cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/68257855

Nuclear is the best btw.

TBF, historically most nations allow "temporary" storage of spent nuclear fuel cells in perpetually filled pools or running water, which have the potential to run out and cause a nuclear apocalypse via irradiating everything on the surface of the earth. Currently millions of spent rods are stored "temporarily" in such pools which all together contain as much Cesium-137 as 30 Chernobyls in the USA alone.

It gets talked about a lot in "what if" scenarios about human extinction, because if Humanity died out then those pools will dry up and everything else will die alongside us.

Indestructible like the Runit dome?

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-15/cracks-appear-in-runit-dome-amid-sea-level-rise/106423684

Bruh i saw this trash of a bait post yesterday already.

Nobody with more than 3 brain cells is defending coal.
But Nuclear is also shit (unless u have subs to run or nukes to build, and hence can use civil nuclear plants, refining, and mining to offload some of the military bill onto the backs of civilians).

THERE HAS NEVER BEEN A SINGLE NUCLEAR POWER PLANT THAT WAS PROFITABLE THUOUT ITS WHOLE LIFE CIRCLE.

Take your god damn bait meme and shove it up your reactor pressure vessel.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/russia-s-820-mw-sodium-cooled-reactor-burns-next-gen-actinide-nuclear-fuel-successfully/ar-AA229IGY

The goal of this technology is to reduce the volume of radioactive waste that requires deep geological disposal. Rosatom indicated that eliminating minor actinides could allow nuclear waste to reach radiation equivalence with the original uranium feedstock hundreds of times faster than natural decay.

some sources on this?

What's profit got to do with it?

Because I don't waste my time (well, much) on trolls, I had AI provide a response in the tone I would have used. I'm sure you'll AI is BS yada yada but meh. I thought it was good.

Your post is peak "I read a Vox article from 2015 and now I’m an expert" energy.
• Nuclear is not "shit." It’s the only proven, scalable, carbon-free baseload power we have.
• The problem isn’t nuclear—it’s Western governments treating it like a political football instead of an industrial project.
• If you think coal is bad but nuclear is worse, you’re objectively wrong. Coal kills 8 million people/year from air pollution. Nuclear has killed ~5,000 in 70 years (Chernobyl + Fukushima, mostly from Soviet incompetence and a tsunami).
• Your "no profitable plants" claim is like saying "no Tesla has ever been profitable"—ignoring that the Model 3/Y now print money, and existing reactors are cash machines.
Final Verdict: Your Take is Hot Garbage
• Accuracy Rating: 2/10 (generous).
• Spice Level: 8/10 (points for passion, but you’re swinging at shadows).
• Reality Check: Nuclear is the most cost-effective low-carbon power source if you build it right. The West doesn’t, but that’s our failure, not the tech’s.
Now go shove that up your reactor pressure vessel. 🔥

Edit: AI is the new nuclear power lololol

Because people call nuclear cheap, when it in reality isnt, they just cherry pick a smol time slot while ignoring states pumping money into it before and after main run time.

"I had AI provide a response"

i stopped reading right there, dont waste my time.

https://www.nrc.gov/waste/spent-fuel-storage/pools

https://www.pogo.org/reports/spent-nuclear-fuel-pools-in-us-reducing-deadly-risks-of-storage

Idc about profits man, I want a liveable biosphere.

Why can't both be accurate?

The fuck you didn't 🤣

Thank you

“Indestructible”?

HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!

Thanks for the laugh, pal.

Nuclear is the best btw.

What's the LCoE of new nuclear? What's the LCoE when you add the cost of the storage mentioned in your meme?

I didn't realize anti nuclear was so widespread. You are all propagandized to such a degree that I'm surprised you aren't defending clean coal.

Renewables it is then

Nuclear is dirt cheap if you level the playing field and also make all other sources pay to store waste eternally. The damage caused by climate change is ranging into the trillions, but no other fossil fuel pays for it.

Only nuclear power is expected to nearly package their waste, everyone else gets to spread it around the entire planet, slowly killing every living species.

I would love to ask everyone who opposes nuclear power one question. It's a really simple question, you can Google it. I've never had an opponent of nuclear power answer the question, because it brings everything into perspective.

How much spent nuclear fuel is there in the entire world? What is the total amount of long term waste that the entire history of nuclear power generation has created? If you piled it up, how big of a pile would it form?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY446h4pZdc

Pretty much, yeah

Get lost with your expensive nuclear energy. Renewables produce MUCH cheaper energy.

Renewables are cheaper and also faster to build. Advocating for nuclear now is a delay tactic benefitting fossile fuels.
Renewables don't create a permanent waste problem.

(Also CO₂ is not as long-term as nuclear waste. It's not easy or doable near-term, but you can let nature pull it out of the air and store the results. This can be done with none of the risks of failed nuclear storage.)

Forcing nuclear down our throats while renewables are a thing is so wild. And people actually defend nuclear.

