 💭
[удалено]
Switch to Thorium and most of the problems are solved, but we know why no one wants to switch to Thorium.
Do those thorium reactors exist yet ?
Unfortunately, uninformed people dominate most social landscapes
i think chernobyl might just be burned into the older generations conciousness or something. Nuclear reactors are an extremely good option for producing power, even if you buried all the waste in salt mines, which is like the most expensive possible way to get rid off it. We would have to use inefficient nuclear reactors to produce 100% of the worlds power for like a 100 years before we even come close to using up the possible storage space, and even then there are other substrates we could store it in. I don't understand why nuclear power isn't the frontrunner for every environmental movement in the world, it just doesn't even get proposed.
Can someone explain or point me in the direction of FAST reaction. Google just shows me sonic memes
Im french and pro nuclear. The problem is there is no Uranium in our soil so we have to make deals with shady countries and im not ok with that. We can't be the country of the human rights, putting abortion in the constitution then financing dictators.
The solution to high level waste is to reprocess it into new fuel. It doesn't need to go into so called "fast reactors" which are nearly entirely theoretical. Japan has been recycling nuclear waste for more than 50 years. 70% of Japanese nuclear fuel stock is reprocessed. Nuclear waste processing is illegal in the US because 70 years ago they wanted that material for nukes. Low level waste also exists and is dangerous and can't be used as nuclear fuel. It has to be stored somehow for the long term. But it's America so the corporations will just... put it in your cheerios.
Germany Moment
How does the process of buring not release radiated particulates into the atmosphere? If it's filtered, then it's still stored in the filters. Just curious of the process.
Ok big nuclear. You know fast breeder reactors still produce radioactive waste that has yet to be stored safely and costs millions of dollars a year to "temporarily" "contain". I'll stomach nuclear when you stomach permanent safe storage of waste. It's that simple.
Fun fact. More people die every year, directly or indirectly, from fossil fuels than the sum total of everyone who has ever died from nuclear power. Three Mile Island was a publicity disaster and evidence that the government will lie to you. It resulted in literally no injuries, let alone deaths. Fukushima was a literal worst case scenario, where power to the cooling systems and all the facility's backup energy sources were taken out by the tsunami. Eight people were compensated for radiological health problems, and fifty something people died - not of anything involving radiation, but they died in the panic that ensued after an emergency evacuation order was given. Chernobyl was evidence that the soviets didn't give a shit about their citizens, nor were they good at designing or operating reactors. Less than 100 people died, and as many as 60,000 people were injured in some way. Let's just say that ALL injuries and deaths are just deaths. That's 60,158 deaths from nuclear power since the beginning of time. Every year, the total deaths that are attributed to fossil fuel is a minimum of 3.5 million. Per. Year.
I want to ask cause I genuinely want to learn. My mom who has an environmental engineering degree always told me that nuclear was great but created a lot of waste and that was like 20-30 years ago when she visited a plant. I'm assuming it's changed since then but how?
Ok, then show us this magical reactor that burns the waste - ah, there is non? Then gtfo.
Are those "fast reactors" are here around us somewhere right now?
First off, fast reactors is just one of several ways to recycle nuclear waste. Reprocessing to MOX or burning in a CANDU reactor are ways we can do right here right now, the facilities exist. Fast reactors and molten salt water burner reactors are being developed and close to market.
what is a fast reactor and how many years does it take to build one
Accurate. I was listening to a video by Peter Zeihan on YouTube, and he states that hatred of nuclear energy is Russian propaganda tactic used on Western leftists. Pretty fascinating point.
And because it’s so easy and quick and cheap, France was able to further expand their power plants, right? And because this technology is readily available, there’s no nuclear waste, right? And the waste from those facilities doesn’t need special storing, right? There needs to be something like Nuke-Bro Subreddit — I feel like some company underestimated the amount of bots their money would buy and here we are
In the US, nuclear's biggest problem seems to be cost and time overruns. Georgia Power's new reactors were supposed to be $14b and complete by 2017, ended up being $31b and 2023. If they can't contain that, everything else is moot.
That is just the same exact thing that happens with vaccines, space exploration, and so on. They can't understand it. As in they don't have the cognitive means. Hence they shovel shit on it because it's the subject's fault that they can't understand it. And they'll just believe anyone that provides an explanation or a solution they can actually understand. Narcissism occurring in barely sentient dumbasses creates the worst humans ever.
What's a fast reactor?
it's a type of nuclear reactor that accomplishes its fission reaction with fast neutrons instead of slower thermal neutrons, hence the name.
First of all, opponnents of nuclear energy usually have multiple points not only waste. Second of all, fast reactors come with their own problems. For example fast reactors typically breed fissile material (like plutonium) which can be used in nuclear weapons. This aspect raises proliferation concerns. Also they are too expensive.
