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Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

445 points by robin_reala 4y ago

ageofwant 4y ago
The Greens' idiotic anti-nuclear stance has empowered and embolden decades of coal and oil exploration and proliferation. As a Green voter I desperately hope this pattern gets adopted and replicated here in Australia the sooner the better.
- kdtsh 4y ago
  Incorrect, that would be Rupert Murdoch.
- sexy_panda 4y ago
  Green parties never endorsed nuclear energy. Maybe you're voting for the wrong party?
  - ageofwant 4y ago
    Perhaps adopting nuclear energy is not the only thing I care about ?
- raxxorraxor 4y ago
  It isn't idiotic. While it is partially ideological reasoning behind their rejection, nuclear power is overall a bad deal with current technologies. France might have problems operating theirs because they have a drought and rivers aren't able to cool the plants. Uranium is only available in limited supply additionally to the high costs of nuclear energy this will become a problem in the long term. We only recently have opened the first permanent storage for nuclear waste (would need to look up if it really opened). Part of the problems are regulation, taxes and missing expertise. I guess Finland wants nuclear energy because prices skyrocketed as Russia capped the lines. But nuclear energy could never be a solution to solve that deficit.
  - ageofwant 4y ago
    Nuclear waste is process and reactor specific. These are engineering problems and are several magnitudes of order smaller problems to deal with that dealing with carbon waste.
    - raxxorraxor 4y ago
      No, it is not a small problem. There are processing plants that show elevated cancer rates in the population living near them and a significant part of radioactivity is just pushed into rivers or the ocean. That is after we have forbidden the practice to just drop nuclear waste in barrels but this is still a legislative shortcoming. Sure, there are better reactor designs and processing methods but they aren't available yet. We should never exclude fission power completely, just that it isn't a good option right now. If research is inhibited by not using bad and costly technologies, we need other sources of funding. That is an issue that could very well need solving.
      - ageofwant 4y ago
        I did not say it was a small problem, I said the current problem of stopping CO2 pollution and removing what we already have pumped into the environment over the last 200 years are orders of magnitude larger.
  - Beltiras 4y ago
    There are good solutions to the problems you pose. Most of the problems with fission energy generation is due to PWRs and using fuel pellets instead of liquid fuel. Current technology burns only 3% of the fuel in pellets before having to replace them. MSRs can burn 97% of their fuel. Solid fuel nuclear reactors have byproducts that are radioactive for millions of years. The byproducts of MSRs are radioactive for hundreds of years. MSRs can actually burn the dirty remains of the nuclear fuel tossed aside during the 20th century.
- jamil7 4y ago
  Sorry, I'm kind of hijacking this comment. Honest question, would Australia actually need nuclear? The whole continent looks like it could become a renewable powerhouse for wind/solar/hydro, there's also quite a lot of lithium there from what I understand.
  - ageofwant 4y ago
    Australia exports millions of tons of thermal coal annually, we have vast gas fields of WA. These are profitable because a international market exist. The market exist because of a lack of affordable alternatives. So no, with enough baseload tech Australia will be probably be OK without nuclear. Solar to H2/Ammonia for example.
chadash 4y ago
I have heard a lot of chatter recently about how nuclear has fallen out of favor among certain circles on the left. Can someone explain what the reasons for that are?
- HideousKojima 4y ago
  What do you mean? The left has been opposed to nuclear since the 60's and 70's, it's been part of pretty much every green party's platform for decades. Dropping opposition to nuclear by some parts of the left is the new phenomenon. If nuclear is falling out of favor with the left then that's simply a return to the status quo.
- xiaq 4y ago
  The green party started out as an anti-nuclear party: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_party
  - mikelward 4y ago
    It gets even more interesting. The Tasmanian Greens are often thought of as the first green party, and they started out as an anti-hydro party. (Well, against a specific dam.) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Tasmania_Group https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Tasmania_Group
- nicoburns 4y ago
  The historical reasons for the opposition are a lot to do with opposition to nuclear weapons, and to a lesser extent environmental concerns around both waste storage/disposal and the impact of catastrophic failure events.
- happytoexplain 4y ago
  I'm not aware of a change, politically, except perhaps in the opposite direction (more people on the left supporting nuclear power - but that seems to have been slowly going on for many years at this point). Those who oppose nuclear don't trust the long term effects of how nuclear waste is stored, and they don't think the tradeoff between how horrible it is when something goes wrong and how rarely it happens is at an acceptable balance. Of course, these are the main two obvious points of examination from anybody arguing the cons of nuclear power - not just people on the political left.
api 4y ago
Wait… someone in the realm of politics changed their mind in a… sane… rational direction? I feel like I could count instances of that in my lifetime on one hand. Everywhere on the political spectrum everyone seems to have been utterly losing their minds for a long time.
- sexy_panda 4y ago
  Running nuclear power plants isn't a sane thing to do, but let's pretend Chernobyl, Fukushima and Three Mile Island never happend.
  - RealityVoid 4y ago
    Yeah, let's pretend thousands of people dying prematurely because of pollution isn't happening as well. Perfect is the enemy of good and looking for a "perfect" solution (zero carbon, zero risk) is just causing suffering and driving us to early extinction.
    - Gwypaas 4y ago
      The alternative isn't fossil fuels. It's renewables. Compare against reality instead of your made up competition.
      - orangecat 4y ago
        The reality is that no country has entirely replaced fossil fuels with renewables. If you're advocating shutting down nuclear plants while any amount of power is coming from coal, you are not being serious.
        ncmncm 4y ago
        Shutting down Fukushima in the years before the earthquake would have been the correct choice no matter what else was going on.
      - gruturo 4y ago
toxik 4y ago
The big problem for nuclear in Sweden at least is that no new staff has been trained for a long time. We couldn’t really run our shutdown reactors if we tried.
- hericium 4y ago
  Last time I visited Sweden, the mentality there seemed a bit like changing the mind on something like approach to energy is unthinkable. "We said in the 70s that nuclear is bad, so we can't just revisit this mindset now, just like that, 50 years later". It may be hard for them to get off nuclear though, as most Swedes (that I met) seem not to care about costs of electricity at all. Lightbulbs on, when leaving a house. Not ever getting into an elevator with a stranger - better for it to ride twice. Petroleum cars are expensive and EVs free to use...
- hans1729 4y ago
  The same applies for Germany; our plants that have been shut down can, de facto, not be reactivated. The effort would be too big, and the industry lacks the experts as priorities shifted for obvious reasons. In other news, Germany just started a partnership with Quatar to import Gas, because, you know, we don't want to support abusive regimes :-) Everything just gets more messy and distorted by the day.
  - hericium 4y ago
    There's also coal electricity from Poland and France seems to be nuking up to serve as Europe's reserve battery for when greens aren't producing or a large exporter misbehaves in politics next time.
    - _ph_ 4y ago
      Often enough, France cannot even power itself, less so export electricity 24/7. And the number of operational reactors is going down, not up. France is only a strong exporter in the times where there is low demand - exporting surplus nuclear energy is of course far better than regulating the reactors down - both from an economic standpoint as well as an ecologic one.
BoxOfRain 4y ago
If the Greens in England and Wales dropped their opposition to nuclear and also binned off a few of their more anti-egalitarian positions (I cannot in good faith support criminal sentencing where a man goes to jail but a woman doesn't for the same crime for example) and I'd probably vote for them at this point. They've only recently been seen as a 'serious' party with mainstream appeal but climate change doesn't really care for our political sensibilities.
