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> which includes major expansion of wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, geothermal. So why should we invest money into nuclear, which has the downsides of clean-up co

> which includes major expansion of wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, geothermal. So why should we invest money into nuclear, which has the downsides of clean-up costs that literally never end, with the burden of having to communicate the risk to every human generation as long as humanity exists? Instead of untying our hand behind our back and simply invest massively in renewables, which have a lifecycle cost profile and risk profile that is much more predictable?

acidburnNSA 4y ago
Nuclear is unique due to its physics advantage in being able to run 24/7 on a tiny land and material footprint. A good nuclear fleet doesn't need backup or storage. Nuclear plants can follow load to the tune of 2-5% full power per minute, rain or shine, without depending on regional weather or seasonal rainfall. Furthermore we know the overall risk profile after operating them for 70 years. The numbers are in and they're excellent. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy It's wild to want to not use this.
- bayesian_horse 4y ago
  Nuclear isn't running 24/7. In theory maybe, but that hasn't worked out in practice. Quite severely not, for some countries.
  - realusername 4y ago
    Even on the worst year of nuclear for France, the renewables still have a worse output than that. This month it's been ~10% of the installed capacity for wind turbines and 3% of the installed capacity for solar. I don't know why it's not on the news either, there's seems to be a massive bias in reporting where nuclear is expected to have a 100% uptime but renewables nobody cares, whatever it produces is ok even single digits is fine.
    - bayesian_horse 4y ago
      I can tell you why: For nuclear you calculate with a near 100% uptime, for renewables there was always variability calculated. You people talk like nobody knew the sun don't shine all day or that wind isn't entirely predictable. Yeah, people know, including the engineers who plan and build such projects...
      - realusername 4y ago
        I'm going to say some hard truth here that nobody really plans for it (as seen as what's happening in Europe this month) and the companies really don't care as long as the renewables are sold, it's not even counted in the price per kwh either.
        bayesian_horse 4y ago
        Bullshit, it's in all the plans. You are completely misconstrueing European energy policy. Of course renewables don't replace all the fossil fuels right now. This may happen eventually with storage technology, but nobody is planning with that. Of course the slack is taken up by burning fossil fuel which reduces the overall replacement factor by a certain amount. That was the plan all along, not some evil bait-and-switch. Nobody ever calculated or promised those energy sources producing all the time. You are either completely ignorant or purposefully lying.
        realusername 4y ago
        You're wrong here and it's even written on paper, there's even a date being set, 2038 for phasing out coal. So yes people do plan for phasing out fossil fuels thanks to renewables, despite having no technology which exist which can achieve that.
        bayesian_horse 4y ago
        Phasing out coal does not mean phasing out all fossil fuels. Isn't that obvious to you or are you intentionally lying and trying to mislead? 2038 is quite a few years in the future. Your blanket statement of "there is no technology which can achieve that" is just not plausible. Of course, when you conflate coal with fossil fuels, if you confuse short-term and long-term plans however you please, you can find a lot of inconsistencies to attack.
- bayesian_horse 4y ago
  Thinking we know the future risk profile of nuclear power from their past history is a dangerous fallacy. Apart from the obvious "black swan" problems with that fallacy, so far nobody actually tried to cause incidents intentionally. And expanding nuclear power means scaling up access to nuclear material rapidly and massively. Including in countries with less stable prospects. The "past risk profile" is worth nothing in that context.
  - realusername 4y ago
    Nobody is saying those countries have to maintain their infrastructure, they can outsource it to countries which have good nuclear industries
    - bayesian_horse 4y ago
      That idea is so far from practical reality it isn't even funny.
      - realusername 4y ago
        That's already what happens for gas and petrol anyways
        bayesian_horse 4y ago
        Not true. Development countries are massively expanding their energy usage. You can handwave around and say they are outsourcing whatever, but in reality, it is much safer to help them transition to renewables or even leave them on fossil fuels rather than give them access to nuclear technology and nuclear material and build nuclear plants were bad shit can happen. Come to think of it, with the lifespan of a nuclear plant, or worse the nuclear waste, there aren't a lot of regions left you would trust to stay completely safe from war, civil war and political upheaval.
