331–340 of 1001 posts
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The goal of making nuclear cheaper isn’t to lower consumer costs. It’s to displace CO2 emitting baseload sources like coal and gas.
Or you know, build renewables and storage which has in recent years reduced Californias fossil gas dependency by 40%.
(Not everywhere has good sun for solar.)
We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation. I understand that regulation is needed but we also need nuclear energy, we have to find a streamlined way to get more plants up and running as soon as possible. I think they should all be government projects so that private companies can't complain that they're losing money and keep have to ratchet up the pric…
> Most of it are fake costs due to regulation. It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate. Compare costs vs coal which isn’t cost competitive these days. Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it. Even after refining you can’t just dump fuel in, you need fuel assemblies. Nuclear must have a more complicated boiler setup wi…
Solar and nuclear both really stand out immensely as the safer alternatives.
People tend to think of nuclear as dangerous, but that's just propaganda. There has been a lot of anti-nuclear propaganda over the years. But the numbers speak truth:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
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Even accounting for the times things have gone “catastrophically wrong”, nuclear is many orders of magnitude safer per unit of energy than every other energy source except solar. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
Data reported by Forbes put the death rates for nuclear power in the US below all other sources of energy including solar: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d... The death rates are wildly different than the ones at the site you linked. I wonder what the reason is for the discrepancy.
The difference in ranking might be down to how they model deaths from nuclear power accidents. One may be using the linear no threshold model, and the other may be using something else. We don't have an agreed upon model for how likely someone is to die as a result of exposure to X amount of radiation, which causes wide gaps in death estimates.
E.g. Chernobyl non-acute radiation death estimates range from 4,000 to 16,000, with some outliers claiming over 60,000. That's a wild swing depending on which model you use.
I'm totally fine with people attempting to build new fission plants. More power to them! I just don't see it happening. They cost too much and take too long. Not holding my breath here.
By some weird accident they stop being that expensive and long to build when you cross the border into China.
We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation. I understand that regulation is needed but we also need nuclear energy, we have to find a streamlined way to get more plants up and running as soon as possible. I think they should all be government projects so that private companies can't complain that they're losing money and keep have to ratchet up the pric…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Most of it are fake costs due to regulation. It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate. Compare costs vs coal which isn’t cost competitive these days. Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it. Even after refining you can’t just dump fuel in, you need fuel assemblies. Nuclear must have a more complicated boiler setup wi…
It really is. Nuclear is 100-1000x safer than coal. By insisting on such an aggressive safety target, we force prices up and actually incur much higher levels of mortality - just delivered in the boring old ways of pollution and climate-driven harms. See https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy for detailed stats. I think we should target “risk parity with Gas” until climate change is under control.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...
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As someone also served by PG&E I don't think cheaper electricity will help. At peak hours electricity is $0.13/kwh but the delivery charge is $0.50/kwh.
The goal of making nuclear cheaper isn’t to lower consumer costs. It’s to displace CO2 emitting baseload sources like coal and gas.
I’m totally fine with nuclear honestly, but I feel like I don’t understand something. No one seems to be able to give me a straight answer with proper facts that explain why we couldn’t just make a whole load more renewable energy generators instead. Sure, it might cost more, but in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no?
1. The electrical system was built for big power plants distributing the electricity to households. If you want to generate electricity a bit everywhere, you need to adapt the infrastructure. That's costly and it hasn't really been done at scale (whereas with nuclear plants it has).
2. With nuclear, you have great control over how much you produce. With renewables, you generally don't: you have electricity when there is wind or when there is sun. Batteries are not a solved problem at scale.
3. Renewable is cheap, but it depends on globalisation, which in turn depends on the abundance of fuel fossils. With nuclear, it's easier to have fewer dependencies. Which proportion of solar panels come from China?
4. Nuclear energy is very dense. Estimate how many solar panels you need to produce as much as a big nuclear plant, even without factoring in the batteries and the weather.
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If Germany invested all their renewable money into nuclear, they would be carbon-neutral today. Not by 2050 but today. Instead the CO2 per capita in Germany is 2x the one in France. And France had built their reactors in the 70s for a modest price. The "whole load more renewable energy" idea is peak wishful thinking and it's incredible people still buy it today.
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