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No, since all currently available nuclear reactor models are way more expensive to build than renewables. And a lot of tangentials remain open. Like where to ge

• scrlk 4y ago
  >And a lot of tangentials remain open. Like where to get and reprocess fuel rods? What about operational safety? And most of all, where to dump the radiactive waste? All solved issues - nuclear energy is a matter of political will at this point.
  • pydry 4y ago
    If operational safety were a completely solved problem nuclear plants would be able to buy insurance without a liability cap of <0.5% of the cost of dealing with 1 fukushima. As it is, even with that subsidy financing plants is basically impossible without more subsidies. Bill Gates' new reactor startup required taxpayers to fund 50% of it to even exist.
    • scrlk 4y ago
      The reason why I believe operational safety is a solved problem: the US Navy has run reactors on board ships and submarines since the 50s, with 0 reactor accidents. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Reactors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Reactors
      • ncmncm 4y ago
        And the Russians have had accidents untold. Which is run more like commercial reactors?
  • _ph_ 4y ago
    No, they are not solved.
  • stinos 4y ago
    I recently saw a documentary where someone was researching what the best way would be to label nuclear waste facilities such that future (far, far furture) generations would understand what's in there. You can't just slam an English text on there and hope in tens of thousands of years it will be understood by whatever creature visits it. Even only in light of just that, calling everything solved is a bit far fetched, no?
    • ElKrist 4y ago
      I can understand it's a stimulating problem for the brain. In terms of priorities it doesn't make any sense at all to me though. It's hard to get the global population to care and act about what the GLOBAL state of the planet will be by the end of the century. So I really could not care less if by accident a few people dug a hole in tens of thousand of years at the wrong place and it created an issue. It's not like the whole human population would meet at this same spot and quickly dig a hole deep enough together so that they all get radiated...
      • carapace 4y ago
        It's not okay to poison people even if they are far away in space and/or time.
    • layer8 4y ago
      In my mind, continued storage of nuclear waste will always have to remain an active process. Dispose and forget like in a landfill isn’t an option if you care about the long-term risks.
    • orwin 4y ago
      But in ten of thousands of years, all radioactive waste will be low activity, no? I mean, we do have prototype reactors that now use actanids as fuel, so the medium lasting high activity waste issue is now dealt with. Don't we only have to worry about the next 300 years for to radioactivity to go down to granitic cave levels?
    • c1ccccc1 4y ago
      That seems super unlikely to be a problem. For long term storage, I'd expect that we'll dig a deep shaft, or use an existing abandoned mine, and then seal it back up. Any group of humans who are willing and able to make a hole through several meters of concrete in order to get at the stuff will almost certainly also have the technological sophistication to know what radiation is, and that radioactive isotopes are dangerous. Also, if you do decide to leave a message anyway, you'll just have to make it interpretable to a human, not to any possible "creature". 10 000 years is nothing on evolutionary time scales, so it will still just be us humans around, (or nobody at all, if we happen to go extinct first).
• gbasin 4y ago
  Cost is not static. Building more will create economies of scale. Most importantly, overhauling the excessive safety guidelines will give you an immediate savings
  • atoav 4y ago
    Factoring in the nuclear waste storage cost over it's whole lifetime (instead of socializing it) will eat those savings easily. Also: Germans love their safety regulations, this is never going to happen.
    • lazide 4y ago
      Probably not, if using casks and storing on site which costs nearly nothing? Reactors don’t generate a lot of waste by volume, and it gets less of a problem over time by it’s very nature.
      • atoav 4y ago
        The required storage time for nuclear waste in Germany is 1 million years. Storing anything safely for one million years in one of the most densly populated continents is a huge challenge and certainly not as easy as "just dump it somewhere in the desert". Also: uranium is a finite resource. After it will have run out, it humanity will have to maintain and check these storage sites for that amount of time. Who is expected to pay this? People who don't profit from the power anymore? In my eyes the only solution is either transmutation into less harmful wastes (very costly) or paying the future storage cost for that timeframe upfront (very, very costly).
        • lazide 4y ago
          Which points out the absurd safety requirements and paperwork. That regulation (if true, I haven’t seen it) is just trying to make it impossible to do anything, not actually protecting anyone in any real way. 1) In far less than a million years, the contents of the cask will be well below background radiation levels. Literally less dangerous from radiation than sitting at home. 2) It’s been less than 100 years since Germany had a raving lunatic trying to conquer the world at the helm, and less than 50 since they were split in half between two world superpowers. It’s ridiculous hubris to think anyone could predict or plan more than 100 years in advance with any certainty, let alone a million. And by setting a million year milestone, they’re saying ‘don’t even try to make something that could work now’ 3) more people will die from the economic fallout of what the gov’t is doing (and the burning of Coal, wars, etc) than would die from any halfway likely outcome of a nuclear disaster here. They could have multiple Fukushima’s and still be better off. 4) as a species, anything recognizably human has been around AT MOST a single digit multiple of that number. Recorded history and civilization is a tiny fraction of that number. It’s a fun mental game, not a pragmatic limit or has any real meaning in this context. Also, while Uranium is finite (as is everything else), we’ve got plenty to last the foreseeable future even without any fancy technology advancements. And there is plenty of avenues for that. It’s the picture of ‘the now is unacceptable, the future is impossible.’
