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They always promise it will be safe but it usually isn't. I wish we just were not wasting so much money and effort on this. Solar and wind are already far cheap
by hristov 7y ago
They always promise it will be safe but it usually isn't. I wish we just were not wasting so much money and effort on this. Solar and wind are already far cheaper, we need to be researching energy storage solutions to make the already cheap solar and wind energy more reliable and not looking for another dangerous boondoggle to make energy for, if we are lucky, ten times the price of solar. Even before the corona-virus hit, this past summer solar cell prices were 15 cents per watt. This is about half of what it was last year. Offshore wind prices are difficult to pin down in a per watt metric, but power companies are saying they are even cheaper than solar and the cheapest option. This is where our efforts should be pointed. We already have the cheap and safe energy we just need to make it more usable and reliable on the grid.
This is all institutional inertia. I know there are a lot of very smart people that studied fission and wanted to dedicate their careers to it and now they are really pissed off that the field is declining rapidly. I know they will all write angry posts in response and down vote me rapidly. I am sorry, I feel bad for you all but I do not wish to risk my life just so you have careers doing something unnecessary and dangerous. You are all very smart I am sure you can re-target your expertise towards power electronics, solid state physics or many of the other fields of physics that are hot right now.
And there is a lot of institutional inertia as well. During the cold war there was an endless stream of tax payer money pointed at anything and everything nuclear and now a lot of the institutions that benefited from it are fighting tooth and nail for relevance. I have the same thing to say to them -- there are other very needed and useful fields where you can direct your efforts.
- pas 7y agoIt's already safer than almost all forms of electricity generation (and probably cheaper in bulk than solar and wind). However, it doesn't matter, because market forces favor small incremental additions, changes, and there is not enough inertia to properly do a 50+ plant megaproject.
- ehsankia 7y ago> They always promise it will be safe but it usually isn't. What is "it" here? Fukushima for example was built in the 70s with a design which was even older. That seem like a very strange bar for "always promise it will be safe". What nuclear plant designed in this century has ever been shown to not be safe? Are we always going to stay stuck on false promises made half a century ago?
- aksss 7y agoI question whether it is ultimately cheaper, if all subsidies were taken away, the natural resource extraction and transportation costs are considered, the relatively short lifespan, e-waste and intermittent generation all taken into an account. I don’t know but I think what we see as “cheap solar/wind” is about as illusory as “cheap gas”. I’m not saying nuclear is “cheap” but relative to its reliability, productivity, lifespan balanced against its footprint, waste, etc, I’d believe that it were cheaper and more beneficial for all in the long run that wind/solar/tidal solutions. There’s a place for renewables, but replacement of fossil fuels seems like too big of an ask.
- p_l 7y agoIt's been only in last two years that a wind power plant was built in Poland without direct subsidy, and there's still "green certificate" trading scheme that is an effective subsidy. Spain switched from direct subsidies to big beefy "guaranteed purchase" 10 year contract... in 2017.