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Only if the “green energy” people actually had that much power... In reality there are 2 forces that have stopped nuclear. NIMBYism. And terrible economics. B

Only if the “green energy” people actually had that much power... In reality there are 2 forces that have stopped nuclear. NIMBYism. And terrible economics. But the green energy people are an easy punching bag for the nuclear advocates who are simply unwilling to face up to the reality of why nuclear keeps failing to take off.

StillBored 7y ago
The costs to built the plants dominates the price. Once built the actual operation and fueling costs are best in class https://www.expressnews.com/business/eagle-ford-energy/article/Nuclear-energy-in-doubt-amid-high-costs-11946922.php https://www.expressnews.com/business/eagle-ford-energy/artic... The majority of the cost to build the plants are due to the crazy uncertainty about the design/build timeline every-time one is built. Given that conceptually they aren't any more complex than your average coal plant those costs are massively over inflated by a number of factors. Frankly if there was a COTS design pre-certified, then it might be possible to wipe out a huge fraction of the built cost.
- akiselev 7y ago
  >> NIMBYism > The majority of the cost to build the plants are due to the crazy uncertainty about the design/build timeline every-time one is built. Given that conceptually they aren't any more complex than your average coal plant those costs are massively over inflated by a number of factors. Frankly if there was a COTS design pre-certified, then it might be possible to wipe out a huge fraction of the built cost. NIMBYism is a large reason why the risks are so uncertain and the costs so high. When dozens of judges at several levels have jurisdiction to require expensive and time consuming state/federal EPA, zoning, air quality, shading, etc. reviews and plaintiffs can use delay tactics to block appeals to those rulings, you get lots of uncertainty and expense.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  Capital costs matter. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t have mortgages or lease cars.
  - creato 7y ago
    This is missing the point. The point is that your house or car would be outrageously expensive too if the engineering cost of the design was amortized over very few units.
    - Spooky23 7y ago
      That's precisely the point. Once the direct subsidy of nuclear via the military's nuclear weapons buildout went away, new plant construction... went way. The capital costs of any traditional power plant are massive, and fix high costs of goods sold for the life of the plant. This Canadian effort may find a way to build more smaller units, which will be great if they succeed. Solar and wind are disruptive because the cost to add a marginal unit of generation is near zero. A marginal add of a natural gas power plant in my US state is nearly $100M and several years. Nuclear is probably 10x that. I understand why nuclear is an appealing technology. Its magical in a way, but it doesn't make sense when engineering a power grid today. It is an awful business with high fixed costs getting disrupted by smaller, cheaper, lower friction alternatives. Again, in my state, New York, despite higher than average rates, nuclear operators like Excelon claim to be losing money operating old plants, and NY ratepayers will be providing $7-10B in subsidy over the next 10-12 years.
      - creato 7y ago
        > Once the direct subsidy of nuclear via the military's nuclear weapons buildout went away, new plant construction... went way. I don't think there was ever a direct subsidy of civilian nuclear power for weapons production. The ways in which military reactors are run to produce fuel for weapons is different than that of power plants. There are dual use technologies involved, shared R&D costs, and so on, but there is no direct subsidy of civilian nuclear power the way you are implying. > The capital costs of any traditional power plant are massive, and fix high costs of goods sold for the life of the plant. I'm pretty sure you are in fact missing the point. The costs of building a modern nuclear plant include a huge amount of one-off engineering because we build so few of them. If we swapped the numbers of units built of coal and nuclear power plants, the cost structures would (probably close to) swap as well, which was the original parent of this thread's point. Look, I'm not here to advocate for nuclear power. I think renewables + batteries are likely to win on economics in the near future, but with some major challenges (building enough batteries for the long tail of intermittent production lapses seems really difficult to me). But that doesn't argue against the fact that we shot ourselves in the climate change foot by not prioritizing nuclear over coal power for decades, and I think a big part of that is based on a mistake ("nuclear is expensive") is because of this inability to amortize costs over more units. edit to add: I think your singling out of capital costs is a strawman of the original comment ("Frankly if there was a COTS design pre-certified, then it might be possible to wipe out a huge fraction of the built cost."). It's unclear whether you are including certification and engineering costs in "capital costs", but the intention of the original point was to include those costs.
