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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/50691754

At this point we should just accept we’re basically asking a trillion dollar industry with lobbyists to stop making money in a capitalist for profit driven world.

Ugh, all the nuclear nonsense popping up lately… such nonsense, and now with the "but it's so clean" bullshittery too… 🙄

Nuclear power is a toppic dripping with nuance... which we're totally great at dealing with these days...

With renewables being branded as "woke" (or "western degeneracy" for the few people in Russia with access to Lemmy), political LLMs being rampant, misinformation being spread as efficient as never before, the industrial interest of certain nations to either sell their Uranium or being able to build nukes, Nuclear Power being ~kinda~ more clean than Coal, Gas and Oil at least (but hellishly expensive and water-gobbling like hell, which apparently most people didn't get the memo of), the price of refined oil products going through the roof, data centers making energy almost scarce…

I don't know what you're talking about, sounds like a great foundation for civilized discussions! 🥴

Oh no, the sun was too much and Mr Fancy Atom had to go to sleep because there was no water for the thirsty guy. Well, better asleep than leaking or blowing up again. Stupid sun throwing all this energy at the ground, so mean.

then the world needs to stop asking and start stabbing

The fossil fuel industry wants more nuclear because it takes a lot of money and a lot of time to build. It gives them more time to make more money. Renewables are too fast and too cheap.

Possible. Though I'd wager there's also a lot of culture war and actual war involved (Russia sells both Oil and Uranium, Iran also sells Oil).

Well. This is a science meme community, but a science community nonetheless, so I’ll try to keep it somewhat scientific.

Like airplanes that crash, nuclear power plants get a bad rep, but in reality it’s one of the most reliable and safest forms of energy production. For example looking at deaths from power generation, it currently sits right near the bottom between solar and wind power and well below hydro power and the rest. And that includes the Chernobyl accident.

As for the water: yes, but when Mr. Sun is out the solar panels go vroom, so Mr. Fancy Atom’s hard work isn’t necessary as much. So they compliment each other nicely. And the current extreme drought in Europe is hopefully a rare occurrence 🤞🏻

The costs associated with nuclear are so overwhelmingly everything other than fuel that selling fuel isn't going to be a big business, nowhere near the global markets for fossil fuels in actual dollars, even if the market one day approaches the same amount of useful energy in joules or kWh.

Airplanes don't have a bad rep, they are incredibly safe and if one occasionally crashes the death toll is generally limited to the passengers.

My issue with nuclear being presented as perfectly safe is that this is largely theoretical. In practice the list of nuclear and radiation accidents is quite long. If you dig a little into your deaths per terawatt-hour list you can find that they count 433 deaths from Chernobyl. The real death toll remains unknown, but ranges from the 30 officially reported by the Soviet government, the WHO estimate of 4000+, and the 35000 families receiving compensation for "owing to the loss of a breadwinner whose death was deemed to possibly related to the Chernobyl accident." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_disaster)

My point is, each of these nuclear accidents has the potential to kill tens of thousands and cause long-term increases in cancers and birth defects. And despite all the safety claims, we see a major incident about once a decade.

Additionally, we still don't know where to store the nuclear waste and enriched uranium continues to bring cash to Russia, as we haven't been able to shake dependance there either.

All in all, nuclear is another fossil fuel that has risks we can't seem to manage properly and the price is much higher than most renewables. I'm not saying to shut all nuclear plants down immediately, especially if we then have to use coal or gas to make up for the loss in production. But let's stop praising it as this amazing alternative by making safety and sustainability claims that are based on propaganda numbers.

Russia has a lot of control over all layers of nuclear power, so this gives them political leverage.

Also decentralised. Everyone can install some PV panels and a battery.

current extreme drought in Europe is hopefully a rare occurrence

Oh boy, do I have news for you.

And the current extreme drought in Europe is hopefully a rare occurrence

aaahahahhahahahahahahahaahahahha

I do love your optimism, tho

You forget another cost: hard dependency (= "Soft Power"). Sure, selling uranium rods might not be as lucrative as other things. But e.g. France is completely dependent on uranium rods for their grid not to go dark, so the very few countries who sell those have a lot of political influence over them. Like Russia.

Russia had Europe at their balls with energy almost completely (Uranium, Oil, Gas) which is one reason why they thought they could get away with even starting the invasion of Ukraine. The price shock for energy in Europe was brutal in 2022, one of my best friends here in Germany had their heating bill quadruple because it was Gas, thereby lost their home and "temporarily" lived on my couch (for 2.5 years). Meanwhile France ALSO had to scramble finding another provider of Uranium rods, which are quite rare. This caused them having even more issues than Germany over a longer period of time, which sounds absurd given Germany famously made themselves almost completely dependent from Russian gas.