- OJFord 4y ago
  > a few of their more anti-egalitarian positions (I cannot in good faith support criminal sentencing where a man goes to jail but a woman doesn't for the same crime for example) That's nuts, haven't heard that before (not that I'm a supporter or anything), any more info on that - what crime for example? Searching not turning up much, since it's being sued for the opposite sexism at the moment; grepping https://policy.greenparty.org.uk/cj.html https://policy.greenparty.org.uk/cj.html, are you referring to these? > CJ381 Recognising the nature of the female prison population, with high levels of mental illness, experience of being a victim of crimes such as sexual assault and domestic violence, and caring responsibilities for children, the only women who should be in custody are those very few that commit serious and violent crimes and who present a threat to the public. > CJ382 For the vast majority of women in the criminal justice system, solutions in the community are more appropriate. Community sentences must be designed to take account of women’s particular vulnerabilities and domestic and childcare commitments. The restrictions placed on sentencers around breaches of community orders must be made more flexible. (Emphasis added.) Does seem a bit weird.
  - lbriner 4y ago
    I think I understand where they are coming from but let's not pretend that dads in prison doesn't also have a massive effect on the development of their children (or not!). In some ways the only people who should be in prison are the most violent and who are a danger to the public but we don't have a great range of alternatives for someone who e.g. steals a large amount of money but is not dangerous to the public per-se.
csours 4y ago
If Germany's Green Party takes the same line, I think it will be a huge blow to Russia. Also, it's about time.
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  If they did, Putin would cheer. It takes 20 years to build a nuclear plant, so the likely result world be that Germany would be "temporarily" dependent on Russian gas for another 20 years.
- jansan 4y ago
  The German green party demanded a ban on sending weapons to conflict zones just at the end of last year, now they would love to send all our army's equipment to Ukraine immediately. They fought tooth and nail for the ban of genertical modified food, but now are in favor of a mandatory mRNA vaccination even for young people. So why shouldn't they make another 180 on their fight against nuclear power, for which they could finally claim victory after the last three nuclear power plants will be switched off by the end of this year.
  - projektfu 4y ago
    > They fought tooth and nail for the ban of genertical modified food, but now are in favor of a mandatory mRNA vaccination even for young people. This is a consistent position. mRNA vaccination is not genetic modification. On the other hand, adenoviral-vector vaccines are genetically modified organisms.
    - jansan 4y ago
      Eating genetically modified food isn't genetic modification, either.
      - Aachen 4y ago
        I don't think any credible person or German party ever claimed that. It's the food you're eating that's modified, not that you get genetically modified from eating it (Of course gmo is a thousand times better than previous practices with random mutation)
epistasis 4y ago
This is great, and hopefully it will stop the premature shutdown of existing nuclear reactors. But it's pretty tiny climate news overall. Nuclear reactors are aging out and nobody in Western Europe or the US seems to know how to build in a cost competitive way anymore. Deploying 5GW of solar and storage, or 3-4GW of wind, is far easier, faster, and cheaper than trying to build a new reactor, which won't come on line for a bare minimum of 10 years, best case. We don't have that long to wait to start replacing nearly all of our fossil fuel infrastructure, and replace the nuclear reactors that are reaching end of life. If nuclear was going to be a climate solution, then all the nuclear reactors started in the 2000s needed to complete on time and on schedule to encourage the building of more. Instead it's 2022 and we are still waiting to see how bad the financial disaster will be for them. That's not the route towards building more nuclear.
- layer8 4y ago
  > nobody in Western Europe or the US seems to know how to build in a cost competitive way anymore Given the huge subsidies for nuclear reactors, did they ever know? Regardless of the environmental merits, it’s not a cheap technology, and due to the limited number of reactors built it’s not exactly a competitive market either. At least at this point in time, building new reactors is necessarily slow and expensive.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    And, by the time one can be completed, it will be unable to compete with other generation built and deployed since the project started. Bidding only at night, it is even less competitive, because costs are 24/7, so prices would need to be 3x higher.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  It's not that simple. People quote low prices for renewables today that we might be scoffing at in 50 years just like we scoff at the early claim that "nuclear power is too cheap to meter" Specifically, you can't compare a nuclear reactor that delivers predictable power to solar and wind systems that deliver power when they want to deliver power. Germany has already had episodes where the spot price for electricity went under zero -- yet to make the electric grid work they have to burn natural gas when renewables aren't available. The story for storage looks better than it ever has but it is still orders of magnitude more expensive more expensive than it needs to be to be practical. People fantasize about feeding excess renewable energy into systems that run intermittently that capture carbon directly from air, synthesize hydrogen and e-fuels, etc. Trouble is that most of the systems have a high capital cost: e-fuel production has a crazy high capital cost as it is, if the factory is running only 20% of the time then bam... capital costs are 5x greater per unit. The LWR struggles to compete with other energy sources for several reasons, not least of which is the high capital cost of the steam turbine and associated heat exchangers. There is hope: https://www.moltexenergy.com/ https://www.moltexenergy.com/
rdl 4y ago
Is this a case of politics, like science, proceeds one funeral at a time? Did the 1970s anti-nuclear people age out of the party leadership and membership so this could get revisited?
- hans1729 4y ago
  Not just aging out, idealism as a political motive is essentially dead, because it's a luxury that can't be afforded anymore. The new green line - everywhere - isn't "nuclear bad", it's "act on climate change or everybody, including your kids, will pay the price". The entire board changed, figures and strategies notwithstanding.
- lbriner 4y ago
  There is a healthy dose of pragmatism. Probably, very few people would choose nuclear if there were loads of alternatives, the capital cost and build times are insane and despite improvements, let's not pretend that nuclear fuel is easy to deal with. But take away gas and coal and you are left with the green alternatives like solar, wind and waves which all have their own challenges the first two have high variability and aren't great for base-load and the third has challenges building equipment that can survive the extremely harsh ocean currents for a period of time that will not leave a trail of rusting relics (afaik).
- weberer 4y ago
  I think it's more to do with the fact that the rhetoric around climate change has shifted. Now the official Green Party stance is that it is the most urgent issue of our time and must be combated by any means necessary. Of course, this conflicts with their (former) anti-nuclear stance, and they've been repeatedly criticized for this hypocrisy. I've even heard young environmentalists speculate that the Greens were secretly in bed with the oil companies.
cies 4y ago
the fossil industry loooooved the green hair folks fighting nuclear. now slowly everyone finds out that with "only renewables", thus without nuclear in the mix, we simply cannot guarantee interrupt free electrical power at scale in most places.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Now fossil industry looooves new nuke projects, because they divert money from renewables for at least a decade until they are finally cancelled.
  - cies 4y ago
    Any source this actually happened?
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      Literally every time. Except not always cancelled.
photochemsyn 4y ago