- altacc 7y ago
  Expensive to build and cheap to run ignores the high decommissioning and long term waste management costs (both financial & practical impacts). If you add that to the kilowatt price, nuclear tends to end up more expensive than most other options.
  - kortilla 7y ago
    Citation needed. Also, don’t try to include plants that were shut down early or plants built on designs from the 50s.
    - altacc 7y ago
      Your oblique point that the costs for newer reactors are probably going to be less than older reactors is acknowledged, but it's still a cost consideration. https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2016/7201-costs-decom-npp.pdf https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2016/7201-costs-decom-npp.... A lot of this report seems to indicate that estimating future decommissioning costs is hard. The costs are estimates, often created by those with a financial incentive to keep the estimate low. In 50 or so years time the reality of decommissioning might be very difficult. On the waste aspect: "The cost of managing spent nuclear fuel ... is not always included in the cost of decommissioning, but is often treated separately. This is even more the case for the final disposal of fuel or related waste, which is a major source of costs in waste management, particularly for high-level waste."
- cf498 7y ago
  Reading the article (and hoping i didnt just read over the part), they never mention the word waste once when it comes to the cost calculation. Thats rather convenient seeing as the number of functioning deep repository sites today is rather limited. What good are small operating costs when the build costs are this expensive and we dont have a viable solution for waste management (yet?). In practice these costs are externalized to the tax payers and next generations of tax payers. As long as we dont have a functioning waste management, waste is a constantly running cost that wont stop at the end of the reactors lifetime. As long as we dont realistically factor in the waste management cost, nuclear is highly subsidized by the following generations who have to pay for the running cost of waste management. That just doesnt make sense. Dont get me wrong, i am not anti- nuclear. It just doesnt make sense to me at this point from an economics perspective. When factoring in the cost of waste management and decommissioning the power plants after the end of its lifetime, they are absurdly expensive. All this not to mention the absurd follow-up costs of having to dig out collapsed long time storage yet again. I dont see how nuclear today is not just another technology that offers a unsustainable, quick and cheap energy source that externalized the costs to the next generations. The running costs of all those waste management failures is starting to add up, and when looking at Germany, who set an exit date for nuclear power, the cost of decommissioning the power plants themselves is going to be a massive loss for the tax payer, even if everything would work as planed. Which, when looking at the history, we can be sure it wont. I am not convinced yet that nuclear doesnt just look good on paper. Get me a realistic calculation for the actual energy price without externalizing the cleanup costs to the tax payer and we can talk. Dont factor in waste management at a fixed price the state offers and dont just assume that no meltdown cleanup will ever be necessary. But i have yet to see anyone make the argument that way, which lets me assume, that nuclear is a wonderful technology to research until someone finds out how to run plants economically viable without just externalizing costs.
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    > It just doesnt make sense to me at this point from an economics perspective. What are you comparing it to? Are you factoring in economic costs of continuing to release carbon into the atmosphere? (I don’t want to excuse lazy/bad accounting... but traditional power plants don’t factor in the cost of the carbon they release, so basically everyone is ignoring long-term costs.)
- TheHypnotist 7y ago
  The trouble is that some markets will operate at a loss due to the glut in Natural Gas. See the northeast reactors.
Reedx 7y ago
Nuclear energy languished largely because of fear, I think. Our failure to invest in nuclear the past several decades was a huge mistake that future generations will rightfully scorn us for.
- natmaka 7y ago