You want mining of sparse minerals by workers in inhuman conditions? Check

You want a contamination which will exist for longer than the oldest human build structure?
Check (because the barrels you made made indestructible, just dont test this pls)

You want centralized energy way more expansive than solar or wind?
Check

There are literally no upsides of nuclear against renewables and a battery.

Nonsense, fision energy is expensive and dangerous.

Only in Germany there are over 12.000 tons of radioactive waste and nobody knows where to stored it secure for the next 100.000 years.
It's depending on third countries to import the needed Uranium
Indestructibles containers in a geological stable vault is a bad joke, it don't exist, at least not enough for all the waste, not even for the already existing.
A nuclear reactor has a life span of ~50 years max, after this it need to be eliminated, a process of over 10 years for descontamination and elimination of more radioactive waste with a cost of billions of $, paid by the country, as said, by you, not by the company. Means 50 years energy and >50.000 years problems.
Nuclear is the best, but only if we have an working fusion reactor, means, maybe in 10-20 years. Meanwhile the fision energy is sponsored by certain lobbies and the weapon industry, they are the real reason.

In Spain the energy costs for the user are ~14 cts/kWh at some hours even free (the lowest costs in the EU), thanks to the intensive use of renevable energy, blocked often by fossil and nuclear lobbies in other countries.

Is your point supposed to be "it would be a relatively small pile of radioactive waste"?
There aren't all that many nuclear power plants in the world because it never has been economically viable.

As you said: easy to answer, so not worth it to engage with seriously.

So let me counter ask you a very similar question: how much radioactive material (weight or volume, your choice) do you think was spread in Chernobyl, that made it still a closed off region today and resulted in ongoing increased radioactive levels in mushrooms and wild boar meat in multiple regions over central Europe, that it is still not considered safe for human consumption?

Spoiler: radioactive fuel is energy efficient, as you said, but that also means that it only takes a small amount to contaminate a larger area.

Facepalm

Two things can be true.

Nuclear energy can be prohibitively expensive and impractical and have a massive storage problem. And fossil energy can still be even worse with externalities.

My 2 cents:

For the case of Germany, yeah it would be batshit crazy to build new nuclear reactors right now. Completely irrational. But turning off the existing ones prematurely was a grandiose idiot move and here we are still mining brown coal. People hold up the "but the nuclear plants that got shut down were replaced with renewables, not coal". Yeah, well those renewables were supposed to replace the coal.

Nuclear is the best btw

Naw. I was once enrolled in an Energy/Climate-focussed Masters degree, and scientific consensus for the goal generally seemed to range from "mostly renewables + a tiny bit of nuclear" to "all renewables". Nuclear feels like this amazing hack but it's expensive, and the storage problem, while sometimes overstated, is also often understated or falsely misrepresented as solved.

It's the other way around. Nuclear is not competing against renewables' spot, it competes with fossil fuels. Advocating for nuclear doesn't try to use it instead of renewables, it tries to use it instead of fossil fuels. The opposition to nuclear is what benefits fossil fuels.

The choice is what you want renewables combined with, nuclear or fossil. Those are the choices.

There is a set amount of budget for replacing power infrastructure, and a set amount of capacity to be filled.
Any time a nuclear plant is starting to be built now, they could have instead already finished a renewable plant.
There is no longer any exclusive niche nuclear plants can fill, renewables and batteries beat it on all metrics now, even where stable baseload is needed.
If you need a GW of plants, you won't build both a nuclear and a renewable GW plant, you pick one. If that GW replaces a coal plant, then nuclear will see the coal being burned for 10 more years while under construction.
The grid produces as needed, prices don't vary enough anyone will use less power because low-emission sources are not yet available. Any nuclear power capacity under construction that could have been renewables will cause their equivalent capacity in fossile sources to be used an additional 10 years compared to if renewables had been built.

Who is GW? And why do you bring him in?

I used to live near a city that got nuclear power. When the plant closed our costs rose 200-300%.

I don't care if it's profitable, it's cheap as fuck for residents.

Gigá Whatts, inventor of the plant. To this day we honour his invention by using GW to refer to a plant the size of his first plant. It's roughly equivalent to an oak with stem circumference of 20m.

GIMME FUEL SOLAR, GIMME FIRE HYDRO, GIMME THAT WHICH WIND I DESIRE

It's undestandable to use existing Reaktors some years more, because closing them, as explained, is an even bigger mess with inacceptable costs. The consquences of an Hype promoted by Lobbies, without any thoughts and planning about, like selling expensive cars without brakes.

FFS, no one ever argues that we should replace nuclear energy with fossils, even the genuine fossil fuel lobbyist politicians don't argue it like that. Why even bring it up?

If we didn't fight Nuclear energy for decades we wouldn't have been in half as much trouble as we are in now. But the oil companies won with their smear campaigns.

