Makes sense, my country has been struggling with this problem for a while because it's tectonically simply not stable enough. And good luck convincing geologically suited countries to take everyone's waste.

Not quite. China is planning less coal capacity but existing contracts are still being built. They're not ramping up construction afaik. https://globalenergymonitor.org/research/china-hits-brakes-coal-power-permits-constructions-remain-robust

Most countries of the global south, when faced with the option coal vs nuclear, will err toward coal due to the far lower cost and weaker infrastructure. Nuclear is simply not that attractive an option if you're a poor country.

The security problem ruins the amazing tech. In an age of terrorism and drones, the risk isn't acceptable. The same goes for hydro unfortunately, which is my fav energy form (I like watermills).

And who said they were ramping up? I don't get what you're arguing here or why. Yes, coal plants are much easier to build than nuclear.

And who said they were ramping up?

What else would it imply to state that Nuclear is actively competing against coal? If they're not ramping up, then it's not an argument because they're not currently choosing new coal over nuclear.

Yes, coal plants are much easier to build than nuclear.

Which is why nuclear is not really competing against coal in the global south...

Cool! Still a demonstrator plant, it looks like, but good to see it's in commercial operation.

and will continue to be the future, forever

Currently in reality? Under capitalism, genocide, planetary annihilation, etc? I'm opposed. It will absolutely be used as a tool of violence and exploitation like every other "technology" developed under capitalism.

In an imaginary world... It depends on the imaginary situation, etc. But that's largely irrelevant to actual reality.

... while creating new problems...

Whitey on the Moon... Now thanks to nuclear energy! \s

It is one of the only viable energy sources for space travel, which means it’s not something we should phase out or stop researching.

Who gives a shit? People have actual real problems on Earth. These kind of wasteful distractions are fundamental reason why.

Whitey On The Moon

Cool story but that doesn't mean shit to me living on earth.

Cool story but it doesn't sound very safe to me.

I don't know? Maybe because that is a brain-dead fucking take on the importance of space travel and completely ignores how nearly every advancement in the space industry leads to massive improvements for people and society?

I don't have the time or patience to deal with people who are too fucking stupid to be able to comprehend why. Whitey on the moon... Are you fucking serious?

I am pro nuclear energy. It's the most efficient way to generate sustainable electricity in abundance in the smallest amount of space.

Same opinion here. It's basically a gas well boiler plant without the CO2. The reason we don't have more of it is due to politics surrounding transporting nuclear waste.

Nation states will choose uranium / plutonium reactors so that they can abuse nuclear power for weapons grade material generation. But we already have nuclear proliferation. Cat's out of the bag. Given that nuclear is a huge win in almost every other way, I'm pro-nuclear even in the context of nation states.

I'm pro but think it needs to be replaced over time

not shut down and replaced by non renewables like it's now sometimes the case

Nuclear energy is still popular. China is building many reactors and many countries are ordering SMRs.

As someone in Singapore where our land space constraints us from deploying large scale solar to fully meet our needs, nuclear (SMRs / Nano Reactors) is the next best solution without having to give up our energy independence to other countries.

I'm amazed at how level headed and straight forward the arguments are presented across a rather large variety of instances!

Also, against.
Renewable + Battery + grid is the way to go. Connect every power source and distribute the energy. Include redundancy because energy is important.

As someone who has done quite a bit of work on power systems (in the New Zealand context) recently.

You have to consider any energy generation technology in the environment it is going to be deployed in.

Whilst I am generally pro-nuclear; as a technology. It doesn't really work as a deployable energy system in comparison to other forms of generation; especially here in NZ. There are three main reasons for this:

• Cost in both time and money to construct nuclear is far too high.
• Industry to support nuclear doesn't exist in NZ. Expert techs, operators, fabricators etc are not here; we would need to build an industry alongside building the first plant.
• Regulatory framework to enable nuclear generation is almost nonexistent. We have medical isotope framework; as a basic way to work with radiological material.
• Bonus challenge; we would have to import all the fuel.

Countries with existing nuclear industries and power plant have a much easier time; but when comparing the cost in time and money to get the first GWh out of a nuclear generator; it is a hard sell.