  After a bunch of mishaps (Fukushima being the more recent) it becomes more and more difficult to pretend that nuke plants aren't dangerous. It justifies fear. Moreover the waste management problem is not solved. During the last decades more and more citizen are less and less willing to pay for nuke plants. In democracies imposing is pretty difficult, and IMHO it's a good thing. In the same timeframe wind, and even more during the last decade, solar plants costs quickly declined, and even more so nowadays. Meanwhile nuke specialists experienced in building and running plants retire. https://www.irena.org/publications/2019/May/Renewable-power-generation-costs-in-2018 https://www.irena.org/publications/2019/May/Renewable-power-...
  - Reedx 7y ago
    Except nuclear energy is the safest form of power: https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy As for Fukushima, more died as a result from it being shut down than in the disaster: https://www.economist.com/asia/2019/11/07/was-shutting-japans-reactors-deadlier-than-the-fukushima-disaster https://www.economist.com/asia/2019/11/07/was-shutting-japan... Furthermore, it lead to a surge in imports of dirty fuels. More coal and oil.
    - natmaka 7y ago
      Once the last reactor decommissioned and the last nuke waste inert we may try to evaluate the impacts. Until them everything can happen, even the worst. As for Fukushima there are many hypothesis about the real impact until now, and even more for the future. Believing the effects are already fully known is at best 'weird'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster_casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... Thinking that we can only replace fossil fuel with nuke is not even funny, as solar and wind soar. In Europe solar and wind already produce as much electricity than nuke plants, and sail around while nuke plants are shutting down. Storage is indeed a challenge, and the real choice is between our capacity to lower nuke-induced risk (waste, disasters...), which seems low after decades of efforts, and on the other hand our capacity to further enhance existing other energy 'sources', which are progressing at a very fast pace.
RobertRoberts 7y ago
> Only if the “green energy” people actually had that much power... > In reality there are 2 forces that have stopped nuclear. NIMBYism. And terrible economics. This is a huge misunderstanding. It was the "green energy" people who first fought nuclear power. Go look throughout the country where nuke plants have been taken down. It's because they were leaking and polluting and were ticking time bombs. The greens have been fighting against nuclear power since day one. There is an underground current of manipulation in online conversations trying to make nuclear power look green. It has only one element of green, that is low carbon, everything else about it is the absolute worst of all power sources. I hope to never see anything but fusion nuclear power come back, and all fission power fade away.
- shkkmo 7y ago
  > . It has only one element of green, that is low carbon, everything else about it is the absolute worst of all power sources. Pretty blatantly false. Nuclear kills fewer people most, if not all other sources of power, per unit of energy generated. There are significant pollution issues from mining and burning coal and from manufacturing solar panels. Hydro produces ecological disruption on par with non other. Wind power has significant and downplayed effects of wildlife. The comparison of these factors is complicated and 'best' depends on what you specific environmental agenda is, but your rhetoric is flat out false.
  - RobertRoberts 7y ago
    There is toxic waste leaking into the Columbia river from nuclear storage in Washington. (only one example) Everything else you described has a solution and can be cleaned up. The nuclear waste is so tragic and horrific and the effects so egregious I can only imagine you are grossly misinformed or a paid troll.
    - shkkmo 7y ago
      > The nuclear waste is so tragic and horrific and the effects so egregious I can only imagine you are grossly misinformed or a paid troll. More horrific than the millions killed by air pollution? This is not to say that nuclear waste isn't a significant problem and one we can do a much better job dealing with, but spreading blatant misinformation does not do anything to help anyone.
kortilla 7y ago
The green energy people have massive amounts of power. They are the reason solar and wind is being built all over the world at an astonishing rate. Their lack of support for nuclear as a base-load is a major factor in its stagnation. In the US a Democrat at the federal level who doesn’t support green energy will be sentenced to the gas chambers. That’s more than half of the House of Representatives and nearly half of the Senate. It has a strong chance of being the next presidency as well. If nuclear were actually supported by green energy people there would be a new plant going up in every state.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- pfdietz 7y ago
