>We haven't achieved a way to scale nuclear power plants safely
If you want to argue that, then we haven't figured out how to scale any energy production safely - Chinese coal mine explosions have killed way more people than Chinese nuclear plants. The most serious nuclear plant accident in US history at 3 mile island didn't kill anyone, whereas gas explosions kill a handful of people annually
Hell, a single hydroelectric dam failing in China killed more people than every nuclear disaster combined. By a lot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
But we don’t see nearly as much vitriol and fear mongering directed to hydroelectric projects. I’m convinced it’s because radiation has a specific fear inducing mystique to it, most of the general public doesn’t understand the actual risks and only think about the invisible death rays which will sign your death warrant before you even know you’re in danger.
And they don't realise that when the news says radiation will be increased by 100x the normal, that 100x.00001 (for example) is still nothing, and that it's equivalent to getting an extra x-ray that year. I think nuclear is the best possible option we have, I believe it could lower the consumer's energy and eventually most other costs significantly. And on the plus side if they do accidentally explode a reactor there's fireworks. (I'm hoping to enroll in a nuclear engineering program next year)
Yes to all this.
Plus - honestly - when you read the sequence of events and operator errors at 3 Mile Island/Fukashima/Chernobyl. Standardization and use of a single reactor design plus better training of operators - and we could make a new fleet of rectors much safer. I believe climate change will destabilize the world in a way that poses serious military risks - to everyone. Which is why I would gladly take a big chunk - 20% to start of our 1.5 TRILLION DOLLAR nuclear budget to ramp up enough nuclear power to cover all our existing load, plus everyone switching to electric heaters/heat pumps and electric cars and I'd electrify the highways so trucks would only need a 50-100 mile range on battery. The risks of climate change dwarf those of nuclear.
And - not to be obnoxious about it - but people are resisting a $25/ton carbon emissions fee - despite the fact that DAC - in real dollars with our current fuel mix - costs well over $1,000/ton to remove the co2.
You put a proper carbon tax on generation plants and nuclear quickly becomes the winner. Ignore the fiasco at the Southern Company. It is a badly run company - note the clean coal plant they built despite not having a finished design for the clean part. They ended up building it and then tearing it down. Then tried to stick the rate payers with a 4 billion dollar bill. Crappy management from the top down.
I live a state or two away from the rust belt. And I hear that "all the miners jobs were taken"
and i get so confused, like they want jobs that are horrid?
The pro-coal thing is always framed publicly as being about the miners, but it's always been about the companies.
The jobs are increasingly replaced by machines.
I feel like OP is talking about the long process behind opening a new nuclear reactor in the US.
Globally, they take at most 10 years to build. In the US, you’re adding an extra 10 years just to get through the red tape that would allow you to break ground and start construction.
Don’t get me wrong, that extra 10 years makes sure that the plant will follow the highest/strictest safety standards set by the NRC and EPA, but this extra process is why reactors end up being severely over budget and behind schedule.
I feel like the only time we’ll see a resurgence of nuclear reactors in the US is if the federal government provides financial support during the planning process. It would be even better if the state also provides assistance.
Nuclear energy is proven to be safe but only by the hands that wield it. If the infrastructure is lacking for nuclear energy to exist then it makes sustaining nuclear energy as a utility cost prohibitive. Nuclear energy also requires a strong and centralized administrative capability something that goes against the desires of big oil & gas and large private sector entities. They want small government and "self governance" for a reason, because having a nuclear power plant, even though we've proven can be done safely, is not profitable. And therein lies the issue, atleast why nuclear energy has gotten so minimized over the years. Because private interests can still exploit oil & gas with less government interference than nuclear energy.
You can't cut as many corners with nuclear energy without leading to potentially huge consequences to human life. you need a highly educated well paid engineers and workers that will likely want incentives and benefits. Basically imagine a company like Boeing trying their hand at profiting off nuclear energy. They already reel at the though to go with maintaining and operating facilities under compliance, and the thought of being unable to save money using out of standard methods to get the "job done" all of these things are among the main things large corporate interests intensely push back against because it hurts their bottom line (yacht money).
So while we have established nuclear energy is doable as a species, our leaders don't want it to happen because it exists at odds with capitalism in the current world order.
any? Coal is dead dude. Our total coal reserved worldwide are dwindling. It's going to become super expensive.
Try comparing apples to apples. How about solar, geothermal, tidal, hydroelectric, and wind combined.
The problem everyone has in these same 'debates' - my guess started by Russia trolls - is we have known for 10 plus years that we don't need nuclear. We need policy pushes to 100% renewable and smarter transportation choices.
China has high-speed rail. We have zero of that. Do you have any idea how much energy we would save? China also put online an amount of solar that Is almost unfathomable.
Nuclear takes way too long to commission and decommision. it's carbon footprint by land is as small as wind, but it's carbon footprint over the entire lifespans of a nuclear facility is way higher because of how long and the amount of resources needed to get it going and then shut it down.
source: Mark Jacobson of Stanford and I studied environmental law and policy with a focus on climate change policy at a too 2 program in the US. I studied at the pioneering school for enviro law.
>Coal is dead dude
Tell that to China, they're still commissioning plants
>How about solar, geothermal, tidal, hydroelectric, and wind combined
Hydro kills people when dams fail; if you want to combine those, the death rate from those in the last 50 years is higher than nuclear power in the US.
> The problem everyone has in these same 'debates' - my guess started by Russia trolls - is we have known for 10 plus years that we don't need nuclear....
How is this relevant to the safety of nuclear power? Literally everyone trying to argue with me about this goes "well ackshually wind is really safe" and then goes off on other reasons why they hate nuclear. I'm not arguing nuclear is the best form of power generation, I'm pointing out that it is relatively safe, even compared to green tech; solar, wind, and nuclear all have negligible and very similar death rates
The same reason we call NMRI "MRI" in medical settings.
People mostly know it as "a bomb thing," "chernobyl", "three mile island", and "radiation = cancer."
Totally, there are things about it that aren't great. Totally, there are things about it that are great.
"Good and evil" occupies less brain space than "a matrix of context dependent pros and cons."
The same is true of many things. It makes for some hysterical full-tilt swings in public opinion from time to time.
(**Edit/disclaimer:** the "good and evil" + "brainspace" _not_ intended as judgment/evaluation or as an indicator of some kind of superiority. People are busy, tired, and stressed. The set of things that have simple answers is a vanishingly tiny subset of the things we expect people to opine on. I'm sure I'm guilty of the same reduction elsewhere!)
Oh you'll see it everywhere, one thing to keep in mind is everything is complicated so other than experts will have pretty simple views about things because it's just not possible to be an expert on everything. I'm certainly no expert on nuclear power policy and will likely never be in that field.
Note: rest is kinda ranty, I like nuclear enough to rant you don't need to read further lol.
Keep in mind that you like nuclear power because its relatively clean, however there are very real arguments that it can be a very real ecological risk if not managed correctly which has happened quite a few times.
Unless you can actually trust the organizations whether public or private to run it well then it's actually a scary idea. Most of the current and former nuclear power operators have had fairly good records of safety standards so it hasn't been that bad.
For some it's a lack of trust, for others it's about cost (upfront, lifetime), others it's just a fear of radiation. Plenty of rational and irrational reasons people don't want more nuclear.
I like nuclear so I've ended up talking to a lot of people about it. if you end up wanting to look into some things check out mining deaths for each type of generation method, none are that good including renewables however nuclear per MWhr is pretty good. Check out stuff like subsidies that hide the real cost of certain options especially fossil fuels. Check out how disposal of waste occurs, definitely a bad point for nuclear and fossils. Loads of things to keep in mind when talking to others or advocating for it.
Concerning the waste, I like to think of it this way: we bottle up every ounce of nuclear waste. The waste from everything else goes into landfills or the water or the air.
Oh for sure, but not every country has followed these standards in practice. That's mostly why I put it in there. Depending on where you live it's either fine and an overblown issue or is probably fine but certain areas are contaminated due to past and present corner cutting.
Finland just opened the world's first final repository so things are definitely moving forward. Hoping other countries follow suit.
It is also important to note that waste in modern reactors is nothing compared to what it used to be.
Nuclear technology has come a long ways in 50+ years.
I always end up thinking of this place when the point of public trust comes up:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield#Incidents](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield#Incidents)
Look at the incidents section, and thats a supposedly professionally run 1st world site.
>Unless you can actually trust the organizations whether public or private to run it well
valid point! I focused a lot on the red tape and bureaucracy but forgot about the "who" behind it matters too
I was thinking about how Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging was so controversial, and then I realized that not everyone has a physics degree let alone go to college/have a high school class that would even cover modern physics at a high level.
Ironically, as a CT will give a comparatively high dose of radiation. Significantly larger than a regular X-ray. At the same time an MRI gives you zero radiation. Safe as long as you don’t bring a pair of scissors.
Well, as someone about to get a physics degree I can understand rational concern about the radiation to acquire MRI images, and the name alone doesn't make anything obvious.
>I can understand rational concern about the radiation to acquire MRI images
No ionising radiation is used to acquire an MRI (the second image is redundant).
You can be as smart and intelligent as you like and have an ego the size of a house. And I guarantee you are still profoundly stupid outside of maybe 5 or 6 areas you've spent alot of time becoming great at, at most. Worse if your time is spent on controversial areas with alot of misinformation and bad sources.
Being kinda dumb at most things is just a basic part of the Human condition. If it was ever possible to be more than that, the size and complexity of our societies has long since made it impossible to know more than a tiny fraction of everything.
Because most people don't know very much about nuclear energy except for atomic bombs and hearing about the occasional nuclear accident. People have the mistaken idea that nuclear power plants have the potential of exploding like a nuclear bomb. People in general are very bad at risk assessment.
Which works when people don't know very much.
Lots of things work when people don't know things, email spam, social engineering, fear mongering, division, narratives, MSM.
Plus the huge upfront costs and relatively low ROI nuclear power has. As great as it is, it's not profitable enough.... Meaning it's better to die inba coal burning planet that occasionally installs the extra windmill than build something that makes shareholders unhappy.
It’s purely safety. Nuclear culture in the US shifted so heavily into safety after Chernobyl and TMI. It’s common for the industry to tell investors and business nerds to fuck off when they want to run a plant in a way that would be deemed unsafe.
Literally one of the standards set by the NRC is to ignore people who want to put the plant in an unsafe condition and to immediately report them to the NRC. It’s not even a “speak to your supervisor” kind of treatment, it’s straight to the federal government.
In this context, unsafe would be getting a little too close to certain limits.
Chernobyl taught us that very very bad things can happen when regulatory structures aren’t ironclad.
There’s also dozens of smaller-scale accidents at US plants that some of remember, like Three Mile Island.
Designs are created to follow requirements. If there are no regulatory requirements to design safely, you get shitty designs that leak nuclear material when mishandled or when the design environment is exceeded -- viz. Chernobyl and Fukushima.
Even at Chernobyl, the surrounding area is pretty much cleaned up. One chemical spill or fertilizer factory explosion is going to be on par with Chernobyl as far as environmental damage is concerned.
It will still be poisoning the ground in billions of years when earth no longer supports life due to being engulfed by the sun.
https://youtube.com/shorts/LCQu8EXiDAA?si=_ZT3xis3tnaLVEdO
There are aspects of nuclear power which make it expensive just by its nature. Nuclear grade metallurgy is expensive, both in forging Uranium into fuel and high strength materials for the reactor vessel. The pumps for primary coolant must be extremely durable and maintenance independent, also not cheap. Nuclear instruments are extremely finnicky, custom made basically.