Right now nuclear only goes up in price, running cost and thereby electricity costs. The idea of building some new ones can really only be justified in terms of CO² output in a combined strategy with renewables, nothing else. And at least in regards to the awful dependency thing and crystal clear cost calculations every politician of any country should be on the same boat. Unfortunately a lot of them replaced their brain with various other stuff.

What are you talking about? Airplanes do have a bad rep. More people are scared of getting into them because they think it will crash than there are people scared of getting into cars. It’s the same with nuclear. The events are big when they happen, but it’s overall very safe. What’s more, airplane crashes have killed many, many more people and they have crashed much more often than there have been NPP accidents or deaths. So, if you want to call airplanes

incredibly safe

you might want to reconsider your stance on NPPs.

if one occasionally crashes the death toll is generally limited to the passengers.

And if NPP accidents occur, the death toll is generally limited to the workers.

the list of nuclear and radiation accidents is quite long

The list for NPP accidents is actually not that long, especially when compared to airplane accidents, and it stops at 2011. That’s 15 years ago and Fukushima caused only one possible death. There have been no signs of increased cancer rates in the 15 years afterwards. What’s more, after each major event—after Chernobyl and again after Fukushima—measures have been taken to prevent these events from happening again.

As for Chernobyl, you can debate the numbers, but it doesn’t mean anything for modern nuclear power plants in the west, since the Soviets built a reactor with an inherently unsafe design that isn’t used anywhere in the west. So, using the airplane analogy again, that would be like saying flying on an airplane is unsafe because of the Hindenburg disaster.

As for uranium: Australia and Canada have uranium reserves that dwarf Russia’s.
Storage of waste is not as much of an issue either. Old mines go down kilometers into the earth.

So while yes, nuclear powerhas its downsides, nuclear is the only form green energy that provides base load power.
If you want to transition away from fossil fuel there is no way to provide base load power without nuclear. Battery storage scales very poorly and we already can’t mine enough lithium and cobalt to power all cars with electricity, let alone having battery storage for all electric grids worldwide.

It may seem scary and accidents happen, but like I said, it just has a bad rep like airplanes do.

The numbers are not propaganda and the only propaganda I am seeing is coming from you. You haven’t made a single valid point and have been fear mongering about deaths and accidents that rarely occur.

Maybe you missed the fingers crossed emoji?

Fingers crossed!

All in all, nuclear is another fossil fuel

Just want to correct it is definitely NOT a fossil fuel.

Unless...

Last month I read somewhere, that having solar and batteriecapacity of same proportions are cheaper then nuclear

Reservoir hydro, geothermal and concentrated solar with thermal storage are actually green and could provide base load energy.

You're free to continue ignoring my points with linked sources in favour of your airplane tangent and theoretical possibilities. As I also said, nuclear sounds all great in theory, but the human factor of cutting corners and prioritising immediate profits are nor giving me the confidence that I'd like to embrace nuclear today.

7ct per kwh vs ~50ct per kwh and a build time of 10 - 15 years just speaks for itself not even talking about the potential risk vs basically no risk with renewables

They are either not feasible everywhere (flat terrain) or wildly expensive and take up a lot of space. Nuclear is also actually green.

I’m not ignoring any of your points, or your sources. I addressed them in multiple sections of my comment. Have you even read it? Your points and sources simply aren’t as good as you think. Nuclear is not just great in theory, it’s great in reality. It is the most reliable source of power and we have had functioning nuclear power plants worldwide for decades. It seems more like you are ignoring my sources for your own scaremongering. And ignoring reality is not the same as making a point.

You don’t need to “embrace” nuclear for it to be a good and viable source of energy. It’s okay to admit you think it’s scary, but it’s not based on reality. This is why the airplane analogy works.

Hahaha, just NUKE IT!! QUICK!! It's all perfectly safe.

From memory, the issue with France is specifically that they use a russian design for the fuel rods that only russia makes.
I wanna say that is hexagonal rods, vs the us standard of round.

There are projects running to make these hexagonal ones in western supply chains, but that is at least 10 years away, and there are not enough rods in storage to bridge that.

And for new plants you'll see initial prospects for the cheap russian format, and then either the plant sees a massive cost overrun when they build the way more expensive more available rod design, or it's dependent right from the start.

that provides base load power

Not necessary.

Oil and coal are cheap because its cost doesn't include externalities...which in itself is a form of subsidy.