  Solar and wind took off when their prices became competitive, then more than competitive, against the alternatives. You would have us believe this didn't matter, and their growth is instead caused by the greens suddenly acquiring political power, and that the simultaneous drop in prices was just an irrelevant coincidence.
belorn 7y ago
The current energy discussion in Swedish politics is Green vs Nuclear. No one is discussing a stop for burning fossil fuels in power plants or banning the import of coal/NG energy from neighbors. Not even a suggestion from the green party at a total stop. Instead we get a bunch of political tricks. If we export more green energy than we import coal energy then we can pretend that that the coal did not actually get released into the air as pollution. We plant trees and talk about carbon capture, and then we discretely cut it down and turn it into biomass fuel and call it carbon neutral. Somehow that turn into negative carbon, while at the same time the old coal power plants can be reused to burn biomass and natural gas. In the latest political debate the green party representative came with this great comeback. People who want to reduce global warming with nuclear are wrong because that side want to lower taxes on gasoline. Thus nuclear is bad. I would like to think that this is isolated to the Swedish green party but somehow I doubt it. No one want to talk about a complete ban on burning fossil fuels for power. I don't have much hope with nuclear advocates, but the current data is hard to dismiss. Looking at EU the lowest gCO2eq/kWh emitting energy grids are Norway, Sweden, Iceland and France. Norway has more hydro than they need. Iceland got plenty of hydro and geothermal. Sweden got nuclear and hydro. France got nuclear. Every other energy grid in EU, regardless of political alignment, is dirtier. Even Denmark with it amazing investment into wind is at this moment (https://www.electricitymap.org/?page=country&solar=false&remote=true&wind=false&countryCode=DK-DK1 https://www.electricitymap.org/?page=country&solar=false&rem...) 400% more polluting than Sweden.
- nothrabannosir 7y ago
  Norway sells most of their green energy and buys fossil fuel energy in return. 98% of their energy production is renewables, but only 9% of their consumption is. A solid 58% of their consumption comes from fossil fuels. Source: Norway’s department of energy. https://www.nve.no/energiforsyning/varedeklarasjon/nasjonal-varedeklarasjon-2018/ https://www.nve.no/energiforsyning/varedeklarasjon/nasjonal-... This isn’t just accounting pedantry: the countries they sell their renewables to use those, to (rightfully) claim green energy consumption. Norway then does the same, but based on their production. Reminiscent of the expression “success has many parents, but failure is an orphan.”
specialist 7y ago
Probably file under "economics": The nukes and communists share the No True Scotman's defense: the prior failures weren't true communism, err, nuke power. If only we had clapped louder, Tinkerbell would fly. Maybe only Tennessee was more pro nuclear than Washington. Alas. Incompetence, corruption, delays, and cost overruns aborted the nukes under construction, which then killed all hopes of building more nukes. For decades, WPPSS (pronounced "Whoops!") was the punchline for local jokes about government, waste, bureaucracy. My favorite was a two-billed baseball hat that said "WPPSS", kinda like this: https://www.villagehatshop.com/photos/product-alternate/giant/4511390S94603/alt/94603.jpg https://www.villagehatshop.com/photos/product-alternate/gian... -- https://www.historylink.org/File/5482 https://www.historylink.org/File/5482 "Several factors combined to ruin construction schedules and to drive costs to three and four times the original estimates. Inflation and design changes constantly plagued all the projects. Builders often got ahead of designers who modified their drawings to conform to what had been built. Safety changes imposed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission increased costs too, but the biggest cause of delays and overruns was mismanagement of the process by the WPPSS. The directors and the managers of the system had no experience in nuclear engineering or in projects of this scale. System managers were unable to develop a unified and comprehensive means of choosing, directing, and supervising contractors. One contractor, already shown to be incompetent, was retained for more work. In a well-publicized example, a pipe hanger was built and rebuilt 17 times. Quality control inspectors complained of inadequate work that went unaddressed." (Attempted emphasis mine.)
api 7y ago
I'm sure its three since fossil fuel lobbies are certainly involved.
naasking 7y ago
> And terrible economics. I think you mean "terribly inflexible regulations".