Funding for the source is interesting: > "The Alliance for Science is a global communications initiative based at the Boyce Thompson Institute, an independent nonprofit research institute affiliated with Cornell University. Our primary source of support is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation." The article does gloss over where Finland would source its uranium from. A GW-scale nuclear power plant burns through ~200 tons of fuel rods per year, and Finland's supplier seems to have been the Russian state-owned uranium outfit Rosatom: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/rosatoms-unit-seeks-compensation-finlands-fennovoima-2022-05-06/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/rosatoms-unit-seeks-... Finland does have plans to start mining and refining uranium ore, but it looks like they'll produce only enough for one reactor: > "Last year, 35% of Finnish electricity production came from the country’s four nuclear reactors, whose owners Fortum and TVO buy their nuclear fuel from other countries including Russia, France and Canada." Anyone holding ownership in Canada's high-grade uranium ores is likely going to do well by this move. About that... https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/25/bill-gates-nuclear-power-will-absolutely-be-politically-acceptable.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/25/bill-gates-nuclear-power-wil... Regardless, countries like Finland which are solar-limited for much of the year are the obvious place for nuclear. Whether they can make their domestic uranium mining operations 'clean and fossil-fuel free', and secure reasonably priced contracts for importing the rest of their required reactor fuel, remains to be seen.
- belorn 4y ago
  > Finland's supplier seems to have been the Russian state-owned uranium outfit Rosatom "TVO has bought uranium from Canada, Australia and Africa, had it converted to UF6 in Canada and France, and enriched in Russia. Fuel fabrication has been in Germany, Sweden and Spain. Fortum predecessor company IVOl contracted for a complete fuel supply service from Russia for the Loviisa plant." (https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/finland.aspx https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...) For a bit more numbers, wikipedia has this: "In 2009, Finland imported nuclear fuel from Sweden (40%), Russia (18%), Germany (2%) and other countries (40%)." Fortum is those 18%. The Swedish plant is to my knowledge American owned, and from the numbers I have seen, the biggest source of uranium that it processes comes from Niger. Canada, Australia and Kazakstan isn't that far however, each sitting around 20%.
stjohnswarts 4y ago
I've been predicting this for a while. Nuclear is the best solution we have in hand right now for scaling back the climate disaster. It's better to hedge than throw all your money into one bet.
Synaesthesia 4y ago
One of the biggest issues which makes it hard for the public to judge how well nuclear does, is the association of nuclear power with nuclear weapons which are totally shrouded in secrecy. Nuclear power and nuclear weapons were developed together, often with nuclear power plants providing fuel for the weapons. All of this data, including disposal and environmental issues are completely classified.
DeathArrow 4y ago
If we would pour into nuclear research the kind of money we pour into renewables, nuclear power would become safer and cheaper.
- bayesian_horse 4y ago
  You still have to haul around huge amounts of radioactive materials with whatever technology. That alone is a big factor in the impossible risk calculations. So far there has never been a dirty bomb. What if the pro-nuclear fanboys get their wish and we solve the energy problems of the developing world using nuclear power? What if a modestly developed country gets overrun or overturned? I don't like the odds. Most risk calculations don't take into account that people seem to make mistakes or might eventually even blow up a reactor intentionally. It's unthinkable until it happens.
  - erosenbe0 4y ago
    Radioactive material in the United States largely doesn't move. It is stored in concrete casks on site that sit there even after decommissioning. You can see with binoculars or satellite photo. Also, same impossible calculations apply to any power tech. Number of people injured installing rooftop solar or wind, poisoned by graphite mining, trucking accidents, aluminum production, and the like.
    - bayesian_horse 4y ago
      With "moving around" I mean mainly getting it out of the ground, processing, installing and waste storage. That alone has proven to be problematic enough. And no, other power technologies are not as impossible to estimate. Nuclear power plants are very unique in the kind of mess they can make, see Fukushima and Tschernobyl. Those sites still need looking after and cleaning up, the final cost can't even be estimated yet. It's always been the accidents that supposedly can't happen and never happened. With other technologies not so much. Falling of a rooftop is a very knowable thing. Calculating the likelihood a nation state fails and terrorists get access to nuclear material for a dirty bomb? Never happened. But if nuclear power is your solution to the climate crisis, it needs to be everywhere...
Sharlin 4y ago
Some context: The Green Party had long been diametrically opposed to nuclear, to the extent that they have twice exited a coalition government in protest of granting additional reactor permits. Over the past ten years their position has gradually shifted though, thanks to STEM-oriented Greens in particular, as it has become obvious that AGW is a bigger threat than nuclear. This in spite of several setbacks: – Obviously, the Fukushima disaster of 2011. – The fact that the Olkiluoto 3 reactor project [1], a 1600MW PWR unit, was plagued by chronic delays and cost overruns – it is only now being connected to the grid, over ten years behind schedule. OL3's fundamental problem was that the European nuclear industry simply was not up to the task of delivering a first-of-its-kind, ambitious third-gen reactor after a fifteen-year hiatus during which no new nuclear power plants were built in Europe. – Another planned nuclear plant, Hanhikivi [2], had problems finding a Western reactor supplier; after some arguably rather shady dealings, a contract was made with Rosatom, the state nuclear corporation of Russia. This received some well-earned criticism, but Finnish decisionmakers (perhaps naively) wanted to think there was no political dimension to such an agreement. After February 24, the project is now almost certainly dead in the water, never having left the planning and design phase. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Unit_3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanhikivi_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanhikivi_Nuclear_Power_Plant
- Gravityloss 4y ago
  There have been some ideas floated around to use the Hanhikivi plant site for building small modular reactors (SMR:s).
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Now all the people who insisted the Greens had been co-opted by Big Oil will be completely silent about their having now been co-opted by Big Nuke. But Big Oil/Gas/Coal loves new nuke projects; each represents a decade or more of still buying fossil fuels, instead of incrementallly displacing fossil with renewables. What this really means is probably that their position is moot, because no new nukes are planned or likely. Delays and cost overruns on a nuke construction project are, for many stakeholders, the whole point of the project. Actually beginning to deliver power to the grid is the end of their income stream, thus to be fought tooth and nail. The larger a project is, the more stakeholders it usually needs, and thus the more active participants who do not want it delivered. The prevalence of this dynamic varies from place to place; it has long been dominant in the US, not just for nuke projects, but for urban tunnels and other big public works projects.
dukeofdoom 4y ago
This might have something to do with Finland being energy reliant on Russia. Fact is Europe is reliant on Russia for energy, and much of the world for many base products. You can't sanction Russia, without causing pain to yourself. So most of the world didn't try, but with with the current peak levels of Anti Russia sentiments in the West, even the far left is forced into making pragmatic decisions.
0xTJ 4y ago
Uh, yeah, so should every green-type party. It's ridiculous to not be encouraging nuclear power when there are plenty of fossil-fuel power plants (especially coal) being operated and built. We can talk about switching away from nuclear when that's done. Nuclear power generation is far better for the environment and far safer (having cause many, many fewer deaths in history, per unit of power generated).
