I am in no way or shape against nuclear power per se. I know its technology, I have studied the engineering behind it etc. Still, any argument against nuclear is immediately categorized as "fearmongering" no matter how much it isn't based on the technology itself. Facts and an interest in truly bringing your country forward don't matter. Money and lobbyism is what rules the discussions.
No matter how many subversive nuclear shills keep posting on reddit and other forums. Reddit drowns in fake marketing/PR accounts, you can buy them by the thousands. In the past, I have seen templates for responses written in the weekly pro-nuclear threads. But whatever - just one simple statement that remains true in 2021 is this:
Nuclear fission power is entirely uneconomical and already replaced by safer, better alternatives.
And on top of the insane cost - plants will never be profitable without lifelong government subsidies - the insane length of construction and planning to build new modern generation plants is completely out of what's reasonable because we have to tackle climate change NOW. You're looking at $20bn and 10-15 years of construction at least.
Finland is currently struggling to finish their new reactor and it costs them dearly. Just invest in renewables and be done with it far sooner at much lower cost and factor 1000 less problems (aside from lobbyism and shilling). Just look at this mess of cost and lost time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Finland#New_c... All that jazz for a measly 1600 MW.
Less than 1500 off-shore wind power turbines deliver a whooping 7.5 Gigawatt for Germany [1]. If you can build 300 wind turbines in 20 years at a fraction of the cost of a single nuclear plant you will have the same output and no possible nuclear incidents or nuclear waste to take care of. Mix it with other renewables and you get the power consistency you need. Nuclear in 2021 is so incredibly unreasonable it bothers me to no end.
In Germany, we still have no reasonable way to dispose of 1900 CASTOR containers containing dangerous plutonium with a half-life of 24,000 fucking years. The containers are rated for 40 year protection btw.
We have a super majority that rejects nuclear power. Do we struggle sometimes to make the shift away from fossil fuels AND nuclear at the same time? Yes. Do we have to buy power from France or other neighbors in times of high demand? Has happened before. But we are making progress and are able to sustain a large portion of our economy on renewables TODAY.
If we had this discussion in 1990, my opinion would have been different. But it's too late and too expensive now to shift back into nuclear. By 2042, when a plant planned TODAY would go online, our renewable infrastructure will far outdo what any nuclear plant is capable of in terms of risk-reward.
Yeah, let's compare the market cap of nuclear companies and the market cap of Total and other "renewable + gaz!!!!11".
> Facts and an interest in truly bringing your country forward don't matter. Money and lobbyism is what rules the discussions.
Well said! But i'm pretty sure not all greenpeace workers are shills for Total, some are genuine, accusing them of being shills is uncalled for and wrong.
Some questions though: electricity is 25% of our energy usage right now, we need to elimitate 80% carbon emission before 2050, so we need to use Co2-free electricity for 80% of our usages, right?
here is the cost to replace only our current electricity generation by only renewable: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626191...
The price does not account for land destruction and material rarefication btw, but let's consider those negligeable, and do some order of magnitude calculations. energy generationcapacity: 1.9TW needed, * 3.5 let's say 6TW. 200 GW of power transmission: 700 GW of power transmission. Biomass 8.5 EJ => ???? well, this is harder since biomass in those scenarii would be used as heating mostly, so not really helping a 80% electricity energy mix. Let's say 28 EJ but with the energy loss in carnot machines, i think it would rather be close to 40 EJ. Do we even have enough land to get to 16 EJ every year? I'm not sure, especially if we have to clear the land with electric tools.
It seems reasonable to say that this won't happen. Ever.
It's all nice, but where does the base load come in? From what I know Germany is decomissioning their reactors, and is replacing them with NEW coal power plants + importing energy from other countries (which is just sidestepping the problem)
What's the real solution here? If all countries did what Germany does, we'll have a lot of coal power plants, why not instead have nuclear ones? I don't know a lot about this topic, but it seems to me there isn't any viable solution here, even if nuclear costs a lot.
I haven't spotted this in this entire thread: managing energy consumption and more efficient distribution.
There's a massive demand for energy. Why? What's causing this? And is that demand really justified?
The controversial part is this: how do you do this? There are two totally naive approaches: either rely completely on free market dynamics, or heavily regulate how energy is consumed and conserved. Reality sits somewhere in between.
Then there's also a hard reality: optimization of consumption has a hard lower bound before the consequences become too painful. As a thought experiment, you could imagine a world with no electrical power plants whatsoever: but then you'd turn back the clock to how things were before the late 19th century. That's when you realize how electricity has shaped modern society over the past 150 years, but also how dependent modern society is on its availability.
Electricity is also a tradable commodity. It's a political and economical strategic asset. Part of why a radical shift isn't possible is because of existing interests who oppose anything that might cause a shift in power balances. I think it's important to recognize this as well. Especially in a discussion that promotes particular types of energy production over one another.
