251–260 of 731 posts
So there are problems. Its also the fastest way to the destroy the world. If you dot the world with these things we become one climate disaster or earth quake away from having written a check that our collective asses can't cash.
Can we just get something straight about the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant? Although it was a 1960's design, the reason it failed the way it did was because of one design flaw... Its backup generators were not placed up on the hills above it. Rather, the backup generators were situated below sea level underneath the reactor buildings. DERP. Fukushima Dai-ichi survived the Magnitude 9 earthquake. It did not s…
> My point is that nuclear power is safe, as long as all disaster scenarios are taken into account To be honest, you could probably make that argument for anything under question in any scenario. But even if we were to skip the logical loopholes ("We took it into account, but we decided the benefits outweighed the costs because of "), let's just look at the raw numbers or simply just historical facts. Have any disast…
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> Renewable energy is cheaper than nuclear, or will be imminently. Renewable energy at that scale is still theoretical and hasn't shown its downsides yet. Nuclear has shown all its downsides, and they have been 95% corrected. It's a mature, known technology.
Renewables already supply a similar amount of power to nuclear, its growth rate is higher, and its cost curve is improving faster. As for plant capacity, the largest power plant in the world is renewable (Hydropower):22.5 GW. Compare that with the largest nuclear plant, the Kashiwazaki Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant (currently closed due to safety concerns): 8GW. If you limit "renewables" to only solar and wind, there ar…
Hydropower is also an example of one of my points. It is a mature technology, and we now know of its big environmental costs as well as it's benefits. We could technically probably double the hydroelectric power of the world, but the natural devastation would be too large, so we mostly chose not to.
We have yet to see what those downside are for solar and wind. For nuclear we know, and also know how to handle them.
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FTA: New nuclear power plants are hugely expensive to build in the United States today. This is why so few are being built. But they don’t need to be so costly. The key to recovering our lost ability to build affordable nuclear plants is standardization and repetition. ... Currently, as M.I.T.’s Richard Lester, a nuclear engineer, has written, a company proposing a new reactor design faces “the prospect of having to…
Two points: 1: France is 75% nuclear and has some of the cheapest electricity. 2: there are a ton of small reactor designs that would be substantially cheaper and quicker to build. Problem is that you can't get them out of research labs.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
In 2011, a week after the Japan's earthquake, NYTimes wrote an article that was rather critical of nuclear energy. I wonder when the flip flop happened. "Living With a Nuclear Question Mark in the Backyard" https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/nyregion/17towns.html
The New York Times, like most newspapers, is not a single, unified voice it its articles, and much less in editorials published under Opinion sections, such as this submission.
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France is phasing out its nuclear fleet and plans to have retired 1/3 of it by 2025. Its only new NPP under construction, Flammanville, is 9 years over schedule and over 300% over budget. It is still not certain when it will open due to safety defects that are still being evaluated.
That's because it's a next-gen project, that's what happens with R&D.
New build nuclear is not cost competitive with new build wind and solar (even when you account for firming costs), and the cost of wind and solar is still falling at an astonishing rate.
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Half the article was about the reasons costs are so much higher in the U.S. than South Korea, and how to fix it.
I never buy the cost problem. I mean look at France. That's another great example. Has some of the cheapest electricity and is 75% nuclear.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
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The problem is that "taking all disaster scenarios into account" is easy in hindsight, but maybe not in planning. But I believe that modern nuclear power reactors can be build intrinsically safe. For me, the real problem begins with the treatment of the waste: It's hard to find a good place to store it or reprocess it. Not so much because finding the actual place is hard, but because using that place will face hard o…
nuclear waste is not as big of a problem as most people think.
Renewables like solar and wind can be local, scaled down to the needs of a single family property, and kept under the sole control, if desired, of an individual owner. Nuclear is fundamentally not that way.
If this article isn't it already, expect to see in the near future that the powerful elite subset of climate deniers will pivot to accept climate change while advocating for nuclear as a solution, all because their cronies stand to benefit from massive construction projects and associated safety, security, and control projects.
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> Renewable energy is cheaper than nuclear, or will be imminently. Renewable energy at that scale is still theoretical and hasn't shown its downsides yet. Nuclear has shown all its downsides, and they have been 95% corrected. It's a mature, known technology.
In 2018, renewables provided 713 TWh of energy to the US electricity grid. Nuclear provided 807 TWh. They're already at the same scale, and renewables are rapidly increasing while nuclear has stagnated for decades. https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3