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Building nukes just means burning fossil fuels for another decade or more. Big Oil loves nuke projects.
  - 0xTJ 4y ago
    I don't see how you could justify that conclusion. Is it that nuclear power plants aren't built overnight, and until they're done current power generation needs to continue? Because in that case it's just the status quo, but with an end data. If it's the fact that the building of a power plant costs significant energy, then why is that your problem with it? You need to bootstrap at some point, and some countries have made the ridiculous decision to go backwards, undoing that investment. Also, "nukes" generally means nuclear weapons, not nuclear reactors. It feels like it's being used here to intentionally denigrate nuclear power generation.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      It is because money that would be building renewables that displace coal, oil and gas is instead tied up in construction, and not displacing any. When the project is finally cancelled, over budget and late, that money is spent and still not bringing renewables online. So, each nuke project eliminates substantial immediate, progressive, and permanent erosion of their market.
      - 0xTJ 4y ago
        Developing effective renewables does not preclude the development of nuclear power. Switching completely to renewables in the very short term is not feasible, and it will take particularly long in areas that aren't well-suited to any of the main renewable power technologies. Also, many governments provide ridiculous fossil fuel subsidies, which should be eliminated, freeing up money. New nuclear power plants will provide huge amounts of very-low-environmental-impact power for decades to come, it's not like its a wasted investment. Your second sentence seems to make the assumption that every nuclear power project will be cancelled, over budget and late, which is obviously wrong. The fact that you'd write that shows a bad-faith argument. You've also ignored the whole "nuke" thing. I strongly recommend watching this great Kurzgesagt video to help inform yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhAemz1v7dQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhAemz1v7dQ.
pimpampum 4y ago
Fision power is no long term solution https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kahih8RT1k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kahih8RT1k
- Aachen 4y ago
  Cookiewalled video is on the channel Sabine Hossenfelder (German theoretical phycisist), titled "Is Nuclear Power Green?" The conclusion chapter transcription: > What speaks in favor of nuclear is that it's climate-friendly, has a small landuse and creates power on demand. What speaks against it is that it's expensive and ultimately not renewable. The disadvantages could be alleviated with new technologies, but it's unclear whether that will work and even if it works, it almost certainly won't have a significant impact on climate change in the next twenty years. > It also speaks against nuclear power that people are afraid of it. Even if these fears are not rational, that doesn't mean they don't exist. If someone isn't comfortable near a nuclear power plant, that affects the quality of life and that can't just be dismissed. > There are two points I didn't discuss which you may have expected me to mention: one is nuclear proliferation and the risk posed by nuclear power plants during war times. This is certainly an important factor, but it's more political than scientific and that would be an entirely different discussion. The other point I didn't mention is nuclear waste. That's because I think it's a red herring which some activist groups are using in the attempt to scare people. For what I'm concerned, burying the stuff in a safe place solves the problem just fine. It's right that there aren't any final disposal sites at the moment, but Finland is expecting to open one next year and several other countries will follow. > And, no, provided adequate safety standards, I wouldn't have a problem with the nuclear waste deposit in my vicinity. > So, what did I learn from this? I learned that nuclear power has become economically even unappealing than it already was 20 years ago, and it's not clear this will ever change. Personally, I would say that this development can be left to the market. I'm not in favor of regulation that makes it even more regulation for us to reduce carbon emissions. To me, this just seems insane. In all fairness, it looks like nuclear won't help much, but then again, every little bit helps. Having said that, I think part of the reason the topic is so controversial is that, what you think is the best strategy depends on local conditions. There is no globally right decision. If your country has abundant solar and wind power, it might not make much sense in nuclear. Though you might want to keep in mind that climate change can affect wind and precipitation patterns in the long run. If your country is at a high risk of earthquakes, then maybe nuclear power just poses too high a risk. If on the other hand, renewables are unreliable in your region of the world, and you don't have a lot of space, and basically never see earthquakes, nuclear power might make a lot of sense. > In the end, I'm afraid my answer to the question "is nuclear power green?" is: it's complicated. --- I wonder if HN needs a "your content is in another castle: link-only comments aren't thoughtful or substantive" guideline, a la stackoverflow (combining the principles from here https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/225370/your-answer-is-in-another-castle-when-is-an-answer-not-an-answer https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/225370/your-answer-... and here https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
lessname 4y ago
I think one of the biggest issues with nuclear power is that they are designed to last decades yet they need to bee maintained properly operate safely over time, which can be a bit expensive and responsibility shifts over time so it gets "forgotten" easily and leaders can blame their predecessors if something bad happens. Here is a research about the safety status of nuclear power plants in switzerland: https://correctiv.org/top-stories/2018/09/12/brandgefaehrlich-so-marode-ist-der-brandschutz-in-europas-atomkraftwerken/ https://correctiv.org/top-stories/2018/09/12/brandgefaehrlic... - sadly in german only
- FunnyBadger 4y ago
  The same issue with roads and bridges in the US.
  - Krasnol 4y ago
    Holes in roads and bridges tend not to be as catastrophic as holes in reactors. Nice try though.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      If we can't even keep our bridges up, my confidence in maintaining nukes properly for decades is nil.
jum1p 4y ago
goodguyamerikan 4y ago
Nuclear power should not need any of endorsement from political parties. Only from scientists which it already has.
- _ph_ 4y ago
  No, there is no clear endorsement from "scientists".
- ncmncm 4y ago
  The people who know most about nukes do not endorse building more.
silencedogood3 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
xangel 4y ago
Finally some light in the tunnel! Hopefully other nations in the EU and worldwide will follow. German greens, I'm looking at you!
the-alchemist 4y ago
Seems like China is gonna be have the best nuclear energy tech in the near future. They currently use French and U.S. designs, but within a generation I bet they'll be making their own, probably better ones. """ Lufeng, run by China General Nuclear Power Group, will receive a pair of third-generation Hualong One pressurized water reactors. China General Nuclear and China National Nuclear Corp. say they together independently developed the advanced reactor, which is based on U.S. and French designs. Haiyang and Sanmen, which are run by State Power Investment Corp. and CNNC, respectively, will receive CAP1000 pressurized water reactors. The technology is based on the AP1000 reactor developed by Westinghouse. China had 53 nuclear power plants at the end of 2021 with an total generating capacity of about 55 gigawatts. The government plans to expand the scale to 70 GW by 2025. Capacity is expected to grow further until it reaches between 120 GW to 150 GW in 2030, which may be enough to surpass the U.S. and France. """ https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Energy/China-greenlights-6-new-nuclear-reactors-in-shift-away-from-coal#:~:text=China%20had%2053%20nuclear%20power,surpass%20the%20U.S.%20and%20France https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Energy/China-greenlights-6-....
falconroar 4y ago
Is the explicit threat of nuclear war by Russia a possible factor here? Ie. Developing nuclear energy would feed into developing nuclear weapons. From what I understand, the anti-war / anti-extinction angle was a primary motivation for at least early Green activists.