StillBored 7y ago

The costs to built the plants dominates the price. Once built the actual operation and fueling costs are best in class https://www.expressnews.com/business/eagle-ford-energy/article/Nuclear-energy-in-doubt-amid-high-costs-11946922.php https://www.expressnews.com/business/eagle-ford-energy/artic... The majority of the cost to build the plants are due to the crazy uncertainty about the design/build timeline every-time one is built. Given that conceptually they aren't any more complex than your average coal plant those costs are massively over inflated by a number of factors. Frankly if there was a COTS design pre-certified, then it might be possible to wipe out a huge fraction of the built cost.

akiselev 7y ago
>> NIMBYism > The majority of the cost to build the plants are due to the crazy uncertainty about the design/build timeline every-time one is built. Given that conceptually they aren't any more complex than your average coal plant those costs are massively over inflated by a number of factors. Frankly if there was a COTS design pre-certified, then it might be possible to wipe out a huge fraction of the built cost. NIMBYism is a large reason why the risks are so uncertain and the costs so high. When dozens of judges at several levels have jurisdiction to require expensive and time consuming state/federal EPA, zoning, air quality, shading, etc. reviews and plaintiffs can use delay tactics to block appeals to those rulings, you get lots of uncertainty and expense.
Spooky23 7y ago
Capital costs matter. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t have mortgages or lease cars.
- creato 7y ago
  This is missing the point. The point is that your house or car would be outrageously expensive too if the engineering cost of the design was amortized over very few units.
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    That's precisely the point. Once the direct subsidy of nuclear via the military's nuclear weapons buildout went away, new plant construction... went way. The capital costs of any traditional power plant are massive, and fix high costs of goods sold for the life of the plant. This Canadian effort may find a way to build more smaller units, which will be great if they succeed. Solar and wind are disruptive because the cost to add a marginal unit of generation is near zero. A marginal add of a natural gas power plant in my US state is nearly $100M and several years. Nuclear is probably 10x that. I understand why nuclear is an appealing technology. Its magical in a way, but it doesn't make sense when engineering a power grid today. It is an awful business with high fixed costs getting disrupted by smaller, cheaper, lower friction alternatives. Again, in my state, New York, despite higher than average rates, nuclear operators like Excelon claim to be losing money operating old plants, and NY ratepayers will be providing $7-10B in subsidy over the next 10-12 years.
    - creato 7y ago
      > Once the direct subsidy of nuclear via the military's nuclear weapons buildout went away, new plant construction... went way. I don't think there was ever a direct subsidy of civilian nuclear power for weapons production. The ways in which military reactors are run to produce fuel for weapons is different than that of power plants. There are dual use technologies involved, shared R&D costs, and so on, but there is no direct subsidy of civilian nuclear power the way you are implying. > The capital costs of any traditional power plant are massive, and fix high costs of goods sold for the life of the plant. I'm pretty sure you are in fact missing the point. The costs of building a modern nuclear plant include a huge amount of one-off engineering because we build so few of them. If we swapped the numbers of units built of coal and nuclear power plants, the cost structures would (probably close to) swap as well, which was the original parent of this thread's point. Look, I'm not here to advocate for nuclear power. I think renewables + batteries are likely to win on economics in the near future, but with some major challenges (building enough batteries for the long tail of intermittent production lapses seems really difficult to me). But that doesn't argue against the fact that we shot ourselves in the climate change foot by not prioritizing nuclear over coal power for decades, and I think a big part of that is based on a mistake ("nuclear is expensive") is because of this inability to amortize costs over more units. edit to add: I think your singling out of capital costs is a strawman of the original comment ("Frankly if there was a COTS design pre-certified, then it might be possible to wipe out a huge fraction of the built cost."). It's unclear whether you are including certification and engineering costs in "capital costs", but the intention of the original point was to include those costs.
