Why go nuclear when renewable is so much cheaper, safer, future proof and less centralised?
Don’t get me wrong. Nuclear is better than coal and gas but it will not safe our way of life.
Just like the electric car is here to preserve the car industry not the planet, nuclear energy is still here to preserve the big energy players, not our environment.
Renewable instead of nuclear, but nuclear instead of coal.
We need a mix. Centralization isn’t the biggest problem. Literally anything we can do to reduce emissions is worth doing, and we won’t be going 100% on anything, so best to get started on the long term projects now so that we can stop turning on new plants based on combustion.
Even if it takes 2 decades to get a new plant going, it’s a nuclear plant’s worth of fossil fuels we don’t need any more, and therefore worth doing.
If it isn’t fossil fuels, it’s automatically better.
The main problem with nuclear power plants isn’t the radiation or the waste or the risk of accident. It’s that they cost so damn much they’re rarely profitable, especially in open electricity markets. 70-80% of the cost of the electricity is building the plant, and without low interest rates and a guaranteed rate when finished it doesn’t make economic sense to build them.
The latest nuclear plant in the US is in Georgia and is $17 billion over budget and seven years later than expected.
No we don’t, you can use only renewables and just cut the useless spending
The classic shortsighted point of view that has put us in the current situation in the first place.
We can and should be doing both. Use the money our governments are giving to fossil fuels in subsidies. $7 trillion PER YEAR (that’s 11 million every minute) in public subsidies go to fossil fuels. Channel that to nuclear and renewables and there’s more than enough to decarbonise the grids with both short- and long-term solutions.
What we definitely should not be doing is closing perfectly working nuclear power plants.
Power generation and power use need to be synchronous. Renewables generate power at rates outside of our control. In order to smooth out that generation and bring a level of control back to power distribution we would need a place to store all the energy. Our current methods are not dense enough and are extremely disruptive/damaging to the environment. Nuclear gives us a steady and predictable base level of generation that we can control. Which would make it so we don’t need to pump vast quantities of water into massive manmade reservoirs or build obnoxiously large batteries.
Nuclear (with the exception of France because they’re special) is limited to being a base load as you alluded, but power demand varies throughout the day. Nuclear can’t vary on a 24 hour scale to follow the load so we need renewables and energy storage or hydroelectric to make up the difference. That’s what “nuclear OR renewables” misses
I can’t imagine a future without solar, wind, and nuclear power.
not unless we find out we are wrong about thermodynamics.
Wind and Solar are “renewable” to a certain scale. If you dump gigantic wind farm in the middle of a jet stream, for example, you can impact downstream climate cycles.
You don’t need to imagine a future without nuclear in the mix - there are plenty of places doing fine with renewables and without coal or nuclear right now.
Yeah, the cost is the real downside to Nuclear. However, for every Nuclear plant running, that’s a lot of batteries it other energy storage that don’t have to be built today in order to have clean energy. Because even if we were utilizing nuclear like we should, we would still need to be building a shit ton of batteries to keep the cost of energy coming down.
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The cost of electricity dropping is bad news for nuclear power plants because they’ll be even less profitable when they’re finished. Especially since they take decades to construct, during which time renewables and storage become even cheaper.
And we’ll still need a way to store power from renewables when they overproduce.
Don’t forget nuclear waste that is just building up forever with nothing to do with it.
Because it gets dark and the wind stops blowing and industry still operates when those things happen. Nuclear is not a forever solution, but a necessary stop-gap.
And where do you think all the materials for that come from? Eind turbines, solar panels and batteries require huge amounts of (rare) earth materials that need to be dug up in very -let’s say ugly- mines… lithium for example, is now the core component for most of our batteries and lithium mines are polluting as hell. If we want to have all the lithium we need for all of our storage capacity, well need to destroy beautiful places like the Atacama desert because if we don’t we won’t have enough lithium.
Storage technology isn’t there yet. Nuclear is. The only viable approach is “all of the above.” Anything less is foolishness and oil industry propaganda.
It’s not actually required at all though, thats all FUD from the big energy monopoly that hate anything that can be owned and run by people that aren’t them - there are endless options for making a stable grid using renewables and they’re all considerably cheaper, quicker to make and a lot more resilient.
Nuclear gets pushed so hard because it protects the billionaires monopoly that’s the only reason.
What are you talking about? Nuclear has been the target of a massive misinformation campaign from the fossil fuel corporations for decades. Looks like you’ve fallen for the FUD. People have been formatted by literally every form of media to think of nuclear as something dirty, dumping green glowing waste into the environment, and making fish grow extra heads.
Countries like Germany have been closing perfectly fine NPPs because of FUD funded by their huge fossil fuel lobby. 80% of our energy is from fossils, and they have apparently successfully convinced people that we shouldn’t attack that number with every tool at our disposal. Meanwhile, we’re collectively spending literally trillions of dollars on fossil fuel subsidies every year. Is that what pushing nuclear hard looks like?
A big problem with solar and wind is that they are not as reliable as nuclear. In a worst-kaas scenario neither will produce energy because there is no sun or wind and there is no way to store enough electricity for these moments. Therefore we need a constant source that creates electricity for those moments. Of course, we do also need renewables, but nuclear is essential because it is reliable.
That’s why places that use mostly renewables and no coal or nuclear often have gas fired generation which can start up in the rare cases when it’s needed. These places already exist and do just fine with no nuclear.
This may be true, but I am not convinced that it is any better than nuclear. To start up regeneration quick the gas winning needs to be on a pilot light (dutch source: https://nos.nl/l/2485108). In Groningen there are (according to the same source) 5 places on pilot light that together must produce at least 2.8 billion cubic metres of gas a year. This is quite a lot of fossil fuels, so I would rather have a nuclear power plant than this gas winning (which comes with other disadvantages as well).
So it’s more nuclear vs renewables and a ton of batteries. (Or other storage options)
Scalability problems. We need to make as many solar wind and battery installations as we can, but there’s only so much production and installation capacity. And eventually we’ll run short on materials, especially for batteries. Nuclear uses a different system, so we can scale that even as we have issues with other systems.
Nuclear is a much more reliable power source, barring a breakdown, you know exactly how much a nuclear reactor will produce at any given time.
Renewables are much more finnicky, and you really need something like hydro, that has a large amount of energy storage, to back it up.
If renewables are an option you should definitely go for them, but we as a species are pretty much at manufacturing capacity for them. That capacity is being increased, but for now it makes sense to do nuclear in parallel.
Renewables also have the issue of storage, and not all locations are as suitable for wind or solar.
There are cases where nuclear makes more sense, and especially in the short term we need anything that will get us away from fossil fuels.