445 points by robin_reala 4y ago

The Greens' idiotic anti-nuclear stance has empowered and embolden decades of coal and oil exploration and proliferation. As a Green voter I desperately hope this pattern gets adopted and replicated here in Australia the sooner the better.

kdtsh 4y ago
Incorrect, that would be Rupert Murdoch.
sexy_panda 4y ago
Green parties never endorsed nuclear energy. Maybe you're voting for the wrong party?
- ageofwant 4y ago
  Perhaps adopting nuclear energy is not the only thing I care about ?
raxxorraxor 4y ago
It isn't idiotic. While it is partially ideological reasoning behind their rejection, nuclear power is overall a bad deal with current technologies. France might have problems operating theirs because they have a drought and rivers aren't able to cool the plants. Uranium is only available in limited supply additionally to the high costs of nuclear energy this will become a problem in the long term. We only recently have opened the first permanent storage for nuclear waste (would need to look up if it really opened). Part of the problems are regulation, taxes and missing expertise. I guess Finland wants nuclear energy because prices skyrocketed as Russia capped the lines. But nuclear energy could never be a solution to solve that deficit.
- ageofwant 4y ago
  Nuclear waste is process and reactor specific. These are engineering problems and are several magnitudes of order smaller problems to deal with that dealing with carbon waste.
  - raxxorraxor 4y ago
    No, it is not a small problem. There are processing plants that show elevated cancer rates in the population living near them and a significant part of radioactivity is just pushed into rivers or the ocean. That is after we have forbidden the practice to just drop nuclear waste in barrels but this is still a legislative shortcoming. Sure, there are better reactor designs and processing methods but they aren't available yet. We should never exclude fission power completely, just that it isn't a good option right now. If research is inhibited by not using bad and costly technologies, we need other sources of funding. That is an issue that could very well need solving.
    - ageofwant 4y ago
      I did not say it was a small problem, I said the current problem of stopping CO2 pollution and removing what we already have pumped into the environment over the last 200 years are orders of magnitude larger.
- Beltiras 4y ago
  There are good solutions to the problems you pose. Most of the problems with fission energy generation is due to PWRs and using fuel pellets instead of liquid fuel. Current technology burns only 3% of the fuel in pellets before having to replace them. MSRs can burn 97% of their fuel. Solid fuel nuclear reactors have byproducts that are radioactive for millions of years. The byproducts of MSRs are radioactive for hundreds of years. MSRs can actually burn the dirty remains of the nuclear fuel tossed aside during the 20th century.
jamil7 4y ago
Sorry, I'm kind of hijacking this comment. Honest question, would Australia actually need nuclear? The whole continent looks like it could become a renewable powerhouse for wind/solar/hydro, there's also quite a lot of lithium there from what I understand.
- ageofwant 4y ago
  Australia exports millions of tons of thermal coal annually, we have vast gas fields of WA. These are profitable because a international market exist. The market exist because of a lack of affordable alternatives. So no, with enough baseload tech Australia will be probably be OK without nuclear. Solar to H2/Ammonia for example.

chadash 4y ago

I have heard a lot of chatter recently about how nuclear has fallen out of favor among certain circles on the left. Can someone explain what the reasons for that are?

HideousKojima 4y ago
What do you mean? The left has been opposed to nuclear since the 60's and 70's, it's been part of pretty much every green party's platform for decades. Dropping opposition to nuclear by some parts of the left is the new phenomenon. If nuclear is falling out of favor with the left then that's simply a return to the status quo.
xiaq 4y ago
The green party started out as an anti-nuclear party: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_party
- mikelward 4y ago
  It gets even more interesting. The Tasmanian Greens are often thought of as the first green party, and they started out as an anti-hydro party. (Well, against a specific dam.) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Tasmania_Group https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Tasmania_Group
nicoburns 4y ago
The historical reasons for the opposition are a lot to do with opposition to nuclear weapons, and to a lesser extent environmental concerns around both waste storage/disposal and the impact of catastrophic failure events.
happytoexplain 4y ago
I'm not aware of a change, politically, except perhaps in the opposite direction (more people on the left supporting nuclear power - but that seems to have been slowly going on for many years at this point). Those who oppose nuclear don't trust the long term effects of how nuclear waste is stored, and they don't think the tradeoff between how horrible it is when something goes wrong and how rarely it happens is at an acceptable balance. Of course, these are the main two obvious points of examination from anybody arguing the cons of nuclear power - not just people on the political left.

api 4y ago

Wait… someone in the realm of politics changed their mind in a… sane… rational direction? I feel like I could count instances of that in my lifetime on one hand. Everywhere on the political spectrum everyone seems to have been utterly losing their minds for a long time.

sexy_panda 4y ago
Running nuclear power plants isn't a sane thing to do, but let's pretend Chernobyl, Fukushima and Three Mile Island never happend.
- RealityVoid 4y ago
  Yeah, let's pretend thousands of people dying prematurely because of pollution isn't happening as well. Perfect is the enemy of good and looking for a "perfect" solution (zero carbon, zero risk) is just causing suffering and driving us to early extinction.
  - Gwypaas 4y ago
    The alternative isn't fossil fuels. It's renewables. Compare against reality instead of your made up competition.
    - orangecat 4y ago
      The reality is that no country has entirely replaced fossil fuels with renewables. If you're advocating shutting down nuclear plants while any amount of power is coming from coal, you are not being serious.
      - ncmncm 4y ago
        Shutting down Fukushima in the years before the earthquake would have been the correct choice no matter what else was going on.
    - gruturo 4y ago

toxik 4y ago

The big problem for nuclear in Sweden at least is that no new staff has been trained for a long time. We couldn’t really run our shutdown reactors if we tried.

hericium 4y ago
Last time I visited Sweden, the mentality there seemed a bit like changing the mind on something like approach to energy is unthinkable. "We said in the 70s that nuclear is bad, so we can't just revisit this mindset now, just like that, 50 years later". It may be hard for them to get off nuclear though, as most Swedes (that I met) seem not to care about costs of electricity at all. Lightbulbs on, when leaving a house. Not ever getting into an elevator with a stranger - better for it to ride twice. Petroleum cars are expensive and EVs free to use...
hans1729 4y ago
The same applies for Germany; our plants that have been shut down can, de facto, not be reactivated. The effort would be too big, and the industry lacks the experts as priorities shifted for obvious reasons. In other news, Germany just started a partnership with Quatar to import Gas, because, you know, we don't want to support abusive regimes :-) Everything just gets more messy and distorted by the day.
- hericium 4y ago
  There's also coal electricity from Poland and France seems to be nuking up to serve as Europe's reserve battery for when greens aren't producing or a large exporter misbehaves in politics next time.
  - _ph_ 4y ago
    Often enough, France cannot even power itself, less so export electricity 24/7. And the number of operational reactors is going down, not up. France is only a strong exporter in the times where there is low demand - exporting surplus nuclear energy is of course far better than regulating the reactors down - both from an economic standpoint as well as an ecologic one.

