America is about to fall behind China on one of the most important issues of our time
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Fossil fuels are killing this planet before your very eyes.
And the only way to save it is nuclear power? Every thread about this topic makes it look this way.
Thing is: Fossil fuels are killing our planet NOW. Spending 10+ years to build a new state-of-the-art nuclear power plant is simply too slow. Just take the money and dump it into technology that's already available at short notice: Solar, wind, geothermal and tons and tons of battery storage. I'm not sure about the situation in other countries, but here in Germany there isn't even a permanent storage site for the nuclear waste we ALREADY produced let alone one for which we'd produce in the future.
Additional factor for not going nuclear in Europe: Do you know which country exports the most fissile material around us? It starts with an R and ends with ussia.
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Chernobyl killed around 4000 people locally and contributed to 16000 deaths on the continent. Normal coal operation has killed half a million people over the last 20 years.
All I'm saying is that accidents are possible, sure, but the laxity of regulations regarding coal has killed way more people than that towards nuclear. And it's not about "one person not having their morning coffee", Chernobyl was dangerous by design, modern reactors simply can't fail that way.
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None of the US based SMRs have been successful, even with billions of funding from the DOE.
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Not sure, maybe from the posts where everybody argues that Nuclear is so much better than coal but totally missing the point that yes, it's better than coal, but so much worse than renewables.
- Huge upfront costs
- Long build time (We need to get CO2 down now!)
- Waste disposal time measured in aeons.
- Risk of contamination (again for aeons)
- Yes, coal kills more people, but
- Scale our usage of nuclear power by 100 and watch the casualties scale as well.
- That's not the frigging point. We want to get rid of coal ANYWAY. The question is which one is better: Fossil nuclear or renewables.
- Yes, coal kills more people, but
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True or false: a nuclear reactor failing, for any number of reasons, can do a lot more damage than a coal plant or any of the processes to gather coal can.
By that same logic, we should dismantle all our cities, since a natural catastrophe can wipe out so much more people if they are clustered up. Or drive instead of flying, because one airplane crashing is worse than one car crashing.
Nuclear reactors failing make for better headlines. You would literally have to build a reactor design that was not safe even back then - they built it to prioritize weapons grade material refinement - and would have to mismanage it systematically for decades in order to get at 5-10% of the death toll coal generation will do 100% in that timeframe.
The big picture is, if every reactor was Chernobyl, was built like Chernobyl, was operated like Chernobyl and would fail like Chernobyl, that would still cause less deaths than the equivalent coal generation. That's the big picture. Fixating on one accident that can provably never happen again is the minutia.
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What can happen? The plant is pretty much working and is the only reliable point of Ukrainian power generation since it can't be targeted. Also, when is the US going to get into a land war on its own soil, and how will smaller nuclear reactors help?
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The question is which one is better: Fossil nuclear or renewables.
Both, whatever we can build faster, whatever makes it easier to reduce coal and oil. It shouldn't be an either-or decision. Also, nuclear is not a fossil fuel, you can debate if it is renewable or not, but nuclear fuel is not made from compressed organic matter.
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It’s clear you’re not willing to engage this in good faith. You’re just going to take the least charitable interpretation of my ideas and twist them into things I am not saying or implying. Have a good one dude
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Both, whatever we can build faster, whatever makes it easier to reduce coal and oil. It shouldn't be an either-or decision.
You are kind of contradicting yourself. Because in both aspects nuclear energy looses to renewables: They are faster and less complex to build. Easier to maintain and dispose of if necessary.
Also, nuclear is not a fossil fuel, you can debate if it is renewable or not, but nuclear fuel is not made from compressed organic matter.
Ok, if you want to split hairs, yes nuclear energy is not fossil but also then there are also no renewables because the energy in the universe is for all we know finite.
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I never said anything about fossil fuels, and do not wish them continued use either.
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The smaller reactors are fail safe so if they get blasted you'll end up with free aluminum parts on your backyard. And if you got one near every home that means you gotta spend a lot of firepower to get them all. And if they produced as much power as needed and are safe to repair and quick to build then good luck taking them all out. Right?
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I said developing.
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You saw in Ukraine what can happen if you rely on large plants.
So, I don't disagree that, especially for some environments, bombing resistance is a legit concern.
However, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that if we find ourselves in a situation where China is bombing US power generation infrastructure, that probably means that World War III -- not some kind of limited-scale fight, but a real all-in conflict -- is on, and I think that the factors that determine what happens there probably aren't mostly going to be "who has more power plants".
World War II was a multi-year affair, but a lot of that was constrained by distance and the ability to project power. From the US's standpoint, the Axis had extremely-limited ability to affect the US. The US started with a very small army and no weapons that could, in short order, reach across the world.
Today's environment is different.
I've not read up on what material's out there, but I'd guess that a World War III, one of two things probably happens:
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The war goes nuclear, in which case nuclear capabilities in large part determine the outcome.
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The war remains conventional. One or both sides have the ability to pretty rapidly destroy the other side's air and/or missile defenses and subsequently destroy critical infrastructure to the degree that the other side cannot sustain the fight. My bet is on the US being in a stronger position here, but regardless, I don't think that what happens is each side keeps churning out hardware for multiple years and slugging the other with that hardware, being able to make use of their power generation capacity.
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OK agreed.
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Fukushima did have some workers undergo significantly higher than usual radioactive doses - I invite you to contrast this with the mortality rate of, say, working on an oil rig.
Not injecting my own opinion in this thread of conversation, but if you're expanding the scope to include oil rig worker adverse health effects, which introduces the fuel supply chain, then you need to also include the fuel supply chain health impacts and deaths with nuclear fuel extraction, such as the tens of thousands of uranium miners that have died digging out uranium.
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there is no coal plant incident even remotely theoretically possible that can render massive regions inhospitable for centuries
If you ignore the incident we’ve all been watching slowly unfold for centuries with our thumbs up our asses, and oil spills to a lesser extent, sure
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Ohh, I get it. The thing with Ukrainian power generation being a military strategic thing though is not that homes can be kept warm - that is great - but that military production is powered. I don't think you can power a munitions factory from scores of smaller reactors, since that would need insane infrastructure that is just not there, and would still be an easy target.
Also, in Ukraine, it would mean a legitimate military target in every backyard. The Russians would be back to carpet bombings already. I'm not saying it would not help, but I think it's a dubious advantage in wartime - which by the way, the US won't be - and even more problematic at peacetime as again, most consumption is industrial.
The thing I don't see is how do you route power from Bob's small reactor to Bezos' AI farm so that Wall Street can keep pretending the American economy exists?