If we subsidized nuclear the same way, we could build plants faster and have cheaper energy.

You’d think that some who writes such long arguments for nuclear power would know this.

Renewables often have storage issues since they aren't on demand. And for the ones that are like hydro, we're to the point that any new dams are the same timeline and cost because everything easy was dammed long ago, and dams of that scale are not without risks.

Ooh an opinion piece from 2013. We were so young and full of hope then… The point is that we used to think that we could all solve it with cool storage ideas. But that hasn’t shown to be the case. Sorry to be the messenger of bad news, please don’t shoot me.

And even this guy admits he doesn’t know what to do in winter except to keep burning methane in gas turbines.

The real challenge is to supply peaks in demand on calm winter evenings following overcast days. That’s when the peak-load power stations, that is, hydro and gas turbines,

Sounds an awful lot like baseload power….

And what about places that have no hydro?

Here’s another opinion piece that says the opposite.

We can keep going for a bit…

You shared an opinion piece written by a self-styled "investor" who proceeds to endorse the forthcoming feasibility of fusion. I shared a piece written by one of the authors of the study he is basing his article on. A study published in a peer-reviewed journal and conducted by a reputable university. They are not the same.

As for the date...renewables have only become more viable since 2013. The price has plummeted, and the feasibility of battery storage has skyrocketed.

Tell me about it! Opinion pieces huh? At least the investor guy’s solution isn’t using gas powered plants.

And how has the feasibility of battery storage skyrocketed exactly? We haven’t built that many at all in the last 13 years since the article was written. It’s always a promise of much better battery technology in the next decade. We don’t have enough lithium mining capacity as it is, especially when we also want to make the transition to EVs and sodium batteries require even more factories that still have to be built.

How about not betting everything on unproven tech that still needs to be researched, where battery factories still have to be built, storage facilities have to be built, and those all have to be individually connected to the grid and provide enough stability to last us winter nights after an overcast day with little wind…

Does that really seem like skyrocketing feasibility to you?

Ok it's obvious you're not here to discuss anything in good faith. You've arrived at your conclusion and will make up whatever nonsense you feel like will support it. Have the life you deserve.

Who is the one dealing out personal attacks here? And I’m the one discussing in bad faith?

Just because someone doesn’t agree with your views doesn’t make them argue in bad faith. You simply haven’t made a strong argument. And you haven’t addressed at all where we are going to get our power from for:

peaks in demand on calm winter evenings following overcast days.

What is your solution? That we simply go dark from time to time? Until you can address that, your entire string of comments is about as useful as praying to the sun god.

Have the life you deserve.

Thanks. I will. I hope you will too. This is pathetic.

We should charge fossils for them, else we are just disadvantaging everything but fossil and nuclear.
Green doesn't get subsidies either and still competes on price with fossils, and it does not have home solar (except arguably residential solar in some places).
A CO₂ tax has been demanded by lots of organizations over the years, but in the EU (and I presume elsewhere) has been repeatedly obstructed by fossil lobyists.

Batteries need to be included if you want to compare renewables to nuclear, yeah. Still by now they beat nuclear on price, including the batteries.
Hydro can be disregarded since it's usually already built, as you mentioned.

For solar and wind, especially solar, things have changed quite a bit. Of course mainly batteries just got a lot cheaper and better, but the power production got so ridiculously cheap that you can use over-provisioning. Meaning you build way more power than you'd need if you could store it, and them simply don't store it all. For example you build enough solar to supply average power for a rainy day in winter, and then only build batteries for the night, completely disregarding seasonal and weather-based storage.

Overprovisioning compared to naive numbers (still thrown around by lobyists) can save you like 80% of battery capacity.

And as a bonus you can run power-based industry (aluminum, hydrogen, titanium, ...) for free when you are otherwise not using the over-capacity, if you don't mind running the machinery on-demand.

vs basically no risk with renewables

Except for:

• the fact that it consumes a colossal amount of resources, so if the world decides to seriously shift toward renewables, it will lead to competition for the metals and other materials needed to build them
• the fact that it consumes a colossal amount of resources, so it takes a huge amount of oil to extract them (oil that we’re running out of)
• the fact that they require an enormous amount of space, so current NIMBY issues will increase tenfold
• the fact that we still don’t have even the beginnings of a storage solution capable of lasting more than a few hours, and therefore a 100% solar + wind scenario is science fiction

In comparison, nuclear has been proven to work reliably and cheaply for entire nations, its problems are political and therefore way easier and realistical to solve than the law-of-physics related problems solar and wind need to solve.