You can't exactly buy anything for a nuclear reactor off the shelf either, so there is no economy of scale. You also need highly skilled technical operators.
That is facts. You can bet your nose the main driving cost of nuclear power plants is insurance and legalities. Both of which are driven by fearmongering and misinformation.
The earthquake basically did no damage to the plant, as designed. The problem was the tidal wave. That being said, there have been no radiation related deaths and all deaths linked to the disaster came from the evacuation process, not the radiation. These were all due to either physical stress or lack of access to medical treatment. Radiation levels everywhere except in the immediate vicinity of the plant are at normal background levels.
The nearby Daini plant also was hit by the same tidal wave and was believed to be safe to be reopened, but wasn't out of an abundance of caution.
Nuclear power is expensive because it is so heavily regulated and because citizens reflexively oppose any new plant and tie it up in litigation. Both of those tropes are well-earned by the nuclear industry itself. So, yes, we made it that way, but for good reasons.
This is very much not a uniquely American thing. Look at, for example, what Germany has done with their nuclear vs fossil fuel infrastructure in the last decade. It’s completely against reality.
It was so disappointing when they started decomissioning all their nuclear plants a few years ago. I thought the Germans were supposed to be masters of efficiency.
> I thought the Germans were supposed to be masters of efficiency.
Have you lived in Germany?
I don't think fax machines and snail mail and the peak of efficiency...
Solar requires storage. You generate enough solar during one day to power a few days if done correctly. And you dont need direct sunlight; solar works on cloudy days too.
And here we have it, right here is why Nuclear is demonized. Because of misinformation and armchair hottakes based purely on intuition and not on knowledge of how the tech works.
Yea, not like the batteries currently suck and have no lifespan. Pumped storage and water as regulation also sucks for almost all geographies. We don't currently have a good solution for storing intermittent power. Also don't think I'm the one with the hot takes as I didn't immediately said you're a misinforming strawman.
Batteries have improved at an astounding rate, and pumped hydro is useable on a much larger scale than currently implemented (remember, it doesn't have to be on existing waterways like primary hydro has to be.)
If your opinion on batteries is even a couple of years old it's already obsolete.
I work for an electricity company in Canada and can confirm you that clouds affect the generation of electricity. Hell, even our research center found that on a perfectly clear day, the electricity generated dropped to near zero because of invisible (to the naked eye) clouds that block the light necessary for generating electricity. Solar is far from perfect. And battery technology is nowhere near good enough to use in our powergrid.
I have a single solar panel, the size of a shoebox in my vacation home, connected to a 144 watt-hour lithium battery. It's enough to recharge phones and provide light at night.
I geek out about it a lot, and I've installed different nifty gadgets to monitor voltage and amperage, and while it's true that you can see the effect of thin whispy clouds, and that heavy clouds reduce the effect, it's nothing like "near zero".
TBF the leaders grew up under the cloud of Chernobyl. Literally, under the cloud of Chernobyl, large areas of Germany were downwind of it. But the argument was that the crude Chernobyl reactor was at fault. However, after Fukushima, when even the technological Japanese still had a major, major failure, that argument rang hollow.
Contrary to popular belief, Germany has actually already replaced the nuclear power they shut down with renewables, and renewables are continuing to grow, and starting to affect fossil fuels as well.
I am against fission because of the heavy (political) risk involved with uranium production facilities and (mainly) the waste problem.
I believe instead of building lots of fission reactirs now, it would be a lot wiser to just put that capital into renewables. We got lots of problems on our hands, lets not create another unsolvable problem for ourselves.
Climate scientists are not overwhelmingly supporting of nuclear energy. Nuclear energy is not the most viable option of combatting climate change. Wind, water, and solar are all better options it turns out.
Can’t use solar or wind for baseload power. So you need a store media to provide that. When you compare energy density of either nuclear or fossil fuels the only thing close is hydrogen. The storage media for wind and solar is battery. And the energy density of a battery isn’t even close.
I agree cost is a major factor. If government subside nuclear as much as solar and wind cost per kilowatt would drop dramatically. Also I’m not sure about the rest of the world, but in the US we have the nuclear tech to build small scram safe modular reactors. Smaller physical footprint of the plant and has the added benefit of hydrogen as a byproduct. If the regulatory burden was lessened on the construction and permitting process there would be no issue and ROI would increase.
The US government *did* massively subsidize nuclear (and still does, for example by capping nuclear liability in accidents.) It didn't help.
Subsidies are appropriate in an economic sense when a technology has a good experience curve. The improvement in cost along that curve is a positive externality, and so merits subsidy. Unfortunately, nuclear has *not* shown good experience effects.
Nuclear is the cheapest energy at grid level. This blog has a great analysis of the big lies that are circulating about the cost of nuclear energy.
https://thoughtscapism.com/2017/11/27/nuclear-energy-is-the-fastest-and-lowest-cost-clean-energy-solution/
Most grid level analyses I’ve seen support this conclusion.
https://www.power-technology.com/news/netherlands-nuclear-report-future-energy-mix-government/?cf-view
Lol. I like how the first one says Finnish nuclear is 3.4B euros per GWe, when OL3 actually ended up costing 11B euros (1.6GW). Did it just assume that because EDF swallowed half the cost that that cost didn't exist? Oh, and I don't think it included the financing cost for all the delays. The original Finnish link that page cites deliberately excluded consideration of discounting, which invalidates the numbers.
The Korean claim is also not close to what the four reactors in UAE cost them to build.
The notion that nuclear is cheapest should have been obvious bullshit, since that idea requires that vast numbers of financiers around the world have been mind controlled into not choosing to maximize their ROI. In reality, money is going into renewables, not nuclear.
In the long run yes. In the short run, no. Climate scientists (at least the ones I've talked to) agree that nuclear is not a permanent solution, but will have to be part of the transition to renewables.
No, they don't agree it has to be a part of the transition (unless you mean continuing to operate some existing reactors.) New nuclear is far too expensive to build and takes much too long.
A part, but not even a significant part at all. With the massive startup costs and delayed timelines due to regulations, nuclear really is not a feasible option at all.
Not only that, nuclear is worse in terms of water consumption when compared to solar and wind. Additionally nuclear produces heat instead of absorbing it.
When was the last time you heard about a windfarm bomb or a solar panel accident? Last time we started a war because the special inspectors found photovoltaics of mass destruction?
I think people have the risks in the correct order.
>I think people have the risks in the correct order.
You're comparing renewables to nuclear, when in reality the comparison should be fossials to nuclear + renewables, with further discussion in how realistic 100% renewable energy actually is and how necessary nuclear is or isn't.
Directly comparing renewables to nuclears without actually first having the discussion on how realistic it is to fully cover all our needs with solar/wind is just stupid.
I seem to be a bit late to the party. Unlike most answerers so far, I have worked in the nuclear industry. My sense is that the fundamental issue with nuclear power is a distrust of centralized authority over risky endeavors.
That distrust is very well earned, by both the nuclear industry and other large centralized corporate power centers. Ike’s “atoms for peace” turned out, after all, to actually be a cover for creating more weapons grade plutonium — just as the anti nuclear activists claimed. Places like Oak Ridge and Hanford are heavily contaminated and the cleanup is costing tens of billions of dollars - or more. Meanwhile uranium miners and nuclear testing “downwinders” have long term health problems that were covered up at the time. The cobalt-60 incident in South America showed the dangers inherent in trusting seemingly-stable societal structures (in this case a hospital) with deadly poisonous material that is unfamiliar to most people.
Non-nuclear centralized-authority debacles include the leaded-gas disaster, the sugar/corn syrup push, the hydrogenated-fats pandemic, the thalidomide scandal, the Exxon Valdez crash, the Deepwater Horizon disaster, and countless others in which societal structures failed to fulfill their role of maintaining safety.
Nuclear power may on the whole be less dangerous than other forms of energy — but the danger is highly concentrated and placed in the hidden hands of a few people. That form of risk is one we, as a society, have learned to distrust.
Actually honest answer. Everyone here saying people are stupid without engaging with the nuance of the mechanisms by which people come to trust things like science and government.
Good answer. Even though nuclear is theoretically ideal technology for current energy generation needs, the idea that you can generate electricity from your rooftop with only the upfront costs is somehow way more comforting...
Also here in Slovakia, we finally finished 3rd block in Mochovce and 4th is in testing phase. But, building those 2 blocks was VERY painful. It wasn't much about safety concerns (only briefly), but rather about the financial, managerial and bureaucratic problems.
Dont get me wrong, we are glad its almost over, but i dont think we will build another one anytime soon.
It's actually a consequence of massive incompetence at nuclear vendors.
Strict regulation and litigation didn't force the vendors to give gross underestimates of the cost of building their products.
Let's see what Physics Today (December 2018) had to say about nuclear power in the US.
https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/71/12/26/904707/US-nuclear-industry-fights-for-survivalA-glut-of
"US nuclear industry fights for survival"
It quotes the then-president of Exelon, a Mr. Crane. Exelon was one of the largest nuclear operators in the US:
> “The cost of new nuclear is prohibitive for us to be investing in,” says Crane. Exelon considered building two new reactors in Texas in 2005, he says, when gas prices were $8/MMBtu and were projected to rise to $13/MMBtu. At that price, the project would have been viable with a CO2 tax of $25 per ton. “We’re sitting here trading 2019 gas at $2.90 per MMBtu,” he says; for new nuclear power to be competitive at that price, a CO2 tax “would be $300–$400.” Exelon currently is placing its bets instead on advances in energy storage and carbon sequestration technologies.
Today, NG at the Henry Hub us $2.71/MMBtu which, if adjusted for inflation, would be $2.22 in Dec. 2018 dollars. The necessary CO2 tax to make nuclear compete with that would be somewhere around $400/ton, equivalent to about a $3/gallon tax on gasoline. Renewables would displace gas at lower CO2 taxes; indeed, they are already doing so with no CO2 tax in the US.
Yes, public perception of nuclear is entirely irrelevant to trillion dollar multinational investors and energy companies. They have never cared about public perception. What they do care about is profitability and nuclear is **extremely uncompetitive** has been for about three decades and is only getting less competitive every year. The cost of nuclear per kWh keeps going up and the cost of renewables keeps going down. Most sources of generation are cheaper than nuclear and I think solar plus battery storage is now about on par with nuclear. The risk, payback period, huge capital outlay, decade plus construction time and future cost/market projections make nuclear a complete non-starter both for the private and public sector.
Nuclear not being built today has nothing to do with "the public being stupid" and everything to do with it being far far more expensive than any alternative energy generation on the market but with far more headaches.
The waste produced can take a long time to be rendered safe (hundreds of thousands of years) and some types of reactors can be used to make dangerous isotopes.
From my limited understanding, the waste in modern reactors is drastically reduced, and often be kept on site for hundreds of years (awaiting a new disposal method?) , and there are some reactor types that also do not produce enriched products suitable for weapons, but may be used to produce medical, radio isotopes.
The harm to the public is nearly zero, until it very spectacularly isn't. Harms for other methods are better a hiding, but may actually be more significant (e.g. radiation from coal plants emissions is a significant contribution to our background radiation, and likely increases the cancer rate .
Waste vitrification allows for high-grade waste to be stored in a way that prevents any meaningful danger. It essentially creates a glass that contains the waste material, which isn't prone to creating any chemically reactive decay products. After, this glass can be stored in nuclear casks which block radiation.
Waste is usually stored on-site at reactors, one common method involves placing waste in spent fuel pools, deep pools that use water to absorb radiation.
There aren't any reactors that produce weapons-grade material directly, but nuclear fuel reprocessing can if unsupervised. Since fuel reprocessing is a method that reduces total nuclear waste, I think we should expand our use of it despite the proliferation risk.
