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Renewables are what you should compare nuclear with. And by your own stats they win even there. Framing it as a contest versus fossil fuels is building a straw

Renewables are what you should compare nuclear with. And by your own stats they win even there. Framing it as a contest versus fossil fuels is building a strawman nowadays.

kergonath 5y ago
Go on, then, compare away. Both in terms of deaths/kWh and CO2/kWh, nuclear is equivalent or better than most renewable you could name. There are arguments against nuclear, but these aren’t them.
- Gwypaas 5y ago
  Yep. So close you can call it equal, unless future deaths from groundwater pollution where to happen from leakage. So lets discount that and focus on the side which allocates capital and brings projects to completion. The cheapest renewables are currently a magnitude cheaper per KWH.
  - kergonath 5y ago
    > unless future deaths from groundwater pollution where to happen Surely you have a risk assessment for this, or can point to holes in the existing ones? No industry is clean by definition and at the moment both wind turbines and solar panels depend on local industry in China, which is quite bad even by European standards and also runs on coal. And then there is the insanity of cutting down forests to put solar panels. > The cheapest renewables are currently a magnitude cheaper per KWH. They are only if you include subsidies and neglect to account for storage. But that’s not really relevant as I am not arguing against renewables. Both renewables and nuclear have different profiles, different advantages, and different use cases. And a combination is much cheaper than using only either. The thing is, though, that by saying that nuclear is as bad as fossil fuels, we contribute to expanding our use of fossil fuels in the future, which is orders of magnitude worse than all the nuclear accidents that ever happened or are likely to happen. There is no way of framing Germany’s decision to close early perfectly functioning nuclear reactors only to build gas-fired power plants as a win for either the climate or humanity.
    - tcfhgj 5y ago
      > There is no way of framing Germany’s decision to close early perfectly functioning nuclear reactors only to build gas-fired power plants as a win for either the climate or humanity. It can be as long as this plan is not realized: gas is good for storing renewable energy over longer periods of time. Germany needs some way of compensating fluctuations of renewables over longer periods of times
    - drran 5y ago
      > They are only if you include subsidies and neglect to account for storage. Hey, nuclear energy is heavily subsidized by government, and it badly needs batteries for storage too. For example, insurance for nuclear stations is provided by government for free, because its price is sky-high. If we include cost of insurance into the price of nuclear energy, its price will be too high for economy. Nuclear can support base load only. For day-to-day management, a hydro, gas, coal, or batteries are necessary. Nuclear is not an option to reduce CO2 emissions substantially without hydro or batteries. We use nuclear power for decades already.
  - xigoi 5y ago
    Nuclear can be built anywhere and can provide power at any time. What renewable has these properties?
    - iso1210 5y ago
      Nuclear can't seem to be built anywhen, it seems to take decades and cost an order of magnitude more per kWh than offshore wind. It can't be built anywhere either, given the local protests (personally I'd rather have a nuclear plant than a coal plant a few miles away, but for some reason people don't like that idea)
      - kergonath 5y ago
        > it seems to take decades This seems to be pure incompetence on our collective part. The Chinese do it on time without much trouble. If you take the EPRs, all the delays are supply chain and contractors issues, and a moving regulatory target. Nothing about that is specific to nuclear. > cost an order of magnitude more per kWh than offshore wind. Not quite, but a bit more. I don’t have the data offhand, but EDF Energy’s offshore wind farms have a similar cost per kWh compared to Hinckley C. Also, in an all-intermittent grid, you need to add the cost of storage, which is far from negligible. The true advantage of wind is that you can scale the project in a much finer way (you can’t build half a nuclear reactor). > It can't be built anywhere either, given the local protests This is a problem in all cases. People are not thrilled about wind turbines or solar farms in their backyards either.
jevoten 5y ago
And yet fossil fuels are still funded, and even subsidized, instead of nuclear. By all means try and get 100% of power from wind and solar, but we're not there yet. And until we are, and they can provide the required baseload power, it's not a strawman at all.
- Gwypaas 5y ago
  Yes, fossil funding and subsidies should have been removed some 30 years ago. At least. Can't argue with that. Baseload as a term does not exist on the producer side. Simply by chance the cheapest sources of energy were the most inflexible ones. This is coal and nuclear, they therefore got coined as "baseload" power generation. Today they aren't cheapest anymore and unsurprisingly suffer. On the other hand, a base demand exist on the consumer side, that is true. But due to electricity being electricity it does not matter how it's met. Nuclear doesn't produce any other better kind of electricity. That's the gear strength of it, it is fungible.
  - CryptoPunk 5y ago
    Electricity transmission is costly, and that's assuming there's the infrastructure in place to do it, which, more often than not, is not the case. This idea that electricity exists as a fungible resource on a global market is totally false. In practice, switching too quickly to reliance on renewables has resulted in poor people seeing their electricity bills skyrocket and greater demand on coal plants when renewables fall short and nuclear plants are no longer running to provide base power.