        realusername 4y ago
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  > The numbers are in and they're excellent. Those numbers could have changed a lot this year if Russian shelling at Zaporizhzhia had worked out a bit differently. And this was a military adversary that wasn't explicitly trying to cause nuclear damage here. The next one might go all out or try something as a false flag. Those 70 years have been in relative peaceful times. And they don't include the 200 years of cleanup we've externalised to the future. We just learned a very painful lesson what externalisation to the future can lead to with global warming.
realusername 4y ago
Because that's the only clean energy source working 24/7 reliably and large scale electricity storage options are pretty much all terrible. Additionally the usage spikes are in winter where solar production is at the lowest of the year and it's not like you can gamble the electricity grid on having wind or not.
- purerandomness 4y ago
  > the only clean energy source Saying nuclear energy is 'clean' because it doesn't cause CO2 emissions is like saying arsenic is the only healthy food because it doesn't contain sugar. You set up a false dichotomy between nuclear energy and "solar and wind", as if that's the only possible renewable energy source. My point is: Nuclear is the most expensive form of energy you can produce, no other energy source has you paying for waste management for 20000+ years. Let's instead invest in a mix of other, already available solutions so that we a) smooth out spikes b) have simple energy storage solutions c) don't have to pay the guy printing new signs saying 'caution, radiation, don't enter this cave and please don't hold this site hostage in case of civil war' for some 20000+ years.
  - realusername 4y ago
    You can have other metrics if you want like human deaths / kWh but again nuclear also has the best metrics here. Additionally, climate change is the biggest threat to humanity, there's no denying that. > Let's instead invest in a mix of other, already available solutions Like what others? There's none. (If you care about CO2 pollution of course) > b) have simple energy storage solutions Have you missed the part where I said that this storage tech doesn't exist? You can't mention technologies which don't exist and claim that we should use them. Deployment of tech isn't R&D. As an example, the solution being used in the real world seems to be an increase of coal and gas if you look at what Germany has done on the past month
    - bayesian_horse 4y ago
      Bullshit metrics calibrated on a past that doesn't matter. The past risks don't predict the future risks, especially not if the intention is to scale up nuclear power by a factor of ten or so. I don't even think the risks will scale linearly, because that scale-up is impossible with the current regulatory posture that is keeping the risks down. There are already energy storage solutions. To ignore those, to claim categorically those will not improve, seems to be a particularly "convenient" argument.
qball 4y ago
>with the burden of having to communicate the risk to every human generation as long as humanity exists? We already have many industrial disasters with dangers that need to be communicated to every human generation to come in the form of acid mine drainage and whatnot. Those releases (which would happen absent human upkeep of dams and tailings ponds) are also things that would absolutely wreck environments for hundreds to thousands of years if released. Every mine you open has clean-up costs that never end; it would be wiser to minimize the amount of new ones. You'll need more of them if you go with the intermittent sources of power because renewables are far more wasteful in terms of materials required (and because they inherently don't produce power constantly).
- purerandomness 4y ago
  > already have many industrial disasters All of them due too fossil energy. Hence the call to invest in already available renewable energy sources. We don't need even more potential disasters. > renewables are far more wasteful in terms of materials required Nuclear energy needs uranium mines which by the way happen to be in countries that are, let's say, politically unstable. The astronomical cost of nuclear waste management is killing any and all attempt to render the TCO of a nuclear plant in a good light, if done honestly. > they inherently don't produce power constantly Are you thinking of solar and wind? When we talk about renewable, we mean geothermal plants, biomass energy and what not. And of course water, wind and solar - the mixture is important so that we can smooth out spikes with those renewables which don't produce power constantly, just as you build multiple nuclear plants, because one plant doesn't produce power constantly. The question is: Why should the money go into ramping up a very expensive technology with lots of risks, when we could invest in better, safer and cleaner tech?
  - realusername 4y ago
    It just doesn't work, you can't "smooth-out" renewables no matter what they try to make you believe. This month, in the EU, solar production was at around 3% of the capacity and wind less than 10% of the capacity, there's nothing you can do to counterbalance that.