One major advantage nuclear has over other forms of generation is physical footprint; effective power density is absolutely massive. To get similar power density in renewable generation, the only thing close would be the in development supercritical geothermal power; though nuclear would still have higher power density and is not geographically constrained.

Maybe things will change in the future. Maybe small modular reactors will eventuate in an easy to deploy way; or the developments in Chinese thorium reactors will pan out to a viable generation tech. But technology is not the only stumbling block that nuclear energy faces; especially in a small country that doesn't have an existing nuclear industry.

I know there is a lot of money being thrown at fusion; and that may change the game entirely, it is an interesting time to be looking at energy systems.

Expensive, takes forever to build, produces shit ton of waste. Also ugly as sin.

Fossil fuel companies want you to support it because it takes a really long time to set up and they can turn a profit during that time.

yes. its stable and powerful, you cant rely entitely on renewable energy because sun does not always shine, wind does not always blow and hydro-electric outputs too little power compared to the damage caused. you also cant rely on coal because youre going to fucking die

You're way off on the amount of waste they produce.

If you collected the waste of every nuclear plant in the United States since 1950 in one place, it would only fill a football field up to about 30ft deep. That's really not all that much considering it's 70+ years of power. That's very easily manageable if people would just get over their fear.

Im pro nuclear power as long as it is cost effective.

Renewable solar and wind with backup batteries is by far the least expensive power supply at the moment.

Anything contradicting the previous sentence is a complete lie that was spread by liars with money to gain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source

We're not running out of space. That's a strange thing to use as a decider.

I think it works great in other places, but it is dangerous for America, where they will be built and maintained by bureaucratic Sociopathic corporations who will cut corners at every opportunity, until they fail, and kill millions.

Maybe someday America will evolve to the point where opportunities like this won't be automatically hijacked by financial psychopaths.

At this rate, I’m grateful for anything that isn’t burning fossil fuels.

I’d rather see solar and wind power though.

I was pro for a long time until I read Nassim Taleb on the tail risk associated with nuclear power.

Look at Fukushima.

Look at nuclear power plants becoming targets in war.

Look at how the capitalists who will be running these things treat risk generally.

There are better options available.

yeah, I'm overall thinking renewables + storage = a much better overall solution for generation, transmission, and impact.

I don't think we should 'get rid' of nuclear - the tremendous investment in giant steam run nuclear plants should be used, but we shouldn't build new ones, and should look really hard at how we're gonna store the waste in a secure manner.

Ideally waste-consuming reactors will come along to eat all those waiting storage pools of hot radionuclides and turn them into energy + inert waste, but until then we have to stop adding to the pile.

They're overstated problems, especially considering other forms of energy production.

where they will be built and maintained by bureaucratic Sociopathic corporations who will cut corners at every opportunity, until they fail, and kill millions.

That applies everywhere though regardless of profit incentive. Even the Soviet Union cut corners on the development and running of the Chernobyl plant which led to its infamous disaster. It's not because of profiting mindset, but due to bureaucratic fear from an authoritarian leadership who want to speed up the process.

I'm against nuclear because it's too expensive and there is no proper place to store the depleted material.

Pro. If you consider how absolutely minuscule the risks are (keep your regulatory bodies free of corruption, guys), all political criticism looks uninformed and performative, answers in this thread included.

Imagine an anti-vaxx hippie: presents as progressive, gushes of pointless contrarianism, easily exploitable by the estabilishment*. That's how I see the nuclear power-"critics", both here and elsewhere.

* E.g.: I consider the Green Party of Switzerland the epitome of counter-productive performative idiocy ever since they've been campaigning for replacing our NPPs with gas turbine plants. Fuckin' 🤡s the lot of them.

On the uneconomical aspect, this isn't really true. Yes, it's uneconomical to build an old reactor in the modern world. However, that's by design, not necessity. It isn't inherent to nuclear reactors that they are expensive.

They're expensive because of a bunch of hurdles we make them jump through that other sources of power get to skip. This is on purpose, to ensure they can't out-compete the existing energy companies that have all the money and power. As an example, no other power source has to account for all of its waste. Even renewables create waste they get to just ignore and let third-world countries deal with. The level of safety is also ridiculous, which raises costs. It's potentially safer than even many/most(/maybe all, if scaled properly) renewables.