• mjhay 4y ago
  Nuclear can provide base load. Battery tech or other storage options are nowhere near developed/scalable enough to do that. Solar and wind always needs natural gas or similar as a backup.
  • _ph_ 4y ago
    The whole concept of "base load" is wrong. Electric networks need to provide exactly as much power as demmanded at any point in time to remain stable. "Base load" was just a statistical construct to determine which fraction of the total load is constant and can consequently served by slow power plants. Like nuclear and coal. To maintain a stable grid, you always needed quick power plants like gas and water. Yes, solar and wind will need to be accompanied by lets call them "on-demand" power sources, like gas, water, in the future large-scale storage and of course power2gas for entirely renewal gas production. By the way, the "base load" was artificially increased in the past to accommodate the mainly slow power plants. This is no longer a requirement, future loads will be more dynamic and more adjusted to the market offers.
    • Tyrek 4y ago
      I'm not sure I understand your point. Time is just a statistical construct, but it's also a useful one. Similarly, base load is a concept to determine how power generation should be distributed between high reliability/consistent sources, vs less consistent sources.
      • SiempreViernes 4y ago
        > Time is just a statistical construct This is an incredible misunderstanding! Honestly, it's like saying that planet Earth is flat. Did you meant something like "time zones are a social construct"? This true but quite a different claim that the one you made (which is not surprising since what you said is just nonsense).
      • _ph_ 4y ago
        The thing is, if the demand of the grid raises, you have to raise power production. Period. Of course, if e.g. it is dark, you cannot raise the power production of solar cells. That is bad. But if your nuclear plant is running at 100% already, you cannot rise the power production either. So it doesn't help you. "Base load" is only the statistical number of load you can expect 24/7 for your planning. So you always have to have some means of power generation available for demand raises at any point and you have to be able to throttle down power generation in case of a demand drop, because otherwise the grid goes down equally as if you had not enough power capacity. The good news is: renewables can be throttled down quickly, better than most other sources, the bad news is, you can only know about 3 days in advance what the maximum output of your renewables will be and there are days with very low total production. A future grid concept would have to come up with a solution for that. Gas would have been the easy way and probably will be the future when based on gas created via power2gas.
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• hi_herbert 4y ago
  I have a very hard time reading online forums. How come people do not see what I see? How can someone not see the constant stream of the same automatic thoughts again and again? Each major topic, including nuclear has comments from people like you and those comments are always the same old introductory talking points depite the author having seen them refuted countless time. How can someone not bore himself and be that mentally immutable? How many times again in their life will people say the same answer and stay imprisoned in the topic introductionnary level? It is remarkable. Anyway let's address the comment: > all currently available nuclear reactor models are way more expensive to build than renewables Okay you use all, a universal quantifier which is epistemologically very weak. For starters the economical costs are accidental bureaucratic contingencies. The interest rate is a self-fullifling prophethy and most of nuclear reactors have been created pre-bureaucratic era, are still in use and are actually much less deadly than C02 air pollution so let's admit the talking point is ad-hoc mediocrity. Secondly even if you take into account the economics of nuclear reactors from countries that have abandoned nuclear.. you have to realize how absurd the comparison is: 1) renewable is increasing the cost of nuclear operation (underusage of maximal throughput) for nor reason 2) solar panel have a short lifespan (20-30 years) with diminishing returns of efficiency, compare that with the lifepsan of 80-90 years that nuclear often attain and you see that the cost that people usually refer for solar panel must be doubled. 3) Essentially it's time to try to avoid making absurd statements. Solar and wind economics are absurd, inexistant once you necessitate a storage grid (e.g. no light at night or with mild weather) and this which is barely doable (still no single real world deployment of a smart grid fully renewable (without cheats like hydro) exists) and has absurd economics (not even talking about the immense stress that would have on lithium resources which are seriously needed for the future of mankind). 3) just show how strong the level of virtue signaling/hypocrisy going on. 4) actually if your country hasn't become crazy you can have nuclear that are more economical even without considering 3), which is likely the case of China but most evidently is the case of Russia, which like it or not is the world leader by far, the new VVER-TOI are disruptive, both in economics and time to build (3.5 years), while simultaneously improving upon safety. > where to get and reprocess fuel rods this is not an issue > What about operational safety well if you're not retarded enough to build a plant in a major seismic/tsunami region the operational safety is much superior to all other classses of energies. Renewable induce more deaths than nuclear. > where to dump the radiactive waste You are talking about a fiction, in france nuclear generate a few kilos of waste per habitant, per year. The majority of nuclear wastes do not come from the nuclear industry and are a non issue since we have many depositories in place and the vast majority become negligibly radioactive after a few years. About the long term part while its very easy to isolate like many kinds of equally or more toxic industrial wastes, it can be reprocessed as MOX fuel however it is slighly less economical but only of a few percents. In the end, once renewable reach a major percentage of energy and heat production, the use of gaz and fuel as pilotable energies will skyrocket making the point moot. If nuclear become the needed pilotable energy it makes renewable economics moot. Hence obviously renewable use will be very limited. Also I foresee that the russian nuclear export monopoly will massively grow although china might take a slice and so could Korea and France iff France new EPR pragmatic design is not a shitshow.