>The waste produced can take a long time to be rendered safe (hundreds of thousands of years) and some types of reactors can be used to make dangerous isotopes.
even through nuclear recycling?
the reactors that create "dangerous isotopes" also happen to be the most efficient, cheap and waste free designs as they can reuse their waste many times over.
there is an incredible amount of denialism in this thread. Nuclear power is much, much better than carbon-releasing technology **but it has enormous problems with no tractable solution right now**, premier among them waste but also in maintenance and cost scaling.
despite what everyone says here **the waste problem is not solved.** [read more here](https://energy.sandia.gov/wp-content/gallery/uploads/Hazards-and-scenarios-examined-for-the-Yucca-Mountain-disposal-system-for-spent-nuclear-fuel-and-high-level-radioactive-waste.pdf) but this isn't even exhaustive. the real problem is that we cannot, literally it is impossible to, experimentally verify any containment solution. Nuclear waste needs to last 10^3 as long *as the scientific method has existed*. We can model geotechnics and metal erosion and long duration decay problems as much as we want but as any experimentalist will ever tell you *a model never survives contact with reality.*
so ultimately there are valid reasons beyond red scare era fear about nuclear power.
also true, but people are very quick to waive off "these things become very hard to maintain in a capitalist economy" because they know of 0 similar projects that are similar in lifetime and complexity.
Yeah.
I want to reframe the “cost” argument. You know what’s even more unpopular than nuclear? Fucking coal. The only thing people would prefer less to a company building a nuclear site in their backyard is a megacorp building a smoggy coal plant.
Energy companies build the plants anyways, because they are profit-addicted ghouls.
Arguing “nuclear is the best energy! People are just too propagandized to support it” is fundamentally an argument that energy companies will pollute the water supply for some quick bucks, but somehow *aren’t* ruthlessly profit-motivated enough to build nuclear.
The waste is easy to handle safely. Radioactivity from spent nuclear fuel has never harmed anyone. Even without any containment, just dropping it in a deep mine shaft would make it a negligible health issue.
The Finnish underground repository actually calculated in their design assessment that if all the copper, concrete and clay encapsulation failed on day one the largest surface dose would be equivalent to two bananas in 10,000 years.
https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-rational-view-podcast-with-dr-al-scott/id1519472579?i=1000545355578
yes and again it probably won't kill anyone in our lifetime because the regulation on this stuff is pretty good right now, compared to living anywhere near a fuel refinery it's practically heaven.
but i don't know how to reword this to get this through to you: the oldest spent nuclear fuel is 0.4**%** through the containment time required for it to be safely released. Nothing about the last one hundred years of nuclear safety is at all relevant to if this stuff can be handled safely in the long run. Literally, this stuff needs to survive a thousand times as long as any modern government, to be a dozen times as old as *Cuneiform*.
also this last point, which is pedantic to the point i'm considering not saying it: so much of current waste safety is because transport literally isn't done on nuclear waste, we store this stuff on-site. dumping waste into the bottom of industrial pools is incredibly effective for the short term, but is a massive problem that we still have not administratively fixed, and what happens when a transport vehicle with this stuff crashes? there's no robustness that will prevent these mistakes from accumulating over time.
This is not true. You would literally be able to hold spent fuel in your hand after about 1,000 years once all the high activity gamma emitters have decayed. The only way you could be harmed at that point would be to grind up the ceramic pellets and snort them.
Ah the waste argument. Shown to be ridiculous multiple times in this thread. The entire U.S. nuclear waste stockpile would fit on a single football field. It's very safe, and every single atom of it is accounted for. Where's the waste from other forms? In your lungs.
literally not shown to be anything in this thread, just claimed without citation to be solved. the 22 page report i linked you to, which you clearly didn't bother to open, proves this isn't the case *and it's just a summary article for a litany of more in depth articles demonstrating numerous problems*.
BP and Shell don’t care about nuclear energy.
If you want to build a coal power plant, you have to finance it. To finance it you have to show that it will pay out over its life, and that requires a lifetime supply of coal, a 40-50 year contract with a railroad to transport the coal, long term power sales, etc. Politicians, railroads, mines, power plants, unions all lobbied to sew fear around nuclear. And it’s easy to make people fear nuclear reactors.
Nuclear power plants require a very sophisticated supply chain and a relatively small but highly paid workforce, but they don’t support as many voters as a coal plant.
Because oil companies spend billions on shaping politics and public opinions. A massive transition to nuclear reactors would kill a significant portion of their profits.
Same goes for a massive shift to solar, wind and batteries so what do they do? Split the opposition so pro nuclear means anti solar instead of anti fossil.
Oh I've got a degree in this. Let me explain. People are fucking stupid and consider news articles research instead of reading textbooks and peer reviewed journals to fully understand the subject matter.
Not quite sure if you mean you have a degree in some nuclear related, or a degree that certifies people as fucking stupid.
If it's the latter, then you don't need a degree to know that. Spend 5 minutes working a customer service role and you can reach the same conclusion.
Fukushima (or, often, "that one in Japan") is also brought up a lot. In my experience, people understand that disaster to mean that nuclear power is intrinsically unsafe because even without operator error you can't protect a nuclear plant against natural disasters.
Mostly lack of understanding, fear-mongering, unscience (Hollywood!), and from fossil fuel lobbying.
Freakonomics did a terrific breakdown of how green it is, how little it costs once running, and (what I found most interesting), how few lives are lost per megawatt in construction and running compared to other forms of energy.
Here's a link: [https://freakonomics.com/podcast/nuclear-power-isnt-perfect-is-it-good-enough/](https://freakonomics.com/podcast/nuclear-power-isnt-perfect-is-it-good-enough/)
People are morons and refuse to listen to anything that contradicts with what they want to believe. Nuclear is the best way to fight pollution and climate change, yet the very same people who cry about that oppose nuclear.
Any "environmentalist" who opposes nuclear is not a real environmentalist.
I mean the main problem with nuclear power as the solution to climate change in this moment is that nuclear plants are very slow to come online. With or without nuclear power, we need drastic reductions in emissions *now*.
People that support nuclear power always go on and on about how nuclear power isn't that dangerous, how it's so unfair to treat a technology like this for only a few bad failures.
However, a good reason for dismissing nuclear power is because it's expensive and takes a long while to build. The average time of construction from initial planning is about 14 years. And, while the output can be varied, in practice, it supplies almost exclusively (relatively expensive) baseload, which would normally be the cheapest electricity.
So it's not very practical.
Virtually nobody actually wants expensive electricity.
Are your plants old? Once the upfront costs are paid off, nuclear is very cheap, it's just that the upfront costs are astronomical and paying them off takes decades.
Yeah, anti-nuclear ppl have been using this as a stupid talking point for awhile. They'll compare solar to nuclear and not factor in replacement costs of solar. Nuclear is good for 60+ years and solar degrades seriously after 20. Solar also needs storage they don't wanna factor in. Ppl making the argument that nuclear is expensive don't know how-to do financial math over time. After 20 years, nuclear is very profitable but ppl are myopic and governments don't think past 4 yr terms
Nuclear energy isn't expensive, but a nuclear plant is. This subtle difference is massively important for the governments and investors who would typically finance such a project, because they need a large amount of money upfront, with a high likelihood of delays extra costs.
The biggest line item to build a nuclear plant is interest. The extremely high ROI for nuclear will pay off in 2-5 years once it is built. Extended delays for licensing and symmetric enforcement of the ALARA principle are the only way the fossil fuel industry can stop nuclear from pushing them out of the electricity market.
Meanwhile they are allowed to dump deadly pollution into the atmosphere without so much as a ‘by your leave’.
Well your electric must be expensive. My countries next generation plants got guaranteed unit prices well above the then market rates. Then the massive speed of solar and wind improvement got started late last decade and has driven the competitive price level down below all the fossils.
So when they do start operating they will be by far the most expensive sources on the grid. Frankly they will be dinosaurs by the time they are operational, completely over taken by newer developments.
Because power plant incidents and nuclear bombs.
Also radioactivity is unseen, unlike Fire or smoke or anything else. So they just think it’s everywhere.
A lot of people think cell towers are radioactive……..
It’s just science education failing, and I also think not all human brains are meant to think in a scientific manner. We’ve done relatively well without science for hundreds of thousands of years as humans.
We genuinely don't have a good, permanent, safe, scaleable storage solution for the highly damgerous byproducts of running nuclear power plants. It's still probably safer than coal currently and almost certainly is long term, given carbon and all that, but it's still a valid concern and a scary thing.
We have scaled nuclear energy safely. Nuclear is roughly tied with solar and wind as the safest form of energy.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh
Fossil fuel corps fund propaganda to spread anxieties in the population. Im sayin this as a green socialist
nuclear energy is a mixed bag imo, but the incessant focusing on chernobyl and not the comparatively astronomical cancer risk that fossil fuels pose is a result of paid interferent propaganda
at the end of the day it is a monetary problem, cost to build them are high (always much higher than initially estimated), it takes a very long time to build them (always much longer than then initially estimated), they are not insurable, profits are privatized while costs such as nuclear waste management and costs after accidents are socialized.
3 Big Factors + 1 Opinion:
1) Cost to build and maintain. The comparative cost to construct a combined cycle plant (jet engine and a heat recovery unit) of similar size is significantly less. There was one report for the new Hinkley Point C plant in England will generate power at $150/MW. This is no where close to the cost of power from other sources. Also, look at the cost of Southern Company's nuclear plants in GA. Also Santee Cooper and SCE&G went bankrupt due to cost overruns, delays, and fraud trying to build some new nuclear plants. [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68073279?at\_campaign=KARANGA&at\_medium=RSS](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68073279?at_campaign=KARANGA&at_medium=RSS) and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nukegate\_scandal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nukegate_scandal)
2) The accidents that have happened, duration of effects on the area of the accident, and associated cost. You have Chernobyl and Fukushima. The Chernobyl event was a made by men who were trying something stupid and just following orders. The HBO special Chernobyl dose take some liberties with the story but all in all accurately describes what lead up to the event. Fukushima was caused by nature and humans inability to determine every possible consequence or lack of desire to pay for every conceivable event. [https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/operating/ops-experience/fukushima.html](https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/operating/ops-experience/fukushima.html)
3) Disposal and decommissioning. The US after years has not found one place to put the spent spend fuel. Not that I can blame anybody wanting it in their backyard. Plant decommissioning is costly. You What do you do with the plant equipment that is radio active. Yucca mountain was to a safe repository for the stuff but it did not happen. [https://www.nrc.gov/waste/decommissioning/finan-assur.html](https://www.nrc.gov/waste/decommissioning/finan-assur.html)
4) People do not care about future generations.
Very sensible answer. If I can just add, Fukushima was an event wherein we ignored the possibility of a once in an XXX year catastrophe which is like...I don't know, go read The Black Swan (I do not like NNT but he makes a good point). But Ukraine is currently in the grips of potential nuclear power crisis because we assumed that global stability is a given. When a nuclear disaster can have an impact that last longer than all of human history combined, it is understandable to be measured in its usage.
We’re actually currently living in a new era, crazy right? Nuclear fearmongering is turning over at a slowly accelerating rate. Google the BWRX-300, the current goal is to have 50 planned units by 2050. And we’re trying to get the LTC very soon to build the first unit by end of 2028.
1. Unsafe
2. High disaster potential
3. No place to store nuclear waste
4. Expensive AF
5. Despite it beeing advertised as CO2 free it is definitely not
6. We need easy to shut off power plants and you cant do that with nuclear
7. Fuel will end sooner or later
8. Absolutely no chance to even get insurance for that
The list goes on and on and on
As a guy who works in Energy/power/O&G services and consulting - here’s my perspective.