altacc 7y ago
Expensive to build and cheap to run ignores the high decommissioning and long term waste management costs (both financial & practical impacts). If you add that to the kilowatt price, nuclear tends to end up more expensive than most other options.
- kortilla 7y ago
  Citation needed. Also, don’t try to include plants that were shut down early or plants built on designs from the 50s.
  - altacc 7y ago
    Your oblique point that the costs for newer reactors are probably going to be less than older reactors is acknowledged, but it's still a cost consideration. https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2016/7201-costs-decom-npp.pdf https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2016/7201-costs-decom-npp.... A lot of this report seems to indicate that estimating future decommissioning costs is hard. The costs are estimates, often created by those with a financial incentive to keep the estimate low. In 50 or so years time the reality of decommissioning might be very difficult. On the waste aspect: "The cost of managing spent nuclear fuel ... is not always included in the cost of decommissioning, but is often treated separately. This is even more the case for the final disposal of fuel or related waste, which is a major source of costs in waste management, particularly for high-level waste."
cf498 7y ago
Reading the article (and hoping i didnt just read over the part), they never mention the word waste once when it comes to the cost calculation. Thats rather convenient seeing as the number of functioning deep repository sites today is rather limited. What good are small operating costs when the build costs are this expensive and we dont have a viable solution for waste management (yet?). In practice these costs are externalized to the tax payers and next generations of tax payers. As long as we dont have a functioning waste management, waste is a constantly running cost that wont stop at the end of the reactors lifetime. As long as we dont realistically factor in the waste management cost, nuclear is highly subsidized by the following generations who have to pay for the running cost of waste management. That just doesnt make sense. Dont get me wrong, i am not anti- nuclear. It just doesnt make sense to me at this point from an economics perspective. When factoring in the cost of waste management and decommissioning the power plants after the end of its lifetime, they are absurdly expensive. All this not to mention the absurd follow-up costs of having to dig out collapsed long time storage yet again. I dont see how nuclear today is not just another technology that offers a unsustainable, quick and cheap energy source that externalized the costs to the next generations. The running costs of all those waste management failures is starting to add up, and when looking at Germany, who set an exit date for nuclear power, the cost of decommissioning the power plants themselves is going to be a massive loss for the tax payer, even if everything would work as planed. Which, when looking at the history, we can be sure it wont. I am not convinced yet that nuclear doesnt just look good on paper. Get me a realistic calculation for the actual energy price without externalizing the cleanup costs to the tax payer and we can talk. Dont factor in waste management at a fixed price the state offers and dont just assume that no meltdown cleanup will ever be necessary. But i have yet to see anyone make the argument that way, which lets me assume, that nuclear is a wonderful technology to research until someone finds out how to run plants economically viable without just externalizing costs.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  > It just doesnt make sense to me at this point from an economics perspective. What are you comparing it to? Are you factoring in economic costs of continuing to release carbon into the atmosphere? (I don’t want to excuse lazy/bad accounting... but traditional power plants don’t factor in the cost of the carbon they release, so basically everyone is ignoring long-term costs.)
TheHypnotist 7y ago
The trouble is that some markets will operate at a loss due to the glut in Natural Gas. See the northeast reactors.