BoxOfRain 4y ago

If the Greens in England and Wales dropped their opposition to nuclear and also binned off a few of their more anti-egalitarian positions (I cannot in good faith support criminal sentencing where a man goes to jail but a woman doesn't for the same crime for example) and I'd probably vote for them at this point. They've only recently been seen as a 'serious' party with mainstream appeal but climate change doesn't really care for our political sensibilities.

OJFord 4y ago
> a few of their more anti-egalitarian positions (I cannot in good faith support criminal sentencing where a man goes to jail but a woman doesn't for the same crime for example) That's nuts, haven't heard that before (not that I'm a supporter or anything), any more info on that - what crime for example? Searching not turning up much, since it's being sued for the opposite sexism at the moment; grepping https://policy.greenparty.org.uk/cj.html https://policy.greenparty.org.uk/cj.html, are you referring to these? > CJ381 Recognising the nature of the female prison population, with high levels of mental illness, experience of being a victim of crimes such as sexual assault and domestic violence, and caring responsibilities for children, the only women who should be in custody are those very few that commit serious and violent crimes and who present a threat to the public. > CJ382 For the vast majority of women in the criminal justice system, solutions in the community are more appropriate. Community sentences must be designed to take account of women’s particular vulnerabilities and domestic and childcare commitments. The restrictions placed on sentencers around breaches of community orders must be made more flexible. (Emphasis added.) Does seem a bit weird.
- lbriner 4y ago
  I think I understand where they are coming from but let's not pretend that dads in prison doesn't also have a massive effect on the development of their children (or not!). In some ways the only people who should be in prison are the most violent and who are a danger to the public but we don't have a great range of alternatives for someone who e.g. steals a large amount of money but is not dangerous to the public per-se.

csours 4y ago

If Germany's Green Party takes the same line, I think it will be a huge blow to Russia. Also, it's about time.

bryanlarsen 4y ago
If they did, Putin would cheer. It takes 20 years to build a nuclear plant, so the likely result world be that Germany would be "temporarily" dependent on Russian gas for another 20 years.
jansan 4y ago
The German green party demanded a ban on sending weapons to conflict zones just at the end of last year, now they would love to send all our army's equipment to Ukraine immediately. They fought tooth and nail for the ban of genertical modified food, but now are in favor of a mandatory mRNA vaccination even for young people. So why shouldn't they make another 180 on their fight against nuclear power, for which they could finally claim victory after the last three nuclear power plants will be switched off by the end of this year.
- projektfu 4y ago
  > They fought tooth and nail for the ban of genertical modified food, but now are in favor of a mandatory mRNA vaccination even for young people. This is a consistent position. mRNA vaccination is not genetic modification. On the other hand, adenoviral-vector vaccines are genetically modified organisms.
  - jansan 4y ago
    Eating genetically modified food isn't genetic modification, either.
    - Aachen 4y ago
      I don't think any credible person or German party ever claimed that. It's the food you're eating that's modified, not that you get genetically modified from eating it (Of course gmo is a thousand times better than previous practices with random mutation)

epistasis 4y ago

This is great, and hopefully it will stop the premature shutdown of existing nuclear reactors. But it's pretty tiny climate news overall. Nuclear reactors are aging out and nobody in Western Europe or the US seems to know how to build in a cost competitive way anymore. Deploying 5GW of solar and storage, or 3-4GW of wind, is far easier, faster, and cheaper than trying to build a new reactor, which won't come on line for a bare minimum of 10 years, best case. We don't have that long to wait to start replacing nearly all of our fossil fuel infrastructure, and replace the nuclear reactors that are reaching end of life. If nuclear was going to be a climate solution, then all the nuclear reactors started in the 2000s needed to complete on time and on schedule to encourage the building of more. Instead it's 2022 and we are still waiting to see how bad the financial disaster will be for them. That's not the route towards building more nuclear.

layer8 4y ago
> nobody in Western Europe or the US seems to know how to build in a cost competitive way anymore Given the huge subsidies for nuclear reactors, did they ever know? Regardless of the environmental merits, it’s not a cheap technology, and due to the limited number of reactors built it’s not exactly a competitive market either. At least at this point in time, building new reactors is necessarily slow and expensive.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  And, by the time one can be completed, it will be unable to compete with other generation built and deployed since the project started. Bidding only at night, it is even less competitive, because costs are 24/7, so prices would need to be 3x higher.
PaulHoule 4y ago
It's not that simple. People quote low prices for renewables today that we might be scoffing at in 50 years just like we scoff at the early claim that "nuclear power is too cheap to meter" Specifically, you can't compare a nuclear reactor that delivers predictable power to solar and wind systems that deliver power when they want to deliver power. Germany has already had episodes where the spot price for electricity went under zero -- yet to make the electric grid work they have to burn natural gas when renewables aren't available. The story for storage looks better than it ever has but it is still orders of magnitude more expensive more expensive than it needs to be to be practical. People fantasize about feeding excess renewable energy into systems that run intermittently that capture carbon directly from air, synthesize hydrogen and e-fuels, etc. Trouble is that most of the systems have a high capital cost: e-fuel production has a crazy high capital cost as it is, if the factory is running only 20% of the time then bam... capital costs are 5x greater per unit. The LWR struggles to compete with other energy sources for several reasons, not least of which is the high capital cost of the steam turbine and associated heat exchangers. There is hope: https://www.moltexenergy.com/ https://www.moltexenergy.com/

rdl 4y ago

Is this a case of politics, like science, proceeds one funeral at a time? Did the 1970s anti-nuclear people age out of the party leadership and membership so this could get revisited?

hans1729 4y ago
Not just aging out, idealism as a political motive is essentially dead, because it's a luxury that can't be afforded anymore. The new green line - everywhere - isn't "nuclear bad", it's "act on climate change or everybody, including your kids, will pay the price". The entire board changed, figures and strategies notwithstanding.
lbriner 4y ago
There is a healthy dose of pragmatism. Probably, very few people would choose nuclear if there were loads of alternatives, the capital cost and build times are insane and despite improvements, let's not pretend that nuclear fuel is easy to deal with. But take away gas and coal and you are left with the green alternatives like solar, wind and waves which all have their own challenges the first two have high variability and aren't great for base-load and the third has challenges building equipment that can survive the extremely harsh ocean currents for a period of time that will not leave a trail of rusting relics (afaik).
weberer 4y ago
I think it's more to do with the fact that the rhetoric around climate change has shifted. Now the official Green Party stance is that it is the most urgent issue of our time and must be combated by any means necessary. Of course, this conflicts with their (former) anti-nuclear stance, and they've been repeatedly criticized for this hypocrisy. I've even heard young environmentalists speculate that the Greens were secretly in bed with the oil companies.

cies 4y ago

the fossil industry loooooved the green hair folks fighting nuclear. now slowly everyone finds out that with "only renewables", thus without nuclear in the mix, we simply cannot guarantee interrupt free electrical power at scale in most places.

ncmncm 4y ago
Now fossil industry looooves new nuke projects, because they divert money from renewables for at least a decade until they are finally cancelled.
- cies 4y ago
  Any source this actually happened?
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    Literally every time. Except not always cancelled.