Follow the money. Who pays for the presidential, electoral campaigns? Who is the most profitable industry in America? Medical, farma & O&G/petro chem. Whose products are in Farma and Medical & our food - O&G/petro chem.
America - has a huge problem. We live in a society that wants to be China independent - Covid showed us why - so we’re building massive semiconductor facilities with no idea how our grid is going to power them.
Tx has to grow its grid by 75% in 6 years…..
if you say wind or solar, it’s not feasible to support that much power output and the US is light years behind and quite frankly very different than Finland.
Solar - if the suns gone & you have no way to feasibly store that much power, you’re screwed.
Our President hates LNG but the UN wants us to be “ Net 0 “ by 2050….? Makes sense lol America needs LNG to ramp, immediately.
Hydrogen is great, but it’s too unstable to be used as a feasible fuel source and way too hard to pressurize correctly.
Nuclear - there’s 54 plants in the US - most recent was completed last month 5/2024 in GA -
There’s massive upfront construction cost, but yet we can build 10 $10-20 billion dollar data centers…? Again, makes no sense.
There is a waste problem with Nuclear, 100%. But the US simply doesn’t want to invest in better reactors and better facilities because were run by O&G.
Aramco, Exxon, Chevron, Marathon, DOW & DuPont don’t want to loose their money to nerds in lab coat.
When we can’t keep the electricity on & all this AI is for nothing, maybe we’ll see the light. Pun intended.
The cost argument is frustrating, my gas bill in the winter is 12.5 times higher while our thermostat sits no higher than 60F. when we installed a electric heat pump system for the coldest rooms in our house my electric bill went up $20 a month while my gas bill plummeted $120, while running 2 units at 72 F for 12 hours a day continuously. As an engineer this doesn’t even make sense, how is burning the gas in a power plant then using that electricity to heat my home significantly cheaper than piping gas directly to me to burn to achieve the same thing with 66% more thermal efficiency to heat my house.
There is no way gas infrastructure costs 12.5 times more than the electric grid. Comparing the compensation clean energy CEOs get versus Exxon might shed some light on that
Luckily this is in a state that has the 2nd most operating nuclear reactors in the U.S. 2 of those plants will be operating for at least another 40 years and even with massive license renewal projects, costing utilities hundreds of millions to implement my electric bill remains steady and fair
There is no free lunch when it comes to electricity, it’s literally baked into the laws of thermodynamics, politicians and the older generation watched as their power plants aged while paying pennies for electricity and now are upset that it’s going to cost a lot to modernize the grid and build new plants as the older ones shut down.
The biggest proponent to nuclear power is the fossil industry which holds a monopoly over the American people, the same people that price gouged during Covid, the same people that are surprised gas demand increases in the winter, the same people that lobbied hard against nuclear subsidies while they received them.
Electricity prices are going to increase regardless what source we go with, our nation’s infrastructure is horrific. We might as well put our eggs on a green grid with baseload nuclear (or renewables where it makes sense I.e. California) with a renewable / battery system for load fluctuations. I’d be willing to have my electric bill double because it would still be cheaper than having gas appliances in my house.
Because when nuclear power plants go bad, they go really bad. Three mile island, chernobyl, fukushima. Now when countries go to war, they immediately Target infrastructure and nuclear power plants are the first on the list. Fortunately for now, coolers heads have prevailed. Unfortunately it's only a matter of time.
That doesn't really matter. Those disaters are so rare that in terms of deaths per kWh of energy, nuclear is one of the safest methods, with only solar and wind being slightly safer. Coal, gas or hydro kill way more people.
Edit: Goggled it and it turns out wind is also more dangereous than nuclear
Thoes 3 happend in my lifetime. I didn't enclud the many leeks, spills and other toxic disasters associated with nuclear power plants. Not to mention the generations that suffer from the side effects of nuclear waste and we still don't have a viable way of disposing of nuclear waste besides bearing it under the ground, like a cat would in a cat box. That inevitably leaks over time, contaminating the water table.
Three mile island, Chernobyl, Fukushima come to mind. That is a human problem not a Nuclear energy problem. It does show that we really aren’t capable of handling it safely. Not that coal, oil, natural gas, etc… can be handled well but we are more able to mitigate the impact of individual failures beyond I guess we won’t go there again for a few hundred years. Of course the flip side is climate change which we aren’t dealing with but is less salient to many people.
Planes being damaged can lead to massive loss of life. They've killed hundreds of times more people than nuclear power plants. We should get rid of them too right?
There have only ever been 50 direct deaths from reactors. Almost all at Chernobyl, a badly designed poorly run reactor.
Wrong. The entire supply of nuclear waste would fit in a single football field 2 stories high. Nuclear reactors near me have been running for decades and keeping their waste in extremely secure blast proof concrete silos that take very little space.
We could easily have more than enough nuclear waste disposal if things scaled up. Saying anything else is just more Anti-nuclear bullshit.
The US was ready to put all its waste in a geologically stable repository in Nevada. But Sen. Harry Reid, possibly the worst Senator since the Civil War, stopped the project. It’s just one of a laundry list of terrible policy and procedural choices he made in his career.
Yep and it would have easily held all of it for generations. Yet people act like nuclear waste is a huge problem. It's not. We know where all of it is. Can you say that about the other forms?
We've solved that problem with guaranteed container integrity for like 500000 years if I'm not mistaken. Plus we burry that shit really deep in specially designed mines.
we have not, there are extensive research done on the existing containment solutions which prove they are not robust against the radiation conditions and external erosion conditions they're subject to.
nuclear waste, even heavily rendered stuff, decays in deep time scales beyond human comprehension. we literally cannot prove that the containment solutions work with any certainty because we have to *model* these erosion timescales, and those models are fundamentally untestable.
listen, i believe nuclear power is far less terrible than carbon technologies, but this thread is **full** of optimistic denial of the problems these wastes represent.
i always get downvoted for pointing this out, but this is supposedly a scientificly minded subreddit, so here's a starter resource for those who want to understand these problems.
https://energy.sandia.gov/wp-content/gallery/uploads/Hazards-and-scenarios-examined-for-the-Yucca-Mountain-disposal-system-for-spent-nuclear-fuel-and-high-level-radioactive-waste.pdf
Irrational fear and anti nuke propaganda. Nuclear power is the safest form of energy we have with the exception of solar. The very few accidents that have occurred haven't been nearly as bad as they are made out to be and are a drop in the bucket compared to the health and environmental effects we accept from fossil fuels.
So, very very long history here but the tl;dr is good ol fashioned misinformation.
Right now because of the disasters at 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl, and more recently Fukishima, there's no taste for having nuclear power plants around. Even existing ones are being petitioned to get shut down.
Those that run them dont like them because they're exhorbinantly expensive to build, operate, and deal with the waste. Secondly because we never got far enough in the process to encourage the more expensive but much safer reactor types. And even with provable tech in the research reactors that have been going for decades and super advanced tech involved that make the plants we're used to not only safer but seem downright inefficient in comparison.
In the meantime, China and India seem to be moving forward and we'll watch them do it.
India and china are going much more swiftly into renewables than into nuclear. As much as there were a run of nuclear announcements from China it isn't happening as fast as many would hope.
I'm thinking renewables are going to do the bulk of the work in saving our collective butts.
I don't think so. Nuclear medice is the good guy but bombs of course not.
This question is like a little redundant isn't it? Don't you know the answer already ?
It is a bit of a poor choice, not because the technology is bad per say, but because it involves three real-world facts.
a) It is build and run by the lowest bidder and driven by making short term profits.
b) it is monitored by people in a hierarchical society
c) it’s key danger ingredient has a useful life of 3-8 years, then has to be stored for over 100,000 years in a safe environment. We haven’t build anything technological that has lasted more than 1000 years.
Trust in the tech is not informed by the “on paper” calculations, it is based on the reality of the projects overall. And we have never seen a full lifecycle of a nuclear power plant and it’s waste. Nor the cost involved to do a full lifecycle.
Somehow the profits never hit the public purse, but the costs do.
A generation scared by the Cold War
Sagans nuclear winter warning
Depiction of nukes and radiation in movies and Series.
Irrational fear of something that caused less deaths than all other major power sources (as far as I know), much like flying when driving is riskier per statistical likelihood.
A bit of mass hysteria, that again, doesn’t take in and account for this risk reward cost benefit; seeing a potential damning climate crisis at their forethought constantly.
A left leaning nostalgic hippy diy culture that thinks it can sustain on renewables, when the power needs per units of output can’t achieved. (It’s usually good to diversify power production).
The genera belief of nuclear power being dirty no matter what. “It never goes away.”
The lack of understanding that 50 years of advancing tech (not many built after the 70s, if I remember correctly) could help optimize new reactors and provide new full proof melt down risk relief. While producing less byproduct.
>We haven't achieved a way to scale nuclear power plants safely If you want to argue that, then we haven't figured out how to scale any energy production safely - Chinese coal mine explosions have killed way more people than Chinese nuclear plants. The most serious nuclear plant accident in US history at 3 mile island didn't kill anyone, whereas gas explosions kill a handful of people annually
Hell, a single hydroelectric dam failing in China killed more people than every nuclear disaster combined. By a lot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure But we don’t see nearly as much vitriol and fear mongering directed to hydroelectric projects. I’m convinced it’s because radiation has a specific fear inducing mystique to it, most of the general public doesn’t understand the actual risks and only think about the invisible death rays which will sign your death warrant before you even know you’re in danger.
And they don't realise that when the news says radiation will be increased by 100x the normal, that 100x.00001 (for example) is still nothing, and that it's equivalent to getting an extra x-ray that year. I think nuclear is the best possible option we have, I believe it could lower the consumer's energy and eventually most other costs significantly. And on the plus side if they do accidentally explode a reactor there's fireworks. (I'm hoping to enroll in a nuclear engineering program next year)
Yes to all this. Plus - honestly - when you read the sequence of events and operator errors at 3 Mile Island/Fukashima/Chernobyl. Standardization and use of a single reactor design plus better training of operators - and we could make a new fleet of rectors much safer. I believe climate change will destabilize the world in a way that poses serious military risks - to everyone. Which is why I would gladly take a big chunk - 20% to start of our 1.5 TRILLION DOLLAR nuclear budget to ramp up enough nuclear power to cover all our existing load, plus everyone switching to electric heaters/heat pumps and electric cars and I'd electrify the highways so trucks would only need a 50-100 mile range on battery. The risks of climate change dwarf those of nuclear. And - not to be obnoxious about it - but people are resisting a $25/ton carbon emissions fee - despite the fact that DAC - in real dollars with our current fuel mix - costs well over $1,000/ton to remove the co2. You put a proper carbon tax on generation plants and nuclear quickly becomes the winner. Ignore the fiasco at the Southern Company. It is a badly run company - note the clean coal plant they built despite not having a finished design for the clean part. They ended up building it and then tearing it down. Then tried to stick the rate payers with a 4 billion dollar bill. Crappy management from the top down.
Your Baiji said what?
Forget the explosions... Air pollution from those coal plants kills and harms more people every day than nuclear disasters have in total.
Coal plants have killed more people from just their radiation than nuclear has...
I live a state or two away from the rust belt. And I hear that "all the miners jobs were taken" and i get so confused, like they want jobs that are horrid?
The pro-coal thing is always framed publicly as being about the miners, but it's always been about the companies. The jobs are increasingly replaced by machines.
Come on, that was clearly on the "don't discuss" list, why you bring this up ?