Renewables are what you should compare nuclear with. And by your own stats they win even there. Framing it as a contest versus fossil fuels is building a strawman nowadays.

kergonath 5y ago

Go on, then, compare away. Both in terms of deaths/kWh and CO2/kWh, nuclear is equivalent or better than most renewable you could name. There are arguments against nuclear, but these aren’t them.

Gwypaas 5y ago
Yep. So close you can call it equal, unless future deaths from groundwater pollution where to happen from leakage. So lets discount that and focus on the side which allocates capital and brings projects to completion. The cheapest renewables are currently a magnitude cheaper per KWH.
- kergonath 5y ago
  > unless future deaths from groundwater pollution where to happen Surely you have a risk assessment for this, or can point to holes in the existing ones? No industry is clean by definition and at the moment both wind turbines and solar panels depend on local industry in China, which is quite bad even by European standards and also runs on coal. And then there is the insanity of cutting down forests to put solar panels. > The cheapest renewables are currently a magnitude cheaper per KWH. They are only if you include subsidies and neglect to account for storage. But that’s not really relevant as I am not arguing against renewables. Both renewables and nuclear have different profiles, different advantages, and different use cases. And a combination is much cheaper than using only either. The thing is, though, that by saying that nuclear is as bad as fossil fuels, we contribute to expanding our use of fossil fuels in the future, which is orders of magnitude worse than all the nuclear accidents that ever happened or are likely to happen. There is no way of framing Germany’s decision to close early perfectly functioning nuclear reactors only to build gas-fired power plants as a win for either the climate or humanity.
  - tcfhgj 5y ago
    > There is no way of framing Germany’s decision to close early perfectly functioning nuclear reactors only to build gas-fired power plants as a win for either the climate or humanity. It can be as long as this plan is not realized: gas is good for storing renewable energy over longer periods of time. Germany needs some way of compensating fluctuations of renewables over longer periods of times
  - drran 5y ago
    > They are only if you include subsidies and neglect to account for storage. Hey, nuclear energy is heavily subsidized by government, and it badly needs batteries for storage too. For example, insurance for nuclear stations is provided by government for free, because its price is sky-high. If we include cost of insurance into the price of nuclear energy, its price will be too high for economy. Nuclear can support base load only. For day-to-day management, a hydro, gas, coal, or batteries are necessary. Nuclear is not an option to reduce CO2 emissions substantially without hydro or batteries. We use nuclear power for decades already.
- xigoi 5y ago
  Nuclear can be built anywhere and can provide power at any time. What renewable has these properties?
  - iso1210 5y ago
    Nuclear can't seem to be built anywhen, it seems to take decades and cost an order of magnitude more per kWh than offshore wind. It can't be built anywhere either, given the local protests (personally I'd rather have a nuclear plant than a coal plant a few miles away, but for some reason people don't like that idea)
    - kergonath 5y ago
      > it seems to take decades This seems to be pure incompetence on our collective part. The Chinese do it on time without much trouble. If you take the EPRs, all the delays are supply chain and contractors issues, and a moving regulatory target. Nothing about that is specific to nuclear. > cost an order of magnitude more per kWh than offshore wind. Not quite, but a bit more. I don’t have the data offhand, but EDF Energy’s offshore wind farms have a similar cost per kWh compared to Hinckley C. Also, in an all-intermittent grid, you need to add the cost of storage, which is far from negligible. The true advantage of wind is that you can scale the project in a much finer way (you can’t build half a nuclear reactor). > It can't be built anywhere either, given the local protests This is a problem in all cases. People are not thrilled about wind turbines or solar farms in their backyards either.

jevoten 5y ago

And yet fossil fuels are still funded, and even subsidized, instead of nuclear. By all means try and get 100% of power from wind and solar, but we're not there yet. And until we are, and they can provide the required baseload power, it's not a strawman at all.

Gwypaas 5y ago
Yes, fossil funding and subsidies should have been removed some 30 years ago. At least. Can't argue with that. Baseload as a term does not exist on the producer side. Simply by chance the cheapest sources of energy were the most inflexible ones. This is coal and nuclear, they therefore got coined as "baseload" power generation. Today they aren't cheapest anymore and unsurprisingly suffer. On the other hand, a base demand exist on the consumer side, that is true. But due to electricity being electricity it does not matter how it's met. Nuclear doesn't produce any other better kind of electricity. That's the gear strength of it, it is fungible.
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  Electricity transmission is costly, and that's assuming there's the infrastructure in place to do it, which, more often than not, is not the case. This idea that electricity exists as a fungible resource on a global market is totally false. In practice, switching too quickly to reliance on renewables has resulted in poor people seeing their electricity bills skyrocket and greater demand on coal plants when renewables fall short and nuclear plants are no longer running to provide base power.