One potential scenario might be this:
Electricity has become superfluous. Nobody ever questions the intricacies of energy production and transport when they plug their smartphone charger in a socket. The vast majority of consumers are conditioned with the idea that a socket will always provide an infinite flow of power. It's only when power is cut off for whatever reason - brown outs, black outs, power is too expensive,... - that one starts to understand that this isn't always true. Having access to electricity isn't a human right after all.
The future might be painful in a sense that more and more people will be confronted with this painful truth. If not pro-actively and softly pushed through public debate; the circumstances - raising energy prices, availability,... - will force people to confront their own power consumption, the lifestyle they have build based on the assumption that power will always be available. It will also confront them with the inequities caused by all of this.
That's why I think it's a fallacy to perceive both nuclear and renewables as "silver bullet" solutions to avert such scenario's. Reality is far more complex.
"struggle to make the shift away from fossil fuel AND nuclear (...) have to buy power from France (...) are able to sustain a large portion of our economy on renewables TODAY."
Let's say 40% of Germany's electricity consumption comes from renewables and 60% from the other sources. If I cut the other sources, will renewables still be able to provide their 40% shares? The answer is no, because people and the economy need a stable electricity. Providing Watts at random times is absolutely not the same value as providing them consistently in a predictable manner
When you say "sustain a large portion of our economy on renewables TODAY" you're missing "with the unavoidable baseload provided by non intermittent sources"
Folks, this is the exact kind of post I am talking about. Uninformed or shilling, who knows.
Germany is already providing stable base load power using renewables, and increasingly so, but here we are, some random account is taking quotes out of context "(...)" and spouts some bullshit about "people needing stable electricity".
Yes, they need it. And guess what. German electricity outages per household amount to somewhere around 15-18mins per year over the last years. As renewable shares grow, coal declines and nuclear is basically wiped out the average interruptions continue to shrink. [1]
The US is at 8 hours per household per year, what are your nuclear plants doing? The answer is obvious: it's a mundane question. It's not just the type of energy generation that matters when providing a stable network and therefore this argument is pure and utter rubbish.
>Do we have to buy power from France or other neighbors in times of high demand? //
We don't need nuclear energy, except we need neighbours to use it for times of high demand??
Why is France selling us (UK and other nearby countries) all this nuclear generated electricity if, as you contend, it's entirely uneconomical and already replaced?
Yes, you are right, but part of the reason that nuclear power is so costly and we don't have a good solution to handle wastes is that we didn't have much scientific and engineering progress in that are for a very long time. Nobody wanted to work on this as such people were treated by academia, media and eco organizations like Holocaust deniers.
That plutonium is that dangerous since it emits energy that probably could be used with the right tech.
No matter how many subversive nuclear shills keep posting on reddit and other forums. Reddit drowns in fake marketing/PR accounts, you can buy them by the thousands. In the past, I have seen templates for responses written in the weekly pro-nuclear threads. But whatever - just one simple statement that remains true in 2021 is this:
Nuclear fission power is entirely uneconomical and already replaced by safer, better alternatives.
And on top of the insane cost - plants will never be profitable without lifelong government subsidies - the insane length of construction and planning to build new modern generation plants is completely out of what's reasonable because we have to tackle climate change NOW. You're looking at $20bn and 10-15 years of construction at least.
Finland is currently struggling to finish their new reactor and it costs them dearly. Just invest in renewables and be done with it far sooner at much lower cost and factor 1000 less problems (aside from lobbyism and shilling). Just look at this mess of cost and lost time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Finland#New_c... All that jazz for a measly 1600 MW.
Less than 1500 off-shore wind power turbines deliver a whooping 7.5 Gigawatt for Germany [1]. If you can build 300 wind turbines in 20 years at a fraction of the cost of a single nuclear plant you will have the same output and no possible nuclear incidents or nuclear waste to take care of. Mix it with other renewables and you get the power consistency you need. Nuclear in 2021 is so incredibly unreasonable it bothers me to no end.
In Germany, we still have no reasonable way to dispose of 1900 CASTOR containers containing dangerous plutonium with a half-life of 24,000 fucking years. The containers are rated for 40 year protection btw.
We have a super majority that rejects nuclear power. Do we struggle sometimes to make the shift away from fossil fuels AND nuclear at the same time? Yes. Do we have to buy power from France or other neighbors in times of high demand? Has happened before. But we are making progress and are able to sustain a large portion of our economy on renewables TODAY.
If we had this discussion in 1990, my opinion would have been different. But it's too late and too expensive now to shift back into nuclear. By 2042, when a plant planned TODAY would go online, our renewable infrastructure will far outdo what any nuclear plant is capable of in terms of risk-reward.
[1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/german-offshore-w...