photochemsyn 4y ago

Funding for the source is interesting: > "The Alliance for Science is a global communications initiative based at the Boyce Thompson Institute, an independent nonprofit research institute affiliated with Cornell University. Our primary source of support is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation." The article does gloss over where Finland would source its uranium from. A GW-scale nuclear power plant burns through ~200 tons of fuel rods per year, and Finland's supplier seems to have been the Russian state-owned uranium outfit Rosatom: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/rosatoms-unit-seeks-compensation-finlands-fennovoima-2022-05-06/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/rosatoms-unit-seeks-... Finland does have plans to start mining and refining uranium ore, but it looks like they'll produce only enough for one reactor: > "Last year, 35% of Finnish electricity production came from the country’s four nuclear reactors, whose owners Fortum and TVO buy their nuclear fuel from other countries including Russia, France and Canada." Anyone holding ownership in Canada's high-grade uranium ores is likely going to do well by this move. About that... https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/25/bill-gates-nuclear-power-will-absolutely-be-politically-acceptable.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/25/bill-gates-nuclear-power-wil... Regardless, countries like Finland which are solar-limited for much of the year are the obvious place for nuclear. Whether they can make their domestic uranium mining operations 'clean and fossil-fuel free', and secure reasonably priced contracts for importing the rest of their required reactor fuel, remains to be seen.

belorn 4y ago
> Finland's supplier seems to have been the Russian state-owned uranium outfit Rosatom "TVO has bought uranium from Canada, Australia and Africa, had it converted to UF6 in Canada and France, and enriched in Russia. Fuel fabrication has been in Germany, Sweden and Spain. Fortum predecessor company IVOl contracted for a complete fuel supply service from Russia for the Loviisa plant." (https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/finland.aspx https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...) For a bit more numbers, wikipedia has this: "In 2009, Finland imported nuclear fuel from Sweden (40%), Russia (18%), Germany (2%) and other countries (40%)." Fortum is those 18%. The Swedish plant is to my knowledge American owned, and from the numbers I have seen, the biggest source of uranium that it processes comes from Niger. Canada, Australia and Kazakstan isn't that far however, each sitting around 20%.

stjohnswarts 4y ago

I've been predicting this for a while. Nuclear is the best solution we have in hand right now for scaling back the climate disaster. It's better to hedge than throw all your money into one bet.

Synaesthesia 4y ago

One of the biggest issues which makes it hard for the public to judge how well nuclear does, is the association of nuclear power with nuclear weapons which are totally shrouded in secrecy. Nuclear power and nuclear weapons were developed together, often with nuclear power plants providing fuel for the weapons. All of this data, including disposal and environmental issues are completely classified.

DeathArrow 4y ago

If we would pour into nuclear research the kind of money we pour into renewables, nuclear power would become safer and cheaper.

bayesian_horse 4y ago
You still have to haul around huge amounts of radioactive materials with whatever technology. That alone is a big factor in the impossible risk calculations. So far there has never been a dirty bomb. What if the pro-nuclear fanboys get their wish and we solve the energy problems of the developing world using nuclear power? What if a modestly developed country gets overrun or overturned? I don't like the odds. Most risk calculations don't take into account that people seem to make mistakes or might eventually even blow up a reactor intentionally. It's unthinkable until it happens.
- erosenbe0 4y ago
  Radioactive material in the United States largely doesn't move. It is stored in concrete casks on site that sit there even after decommissioning. You can see with binoculars or satellite photo. Also, same impossible calculations apply to any power tech. Number of people injured installing rooftop solar or wind, poisoned by graphite mining, trucking accidents, aluminum production, and the like.
  - bayesian_horse 4y ago
    With "moving around" I mean mainly getting it out of the ground, processing, installing and waste storage. That alone has proven to be problematic enough. And no, other power technologies are not as impossible to estimate. Nuclear power plants are very unique in the kind of mess they can make, see Fukushima and Tschernobyl. Those sites still need looking after and cleaning up, the final cost can't even be estimated yet. It's always been the accidents that supposedly can't happen and never happened. With other technologies not so much. Falling of a rooftop is a very knowable thing. Calculating the likelihood a nation state fails and terrorists get access to nuclear material for a dirty bomb? Never happened. But if nuclear power is your solution to the climate crisis, it needs to be everywhere...

Sharlin 4y ago

Some context: The Green Party had long been diametrically opposed to nuclear, to the extent that they have twice exited a coalition government in protest of granting additional reactor permits. Over the past ten years their position has gradually shifted though, thanks to STEM-oriented Greens in particular, as it has become obvious that AGW is a bigger threat than nuclear. This in spite of several setbacks: – Obviously, the Fukushima disaster of 2011. – The fact that the Olkiluoto 3 reactor project [1], a 1600MW PWR unit, was plagued by chronic delays and cost overruns – it is only now being connected to the grid, over ten years behind schedule. OL3's fundamental problem was that the European nuclear industry simply was not up to the task of delivering a first-of-its-kind, ambitious third-gen reactor after a fifteen-year hiatus during which no new nuclear power plants were built in Europe. – Another planned nuclear plant, Hanhikivi [2], had problems finding a Western reactor supplier; after some arguably rather shady dealings, a contract was made with Rosatom, the state nuclear corporation of Russia. This received some well-earned criticism, but Finnish decisionmakers (perhaps naively) wanted to think there was no political dimension to such an agreement. After February 24, the project is now almost certainly dead in the water, never having left the planning and design phase. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Unit_3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanhikivi_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanhikivi_Nuclear_Power_Plant

Gravityloss 4y ago
There have been some ideas floated around to use the Hanhikivi plant site for building small modular reactors (SMR:s).
ncmncm 4y ago
Now all the people who insisted the Greens had been co-opted by Big Oil will be completely silent about their having now been co-opted by Big Nuke. But Big Oil/Gas/Coal loves new nuke projects; each represents a decade or more of still buying fossil fuels, instead of incrementallly displacing fossil with renewables. What this really means is probably that their position is moot, because no new nukes are planned or likely. Delays and cost overruns on a nuke construction project are, for many stakeholders, the whole point of the project. Actually beginning to deliver power to the grid is the end of their income stream, thus to be fought tooth and nail. The larger a project is, the more stakeholders it usually needs, and thus the more active participants who do not want it delivered. The prevalence of this dynamic varies from place to place; it has long been dominant in the US, not just for nuke projects, but for urban tunnels and other big public works projects.

dukeofdoom 4y ago

This might have something to do with Finland being energy reliant on Russia. Fact is Europe is reliant on Russia for energy, and much of the world for many base products. You can't sanction Russia, without causing pain to yourself. So most of the world didn't try, but with with the current peak levels of Anti Russia sentiments in the West, even the far left is forced into making pragmatic decisions.