As for outdated, I have no idea what this could even mean. Care to explain? There are new reactor designs. If you mean old designs are old then sure. If you mean the source of power itself does not function anymore, then that's absolutely insane.

Authoritarian? Sure, I guess. Our whole grid is the. As an Anarchist, sure, I'd prefer people to generate the power themselves. However, efficiencies of scale mean this isn't the best option short-term. We need to get off of dirty energy ASAP. Even solar benefits from scale. Kwh/$ is better on solar farms than an individual house. But also, micro-reactors are becoming a thing. They generate too much power for an individual house, but they do allow for localized power generation with nuclear.

Pro, but renewables do deploy way faster so we do want those renewables to be running while we wait for the nuclear plants to be constructed.

Turning off fossil fuel burning plants is the priority

I used to be anti-nuclear in the past but I realized a lot of the talking points were either wrong or directly favoring the fossil fuel companies. 100% for Nuclear and renewable energy.

I wish nuclear power operators had to accout for all their waste, but that isn't true at all. And the rest of you comment is equal levels of ignoring reality.

We need to get off of dirty energy ASAP.

Exactly, and nuclear energy is the opposite of that. It takes decades to build and those non-existing micro-reactors are the latest investor scam that make evel less economic and technical sense than regular sized reactors.

Pro, I think a lot of the anti-nuclear sentiments are leftovers from when nuclear power was not as heavily regulated as it is now.

Now it's basically impossible for a meltdown except for if a literal natural disaster happens, and sometimes even then

And it's a very clean energy source, with the one problem of what to do with the radioactive waste, but there is far less waste than fossil fuels, and it's easier to get rid of.

There's plenty of places?

And do remember, it's taking what was already a dangerous material, processing it to be less dangerous, and then putting it somewhere safe

I'm nominally pro, or maybe passively anti while cheaper, more scalable, and cleaner sources are at hand. If you're already going full wind, solar, and geo and there's still a rationale for a nuclear plant, I'm open to it. But that's a big fat if.

The thing with nuclear power is that it's FAR easier to convert a fossil fuel generator to nuclear than it is to convert it to green or to build a new one.

And yes, I agree, we need more green, but we first need to kill off all the fossil fuel options.

As a society, it's easier to do everything at once rather than one thing at a time. Edit: The difference with nuclear is that it's so much more expensive than other green options that spending on it now takes significant potential kwh out of the grid if it is given equal funding priority.

Unlike where we store all the CO2, plenty of room for that in our atmosphere.

Although you are right in the sense that nuclear produces steam, I am not aware of any instance of this having been done. The steam turbine is such a small part of a nuclear plant.

In my view nuclear is best as a baseline production and heat production method. The baseline part may reduce as grid batteries smooth out the volatile production of the renewables.

NZ is earthquake and volcano prone, not ideal for nuclear.

I'm a fan of nuclear technology. Any plants working today should be maintained indefinitely, and in places that don't have any options due to geography building new ones today makes sense. And hopefully those investments can help make nuclear tech cheaper in the future with SMRs, etc.

That said, anywhere that is still burning fossil fuels on a nice sunny day should be investing all their energy money into building renewables. It's such an amazingly cheap and quick way to replace fossil fuels. Each panel hooked up is instantly displacing fossil fuels being burnt. And once you have enough solar to cover the daylight hours, you're going to be overproducing during the brightest hours and that will induce people to hook up batteries to profit from the "free" energy and now you've solved the duck curve hours.

I also have some reservations about humans being responsible enough. I live in Japan and do not trust that the energy companies have learned anything from Fukushima, they're just doing as little as possible to cover their asses. The end of Pax Americana and the rise of Climate Change unrest will also increase terrorism risks. It's not bad enough that I'm saying don't build nuclear, but I feel it's still enough of a risk that renewables should be preferred when possible (of course new tech mitigates this to some extent with safer spent fuels and smaller reactors). Just decentralizing the grid so that homes can generate their own power after storms is a huge win with renewables.

The entire NPP is also nuclear waste when it is taken out of operation. That is a lot of waste. Sure, it may not be highly radioactive, but you cannot just dump it on a landfill and call it a day, either. Every screw, every doorknob, every everything has to be properly disposed of.