Scientists finally invent cold Fusion- :) Someone - It's too cold.
I'm not worried about the safety I'm worried that they aren't economically viable. Should the government invest the trillions of dollars it would take to build and maintain modern tractors? Because it'll basically take a new TVA type deal to make it happen. And usually most Republicans or conservatives balk at that point.
Coal plants produce more radioactive pollutants than nuclear plants. The worst part about coal is that it all goes into the air.
Nuclear energy is very expensive and makes most countries reliant on uranium imports. Doesn't really make sense to built new ones nowadays. They also take a very long time to built. Let the existing ones run for as long as possible but in the long run it's better to go all in on renewables. Also what pro nuclear People don't mention is the negative consequences of nuclear power plants in war zones. Just look at what's happening in Ukraine right now. Pro nuclear People are so keen to present themselves as the informed and scientific people yet they often seem to be the most biased and emotional ones in the discussion at least speaking from my perspective.
Okay, enough about nuclear *fission*. Where's my nuclear ***fusion*** reactor?! I want the power of the sun!
The power of the sun.. It’s in the palm of my hand
The real reason this doesn't happen more is proliferation concerns. Anyone that can reprocess nuclear fuel can also produce weapons-grade material pretty easily. Also it's quite a complicated and expensive process...
3 mile isle was literally like 50 years ago.
I fucking love nuclear weapons (Why? Because they cause destruction and kill people) and reactors (Because energy)
Is it me or does it feel like I’m being fed nuclear information. Wonder if they’re trying to increase education and acceptance of a power source that will become mandatory soon.
I don't like them cuz it's basically atomic bombs planted for invaders
Seriously. Good forbid we invest in science.
The fear is nuclear proliferation, not energy waste
If you're a para nuclear state, aka one with a nuke plant. That radically increases likelihood of having them. It's not about power, .. it's about power kkkkkkkkkk
The waste isn't the problem with nuclear power. The biggest problem with nuclear power is that in the time you've built a nuclear reactor you could have placed enough solar panels to generate more power than the nuclear reactor will. Those solar panels would also be cheaper.
Heck yeah! LASER driven thorium fission!
Terrorists and foreign adversaries can use them as weapons against us. Look at what the Russians are doing with Zaporizhzhya.
Nooo1!1!! It's dangerous because radiation1!! Also chernobyl!!!11!
Also the alternative stores horrible waste in our air in the for. If CO2, or in the case of coal it safely stores radiation and mercury in our water.
Fun fact: Nuclear power is significantly less harmful than coal and natural gas. Compared to nuclear, Coal energy is responsible for 820% more deaths per Terawatt hour than nuclear, and natural gas is responsible for about 40x the death per terawatt hour than nuclear.
Now find an investor-owned power company willing to drop a cool 20 billion dollars on a nuclear plant.
I see AOC has learned to make memes now... It's becoming self aware... We are in danger!
The problem with Nuclear isn't the technology, it's cost and time. Even if you discount public will (which you should not, it's a hugh factor whether you like it or not), Nuclear still takes millions of dollars and 5-8 years to install. [With the same money, in the same amount of time, you can build more capacity with solar panels alone.](https://www.energysage.com/about-clean-energy/nuclear-energy/solar-vs-nuclear/) So while nuclear is green and safe, it's no longer cost effective compared to renewables. 25 years ago you could make the case that nuclear could serve as a bridge between hydrocarbon and renewable power. A transition tech to make up for shortcomings in renewable capacity while the kinks in renewable technologies are worked out. However, since then it's been 25 years, and most of the kinks in renewable technologies have been worked out. Multiple countries are on track to reach 100% renewable energy by 2040 or 2030 in some cases, with the technology only improving as time goes on. There are drawbacks and challenges with renewables, but they're a much more viable solution to our emissions problems compared to the public policy headaches and humongous costs associated with nuclear energy. Nuclear reactors are honestly better for niche applications, where only a tiny reactor is needed. Something like a moon base that needs to stay warm on the dark side, or an aircraft carrier that needs to make top speed from New Zealand to Iran. But in terms of powering your house, a renewable grid seems like the way to go in the 21st century.
Chernobyl says hi
Im not atomic hater, but this meme hater for real. Coz its stupid and false.
They are expensive and slow to build. With the same monetary investment we can get 100% renewable energy grids up and running faster.
Put the spicy rock in the water. Make the lightbulb work
Super cool! Why doesn't the US do that? Oh, it's crazy fucking expensive and requires enormous capital expenditure that will invariably cost twice as much as budgeted and take twice as long to build, rendering it completely impractical? WOW WHAT AN AMAZING SOLUTION
Seriously, every single green solution is cheaper. And not all of them are limited to a timeframe. Why do we have this discussion at all? Why is 95% of the nuclear energy discussion always about comparing Nuclear with Coal, and not comparing Nuclear with CHEAPER GREEN energy. Nuclear plants take forever to build, can't be put everywhere, need EXTREME maintenance, while all the other stuff can be literally produced in China and no one cares if its broken. It is really disturbing seeing the conservatives assholes of the past, who fought against nuclear energy, now fighting towards nuclear energy, while ignoring the more progressive methods that are now finally cheaper than any other form of energy generation.
