Comment by Kalash@feddit.ch on Why has the world started to mine coal again?

With climate change looming, it seems so completely backwards to go back to using it again.

Is it coal miners pushing to keep their jobs? Fear of nuclear power? Is purely politically motivated, or are there genuinely people who believe coal is clean?

Edit, I will admit I was ignorant to the usage of coal nowadays.

Now I’m more depressed than when I posted this

In my country, because of a decades long fearmongering and disinfomation campaing that destoyed the nuclear energy industry. So now we’re stucked with coal to keep the power running at night and during winter.

Well, nuclear energy is expensive anyways and the amount of uranium on this world seems quite limited.

It’s just not the technology of the future. In the long term we should use regenerative energies that are way cheaper.

Well you didn’t google any of that.

Nuclear power plants are expensive to build but the cost of running one especially when adjusted to the amount of electricity it produces is not significantly more than running any other power plant. Also uranium is not considered to be a gobally scarce resource.

That’s also what I believed. But turns out nuclear is the most expensive kind of energy.

Here’s a good summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kahih8RT1k

(Seriously, watch it)

The high cost is largely explained by the fact that there’s no “standard model” for nuclear power plants but instead they’re all designed and built from scratch which can make them really expensive. Olkiluoto 3 nuclear power plant in Finland is the world’s 8th most expensive building at whopping 12 billion dollar cost to build. The original price estimate was 3 billion. Many of the buildings on that list ahead of Olkiluoto 3 are also nuclear power plants.

This however isn’t some inherent probem about nuclear power itself but rather the way we do it. It doesn’t need to be that expensive.

Yeah, I’m still not convinced. If current state of the art makes it 5 times more expensive than current state solar or wind. Your explanation needs to be more than ‘but we choose to build it more expensive than it needs to be’.

Sure theoretically this might not be an inherent problem. But the same applies to renewable. I’m not sure if solar or wind are close to something limiting their efficiency or cost of production. There might be new technology advancing both of them. We can talk about this and look for more information. But it’s a very hypothetical discussion. As of now in the real world, there are real-world power plants and if no-one can demonstrate to bridge that big gap in economic efficiency… Maybe there’s something to it…

And apart from that. I’d argue that there are some inherent problems. For example mega-projects having issues with their budget. That’s a very interesting topic but inherent to big and complex projects for several reasons. Also a nuclear plant and all the infrastructure around it is inherently more complex and more expensive than for example a wind turbine and what we need to assemble a bit of steel tubing, wings and a bit of copper. (Broadly speaking.) I think it’s a combination of factors. But I’d be surprised if the future holds something increasing the economic efficiency of nuclear (fission) power plants by that factor.

(Edit: Those numbers from the video are for the US. But 5 times more expensive is huge.)

We don’t choose to build it more expensive than it needs to be. It’s by nature always going to be more expensive to build one of something instead of what the cost per unit is going to be when you make many.

Wind and solar isn’t going to solve the issue untill we come up with a way to store energy on large scale. When you plug in an appliance that electricity is not taken from a reserve but it’s produced for you in real time. Wind doesn’t blow and sun doesn’t shine according to how much electricity is needed at each moment. Finland produces all its electricity basically by hydro, wind and nuclear power. When it’s windy we have excess electricity and the prices drops to negative and we got to sell it abroad but when it’s calm the opposite is true. This wouldn’t be the case if we could somehow store that excess energy.

Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=0kahih8RT1k

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

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Right, but that’s why people are talking about nuclear as a bridge technology, not as a permanent solution. Whether or not we can make it pencil out before smashing through all of the critical tipping points in global temperature averages is not something I’m qualified to have an opinion on, but I’m credibly informed that we might at least want to give it a serious look.

At one point in the future I’m sure we can look back, do the calculations and see if that had been a good bridge or an expensive thing for the taxpayer to deal with the dismantling and long time storage.

As of now I think the time of that bridge technology has come to an end anyways. We now have efficient renewable energies available. And concepts for energy storage. I think we should invest in that instead of putting the money into a thing of the past.

Nuclear is no more expensive than renewable. The amount of uranium is limited, but it’s not the only fuel for nuclear.