Reedx 7y ago

Nuclear energy languished largely because of fear, I think. Our failure to invest in nuclear the past several decades was a huge mistake that future generations will rightfully scorn us for.

natmaka 7y ago
After a bunch of mishaps (Fukushima being the more recent) it becomes more and more difficult to pretend that nuke plants aren't dangerous. It justifies fear. Moreover the waste management problem is not solved. During the last decades more and more citizen are less and less willing to pay for nuke plants. In democracies imposing is pretty difficult, and IMHO it's a good thing. In the same timeframe wind, and even more during the last decade, solar plants costs quickly declined, and even more so nowadays. Meanwhile nuke specialists experienced in building and running plants retire. https://www.irena.org/publications/2019/May/Renewable-power-generation-costs-in-2018 https://www.irena.org/publications/2019/May/Renewable-power-...
- Reedx 7y ago
  Except nuclear energy is the safest form of power: https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy As for Fukushima, more died as a result from it being shut down than in the disaster: https://www.economist.com/asia/2019/11/07/was-shutting-japans-reactors-deadlier-than-the-fukushima-disaster https://www.economist.com/asia/2019/11/07/was-shutting-japan... Furthermore, it lead to a surge in imports of dirty fuels. More coal and oil.
  - natmaka 7y ago
    Once the last reactor decommissioned and the last nuke waste inert we may try to evaluate the impacts. Until them everything can happen, even the worst. As for Fukushima there are many hypothesis about the real impact until now, and even more for the future. Believing the effects are already fully known is at best 'weird'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster_casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... Thinking that we can only replace fossil fuel with nuke is not even funny, as solar and wind soar. In Europe solar and wind already produce as much electricity than nuke plants, and sail around while nuke plants are shutting down. Storage is indeed a challenge, and the real choice is between our capacity to lower nuke-induced risk (waste, disasters...), which seems low after decades of efforts, and on the other hand our capacity to further enhance existing other energy 'sources', which are progressing at a very fast pace.

RobertRoberts 7y ago

> Only if the “green energy” people actually had that much power... > In reality there are 2 forces that have stopped nuclear. NIMBYism. And terrible economics. This is a huge misunderstanding. It was the "green energy" people who first fought nuclear power. Go look throughout the country where nuke plants have been taken down. It's because they were leaking and polluting and were ticking time bombs. The greens have been fighting against nuclear power since day one. There is an underground current of manipulation in online conversations trying to make nuclear power look green. It has only one element of green, that is low carbon, everything else about it is the absolute worst of all power sources. I hope to never see anything but fusion nuclear power come back, and all fission power fade away.

shkkmo 7y ago
> . It has only one element of green, that is low carbon, everything else about it is the absolute worst of all power sources. Pretty blatantly false. Nuclear kills fewer people most, if not all other sources of power, per unit of energy generated. There are significant pollution issues from mining and burning coal and from manufacturing solar panels. Hydro produces ecological disruption on par with non other. Wind power has significant and downplayed effects of wildlife. The comparison of these factors is complicated and 'best' depends on what you specific environmental agenda is, but your rhetoric is flat out false.
- RobertRoberts 7y ago
  There is toxic waste leaking into the Columbia river from nuclear storage in Washington. (only one example) Everything else you described has a solution and can be cleaned up. The nuclear waste is so tragic and horrific and the effects so egregious I can only imagine you are grossly misinformed or a paid troll.
  - shkkmo 7y ago
    > The nuclear waste is so tragic and horrific and the effects so egregious I can only imagine you are grossly misinformed or a paid troll. More horrific than the millions killed by air pollution? This is not to say that nuclear waste isn't a significant problem and one we can do a much better job dealing with, but spreading blatant misinformation does not do anything to help anyone.

kortilla 7y ago

The green energy people have massive amounts of power. They are the reason solar and wind is being built all over the world at an astonishing rate. Their lack of support for nuclear as a base-load is a major factor in its stagnation. In the US a Democrat at the federal level who doesn’t support green energy will be sentenced to the gas chambers. That’s more than half of the House of Representatives and nearly half of the Senate. It has a strong chance of being the next presidency as well. If nuclear were actually supported by green energy people there would be a new plant going up in every state.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
pfdietz 7y ago
Solar and wind took off when their prices became competitive, then more than competitive, against the alternatives. You would have us believe this didn't matter, and their growth is instead caused by the greens suddenly acquiring political power, and that the simultaneous drop in prices was just an irrelevant coincidence.