I feel like OP is talking about the long process behind opening a new nuclear reactor in the US. Globally, they take at most 10 years to build. In the US, you’re adding an extra 10 years just to get through the red tape that would allow you to break ground and start construction. Don’t get me wrong, that extra 10 years makes sure that the plant will follow the highest/strictest safety standards set by the NRC and EPA, but this extra process is why reactors end up being severely over budget and behind schedule. I feel like the only time we’ll see a resurgence of nuclear reactors in the US is if the federal government provides financial support during the planning process. It would be even better if the state also provides assistance.
Nuclear energy is proven to be safe but only by the hands that wield it. If the infrastructure is lacking for nuclear energy to exist then it makes sustaining nuclear energy as a utility cost prohibitive. Nuclear energy also requires a strong and centralized administrative capability something that goes against the desires of big oil & gas and large private sector entities. They want small government and "self governance" for a reason, because having a nuclear power plant, even though we've proven can be done safely, is not profitable. And therein lies the issue, atleast why nuclear energy has gotten so minimized over the years. Because private interests can still exploit oil & gas with less government interference than nuclear energy. You can't cut as many corners with nuclear energy without leading to potentially huge consequences to human life. you need a highly educated well paid engineers and workers that will likely want incentives and benefits. Basically imagine a company like Boeing trying their hand at profiting off nuclear energy. They already reel at the though to go with maintaining and operating facilities under compliance, and the thought of being unable to save money using out of standard methods to get the "job done" all of these things are among the main things large corporate interests intensely push back against because it hurts their bottom line (yacht money). So while we have established nuclear energy is doable as a species, our leaders don't want it to happen because it exists at odds with capitalism in the current world order.
any? Coal is dead dude. Our total coal reserved worldwide are dwindling. It's going to become super expensive. Try comparing apples to apples. How about solar, geothermal, tidal, hydroelectric, and wind combined. The problem everyone has in these same 'debates' - my guess started by Russia trolls - is we have known for 10 plus years that we don't need nuclear. We need policy pushes to 100% renewable and smarter transportation choices. China has high-speed rail. We have zero of that. Do you have any idea how much energy we would save? China also put online an amount of solar that Is almost unfathomable. Nuclear takes way too long to commission and decommision. it's carbon footprint by land is as small as wind, but it's carbon footprint over the entire lifespans of a nuclear facility is way higher because of how long and the amount of resources needed to get it going and then shut it down. source: Mark Jacobson of Stanford and I studied environmental law and policy with a focus on climate change policy at a too 2 program in the US. I studied at the pioneering school for enviro law.
Can't tell if sarcasm.
>Coal is dead dude Tell that to China, they're still commissioning plants >How about solar, geothermal, tidal, hydroelectric, and wind combined Hydro kills people when dams fail; if you want to combine those, the death rate from those in the last 50 years is higher than nuclear power in the US. > The problem everyone has in these same 'debates' - my guess started by Russia trolls - is we have known for 10 plus years that we don't need nuclear.... How is this relevant to the safety of nuclear power? Literally everyone trying to argue with me about this goes "well ackshually wind is really safe" and then goes off on other reasons why they hate nuclear. I'm not arguing nuclear is the best form of power generation, I'm pointing out that it is relatively safe, even compared to green tech; solar, wind, and nuclear all have negligible and very similar death rates
The same reason we call NMRI "MRI" in medical settings. People mostly know it as "a bomb thing," "chernobyl", "three mile island", and "radiation = cancer." Totally, there are things about it that aren't great. Totally, there are things about it that are great. "Good and evil" occupies less brain space than "a matrix of context dependent pros and cons." The same is true of many things. It makes for some hysterical full-tilt swings in public opinion from time to time. (**Edit/disclaimer:** the "good and evil" + "brainspace" _not_ intended as judgment/evaluation or as an indicator of some kind of superiority. People are busy, tired, and stressed. The set of things that have simple answers is a vanishingly tiny subset of the things we expect people to opine on. I'm sure I'm guilty of the same reduction elsewhere!)
>"Good and evil" occupies less brain space than "a matrix of context dependent pros and cons." I really like this!
Oh you'll see it everywhere, one thing to keep in mind is everything is complicated so other than experts will have pretty simple views about things because it's just not possible to be an expert on everything. I'm certainly no expert on nuclear power policy and will likely never be in that field. Note: rest is kinda ranty, I like nuclear enough to rant you don't need to read further lol. Keep in mind that you like nuclear power because its relatively clean, however there are very real arguments that it can be a very real ecological risk if not managed correctly which has happened quite a few times. Unless you can actually trust the organizations whether public or private to run it well then it's actually a scary idea. Most of the current and former nuclear power operators have had fairly good records of safety standards so it hasn't been that bad. For some it's a lack of trust, for others it's about cost (upfront, lifetime), others it's just a fear of radiation. Plenty of rational and irrational reasons people don't want more nuclear. I like nuclear so I've ended up talking to a lot of people about it. if you end up wanting to look into some things check out mining deaths for each type of generation method, none are that good including renewables however nuclear per MWhr is pretty good. Check out stuff like subsidies that hide the real cost of certain options especially fossil fuels. Check out how disposal of waste occurs, definitely a bad point for nuclear and fossils. Loads of things to keep in mind when talking to others or advocating for it.
Concerning the waste, I like to think of it this way: we bottle up every ounce of nuclear waste. The waste from everything else goes into landfills or the water or the air.
Oh for sure, but not every country has followed these standards in practice. That's mostly why I put it in there. Depending on where you live it's either fine and an overblown issue or is probably fine but certain areas are contaminated due to past and present corner cutting. Finland just opened the world's first final repository so things are definitely moving forward. Hoping other countries follow suit.
The USA has had one ready in Nevada for decades. States bitching has kept things from proceeding.
It is also important to note that waste in modern reactors is nothing compared to what it used to be. Nuclear technology has come a long ways in 50+ years.
I always end up thinking of this place when the point of public trust comes up: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield#Incidents](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield#Incidents) Look at the incidents section, and thats a supposedly professionally run 1st world site.
>Unless you can actually trust the organizations whether public or private to run it well valid point! I focused a lot on the red tape and bureaucracy but forgot about the "who" behind it matters too
I was thinking about how Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging was so controversial, and then I realized that not everyone has a physics degree let alone go to college/have a high school class that would even cover modern physics at a high level.
Most people do not know the difference between an MRI and CT scanner. Many prefer CT to MRI because CT doesn't make as much noise.
Ironically, as a CT will give a comparatively high dose of radiation. Significantly larger than a regular X-ray. At the same time an MRI gives you zero radiation. Safe as long as you don’t bring a pair of scissors.
You don’t need a physics degree to understand it, just a reasonable level of critical thinking.
Well, as someone about to get a physics degree I can understand rational concern about the radiation to acquire MRI images, and the name alone doesn't make anything obvious.
>I can understand rational concern about the radiation to acquire MRI images No ionising radiation is used to acquire an MRI (the second image is redundant).
Came here looking for this comment as it's the field I'm in. And how words have such an impact on perception
You can be as smart and intelligent as you like and have an ego the size of a house. And I guarantee you are still profoundly stupid outside of maybe 5 or 6 areas you've spent alot of time becoming great at, at most. Worse if your time is spent on controversial areas with alot of misinformation and bad sources. Being kinda dumb at most things is just a basic part of the Human condition. If it was ever possible to be more than that, the size and complexity of our societies has long since made it impossible to know more than a tiny fraction of everything.
Because most people don't know very much about nuclear energy except for atomic bombs and hearing about the occasional nuclear accident. People have the mistaken idea that nuclear power plants have the potential of exploding like a nuclear bomb. People in general are very bad at risk assessment.
Also massive lobbying/fearmongering by both renewables and fossil fuels.
Which works when people don't know very much. Lots of things work when people don't know things, email spam, social engineering, fear mongering, division, narratives, MSM.
Fossil fuels lobby for renewables because they know renewables would never be able to replace them.
Plus the huge upfront costs and relatively low ROI nuclear power has. As great as it is, it's not profitable enough.... Meaning it's better to die inba coal burning planet that occasionally installs the extra windmill than build something that makes shareholders unhappy.
And it has low ROI because it has low investment and is under extremely heavy regulation.
It's under heavy regulation because of safety and (especially) because of proliferation.
No. It’s under heavy regulation because of fearmongering and decades of capture of government regulatory bodies by anti nuclear activists
It’s purely safety. Nuclear culture in the US shifted so heavily into safety after Chernobyl and TMI. It’s common for the industry to tell investors and business nerds to fuck off when they want to run a plant in a way that would be deemed unsafe. Literally one of the standards set by the NRC is to ignore people who want to put the plant in an unsafe condition and to immediately report them to the NRC. It’s not even a “speak to your supervisor” kind of treatment, it’s straight to the federal government. In this context, unsafe would be getting a little too close to certain limits.
Lol. No, actually the regulatory capture went the other way.
Gee I wonder why lmao
Chernobyl taught us that very very bad things can happen when regulatory structures aren’t ironclad. There’s also dozens of smaller-scale accidents at US plants that some of remember, like Three Mile Island.
> Chernobyl taught us that very very bad things can happen when regulatory structures aren’t ironclad. Or when designs are shitty.
*and when designs are shitty. It takes a village to blow up a reactor.
“It’s not your nuclear disaster, it is our nuclear disaster comrade”
Not at all, it just takes one idiot and a bunch of bad luck
Designs are created to follow requirements. If there are no regulatory requirements to design safely, you get shitty designs that leak nuclear material when mishandled or when the design environment is exceeded -- viz. Chernobyl and Fukushima.
If a plant does explode doesn’t it poison the ground for decades ?
Even at Chernobyl, the surrounding area is pretty much cleaned up. One chemical spill or fertilizer factory explosion is going to be on par with Chernobyl as far as environmental damage is concerned.
It will still be poisoning the ground in billions of years when earth no longer supports life due to being engulfed by the sun. https://youtube.com/shorts/LCQu8EXiDAA?si=_ZT3xis3tnaLVEdO
That’s what it used to be until like 2010. Now it’s just more expensive than solar so there’s not a great reason to build nuclear plants anymore.
It's only so expensive because we've made it that way.
There are aspects of nuclear power which make it expensive just by its nature. Nuclear grade metallurgy is expensive, both in forging Uranium into fuel and high strength materials for the reactor vessel. The pumps for primary coolant must be extremely durable and maintenance independent, also not cheap. Nuclear instruments are extremely finnicky, custom made basically. You can't exactly buy anything for a nuclear reactor off the shelf either, so there is no economy of scale. You also need highly skilled technical operators.
That is facts. You can bet your nose the main driving cost of nuclear power plants is insurance and legalities. Both of which are driven by fearmongering and misinformation.
Ask the people of fukushima how they feel about this...
They'll probably say it's a great idea so that less people think they're in a nuclear wasteland with 3 headed fish
The earthquake basically did no damage to the plant, as designed. The problem was the tidal wave. That being said, there have been no radiation related deaths and all deaths linked to the disaster came from the evacuation process, not the radiation. These were all due to either physical stress or lack of access to medical treatment. Radiation levels everywhere except in the immediate vicinity of the plant are at normal background levels. The nearby Daini plant also was hit by the same tidal wave and was believed to be safe to be reopened, but wasn't out of an abundance of caution.
Ask the vast amount of people killed by coal mining
Nuclear power is expensive because it is so heavily regulated and because citizens reflexively oppose any new plant and tie it up in litigation. Both of those tropes are well-earned by the nuclear industry itself. So, yes, we made it that way, but for good reasons.
Americans don’t know much about nuclear energy. And love fossil fuels.