Sure it is. The World nuclear status report 2021 for example says it’s five times more expensive than wind energy.

And sure there are other fuels for nuclear. But I think most of them are even more limited?!

Thorium is one of the most abundant material on earth. Unlike lithium for example.

Yeah. But the technology is - at this point - more sci-fi than anything else. Probably nothing we need to worry about in the next few years.

And you still need to mine some non-renewable resource. It’s still nuclear and produces waste. And it seems super expensive.

There are working thorium reactor for 50 years or something. Hardly sci-fy.

Renewables need batteries to work. Which needs lithium.

The paper doesn’t account account for availability. Nuclear has over 90% availability, which means for 1MW of power installed, you get on average over 0.9MW of power to use. Renewable are far below that, between 40 and 60% iirc. Which means you need to double the cost for a defined output. And that doesn’t consider batteries.

Unless the document talks about that, please point me to the right chapter then.

Damn. I shouldn’t have linked auch a long PDF. What are you talking about? I’m referring to the diagram (and text) on page 293. The annual Levelized Cost Of Energy.

It’s not only calculated on sunny days. They take the annual energy output for the calculation. Availability and everything included or these numbers wouldn’t make any sense.

And yes, we need batteries. But the nuclear plants also need other (faster) plants alongside. And this match isn’t a close call. With a 5 fold increase in being economical, we have plenty of money to spare to afford some batteries and hydroelectric dams.

I was looking at the building cost. Looking more into the Wikipedia article, it seems to account for availability. But the numbers are very speculative still, there is a crazy variation both for the specific data points and for the studies. Another big factor is the interest rate for investment which can double the cost of nuclear energy depending on the assumption.

Another thing that bother me is the speculative nature of these things. No photovoltaic power plant ever went through its whole lifespan. No significant energy production was made with variable renewable. Whereas nuclear was used for 70 years now. Yet the speculation makes it like nuclear will be expensive and unreliable and renewable will be cheap and reliable when the actual history is the exact opposite. Technology advances obviously, but still. I don’t consider renewable to be a tried and tested technology that scales while nuclear is.

But we could have worked on these issues for years by now. Abandoning the entire industry also lead to slowdown in research and inovation in the field. Of course now we’re hopelessly behind.

Oor the ressources could be better spent in renewables, which are available as long as the sun exists, while nuclear will run out of fuel within the 22cnd century.

Also with nuclear Europe is entirely dependent on imports, primarily from Russia and russia-aligned countries. Being pro nuclear in Europe means being pro Putin.

And the feddit.de misinformation brigade has arrived.

I am quite sure i know a thing or two about politics that happened during my lifetime and i actively followed. Also i used to be a proponent for nuclear power when i was younger. But unlike the nuclear shills i am willing to accept when a technology is inferior and risky.

I am quite sure i know a thing or two about politics that happened during my lifetime and i actively followed

Funny, so do I.

Anyway, believe that “being pro nuclear in Europe means being pro Putin” or what ever absurd things you come up with.

I was here to give my response to OPs question. Discussing energy politics with the average German is as pointless as discussing biology with an anti-vaxxer and I have no interest in it.

Why are you pro-coal?

They’re not wrong, I think initial estimates was 500 years, but that will change as more reactors get built.

That is indeed very wrong. With extracing Uranium from sea water and recycing fuel in breeder reacots, this goes up to like 90.000 years. And that’s just Uranium, other fuels can be explored.

False information. There is enough fissionable material to last humans 10s of thousands of years.

Do you all have a source for that?

https://whatisnuclear.com/nuclear-sustainability.html

Several other studies estimate 90 thousand years. All of this is Uranium alone.

Australia and Canada both have very large amounts of nuclear fuel that are currently unused because of short-sighted comments like this.

Uranium city is coming back baby!

Oor we can do both so that in the middle of winter when there’s only 6 hrs of sun (less when cloudy) we can still have electricity without ridiculously sized batteries.

Also uranium is so energy dense it can be mined and refined in Canada or Australia and shipped so, so very easily.

Nuclear won’t run out of fuel. But if renewable are so good, why are so many countries mining coal?

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Why has the world started to mine coal again?

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