acidburnNSA 4y ago

Nuclear is unique due to its physics advantage in being able to run 24/7 on a tiny land and material footprint. A good nuclear fleet doesn't need backup or storage. Nuclear plants can follow load to the tune of 2-5% full power per minute, rain or shine, without depending on regional weather or seasonal rainfall. Furthermore we know the overall risk profile after operating them for 70 years. The numbers are in and they're excellent. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy It's wild to want to not use this.

bayesian_horse 4y ago
Nuclear isn't running 24/7. In theory maybe, but that hasn't worked out in practice. Quite severely not, for some countries.
- realusername 4y ago
  Even on the worst year of nuclear for France, the renewables still have a worse output than that. This month it's been ~10% of the installed capacity for wind turbines and 3% of the installed capacity for solar. I don't know why it's not on the news either, there's seems to be a massive bias in reporting where nuclear is expected to have a 100% uptime but renewables nobody cares, whatever it produces is ok even single digits is fine.
  - bayesian_horse 4y ago
    I can tell you why: For nuclear you calculate with a near 100% uptime, for renewables there was always variability calculated. You people talk like nobody knew the sun don't shine all day or that wind isn't entirely predictable. Yeah, people know, including the engineers who plan and build such projects...
    - realusername 4y ago
      I'm going to say some hard truth here that nobody really plans for it (as seen as what's happening in Europe this month) and the companies really don't care as long as the renewables are sold, it's not even counted in the price per kwh either.
      - bayesian_horse 4y ago
        Bullshit, it's in all the plans. You are completely misconstrueing European energy policy. Of course renewables don't replace all the fossil fuels right now. This may happen eventually with storage technology, but nobody is planning with that. Of course the slack is taken up by burning fossil fuel which reduces the overall replacement factor by a certain amount. That was the plan all along, not some evil bait-and-switch. Nobody ever calculated or promised those energy sources producing all the time. You are either completely ignorant or purposefully lying.
        realusername 4y ago
        You're wrong here and it's even written on paper, there's even a date being set, 2038 for phasing out coal. So yes people do plan for phasing out fossil fuels thanks to renewables, despite having no technology which exist which can achieve that.
        bayesian_horse 4y ago
        Phasing out coal does not mean phasing out all fossil fuels. Isn't that obvious to you or are you intentionally lying and trying to mislead? 2038 is quite a few years in the future. Your blanket statement of "there is no technology which can achieve that" is just not plausible. Of course, when you conflate coal with fossil fuels, if you confuse short-term and long-term plans however you please, you can find a lot of inconsistencies to attack.
bayesian_horse 4y ago
Thinking we know the future risk profile of nuclear power from their past history is a dangerous fallacy. Apart from the obvious "black swan" problems with that fallacy, so far nobody actually tried to cause incidents intentionally. And expanding nuclear power means scaling up access to nuclear material rapidly and massively. Including in countries with less stable prospects. The "past risk profile" is worth nothing in that context.
- realusername 4y ago
  Nobody is saying those countries have to maintain their infrastructure, they can outsource it to countries which have good nuclear industries
  - bayesian_horse 4y ago
    That idea is so far from practical reality it isn't even funny.
    - realusername 4y ago
      That's already what happens for gas and petrol anyways
      - bayesian_horse 4y ago
        Not true. Development countries are massively expanding their energy usage. You can handwave around and say they are outsourcing whatever, but in reality, it is much safer to help them transition to renewables or even leave them on fossil fuels rather than give them access to nuclear technology and nuclear material and build nuclear plants were bad shit can happen. Come to think of it, with the lifespan of a nuclear plant, or worse the nuclear waste, there aren't a lot of regions left you would trust to stay completely safe from war, civil war and political upheaval.
        realusername 4y ago
GekkePrutser 4y ago
> The numbers are in and they're excellent. Those numbers could have changed a lot this year if Russian shelling at Zaporizhzhia had worked out a bit differently. And this was a military adversary that wasn't explicitly trying to cause nuclear damage here. The next one might go all out or try something as a false flag. Those 70 years have been in relative peaceful times. And they don't include the 200 years of cleanup we've externalised to the future. We just learned a very painful lesson what externalisation to the future can lead to with global warming.