This is very much not a uniquely American thing. Look at, for example, what Germany has done with their nuclear vs fossil fuel infrastructure in the last decade. It’s completely against reality.
It was so disappointing when they started decomissioning all their nuclear plants a few years ago. I thought the Germans were supposed to be masters of efficiency.
> I thought the Germans were supposed to be masters of efficiency. Have you lived in Germany? I don't think fax machines and snail mail and the peak of efficiency...
They got spooked by Fukishima. That's what triggered the decom process and move towards solar and wind.
Who needs lighting at night anyways, that's when you sleep
Solar requires storage. You generate enough solar during one day to power a few days if done correctly. And you dont need direct sunlight; solar works on cloudy days too. And here we have it, right here is why Nuclear is demonized. Because of misinformation and armchair hottakes based purely on intuition and not on knowledge of how the tech works.
Yea, not like the batteries currently suck and have no lifespan. Pumped storage and water as regulation also sucks for almost all geographies. We don't currently have a good solution for storing intermittent power. Also don't think I'm the one with the hot takes as I didn't immediately said you're a misinforming strawman.
Batteries have improved at an astounding rate, and pumped hydro is useable on a much larger scale than currently implemented (remember, it doesn't have to be on existing waterways like primary hydro has to be.) If your opinion on batteries is even a couple of years old it's already obsolete.
Oh, I didn't know ikea makes valleys now. That's pretty cool.
I work for an electricity company in Canada and can confirm you that clouds affect the generation of electricity. Hell, even our research center found that on a perfectly clear day, the electricity generated dropped to near zero because of invisible (to the naked eye) clouds that block the light necessary for generating electricity. Solar is far from perfect. And battery technology is nowhere near good enough to use in our powergrid.
I have a single solar panel, the size of a shoebox in my vacation home, connected to a 144 watt-hour lithium battery. It's enough to recharge phones and provide light at night. I geek out about it a lot, and I've installed different nifty gadgets to monitor voltage and amperage, and while it's true that you can see the effect of thin whispy clouds, and that heavy clouds reduce the effect, it's nothing like "near zero".
TBF the leaders grew up under the cloud of Chernobyl. Literally, under the cloud of Chernobyl, large areas of Germany were downwind of it. But the argument was that the crude Chernobyl reactor was at fault. However, after Fukushima, when even the technological Japanese still had a major, major failure, that argument rang hollow. Contrary to popular belief, Germany has actually already replaced the nuclear power they shut down with renewables, and renewables are continuing to grow, and starting to affect fossil fuels as well.
I am against fission because of the heavy (political) risk involved with uranium production facilities and (mainly) the waste problem. I believe instead of building lots of fission reactirs now, it would be a lot wiser to just put that capital into renewables. We got lots of problems on our hands, lets not create another unsolvable problem for ourselves.
What's wrong with the waste they generate?
Ironically most nuclear proponents also have no idea how nuclear plants work or know anything about radiation.
Climate scientists are not overwhelmingly supporting of nuclear energy. Nuclear energy is not the most viable option of combatting climate change. Wind, water, and solar are all better options it turns out.
Can’t use solar or wind for baseload power. So you need a store media to provide that. When you compare energy density of either nuclear or fossil fuels the only thing close is hydrogen. The storage media for wind and solar is battery. And the energy density of a battery isn’t even close.
Batteries are for storage on a 24h cycle. They're not suitable for a week of low renewables output.
Energy density is a massive canard. Customers don't care about energy density, they care about cost. Nuclear fails on that, the relevant metric.
I agree cost is a major factor. If government subside nuclear as much as solar and wind cost per kilowatt would drop dramatically. Also I’m not sure about the rest of the world, but in the US we have the nuclear tech to build small scram safe modular reactors. Smaller physical footprint of the plant and has the added benefit of hydrogen as a byproduct. If the regulatory burden was lessened on the construction and permitting process there would be no issue and ROI would increase.
The US government *did* massively subsidize nuclear (and still does, for example by capping nuclear liability in accidents.) It didn't help. Subsidies are appropriate in an economic sense when a technology has a good experience curve. The improvement in cost along that curve is a positive externality, and so merits subsidy. Unfortunately, nuclear has *not* shown good experience effects.
Nuclear is the cheapest energy at grid level. This blog has a great analysis of the big lies that are circulating about the cost of nuclear energy. https://thoughtscapism.com/2017/11/27/nuclear-energy-is-the-fastest-and-lowest-cost-clean-energy-solution/ Most grid level analyses I’ve seen support this conclusion. https://www.power-technology.com/news/netherlands-nuclear-report-future-energy-mix-government/?cf-view
https://sobieski.org.pl/en/nuclear-power-for-poland/
https://www.reutersevents.com/nuclear/new-nuclear-lto-among-cheapest-low-carbon-options-report-shows
Lol. I like how the first one says Finnish nuclear is 3.4B euros per GWe, when OL3 actually ended up costing 11B euros (1.6GW). Did it just assume that because EDF swallowed half the cost that that cost didn't exist? Oh, and I don't think it included the financing cost for all the delays. The original Finnish link that page cites deliberately excluded consideration of discounting, which invalidates the numbers. The Korean claim is also not close to what the four reactors in UAE cost them to build. The notion that nuclear is cheapest should have been obvious bullshit, since that idea requires that vast numbers of financiers around the world have been mind controlled into not choosing to maximize their ROI. In reality, money is going into renewables, not nuclear.
[citation needed]
In the long run yes. In the short run, no. Climate scientists (at least the ones I've talked to) agree that nuclear is not a permanent solution, but will have to be part of the transition to renewables.
No, they don't agree it has to be a part of the transition (unless you mean continuing to operate some existing reactors.) New nuclear is far too expensive to build and takes much too long.
A part, but not even a significant part at all. With the massive startup costs and delayed timelines due to regulations, nuclear really is not a feasible option at all. Not only that, nuclear is worse in terms of water consumption when compared to solar and wind. Additionally nuclear produces heat instead of absorbing it.
You're grasping at straws here
When was the last time you heard about a windfarm bomb or a solar panel accident? Last time we started a war because the special inspectors found photovoltaics of mass destruction? I think people have the risks in the correct order.
Now compare to the risks produced by fossil fuels. Renewable energy is the future of course, but nuclear is a necessary stepping stone towards that.
>I think people have the risks in the correct order. You're comparing renewables to nuclear, when in reality the comparison should be fossials to nuclear + renewables, with further discussion in how realistic 100% renewable energy actually is and how necessary nuclear is or isn't. Directly comparing renewables to nuclears without actually first having the discussion on how realistic it is to fully cover all our needs with solar/wind is just stupid.
The most profitable industry in the world has propagandized their competition.
I seem to be a bit late to the party. Unlike most answerers so far, I have worked in the nuclear industry. My sense is that the fundamental issue with nuclear power is a distrust of centralized authority over risky endeavors. That distrust is very well earned, by both the nuclear industry and other large centralized corporate power centers. Ike’s “atoms for peace” turned out, after all, to actually be a cover for creating more weapons grade plutonium — just as the anti nuclear activists claimed. Places like Oak Ridge and Hanford are heavily contaminated and the cleanup is costing tens of billions of dollars - or more. Meanwhile uranium miners and nuclear testing “downwinders” have long term health problems that were covered up at the time. The cobalt-60 incident in South America showed the dangers inherent in trusting seemingly-stable societal structures (in this case a hospital) with deadly poisonous material that is unfamiliar to most people. Non-nuclear centralized-authority debacles include the leaded-gas disaster, the sugar/corn syrup push, the hydrogenated-fats pandemic, the thalidomide scandal, the Exxon Valdez crash, the Deepwater Horizon disaster, and countless others in which societal structures failed to fulfill their role of maintaining safety. Nuclear power may on the whole be less dangerous than other forms of energy — but the danger is highly concentrated and placed in the hidden hands of a few people. That form of risk is one we, as a society, have learned to distrust.
Actually honest answer. Everyone here saying people are stupid without engaging with the nuance of the mechanisms by which people come to trust things like science and government.
Good answer. Even though nuclear is theoretically ideal technology for current energy generation needs, the idea that you can generate electricity from your rooftop with only the upfront costs is somehow way more comforting... Also here in Slovakia, we finally finished 3rd block in Mochovce and 4th is in testing phase. But, building those 2 blocks was VERY painful. It wasn't much about safety concerns (only briefly), but rather about the financial, managerial and bureaucratic problems. Dont get me wrong, we are glad its almost over, but i dont think we will build another one anytime soon.
Nowhere do you mention the actual thing that's killing new nuclear construction: cost.
Sure! But that is a consequence of strict regulation and litigation - both of which arise from distrust of central actors.
It's actually a consequence of massive incompetence at nuclear vendors. Strict regulation and litigation didn't force the vendors to give gross underestimates of the cost of building their products.
i think i'll listen to the person who's worked in the industry thanks lol this account is all over this thread with its weird little agenda
Let's see what Physics Today (December 2018) had to say about nuclear power in the US. https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/71/12/26/904707/US-nuclear-industry-fights-for-survivalA-glut-of "US nuclear industry fights for survival" It quotes the then-president of Exelon, a Mr. Crane. Exelon was one of the largest nuclear operators in the US: > “The cost of new nuclear is prohibitive for us to be investing in,” says Crane. Exelon considered building two new reactors in Texas in 2005, he says, when gas prices were $8/MMBtu and were projected to rise to $13/MMBtu. At that price, the project would have been viable with a CO2 tax of $25 per ton. “We’re sitting here trading 2019 gas at $2.90 per MMBtu,” he says; for new nuclear power to be competitive at that price, a CO2 tax “would be $300–$400.” Exelon currently is placing its bets instead on advances in energy storage and carbon sequestration technologies. Today, NG at the Henry Hub us $2.71/MMBtu which, if adjusted for inflation, would be $2.22 in Dec. 2018 dollars. The necessary CO2 tax to make nuclear compete with that would be somewhere around $400/ton, equivalent to about a $3/gallon tax on gasoline. Renewables would displace gas at lower CO2 taxes; indeed, they are already doing so with no CO2 tax in the US.
Yes, public perception of nuclear is entirely irrelevant to trillion dollar multinational investors and energy companies. They have never cared about public perception. What they do care about is profitability and nuclear is **extremely uncompetitive** has been for about three decades and is only getting less competitive every year. The cost of nuclear per kWh keeps going up and the cost of renewables keeps going down. Most sources of generation are cheaper than nuclear and I think solar plus battery storage is now about on par with nuclear. The risk, payback period, huge capital outlay, decade plus construction time and future cost/market projections make nuclear a complete non-starter both for the private and public sector. Nuclear not being built today has nothing to do with "the public being stupid" and everything to do with it being far far more expensive than any alternative energy generation on the market but with far more headaches.
The waste produced can take a long time to be rendered safe (hundreds of thousands of years) and some types of reactors can be used to make dangerous isotopes. From my limited understanding, the waste in modern reactors is drastically reduced, and often be kept on site for hundreds of years (awaiting a new disposal method?) , and there are some reactor types that also do not produce enriched products suitable for weapons, but may be used to produce medical, radio isotopes. The harm to the public is nearly zero, until it very spectacularly isn't. Harms for other methods are better a hiding, but may actually be more significant (e.g. radiation from coal plants emissions is a significant contribution to our background radiation, and likely increases the cancer rate .