belorn 7y ago

The current energy discussion in Swedish politics is Green vs Nuclear. No one is discussing a stop for burning fossil fuels in power plants or banning the import of coal/NG energy from neighbors. Not even a suggestion from the green party at a total stop. Instead we get a bunch of political tricks. If we export more green energy than we import coal energy then we can pretend that that the coal did not actually get released into the air as pollution. We plant trees and talk about carbon capture, and then we discretely cut it down and turn it into biomass fuel and call it carbon neutral. Somehow that turn into negative carbon, while at the same time the old coal power plants can be reused to burn biomass and natural gas. In the latest political debate the green party representative came with this great comeback. People who want to reduce global warming with nuclear are wrong because that side want to lower taxes on gasoline. Thus nuclear is bad. I would like to think that this is isolated to the Swedish green party but somehow I doubt it. No one want to talk about a complete ban on burning fossil fuels for power. I don't have much hope with nuclear advocates, but the current data is hard to dismiss. Looking at EU the lowest gCO2eq/kWh emitting energy grids are Norway, Sweden, Iceland and France. Norway has more hydro than they need. Iceland got plenty of hydro and geothermal. Sweden got nuclear and hydro. France got nuclear. Every other energy grid in EU, regardless of political alignment, is dirtier. Even Denmark with it amazing investment into wind is at this moment (https://www.electricitymap.org/?page=country&solar=false&remote=true&wind=false&countryCode=DK-DK1 https://www.electricitymap.org/?page=country&solar=false&rem...) 400% more polluting than Sweden.

nothrabannosir 7y ago
Norway sells most of their green energy and buys fossil fuel energy in return. 98% of their energy production is renewables, but only 9% of their consumption is. A solid 58% of their consumption comes from fossil fuels. Source: Norway’s department of energy. https://www.nve.no/energiforsyning/varedeklarasjon/nasjonal-varedeklarasjon-2018/ https://www.nve.no/energiforsyning/varedeklarasjon/nasjonal-... This isn’t just accounting pedantry: the countries they sell their renewables to use those, to (rightfully) claim green energy consumption. Norway then does the same, but based on their production. Reminiscent of the expression “success has many parents, but failure is an orphan.”

specialist 7y ago

Probably file under "economics": The nukes and communists share the No True Scotman's defense: the prior failures weren't true communism, err, nuke power. If only we had clapped louder, Tinkerbell would fly. Maybe only Tennessee was more pro nuclear than Washington. Alas. Incompetence, corruption, delays, and cost overruns aborted the nukes under construction, which then killed all hopes of building more nukes. For decades, WPPSS (pronounced "Whoops!") was the punchline for local jokes about government, waste, bureaucracy. My favorite was a two-billed baseball hat that said "WPPSS", kinda like this: https://www.villagehatshop.com/photos/product-alternate/giant/4511390S94603/alt/94603.jpg https://www.villagehatshop.com/photos/product-alternate/gian... -- https://www.historylink.org/File/5482 https://www.historylink.org/File/5482 "Several factors combined to ruin construction schedules and to drive costs to three and four times the original estimates. Inflation and design changes constantly plagued all the projects. Builders often got ahead of designers who modified their drawings to conform to what had been built. Safety changes imposed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission increased costs too, but the biggest cause of delays and overruns was mismanagement of the process by the WPPSS. The directors and the managers of the system had no experience in nuclear engineering or in projects of this scale. System managers were unable to develop a unified and comprehensive means of choosing, directing, and supervising contractors. One contractor, already shown to be incompetent, was retained for more work. In a well-publicized example, a pipe hanger was built and rebuilt 17 times. Quality control inspectors complained of inadequate work that went unaddressed." (Attempted emphasis mine.)

api 7y ago

I'm sure its three since fossil fuel lobbies are certainly involved.

naasking 7y ago

> And terrible economics. I think you mean "terribly inflexible regulations".