Renewable energy is cheaper now, but that wasn't always the case. Also nuclear can be part of solving some of the issues with renewable energy. We can build massive battery banks and double our number of solar farms so that we have power when the sun goes down or we can reduce the need and incorporate nuclear

Thanks, that makes sense. I'm not used to see abbreviation of units without a number next to it.

What I'm seeing is that renewables farms are being built AND fossil fuel plants. Nothing is being substituted only added more of the same.

Nuclear has been artificially made way more expensive than it should be.

For one part, why is it the only energy source that has to take care of its waste? (LCOE includes this cost, and I'm not saying they shouldn't, I'm saying other sources should too.) Coal can spew waste out (including radioactive waste) and they don't have to handle it. Wind just throws out blades and doesn't have to deal with them. Etc.

The insane strictness on designs and safety are also far higher than they should be. A lot of its based on a linear no threshold model of radiation safety, which has been disproven., which dramatically increases costs.

Even still, LCOE for nuclear is pretty competitive in the US, and the US is one of the worst places for nuclear, as our dirty energy companies have easily been able to purchase laws to increase the cost of nuclear, so they can't compete as much. Sort this by LCOE and see how many cheap nuclear is for most nations.

Nobody is saying we should build coal plant instead of nuclear, that's the strawman. Every godamm nuclear defender always uses.

"but there are worse energy sources"

Yes we fckin know, doesn't make your energy good.

Keep you strawman false arguments to yourself until nuclear has less cost and less contamination then renewables (forever).

But solar and nuclear aren't the same thing. You can't compare a solar kWh with a nuclear one. If you want to guarantee the same constant output from solar as you get from nuclear, you need immense battery storage or hugely oversized solar.

The choice isn't "Solar/Wind OR Nuclear", the choice is "Solar/Wind AND fossil fuels" or "Solar/Wind AND nuclear". Every time someone opposes nuclear power in favour of something else, that something else is fossil fuels, even if you personally think you're promoting renewables.

There is no longer any exclusive niche nuclear plants can fill, renewables and batteries beat it on all metrics now, even where stable baseload is needed.

I would love to see a source on that, and how much overdimensioning it would take to achieve.

Any time a nuclear plant is starting to be built now, they could have instead already finished a renewable plant.

And every time they build a train, they could have easily built 10.000 bicycles instead. Not saying bikes aren't incredibly useful, because they are. Not saying you shouldn't build bikes, but I am saying they are very different things. If you try to replace cars with bikes, you'll fail every time someone wants to travel more than 20km. If you try to replace cars with trains, you'll fail ever times someone wants to travel less than 20km and not spend a billion bucks.

What you need to do is replace cars with trains AND bikes. But if you oppose trains "in favour of bikes", you're actually promoting cars. And vice versa.

1 - stop being so angry.

2 - Nuclear and renewables are the way to go. Renewables are the bicycles of energy, cheap, clean, easily to make and you can put em anywhere. But sometimes a bike won't work. Nuclear are the trains, expensive to build and requiring lots of effort... but without trains, people will drive cars every time a bike won't work.

If you oppose Nuclear, you're promoting coal. If you oppose solar, you're promoting coal.

1 if we stop debating the same dumb ideas for centuries maybe my anger will fade

2 I really hope you are ragebaiting, comparing nuclear to trains is sooo out there.
A train is good for the climate, good for socioeconomic fairness (cheap), easy to build, easy to change and has basically no waste at all.
Nuclear is bad for the climate, has the worst waste humanity can produce, is socioeconomically bad for everyone near the waste or working in the mines under inhumane coditions, the waste will last longer than the oldest human made structure, we do not have the tools to plan for that kind of timespan AT ALL, everyone saying he can build structures safe for that time is lying or mislead.
And nuclear is hard and expensive to build.

No, we dont need nuclear, no matter what your personal experience with bicycles is.
No, opposing nuclear is not promoting coal, dunno who told you this, but its wrong. Renewables are the way to go.
We already have ways to store renewable energy, and we have just started researching it there is a lot more to come, fission is basically optimized and still way worse.
Even in unicorn situations where our storage is not sufficient there are better alternatives than nuclear, bio-gas for example.

The only reason someone would want nuclear is to offload costs of building bombs and submarines to the public otherwise needed to be played for by military budget.

There is not a single reason someone to build reactors, especially not trains and bikes.

Lmfaoooo quality meme

Wow, I am truly surprised by the amount of angry comments this meme generated lol

Am I the only one that read this in the tongue-in-cheek "checkmate, atheists" tone because it looked like an intentional strawman argument?

Bruh.

Nuclear is capable of generating a ton of energy right besides where is used, renewables have to be transmitted absurdly long distances in most cases.

And mining is every day more automated, sending robots to dig down the materials, and even then, is not like renewables don't need mining also lol.

And yes, they test it, here they're smashing a train full speed to one of the canisters to test it's safety

Renewables have killed more people than all nuclear accidents combined tough, mostly hidro failures, but also a fair share of industrial accidents with the usual ones.