0xTJ 4y ago

Uh, yeah, so should every green-type party. It's ridiculous to not be encouraging nuclear power when there are plenty of fossil-fuel power plants (especially coal) being operated and built. We can talk about switching away from nuclear when that's done. Nuclear power generation is far better for the environment and far safer (having cause many, many fewer deaths in history, per unit of power generated).

ncmncm 4y ago
Building nukes just means burning fossil fuels for another decade or more. Big Oil loves nuke projects.
- 0xTJ 4y ago
  I don't see how you could justify that conclusion. Is it that nuclear power plants aren't built overnight, and until they're done current power generation needs to continue? Because in that case it's just the status quo, but with an end data. If it's the fact that the building of a power plant costs significant energy, then why is that your problem with it? You need to bootstrap at some point, and some countries have made the ridiculous decision to go backwards, undoing that investment. Also, "nukes" generally means nuclear weapons, not nuclear reactors. It feels like it's being used here to intentionally denigrate nuclear power generation.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    It is because money that would be building renewables that displace coal, oil and gas is instead tied up in construction, and not displacing any. When the project is finally cancelled, over budget and late, that money is spent and still not bringing renewables online. So, each nuke project eliminates substantial immediate, progressive, and permanent erosion of their market.
    - 0xTJ 4y ago
      Developing effective renewables does not preclude the development of nuclear power. Switching completely to renewables in the very short term is not feasible, and it will take particularly long in areas that aren't well-suited to any of the main renewable power technologies. Also, many governments provide ridiculous fossil fuel subsidies, which should be eliminated, freeing up money. New nuclear power plants will provide huge amounts of very-low-environmental-impact power for decades to come, it's not like its a wasted investment. Your second sentence seems to make the assumption that every nuclear power project will be cancelled, over budget and late, which is obviously wrong. The fact that you'd write that shows a bad-faith argument. You've also ignored the whole "nuke" thing. I strongly recommend watching this great Kurzgesagt video to help inform yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhAemz1v7dQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhAemz1v7dQ.

pimpampum 4y ago

Fision power is no long term solution https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kahih8RT1k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kahih8RT1k

Aachen 4y ago
Cookiewalled video is on the channel Sabine Hossenfelder (German theoretical phycisist), titled "Is Nuclear Power Green?" The conclusion chapter transcription: > What speaks in favor of nuclear is that it's climate-friendly, has a small landuse and creates power on demand. What speaks against it is that it's expensive and ultimately not renewable. The disadvantages could be alleviated with new technologies, but it's unclear whether that will work and even if it works, it almost certainly won't have a significant impact on climate change in the next twenty years. > It also speaks against nuclear power that people are afraid of it. Even if these fears are not rational, that doesn't mean they don't exist. If someone isn't comfortable near a nuclear power plant, that affects the quality of life and that can't just be dismissed. > There are two points I didn't discuss which you may have expected me to mention: one is nuclear proliferation and the risk posed by nuclear power plants during war times. This is certainly an important factor, but it's more political than scientific and that would be an entirely different discussion. The other point I didn't mention is nuclear waste. That's because I think it's a red herring which some activist groups are using in the attempt to scare people. For what I'm concerned, burying the stuff in a safe place solves the problem just fine. It's right that there aren't any final disposal sites at the moment, but Finland is expecting to open one next year and several other countries will follow. > And, no, provided adequate safety standards, I wouldn't have a problem with the nuclear waste deposit in my vicinity. > So, what did I learn from this? I learned that nuclear power has become economically even unappealing than it already was 20 years ago, and it's not clear this will ever change. Personally, I would say that this development can be left to the market. I'm not in favor of regulation that makes it even more regulation for us to reduce carbon emissions. To me, this just seems insane. In all fairness, it looks like nuclear won't help much, but then again, every little bit helps. Having said that, I think part of the reason the topic is so controversial is that, what you think is the best strategy depends on local conditions. There is no globally right decision. If your country has abundant solar and wind power, it might not make much sense in nuclear. Though you might want to keep in mind that climate change can affect wind and precipitation patterns in the long run. If your country is at a high risk of earthquakes, then maybe nuclear power just poses too high a risk. If on the other hand, renewables are unreliable in your region of the world, and you don't have a lot of space, and basically never see earthquakes, nuclear power might make a lot of sense. > In the end, I'm afraid my answer to the question "is nuclear power green?" is: it's complicated. --- I wonder if HN needs a "your content is in another castle: link-only comments aren't thoughtful or substantive" guideline, a la stackoverflow (combining the principles from here https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/225370/your-answer-is-in-another-castle-when-is-an-answer-not-an-answer https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/225370/your-answer-... and here https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

lessname 4y ago

I think one of the biggest issues with nuclear power is that they are designed to last decades yet they need to bee maintained properly operate safely over time, which can be a bit expensive and responsibility shifts over time so it gets "forgotten" easily and leaders can blame their predecessors if something bad happens. Here is a research about the safety status of nuclear power plants in switzerland: https://correctiv.org/top-stories/2018/09/12/brandgefaehrlich-so-marode-ist-der-brandschutz-in-europas-atomkraftwerken/ https://correctiv.org/top-stories/2018/09/12/brandgefaehrlic... - sadly in german only

FunnyBadger 4y ago
The same issue with roads and bridges in the US.
- Krasnol 4y ago
  Holes in roads and bridges tend not to be as catastrophic as holes in reactors. Nice try though.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    If we can't even keep our bridges up, my confidence in maintaining nukes properly for decades is nil.

jum1p 4y ago

goodguyamerikan 4y ago

Nuclear power should not need any of endorsement from political parties. Only from scientists which it already has.

_ph_ 4y ago
No, there is no clear endorsement from "scientists".
ncmncm 4y ago
The people who know most about nukes do not endorse building more.

silencedogood3 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

xangel 4y ago

Finally some light in the tunnel! Hopefully other nations in the EU and worldwide will follow. German greens, I'm looking at you!

the-alchemist 4y ago

Seems like China is gonna be have the best nuclear energy tech in the near future. They currently use French and U.S. designs, but within a generation I bet they'll be making their own, probably better ones. """ Lufeng, run by China General Nuclear Power Group, will receive a pair of third-generation Hualong One pressurized water reactors. China General Nuclear and China National Nuclear Corp. say they together independently developed the advanced reactor, which is based on U.S. and French designs. Haiyang and Sanmen, which are run by State Power Investment Corp. and CNNC, respectively, will receive CAP1000 pressurized water reactors. The technology is based on the AP1000 reactor developed by Westinghouse. China had 53 nuclear power plants at the end of 2021 with an total generating capacity of about 55 gigawatts. The government plans to expand the scale to 70 GW by 2025. Capacity is expected to grow further until it reaches between 120 GW to 150 GW in 2030, which may be enough to surpass the U.S. and France. """ https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Energy/China-greenlights-6-new-nuclear-reactors-in-shift-away-from-coal#:~:text=China%20had%2053%20nuclear%20power,surpass%20the%20U.S.%20and%20France https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Energy/China-greenlights-6-....

falconroar 4y ago

Is the explicit threat of nuclear war by Russia a possible factor here? Ie. Developing nuclear energy would feed into developing nuclear weapons. From what I understand, the anti-war / anti-extinction angle was a primary motivation for at least early Green activists.