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Counterpoint: the operators and engineers failed to develop designs which are safe and commercially viable. The actual cost of Nuclear has exceeded all reasonab
by oezi 3y ago
Counterpoint: the operators and engineers failed to develop designs which are safe and commercially viable. The actual cost of Nuclear has exceeded all reasonable levels. The continued subsidies would have been much better spent on developing renewables.
- rayiner 3y agoFrance has been getting the majority of its power from nuclear for the last 40 years. The French have such a low carbon footprint that if the entire developed world came down to the French level, the entire developing world could come up to the French level—without increasing CO2 emissions compared to today’s levels. Yeah, we can spend money “developing renewables” now. But we are basically out of time already. Nuclear is something we could have deployed at the national grid scale 50 years ago, which would’ve been impossible with renewables. Now, anything we do—barring a major advance in carbon capture—will be too little too late. Even as of 2022, Germany gets only 40% of total power consumption from wind, solar, and hydro. It will take Germany until probably 2030 or so to get to the same place France was at in 1990.
- hef19898 3y agoAnd the French are the only ones doing that. Also, back when France built its nuclear reactors, climate change and CO2 emissions were nothing people considered or where bothered with. Love it how the only feasible way forward from where we stand now, aka massive investments in renewables of all kinds, is always countered by what we should have done decades ago, usually by die hard nuclear fan boys. Just a very lazy way of argueing with 20/20 hindsight.
- vlovich123 3y agoGreen house gasses and global warming were well understood since the 1970s. In fact, fossil fuel companies did their best to silence their own research showing it on three fronts as I understand it: 1. Promoting a global cooling theory to prime the public with a theory that’s easily discredited so that people think “those scientists don’t know anything” 2. Funding greenpeace and other environmentalist groups that were anti nuclear 3. Funding politicians who promoted an anti nuclear message. It is a bit of a conspiracy theory to link each individual point together into a narrative, but I believe #1 and #2 are generally known and have evidence for while #3 is probably a conjecture on my part. Anyway, global warming was a known issue since the 1970s. Heck - I did a report for geography class on how big a problem global warming would be in the mid 90s. Regardless, I’ll counter and say that nuclear is still cheaper than solar which is about competitive only if you exclude storage. So from that perspective, combined with Whrite’s law, bucket nuclear is still the better investment option. The only challenge is we’ve killed our nuclear manufacturing industry so hard there’s going to be an extra cost to spin it up again.
- hef19898 3y agoBasically everything in comment is factually wrong so... Edit: Nuclear is more expensive than wind and solar, based on auction prices for projects since 2017 (?). Nuclear net capacity gains are miniscule for decades now, and will for decades. Most new reactors replace old obes. At the same time glovally more wind and solar capacity is installed in a month than nuclear in more than a year (look up the numbers for yourself). Anti-nuclear movements were a result from Chernobyl, and they were, violently at times, oppossed by govenrments. The reason why not more goes into juclear projects is easy: the ROI is too low.
- vlovich123 3y agoNuclear is not more expensive once you factor in storage as that’s required for wind/solar to compete on an even field. Nuclear would also get cheaper if we built more of it.
- hef19898 3y agoNice talking points. And they work, if you ignore realities around nuclear built out or assume the low numbers are due to some kind of conspiracy. And storage, well, you'd be surprise how much storage you actually need in modern grids. The prices I refer to so, are real world costs and feed prices for real world projects. Unless you believe people calculating those professionally don't know what they do, I hope we can agree that the are correct and can serve as valid basis for comparisons and discusion.
- vlovich123 3y agoPlease show me a single wind/solar installation that has storage priced in. These projects are being priced without storage nor are any that I’m aware of being constructed to supply baseload power precisely because grid scale storage for intermittent renewables is expensive and unsolved. So no, I don’t agree that evaluating the price of non-baseload power projects tells us anything about the costs involved with baseload power plants.
- Moldoteck 3y agoHow can china develop nu lear much cheaper and faster? Maybe the problem is not the design and rather overregulation and lack of political will?