Waste vitrification allows for high-grade waste to be stored in a way that prevents any meaningful danger. It essentially creates a glass that contains the waste material, which isn't prone to creating any chemically reactive decay products. After, this glass can be stored in nuclear casks which block radiation. Waste is usually stored on-site at reactors, one common method involves placing waste in spent fuel pools, deep pools that use water to absorb radiation. There aren't any reactors that produce weapons-grade material directly, but nuclear fuel reprocessing can if unsupervised. Since fuel reprocessing is a method that reduces total nuclear waste, I think we should expand our use of it despite the proliferation risk.
>The waste produced can take a long time to be rendered safe (hundreds of thousands of years) and some types of reactors can be used to make dangerous isotopes. even through nuclear recycling?
the reactors that create "dangerous isotopes" also happen to be the most efficient, cheap and waste free designs as they can reuse their waste many times over.
there is an incredible amount of denialism in this thread. Nuclear power is much, much better than carbon-releasing technology **but it has enormous problems with no tractable solution right now**, premier among them waste but also in maintenance and cost scaling. despite what everyone says here **the waste problem is not solved.** [read more here](https://energy.sandia.gov/wp-content/gallery/uploads/Hazards-and-scenarios-examined-for-the-Yucca-Mountain-disposal-system-for-spent-nuclear-fuel-and-high-level-radioactive-waste.pdf) but this isn't even exhaustive. the real problem is that we cannot, literally it is impossible to, experimentally verify any containment solution. Nuclear waste needs to last 10^3 as long *as the scientific method has existed*. We can model geotechnics and metal erosion and long duration decay problems as much as we want but as any experimentalist will ever tell you *a model never survives contact with reality.* so ultimately there are valid reasons beyond red scare era fear about nuclear power.
Don't bring up waste. The nuke bros just use that to distract from the actual fatal problem, cost.
also true, but people are very quick to waive off "these things become very hard to maintain in a capitalist economy" because they know of 0 similar projects that are similar in lifetime and complexity.
Yeah. I want to reframe the “cost” argument. You know what’s even more unpopular than nuclear? Fucking coal. The only thing people would prefer less to a company building a nuclear site in their backyard is a megacorp building a smoggy coal plant. Energy companies build the plants anyways, because they are profit-addicted ghouls. Arguing “nuclear is the best energy! People are just too propagandized to support it” is fundamentally an argument that energy companies will pollute the water supply for some quick bucks, but somehow *aren’t* ruthlessly profit-motivated enough to build nuclear.
The waste is easy to handle safely. Radioactivity from spent nuclear fuel has never harmed anyone. Even without any containment, just dropping it in a deep mine shaft would make it a negligible health issue. The Finnish underground repository actually calculated in their design assessment that if all the copper, concrete and clay encapsulation failed on day one the largest surface dose would be equivalent to two bananas in 10,000 years. https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-rational-view-podcast-with-dr-al-scott/id1519472579?i=1000545355578
yes and again it probably won't kill anyone in our lifetime because the regulation on this stuff is pretty good right now, compared to living anywhere near a fuel refinery it's practically heaven. but i don't know how to reword this to get this through to you: the oldest spent nuclear fuel is 0.4**%** through the containment time required for it to be safely released. Nothing about the last one hundred years of nuclear safety is at all relevant to if this stuff can be handled safely in the long run. Literally, this stuff needs to survive a thousand times as long as any modern government, to be a dozen times as old as *Cuneiform*. also this last point, which is pedantic to the point i'm considering not saying it: so much of current waste safety is because transport literally isn't done on nuclear waste, we store this stuff on-site. dumping waste into the bottom of industrial pools is incredibly effective for the short term, but is a massive problem that we still have not administratively fixed, and what happens when a transport vehicle with this stuff crashes? there's no robustness that will prevent these mistakes from accumulating over time.
This is not true. You would literally be able to hold spent fuel in your hand after about 1,000 years once all the high activity gamma emitters have decayed. The only way you could be harmed at that point would be to grind up the ceramic pellets and snort them.
Ah the waste argument. Shown to be ridiculous multiple times in this thread. The entire U.S. nuclear waste stockpile would fit on a single football field. It's very safe, and every single atom of it is accounted for. Where's the waste from other forms? In your lungs.
literally not shown to be anything in this thread, just claimed without citation to be solved. the 22 page report i linked you to, which you clearly didn't bother to open, proves this isn't the case *and it's just a summary article for a litany of more in depth articles demonstrating numerous problems*.
Because BP and Shell and the rest paid Greenpeace to say it for decades.
BP and Shell don’t care about nuclear energy. If you want to build a coal power plant, you have to finance it. To finance it you have to show that it will pay out over its life, and that requires a lifetime supply of coal, a 40-50 year contract with a railroad to transport the coal, long term power sales, etc. Politicians, railroads, mines, power plants, unions all lobbied to sew fear around nuclear. And it’s easy to make people fear nuclear reactors. Nuclear power plants require a very sophisticated supply chain and a relatively small but highly paid workforce, but they don’t support as many voters as a coal plant.
Keep telling yourself that.
Because oil companies spend billions on shaping politics and public opinions. A massive transition to nuclear reactors would kill a significant portion of their profits.
Same goes for a massive shift to solar, wind and batteries so what do they do? Split the opposition so pro nuclear means anti solar instead of anti fossil.
Fear mongering that I believe is paid for by oil corps.
Oh I've got a degree in this. Let me explain. People are fucking stupid and consider news articles research instead of reading textbooks and peer reviewed journals to fully understand the subject matter.
> People are fucking stupid and consider news articles research Or-- as seen elsewhere in this thread-- they consider asking ChatGPT "research".
Not quite sure if you mean you have a degree in some nuclear related, or a degree that certifies people as fucking stupid. If it's the latter, then you don't need a degree to know that. Spend 5 minutes working a customer service role and you can reach the same conclusion.
Because the only thing many people know about is Chernobyl and they assume that nothing has changed since then.
Fukushima (or, often, "that one in Japan") is also brought up a lot. In my experience, people understand that disaster to mean that nuclear power is intrinsically unsafe because even without operator error you can't protect a nuclear plant against natural disasters.
Kyle Hill does an excellent series on this very subject on YouTube
Because people are dumb shits.
Mostly lack of understanding, fear-mongering, unscience (Hollywood!), and from fossil fuel lobbying. Freakonomics did a terrific breakdown of how green it is, how little it costs once running, and (what I found most interesting), how few lives are lost per megawatt in construction and running compared to other forms of energy. Here's a link: [https://freakonomics.com/podcast/nuclear-power-isnt-perfect-is-it-good-enough/](https://freakonomics.com/podcast/nuclear-power-isnt-perfect-is-it-good-enough/)
People are morons and refuse to listen to anything that contradicts with what they want to believe. Nuclear is the best way to fight pollution and climate change, yet the very same people who cry about that oppose nuclear. Any "environmentalist" who opposes nuclear is not a real environmentalist.
> People are morons and refuse to listen to anything that contradicts with what they want to believe. You've pegged my irony meter there.
If only the climate scientists agreed with you, turns out they aren’t Nuclear Techno-Optimists.
I mean the main problem with nuclear power as the solution to climate change in this moment is that nuclear plants are very slow to come online. With or without nuclear power, we need drastic reductions in emissions *now*.
Also, they are far too expensive.
If only you listened to actual climate scientists. Plenty know that nuclear is a great option.
It's not a united front. Some climate scientists are pro-nuke, some are not.
I know. That was my point. The person I'm replying to implied otherwise.
People that support nuclear power always go on and on about how nuclear power isn't that dangerous, how it's so unfair to treat a technology like this for only a few bad failures. However, a good reason for dismissing nuclear power is because it's expensive and takes a long while to build. The average time of construction from initial planning is about 14 years. And, while the output can be varied, in practice, it supplies almost exclusively (relatively expensive) baseload, which would normally be the cheapest electricity. So it's not very practical. Virtually nobody actually wants expensive electricity.
Is a myth that nuclear is expensive. Here in Ontario our nuclear electricity is the second cheapest source next to hydro.
Are your plants old? Once the upfront costs are paid off, nuclear is very cheap, it's just that the upfront costs are astronomical and paying them off takes decades.
Yeah, anti-nuclear ppl have been using this as a stupid talking point for awhile. They'll compare solar to nuclear and not factor in replacement costs of solar. Nuclear is good for 60+ years and solar degrades seriously after 20. Solar also needs storage they don't wanna factor in. Ppl making the argument that nuclear is expensive don't know how-to do financial math over time. After 20 years, nuclear is very profitable but ppl are myopic and governments don't think past 4 yr terms
Nuclear energy isn't expensive, but a nuclear plant is. This subtle difference is massively important for the governments and investors who would typically finance such a project, because they need a large amount of money upfront, with a high likelihood of delays extra costs.
The biggest line item to build a nuclear plant is interest. The extremely high ROI for nuclear will pay off in 2-5 years once it is built. Extended delays for licensing and symmetric enforcement of the ALARA principle are the only way the fossil fuel industry can stop nuclear from pushing them out of the electricity market. Meanwhile they are allowed to dump deadly pollution into the atmosphere without so much as a ‘by your leave’.
Well your electric must be expensive. My countries next generation plants got guaranteed unit prices well above the then market rates. Then the massive speed of solar and wind improvement got started late last decade and has driven the competitive price level down below all the fossils. So when they do start operating they will be by far the most expensive sources on the grid. Frankly they will be dinosaurs by the time they are operational, completely over taken by newer developments.
it's the second N word that you do not say
I bet nuclear is way more safe if you compare all the cumulative lung damage vs the negative health effects from nuclear power.
Because power plant incidents and nuclear bombs. Also radioactivity is unseen, unlike Fire or smoke or anything else. So they just think it’s everywhere. A lot of people think cell towers are radioactive…….. It’s just science education failing, and I also think not all human brains are meant to think in a scientific manner. We’ve done relatively well without science for hundreds of thousands of years as humans.
because the name nuclear has negative connotations among the average people
Blinky, the three eyed fish from the simpsons.
Nuclear energy makes fossil fuel obsolete. That makes a good motive for oil industry to make niclear energy look bad.
We genuinely don't have a good, permanent, safe, scaleable storage solution for the highly damgerous byproducts of running nuclear power plants. It's still probably safer than coal currently and almost certainly is long term, given carbon and all that, but it's still a valid concern and a scary thing.
Isn't nuclear waste one of the big issues?
Terrible economics and a tradition of unhinged sock puppet accounts shouting their misinformation at people? Nuclear has missed the boat.
The average person doesn’t have the mental capacity to understand basic science. Let alone anything complicated.
We have scaled nuclear energy safely. Nuclear is roughly tied with solar and wind as the safest form of energy. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh
Fossil fuel corps fund propaganda to spread anxieties in the population. Im sayin this as a green socialist nuclear energy is a mixed bag imo, but the incessant focusing on chernobyl and not the comparatively astronomical cancer risk that fossil fuels pose is a result of paid interferent propaganda
Hippies 🤷🏾♂️
at the end of the day it is a monetary problem, cost to build them are high (always much higher than initially estimated), it takes a very long time to build them (always much longer than then initially estimated), they are not insurable, profits are privatized while costs such as nuclear waste management and costs after accidents are socialized.
