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
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)
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=0kahih8RT1k
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
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.
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.
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.
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.