realusername 4y ago

Because that's the only clean energy source working 24/7 reliably and large scale electricity storage options are pretty much all terrible. Additionally the usage spikes are in winter where solar production is at the lowest of the year and it's not like you can gamble the electricity grid on having wind or not.

purerandomness 4y ago
> the only clean energy source Saying nuclear energy is 'clean' because it doesn't cause CO2 emissions is like saying arsenic is the only healthy food because it doesn't contain sugar. You set up a false dichotomy between nuclear energy and "solar and wind", as if that's the only possible renewable energy source. My point is: Nuclear is the most expensive form of energy you can produce, no other energy source has you paying for waste management for 20000+ years. Let's instead invest in a mix of other, already available solutions so that we a) smooth out spikes b) have simple energy storage solutions c) don't have to pay the guy printing new signs saying 'caution, radiation, don't enter this cave and please don't hold this site hostage in case of civil war' for some 20000+ years.
- realusername 4y ago
  You can have other metrics if you want like human deaths / kWh but again nuclear also has the best metrics here. Additionally, climate change is the biggest threat to humanity, there's no denying that. > Let's instead invest in a mix of other, already available solutions Like what others? There's none. (If you care about CO2 pollution of course) > b) have simple energy storage solutions Have you missed the part where I said that this storage tech doesn't exist? You can't mention technologies which don't exist and claim that we should use them. Deployment of tech isn't R&D. As an example, the solution being used in the real world seems to be an increase of coal and gas if you look at what Germany has done on the past month
  - bayesian_horse 4y ago
    Bullshit metrics calibrated on a past that doesn't matter. The past risks don't predict the future risks, especially not if the intention is to scale up nuclear power by a factor of ten or so. I don't even think the risks will scale linearly, because that scale-up is impossible with the current regulatory posture that is keeping the risks down. There are already energy storage solutions. To ignore those, to claim categorically those will not improve, seems to be a particularly "convenient" argument.

qball 4y ago

>with the burden of having to communicate the risk to every human generation as long as humanity exists? We already have many industrial disasters with dangers that need to be communicated to every human generation to come in the form of acid mine drainage and whatnot. Those releases (which would happen absent human upkeep of dams and tailings ponds) are also things that would absolutely wreck environments for hundreds to thousands of years if released. Every mine you open has clean-up costs that never end; it would be wiser to minimize the amount of new ones. You'll need more of them if you go with the intermittent sources of power because renewables are far more wasteful in terms of materials required (and because they inherently don't produce power constantly).

purerandomness 4y ago
> already have many industrial disasters All of them due too fossil energy. Hence the call to invest in already available renewable energy sources. We don't need even more potential disasters. > renewables are far more wasteful in terms of materials required Nuclear energy needs uranium mines which by the way happen to be in countries that are, let's say, politically unstable. The astronomical cost of nuclear waste management is killing any and all attempt to render the TCO of a nuclear plant in a good light, if done honestly. > they inherently don't produce power constantly Are you thinking of solar and wind? When we talk about renewable, we mean geothermal plants, biomass energy and what not. And of course water, wind and solar - the mixture is important so that we can smooth out spikes with those renewables which don't produce power constantly, just as you build multiple nuclear plants, because one plant doesn't produce power constantly. The question is: Why should the money go into ramping up a very expensive technology with lots of risks, when we could invest in better, safer and cleaner tech?
- realusername 4y ago
  It just doesn't work, you can't "smooth-out" renewables no matter what they try to make you believe. This month, in the EU, solar production was at around 3% of the capacity and wind less than 10% of the capacity, there's nothing you can do to counterbalance that.