Overall, I agree. I run my own yard offgrid with solar and battery, but I still end up firing up the generator a fair bit in winter because the demand periods don't match the production peak.

But it seems like that's just a scaling problem, and it seems like a few billion spent on batteries is a less technical solution than a fission plant, depending on the design and scale. But it hasn't really happened yet, even in China where the parts are produced. They're further along, but they're still firing up coal and nuclear at a scale unmatched by the western countries right now, alongside record solar production. So something in that theory isn't lining up.

The price stuff is only relevant for new production, there's not yet a financial reason to replace all existing plants with renewables.

As for China, I'm not fully sure why they aren't. Either it's internal lobbying, making decisions against the public interest, or it could be China wanting to keep their market control.
There is still limited supply, for example building solar cell fabs is a very involved process. China might well be able to use their entire production internally for a long time before fabs scale past their demand. And in the mean time, the rest of the world would first see price increases or shortages, and then build their own fabs taking chinas market control.

There is also the very short-term thing where they are replacing oil with coal due to the Iran war (best war in the history of war, maybe ever).

consumes a colossal amount of resources [...] so it takes a huge amount of oil

Solar is the main source of interest, since it's gotten so cheap. And solar is fundamentally a thin slice of silicon with trace amounts of mystery elements. The entire thing can be made extremely thin, but it doesn't really matter. Because silicon is just fancy sand, and we have enough, it's not a concern. The trace amounts of mystery elements (dopants) are so minor they don't matter, regardless of what they are and how they are sourced. Then there are conductors and structural elements, for which you can use what is available. This would be say aluminum for contacts (though they are very thin so you can still use fancier elements), aluminum and epoxy for the frames and protective layers, ...
In sum solar has no problematic elements, and the amounts involved are minor on the scale of large construction projects.

Wind I want to say is similar. Mainly bulk construction materials like resin, concrete, steel. With some electrical components. The main difference is that here you have generators that might need a lot of copper. Though that is changing, I am not sure how far that is in the rollout but it won't a concern into the future. Generators won't need nearly as much copper in the future.

The only thing relevant for pollution, oil use, cost, supply, ... in the constituent resources are the batteries. If you put electric car batteries from 10 years ago into a box, you'll have a bad time.
Since then though, we've seen chemistries that make good lithium batteries without problematic elements like cobalt or nickel.
Making batteries that don't move lets you optimize things even further than for cars in that respect. The production for car vs grid batteries are now also separate due to that.
The main issue of current grid batteries is thus lithium. Which is environmentally problematic to refine, and is expensive, but is readily available and does not depend on oil to my knowledge. The existing production also does not emit enough CO₂ to matter in the ultimate CO₂/kWh numbers when those go into grid use for decades, especially under overprovisioning where you need less batteries per renewable power production to begin with.
And ofc there are many developments in battery tech. Lithium is not inherently necessary for all batteries, there will be alternate chemistries available not too far into the future.
If you are thinking of building a nuclear plant now, then you need to consider what batteries you would need to buy in 10 years when it would be done, not which batteries are available now. In 10 years I'd expect something like molten metal or iron batteries that don't have any even slightly problematic elements.

the fact that they require an enormous amount of space

Loosely about 0.1% of current agricultural land. Even if you don't want to build some solar farms in place of existing farms for various reasons, it's not that much compared to other large infrastructure like cities, roads, agriculture, so you can find mixed use situations where they fit well.
For example over parking spaces providing shade, on top of roofs where you don't usually see them, or on top of crops that benefit from the shade.

If you look at countries that have a few tens of percent of their grid on solar at present (often with gas turbines instead of batteries), there will of course be a few panels visible when you get around, but it isn't omnipresent.

the fact that we still don’t have even the beginnings of a storage solution capable of lasting more than a few hours

Overprovisioning. If you naively assume you build exactly as many solar panels as you need to average to the demand over the year, you get some very large numbers for storage. But given that solar is very cheap and batteries are expensive and problematic, there is no reason to do that. What you do in practice with both solar and wind, is you build more than you would need, enough so that under suboptimal production you still don't need to draw from storage. Wind turbines don't always spin when it's windy, especially very windy, since then they produce so much power all demands are fulfilled and the rest would overload the grid. For solar it's increasingly the same, you just can't tell.
Private micro-solar often has a maximum power it can send to the grid, and home solar installations are over-specced for that and can send the maximum for far more of the day. Simply because overspeccing is minor increase if cost compared to everything else so financially the best decision.

In short: The sun shines every few hours, you don't have to store seasonal power.

And I’m the one discussing in bad faith?