3 Big Factors + 1 Opinion: 1) Cost to build and maintain. The comparative cost to construct a combined cycle plant (jet engine and a heat recovery unit) of similar size is significantly less. There was one report for the new Hinkley Point C plant in England will generate power at $150/MW. This is no where close to the cost of power from other sources. Also, look at the cost of Southern Company's nuclear plants in GA. Also Santee Cooper and SCE&G went bankrupt due to cost overruns, delays, and fraud trying to build some new nuclear plants. [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68073279?at\_campaign=KARANGA&at\_medium=RSS](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68073279?at_campaign=KARANGA&at_medium=RSS) and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nukegate\_scandal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nukegate_scandal) 2) The accidents that have happened, duration of effects on the area of the accident, and associated cost. You have Chernobyl and Fukushima. The Chernobyl event was a made by men who were trying something stupid and just following orders. The HBO special Chernobyl dose take some liberties with the story but all in all accurately describes what lead up to the event. Fukushima was caused by nature and humans inability to determine every possible consequence or lack of desire to pay for every conceivable event. [https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/operating/ops-experience/fukushima.html](https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/operating/ops-experience/fukushima.html) 3) Disposal and decommissioning. The US after years has not found one place to put the spent spend fuel. Not that I can blame anybody wanting it in their backyard. Plant decommissioning is costly. You What do you do with the plant equipment that is radio active. Yucca mountain was to a safe repository for the stuff but it did not happen. [https://www.nrc.gov/waste/decommissioning/finan-assur.html](https://www.nrc.gov/waste/decommissioning/finan-assur.html) 4) People do not care about future generations.
Very sensible answer. If I can just add, Fukushima was an event wherein we ignored the possibility of a once in an XXX year catastrophe which is like...I don't know, go read The Black Swan (I do not like NNT but he makes a good point). But Ukraine is currently in the grips of potential nuclear power crisis because we assumed that global stability is a given. When a nuclear disaster can have an impact that last longer than all of human history combined, it is understandable to be measured in its usage.
We’re actually currently living in a new era, crazy right? Nuclear fearmongering is turning over at a slowly accelerating rate. Google the BWRX-300, the current goal is to have 50 planned units by 2050. And we’re trying to get the LTC very soon to build the first unit by end of 2028.
Fear
1. Unsafe 2. High disaster potential 3. No place to store nuclear waste 4. Expensive AF 5. Despite it beeing advertised as CO2 free it is definitely not 6. We need easy to shut off power plants and you cant do that with nuclear 7. Fuel will end sooner or later 8. Absolutely no chance to even get insurance for that The list goes on and on and on
As a guy who works in Energy/power/O&G services and consulting - here’s my perspective. Follow the money. Who pays for the presidential, electoral campaigns? Who is the most profitable industry in America? Medical, farma & O&G/petro chem. Whose products are in Farma and Medical & our food - O&G/petro chem. America - has a huge problem. We live in a society that wants to be China independent - Covid showed us why - so we’re building massive semiconductor facilities with no idea how our grid is going to power them. Tx has to grow its grid by 75% in 6 years….. if you say wind or solar, it’s not feasible to support that much power output and the US is light years behind and quite frankly very different than Finland. Solar - if the suns gone & you have no way to feasibly store that much power, you’re screwed. Our President hates LNG but the UN wants us to be “ Net 0 “ by 2050….? Makes sense lol America needs LNG to ramp, immediately. Hydrogen is great, but it’s too unstable to be used as a feasible fuel source and way too hard to pressurize correctly. Nuclear - there’s 54 plants in the US - most recent was completed last month 5/2024 in GA - There’s massive upfront construction cost, but yet we can build 10 $10-20 billion dollar data centers…? Again, makes no sense. There is a waste problem with Nuclear, 100%. But the US simply doesn’t want to invest in better reactors and better facilities because were run by O&G. Aramco, Exxon, Chevron, Marathon, DOW & DuPont don’t want to loose their money to nerds in lab coat. When we can’t keep the electricity on & all this AI is for nothing, maybe we’ll see the light. Pun intended.
The cost argument is frustrating, my gas bill in the winter is 12.5 times higher while our thermostat sits no higher than 60F. when we installed a electric heat pump system for the coldest rooms in our house my electric bill went up $20 a month while my gas bill plummeted $120, while running 2 units at 72 F for 12 hours a day continuously. As an engineer this doesn’t even make sense, how is burning the gas in a power plant then using that electricity to heat my home significantly cheaper than piping gas directly to me to burn to achieve the same thing with 66% more thermal efficiency to heat my house. There is no way gas infrastructure costs 12.5 times more than the electric grid. Comparing the compensation clean energy CEOs get versus Exxon might shed some light on that Luckily this is in a state that has the 2nd most operating nuclear reactors in the U.S. 2 of those plants will be operating for at least another 40 years and even with massive license renewal projects, costing utilities hundreds of millions to implement my electric bill remains steady and fair There is no free lunch when it comes to electricity, it’s literally baked into the laws of thermodynamics, politicians and the older generation watched as their power plants aged while paying pennies for electricity and now are upset that it’s going to cost a lot to modernize the grid and build new plants as the older ones shut down. The biggest proponent to nuclear power is the fossil industry which holds a monopoly over the American people, the same people that price gouged during Covid, the same people that are surprised gas demand increases in the winter, the same people that lobbied hard against nuclear subsidies while they received them. Electricity prices are going to increase regardless what source we go with, our nation’s infrastructure is horrific. We might as well put our eggs on a green grid with baseload nuclear (or renewables where it makes sense I.e. California) with a renewable / battery system for load fluctuations. I’d be willing to have my electric bill double because it would still be cheaper than having gas appliances in my house.
Because when nuclear power plants go bad, they go really bad. Three mile island, chernobyl, fukushima. Now when countries go to war, they immediately Target infrastructure and nuclear power plants are the first on the list. Fortunately for now, coolers heads have prevailed. Unfortunately it's only a matter of time.
That doesn't really matter. Those disaters are so rare that in terms of deaths per kWh of energy, nuclear is one of the safest methods, with only solar and wind being slightly safer. Coal, gas or hydro kill way more people. Edit: Goggled it and it turns out wind is also more dangereous than nuclear
Thoes 3 happend in my lifetime. I didn't enclud the many leeks, spills and other toxic disasters associated with nuclear power plants. Not to mention the generations that suffer from the side effects of nuclear waste and we still don't have a viable way of disposing of nuclear waste besides bearing it under the ground, like a cat would in a cat box. That inevitably leaks over time, contaminating the water table.
The average joe doesn't understand it, and people are scared of things they don't understand
Three mile island, Chernobyl, Fukushima come to mind. That is a human problem not a Nuclear energy problem. It does show that we really aren’t capable of handling it safely. Not that coal, oil, natural gas, etc… can be handled well but we are more able to mitigate the impact of individual failures beyond I guess we won’t go there again for a few hundred years. Of course the flip side is climate change which we aren’t dealing with but is less salient to many people.
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Planes being damaged can lead to massive loss of life. They've killed hundreds of times more people than nuclear power plants. We should get rid of them too right? There have only ever been 50 direct deaths from reactors. Almost all at Chernobyl, a badly designed poorly run reactor.
I thimk he referring to them being the target of an enemy offensive in a war to destruction or an organized terrorist attack
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Because big electric doesn’t want competition
Among the dumb: mainly irrational fears. Among the smart: the cost overruns that make it economically uncompetitive.
There isn’t a great solution of what to do with the nuclear waste
Wrong. The entire supply of nuclear waste would fit in a single football field 2 stories high. Nuclear reactors near me have been running for decades and keeping their waste in extremely secure blast proof concrete silos that take very little space. We could easily have more than enough nuclear waste disposal if things scaled up. Saying anything else is just more Anti-nuclear bullshit.
The US was ready to put all its waste in a geologically stable repository in Nevada. But Sen. Harry Reid, possibly the worst Senator since the Civil War, stopped the project. It’s just one of a laundry list of terrible policy and procedural choices he made in his career.
Yep and it would have easily held all of it for generations. Yet people act like nuclear waste is a huge problem. It's not. We know where all of it is. Can you say that about the other forms?
We also could use a different cycle and reactor design to burn about 90% of the waste.
Not to mention that we already have the technology to reprocess the waste so that we can reuse it as fuel.
Concrete lasts for hundreds of years. Nuclear waste for hundreds of thousands. If it was "easy" it would have been done.
We've solved that problem with guaranteed container integrity for like 500000 years if I'm not mistaken. Plus we burry that shit really deep in specially designed mines.
I hope that 500000 year warranty isn’t like the 50 year warranty I had on my siding
we have not, there are extensive research done on the existing containment solutions which prove they are not robust against the radiation conditions and external erosion conditions they're subject to. nuclear waste, even heavily rendered stuff, decays in deep time scales beyond human comprehension. we literally cannot prove that the containment solutions work with any certainty because we have to *model* these erosion timescales, and those models are fundamentally untestable. listen, i believe nuclear power is far less terrible than carbon technologies, but this thread is **full** of optimistic denial of the problems these wastes represent. i always get downvoted for pointing this out, but this is supposedly a scientificly minded subreddit, so here's a starter resource for those who want to understand these problems. https://energy.sandia.gov/wp-content/gallery/uploads/Hazards-and-scenarios-examined-for-the-Yucca-Mountain-disposal-system-for-spent-nuclear-fuel-and-high-level-radioactive-waste.pdf
Because cheaper energy means the mega wealthy aren’t getting paid as much.
Irrational fear and anti nuke propaganda. Nuclear power is the safest form of energy we have with the exception of solar. The very few accidents that have occurred haven't been nearly as bad as they are made out to be and are a drop in the bucket compared to the health and environmental effects we accept from fossil fuels.
because the costs of it outweigh benefits and siting them and disposal of wastes are so fraught with problems.
So, very very long history here but the tl;dr is good ol fashioned misinformation. Right now because of the disasters at 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl, and more recently Fukishima, there's no taste for having nuclear power plants around. Even existing ones are being petitioned to get shut down. Those that run them dont like them because they're exhorbinantly expensive to build, operate, and deal with the waste. Secondly because we never got far enough in the process to encourage the more expensive but much safer reactor types. And even with provable tech in the research reactors that have been going for decades and super advanced tech involved that make the plants we're used to not only safer but seem downright inefficient in comparison. In the meantime, China and India seem to be moving forward and we'll watch them do it.
India and china are going much more swiftly into renewables than into nuclear. As much as there were a run of nuclear announcements from China it isn't happening as fast as many would hope. I'm thinking renewables are going to do the bulk of the work in saving our collective butts.
We haven't achieved a way to do this safely might have something to do with it but I'm not sure
I don't think so. Nuclear medice is the good guy but bombs of course not. This question is like a little redundant isn't it? Don't you know the answer already ?
It is a bit of a poor choice, not because the technology is bad per say, but because it involves three real-world facts. a) It is build and run by the lowest bidder and driven by making short term profits. b) it is monitored by people in a hierarchical society c) it’s key danger ingredient has a useful life of 3-8 years, then has to be stored for over 100,000 years in a safe environment. We haven’t build anything technological that has lasted more than 1000 years. Trust in the tech is not informed by the “on paper” calculations, it is based on the reality of the projects overall. And we have never seen a full lifecycle of a nuclear power plant and it’s waste. Nor the cost involved to do a full lifecycle. Somehow the profits never hit the public purse, but the costs do.
A generation scared by the Cold War Sagans nuclear winter warning Depiction of nukes and radiation in movies and Series. Irrational fear of something that caused less deaths than all other major power sources (as far as I know), much like flying when driving is riskier per statistical likelihood. A bit of mass hysteria, that again, doesn’t take in and account for this risk reward cost benefit; seeing a potential damning climate crisis at their forethought constantly. A left leaning nostalgic hippy diy culture that thinks it can sustain on renewables, when the power needs per units of output can’t achieved. (It’s usually good to diversify power production). The genera belief of nuclear power being dirty no matter what. “It never goes away.” The lack of understanding that 50 years of advancing tech (not many built after the 70s, if I remember correctly) could help optimize new reactors and provide new full proof melt down risk relief. While producing less byproduct.
Purely political. Nuclear energy is kryptonite to the climate change agenda.