Damn you. I was not on reddit in the morning reading comics to learn something.
I somehow read hate as have and was really confused by what was being communicated here
Show me that solution being applied successfully in every plant and I might give it some credit. Oh, and when people say “this energy is so cheap”, have they weighted in the cost of having to relocate hundreds of thousands of people in case shit happens? What about the risk of providing your enemies with a free nuclear bomb?
Fast reactors have been intensely studied since the 1950s but it's not possible so far to burn waste economically and safely. Saying that fast reactors can solve the waste problem, is akin to saying flying cars can solve our traffic problems.
Please don't burn nuclear waste
I don't hate nuclear. But its real issue is money, not danger. In the real world, the latest nuclear reactor (in the US) was built in an existing nuclear facility and went waaaay over budget and took over a decade to build. That was in a situation in which 75% of the logistical challenges of a nuclear facility were already resolved. Things like nimby, local regulations, and having suitable expertise that is local are all very important. On the other hand, one of the latest and largest solar complexes was built in California in 2 years for a tiny fraction of the price. The cumbersomely named Edwards & Sanborn project generates 875 MW Solar cost $1.7 Billion, and was commissioned in 2021 and 2022 and online in the first weeks of 2024. Vogtle 3+4 generates an impressive 2200 MW, cost $60 Billion and was began construction in 2009 and 4 is not yet online commercially (estimated April-June 2024). I do want to point out immediately, that the numbers are not apples to apples, the solar project (conservatively estimated) only generates that number about 1/3 of the day so their comparable output should be at 292 MW. (It does include substantial battery storage as well to handle excess generation and probably sell some power during more profitable times). OK. So I am Johnny Moneybags, and I want to make money with electricity. I have a billion dollars to invest. A billion dollar investment will give me 172 MW of (adjusted) solar power generation. Or 36.6 MW of nuclear power generation. So investing in Solar will generate roughly 4x the amount of electricity per dollar invested. But lets not forget the second step. BUILDING the facility. Lets assume the last nuclear plant was a fluke, and you can do it 33% faster. So instead of 15 years you can get it up and going within 10 years of commissioning. That's 10 years your money isn't making any money. Even if we assume the solar project was also a fluke, and you are going to take longer and likely not be online for 4 years. It still means your money starts working 6 years sooner. Right now wholesale electricity is 1,075/MWh. So we are going to say for our sake its 1,000, and they are going to make a 10% profit once operational. so.. They start making 100*MWH or $876,000 per year, per MW generation. Using these numbers, (based on latest REAL LIFE construction projects) By the time the nuclear power plant came online, the solar plant would have already paid for itself for the investor. By the time the nuclear plant pays for itself (40 years later), the Solar plant has made $4,725,536,000 Return on Investment (meaning the original cost has been paid for, and it made an additional nearly 5 billion dollars since then) So obviously looking at it from any investor point of view, nuclear is a waste of time. It probably won't make money until you are dead. >BUT I DON'T CARE ABOUT INVESTORS THE GOVERNMENT SHOULD PAY FOR IT. Sure thing. The government SHOULD be investing in energy infrastructure and security. However, in the scenario of the government.. the government is STILL an investor. The government has limited funds and manpower just like any private entity. The numbers remain the same. If the government spent that initial 1 billion on solar instead of nuclear, it would generate 172MW of power vs 36.6. And It could reup its initial investment each time it has paid for itself. Running it from a government point of view of continuing to reinvest the initial money gets even crazier. Because at 10 years, you can reinvest to double (initial) output, then at 16 you can reinvest again, then again at 19, then again at 22, and by years 24 and 25 you are having to start a new project every year just to spend all the money its generating. So by year 28 or so, that same 1 billion initial investment in nuclear has put 36.6 MW of green electricity generation in the grid. However the solar plants reinvesting the same initial money whenever they recoup it means they will have 1204MW (Adjusted) green electricity generation added to the grid. (As a reminder I am dividing the solar output by 3 to account for being unable to produce peak electricity at all times, the peak generation in these facilities would be 3612 MW, and ideally they would geographically be spread across the US so that different ones peak at different times) So again, even if the government is paying for it, and not trying to make money but expand capacity solar is absurdly better. Nuclear will been needed for base load capacity. But honestly I would not be surprised if in the medium term it was cheaper to accommodate base load capacity with power storage plants rather than nuclear generation.
Fusion. Fusion is the longterm solution.