If you're going to pretend that batteries haven't become enormously more popular over the past decade and that some investor hack is equivalent to someone whose career is research in this exact area, that tells me everything I need to know about how you are approaching this. It's not worth effort partaking any further with someone who cannot have the basic decency to do likewise.

pretend that batteries haven't become enormously more popular

Am I? Where? And I thought you said I was arguing in bad faith? Quote me or GTFO.

equivalent to someone whose career is research in this exact area

I never said that. I said they were both opinion pieces. Building more straw mans it seems.. And your career research dude’s answer to winter nights without much wind is GAS TURBINES. Also it’s another logical fallacy.

that tells me everything I need to know

You just can’t handle being proven wrong, you’re a sore loser and an even poorer debater. You couldn’t make an argument stick if your life depended on it. Also, another logical fallacy.

Looks like your entire string of comments is made out of bad faith arguments and you have the audacity to say that about me?

basic decency

LOL

Solar is the main source of interest, since it’s gotten so cheap. And solar is fundamentally a thin slice of silicon [...] In sum solar has no problematic elements, and the amounts involved are minor on the scale of large construction projects.

Solar needs silver, tellurium, indium, gallium, cadmium and other things. Silver is already close-ish to become scarce, tellurium and gallium are for most part a China world-wide monopoly. Rare earth elements are needed in inverters and power conversion, and lithium/cobalt/nickel are needed for batteries needed by solar to be viable without a reliable power source. All of that will be in competition with EV and other applications.

And nope, the amounts involved are not minor if we talk about all country phasing out of both nuclear and fossil.

The only thing relevant for pollution, oil use, cost, supply, … in the constituent resources are the batteries

Nope. I mean as of today, and for decades to come the highly globalized production will be entirely dependent on oil. No oil: no ore mining, no manufacturing, no transportation, no installation, and therefore no wind turbines and no solar panels. And that’s before we even get to batteries and the power grid.

So in a world where peak oil has already passed, the price of everything that relies heavily on globalization will keep rising, including solar panels and wind turbines. And let me remind you once again that we’re still only at the very beginning of solar and wind power: competition among countries hasn’t even started yet.

So you might say that without oil, we can’t build nuclear power plants either, and that’s true. Except that with, say, 1 million liters of oil, we can generate far more megawatts through nuclear power than through solar and wind, because it requires far fewer resources and far less reliance on globalization.

The main issue of current grid batteries is thus lithium. Which is environmentally problematic to refine, and is expensive, but is readily available and does not depend on oil to my knowledge.

It's entirely dependent on oil. Nothing get produced without oil, and oil will get costlier and scarce year after year.

Also, we would need most of the entire world lithium reserve just to convert our cars from oil to electricity. Powering entire countries with batteries, which necessitate magnitudes more storage, is just science-fiction.

And ofc there are many developments in battery tech. Lithium is not inherently necessary for all batteries, there will be alternate chemistries available not too far into the future. If you are thinking of building a nuclear plant now, then you need to consider what batteries you would need to buy in 10 years when it would be done, not which batteries are available now.

I mean, if I seriously start building gen II nuclear reactors in parallel, I'll have a dozen by 10-15 years, and have almost entirely decarbonated my electricity by 20-25 years with more than 50 reactors. That's feasible, France proved back in the 70-80's, humanity is not not dumber and less capable than then.

But again, you can't tell when/if you will ever find some storage technology that you can scale up to TWh for capacity, and GW worth of power input/output.

Loosely about 0.1% of current agricultural land.

Batteries are not up to scale and might never be, and you would need like 5 of the Europe biggest STEP to cover capacity, and 15+ for power output just for France's needs in a windless night in winter. We're talking about 60-70GW over 14h. And that's assuming you somehow have enough solar and water the next day to pump all the water back in 10h, to be prepared for the next night.

Also STEPs can't be built anywhere, it's highly dependent of the geography of the country. Some countries will need to rely on batteries exclusively, which again, are just plain science-fiction as of today.

Overprovisioning

Overprovisioning does nothing when sun is down and wind is missing over most of the continent, which will happen even more often due to climate change. Once again, just to hold a single windless night of winter in France, you'll need close to a TWh of storage capacity, and 60-70GW of power output. And that's without accounting for the remaining 2/3 of energy consumption that is still fossil-based and needs to be converted to electricity.

So yeah, you need a baseline of controllable power production AKA fossils, nuclear, or hydro. Fossils are out for obvious reasons, as well as biomass which is just Germany coping for its bad energy policies, and not all countries have access to hydroelectricity. So we need nuclear in the end.