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Which is to be expected when you build a massively centralized, both physical and organisational, power system. And which is my main issue with nuclear power:

by berkes 4y ago

Which is to be expected when you build a massively centralized, both physical and organisational, power system. And which is my main issue with nuclear power: it isn't distributed, but centralized and heavily dependent on governments and extreme long-term-planning. Which is a recipe for disaster. The chance that Flamaville would be delivered late is about 100%. Reacting to rapid changes like a war (spiking fuel prices or making NG unattainable) always slow, and always late if possible at all. So, aside from all the other arguments against nuclear power, it is slow, expensive, centralized and heavily dependent on governments; it's the closest you'll get to a government-ran electricity production. All of which make me wonder every time why the European left (pro- government) are against it, but the right (market liberalism) love it. It should be the exact opposite. The entire opposite is solar: heavily distributed, privately owned and immensely fast. Wind is somewhere in-between, cheaper and faster to build than a CHP, but obviously more centralized than solar.

nradov 4y ago
Solar is only the opposite of nuclear if you ignore storage requirements. There is potential for use of distributed battery storage, but we're decades away from being able to build that out economically at scale. Installing some home battery backup or EV reverse charging systems won't be sufficient; we have to be able to keep heavy industry running through multiple days of little sunshine.
- berkes 4y ago
  I'm not saying one is better than the other, nor am I commenting on it's value for [electricity consumer]. They are opposites on "centralisation" vs "decentralisation". With solar, I, a private citizen, can generate electricity, store it, sell it, expand it, mine bitcoin with it, and so fort. With Nuclear, I'm completely at the whims of a government and a semi-private monopolist. "Free-market-nuts" should therefore hate Nuclear and love solar. Yet the opposite is true. And I find that remarkable.
mschuster91 4y ago
> All of which make me wonder every time why the European left (pro- government) are against it, but the right (market liberalism) love it. It should be the exact opposite. That one is actually easy to answer: Most of the European left does not like nuclear because of cost externalization - let's be real: it's not today's rate payers that are going to fund the decades worth of work needed to dismantle the plants (e.g. the AKW Greifswald in Germany has already been taking 30 years with at least 15 more years planned [1]) or to safely store all that nuclear waste for likely hundreds if not thousands of years, it's the tax payers of the future. On top of that come the enormous and un-insurable financial risks of disasters: Chernobyl happened 35 years ago and still you can't eat game or shrooms in Bavaria without running them in front of a Geiger counter (not to mention that Chernobyl is in an active war zone with radiation-releasing disruptions having happened as a part of the war, as are about a dozen other plants that are, to make it worse, even being actively shot at), the cost of the Fukushima cleanup is estimated to run into 200 billion dollars. In contrast, the European right wing loves nuclear precisely because it is so "cheap" on paper with ~13 ct/kWh... it's their usual playbook of conveniently ignoring the above-mentioned externalities. [1] https://www.zeit.de/2021/42/rueckbau-kernkraftwerke-atomausstieg-kkw-greifswald-abriss/komplettansicht https://www.zeit.de/2021/42/rueckbau-kernkraftwerke-atomauss...
- ETH_start 4y ago
  All of the long-lasting waste generated by nuclear plants can be used as fuel in breeder reactors. Newer generation reactors are also immune to the kind of meltdowns that afflicted Chernobyl and Fukushima. It took decades of massive government subsidies for solar panel production to scale up and advance enough to make solar as affordable as it is today. The same could be achieved with nuclear, with the additional benefits of not having the additional costs of storage and transmission infrastructure, which push up the real cost of solar to "$472 per MWH": https://web.archive.org/web/20220916003958/https://files.americanexperiment.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/The-High-Cost-of-100-Percent-Carbon-Free-Electricity-by-2040-in-Minnesota.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20220916003958/https://files.ame...

by berkes 4y ago

nradov 4y ago

Solar is only the opposite of nuclear if you ignore storage requirements. There is potential for use of distributed battery storage, but we're decades away from being able to build that out economically at scale. Installing some home battery backup or EV reverse charging systems won't be sufficient; we have to be able to keep heavy industry running through multiple days of little sunshine.

berkes 4y ago
I'm not saying one is better than the other, nor am I commenting on it's value for [electricity consumer]. They are opposites on "centralisation" vs "decentralisation". With solar, I, a private citizen, can generate electricity, store it, sell it, expand it, mine bitcoin with it, and so fort. With Nuclear, I'm completely at the whims of a government and a semi-private monopolist. "Free-market-nuts" should therefore hate Nuclear and love solar. Yet the opposite is true. And I find that remarkable.

mschuster91 4y ago

> All of which make me wonder every time why the European left (pro- government) are against it, but the right (market liberalism) love it. It should be the exact opposite. That one is actually easy to answer: Most of the European left does not like nuclear because of cost externalization - let's be real: it's not today's rate payers that are going to fund the decades worth of work needed to dismantle the plants (e.g. the AKW Greifswald in Germany has already been taking 30 years with at least 15 more years planned [1]) or to safely store all that nuclear waste for likely hundreds if not thousands of years, it's the tax payers of the future. On top of that come the enormous and un-insurable financial risks of disasters: Chernobyl happened 35 years ago and still you can't eat game or shrooms in Bavaria without running them in front of a Geiger counter (not to mention that Chernobyl is in an active war zone with radiation-releasing disruptions having happened as a part of the war, as are about a dozen other plants that are, to make it worse, even being actively shot at), the cost of the Fukushima cleanup is estimated to run into 200 billion dollars. In contrast, the European right wing loves nuclear precisely because it is so "cheap" on paper with ~13 ct/kWh... it's their usual playbook of conveniently ignoring the above-mentioned externalities. [1] https://www.zeit.de/2021/42/rueckbau-kernkraftwerke-atomausstieg-kkw-greifswald-abriss/komplettansicht https://www.zeit.de/2021/42/rueckbau-kernkraftwerke-atomauss...

ETH_start 4y ago
All of the long-lasting waste generated by nuclear plants can be used as fuel in breeder reactors. Newer generation reactors are also immune to the kind of meltdowns that afflicted Chernobyl and Fukushima. It took decades of massive government subsidies for solar panel production to scale up and advance enough to make solar as affordable as it is today. The same could be achieved with nuclear, with the additional benefits of not having the additional costs of storage and transmission infrastructure, which push up the real cost of solar to "$472 per MWH": https://web.archive.org/web/20220916003958/https://files.americanexperiment.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/The-High-Cost-of-100-Percent-Carbon-Free-Electricity-by-2040-in-Minnesota.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20220916003958/https://files.ame...