I’m pro nuclear energy and think that people who are against are just unknowingly helping the fossil fuel industry.
Overrated by some Reddit/lib types.
They advocate it because they feel they’ll shock environmentalists.
There’s a reason hardly any nuclear plants have been built the past 40 years. Because there are more profitable ways of making energy.
It wasn’t hippies shut it down, it was profit-calculation.
And we’re running low on fossil fuels. “Oh we’ll use uranium instead!” Well that’s a non-renewable mineral too, we’ll run out of that soon enough.
Of course there are some drawbacks, but there are more positive sides. And it’s stupid to close nuclear plants in the middle of a climate crisis, like Germany is doing.
It’s fine to reduce nuclear for renewables, but they’re just stupid replacing it with coal.
it’s better but outdated and silly compared to renewables.
Advocating for wide spread nuclear is like unironically advocating for muskets as weapons. They had a place as a stopgap when the current tech wasn’t there but it’s outdated beyond niche purposes. Technology has caught up now so there’s no real need for nuclear beyond making generation more stable. Keeping a few plants as backup, maybe even expand it a little, but 95% of your climate plan should be renewables.
Nuclear isn’t competing with solar and wind though; it’s not in the same load category. Nuclear, coal and oil together manage the base load because they can run cheaply at maximum capacity around the clock; bio, methane and hydro manage the mid and peak loads because they respond to fast demand changes very well, and wind and solar are injected with priority when they are available. Renewables mostly reduce the demand in methane and hydropower when there is sunshine and wind, while nuclear competes with heavy thermal such as coal, oil, and waste. A nuclear power plant can almost never be replaced with renewables, and closing it is a bad idea until storage is sufficient to smooth out the duck curve
Renewables mostly reduce the demand in methane and hydropower when there is sunshine and wind, while nuclear competes with heavy thermal such as coal, oil, and waste.
I would assume any energy plan for a habitable earth would not rely on coal, oil and waste. You are describing how nuclear is used today, which is fine and I generally agree. But the context is the future of energy infrastructure.
A nuclear power plant can almost never be replaced with renewables, and closing it is a bad idea until storage is sufficient to smooth out the duck curve
This is more or less what I said in my original comment, nuclear should be expanded in small quantities, as needed, but the bulk of any new energy infrastructure should be renewables. I do disagree that the only way to smooth the duck curve is with nuclear. Infrequent brownouts, rationing, and enough redundancy and storage, each with their own issues granted, could do the same thing.
My comment was more directed towards a subset of people who think nuclear should become the major source of energy production.
I’m “against” it in current reality in the sense that I see it as the techie way to greenwash energy production. It relies on a lot of mining, typically in third world countries, to supply the energy consumption of the imperial core.
That wrecks the local environment and the society getting wrecked is never gonna benefit from that energy. I’m pretty sure Europe which relies a lot on nuclear barely has any mines themselves. Building the infrastructure is also very expensive (specially since a shoddy job would be so dangerous to first worlders), to the point where it makes other large scale projects like dams sound plausible.
They just aren’t made instead beause they’d be changing and possibly harming the core environment rather than the peripheral one.
Nuclear proponents always have this (possibly very real) strawman in their heads about how “nuclear is unsafe” or “nuclear weapons” with good counterarguments for both, but I’ve yet to see one explicitly countering the position that nuclear power is just externalising the damage to overexploited countries. The current Niger situation comes to mind.
And nuclear waste disposal as it exists is also very unsustainable.
Now, if the same countries that extract the uranium/plutonium had the right to decide if that’s acceptable to them democratically, and got help from “green” countries to set up their own end-to-end nuclear infrastructure with no strings attached for the good of the human race, then I’d be very interested.
But hydro, wind and solar are all right there with way less drawbacks.
I understand your points. I’m just not convinced that renewables avoid the issues with externalized damage due to mining, production, and waste. Simply based on the amounts of materials needed, renewables are pretty resource intensive, and a lot of these resources come from over-exploited nations just as raw uranium often does.
China and Russia are, as far as I am aware anyway, sharing technology that does allow formerly colonized countries to build their own nuclear power and potentially use their own uranium resources to fuel it.
I see waste disposal as a social and political problem rather than a technical problem. We could manage it sustainably, but we choose not to because of all the cultural fear and anxiety we have surrounding anything nuclear.
They don’t 100% avoid it, but the point is that after the thing is built, both the damages and benefits are felt mostly by the same nation. Nuclear on the other hand requires a stable stream of material, and it’s a privilege usually reserved to technologically advanced nations. Third world nations on the other hand can afford to build their own dams, like Brazil or Ethiopia.
Like others pointed out, hydro (dams) are a mess for the environment too, but you can’t build a dam in Africa and export the energy to Europe. Uranium can be exported though, and that’s how it’s implemented currently.
I’m not against it as an ideal, just that the discourse around it often ignores the current material conditions of it. The countries that can afford to move their grid to nuclear are either huge and advanced like China or Russia/USSR, or rely on blood uranium from their colonies.
But I’m happy those two are helping out and it might eventually be universally feasible, even if from my naive position I’d prefer a >90% green grid.
I don’t know if hydro should be lumped in with other renewables. It’s very disruptive for the ecosystems involved with the river.
I include wave power in hydro (which might be incorrect), but I mainly mean dams and I don’t disagree that they’re also quite harmful.
In Brazil we have had a majority of our energy be generated by hydroelectric dams for a long time, which had a ton of negative side effects, including native lands and the historical ruins of a Christian commune getting flooded and submerged. I vaguely remember some new plans for another dam displacing some tribes too.
But at least the product of that destruction is bound by our battery technology to stay within our borders, which is my main (only?) issue with mining for nuclear fuel.
The people leading the charge against nuclear aren’t unknowingly helping the fossil fuel industry, they are funded by the fossil fuel industry. Have been since the late sixties / early seventies when oil and gas companies realized that they could very easily commandeer the anti-nuclear-weapon and environmentalist bandwagon. Since then they’ve leveraged fear, of nuclear weapons, radiation and unreliable Soviet reactors, to keep fossil fuels pumping in money.
Currently I think fission energy is the best we have. It’s relatively low pollution, relatively low whole cycle footprint, energy dense, efficient, reliable, and so on. Renewables complement and enhance but cannot replace some form of always on baseload power.
You can also look at the history of civilization based on how energy dense their primary fuel was. Coal and oil unlocked industrial potential for having many times more energy than wood. The nuclear age brought on intriguing thoughts like electricity “too cheap to meter.” Throwing away that very well earned technical expertise in favour of filthy coal and inefficient renewables is completely silly. Until we find/unlock the next fuel source with a higher energy density, it’s the best we’ve got. We should be leveraging it to improve people’s quality of life as we have with every energy related breakthrough in human history.
We don’t need high energy density. It’s anomalous and the cause for climate change that we are using the vast stores of fossil energy now. They are the product of millennia and not sustainable. We will run out of nuclear the same way eventually. To live in harmony with our biosphere we need a reduction in overall energy consumption even with renewables. Please read Half Earth Socialism because they can articulate the argument better than me.
We will not “run out of nuclear eventually”. In the 80 years that we have nuclear fuel, we have used only enough to fill the pitch of a regular football pitch with 62 gallon barrels. The vast majority of that is from nuclear weapons as well. Further, nuclear fuel is in its infancy, and we have already begun finding ways to recycle the fuel we have been using. That’s on top of uranium mining bieng essentially a rounding error compared to all fossil fuels, and already providing a sizeable portion of the world power creation.
We also absolutely need to use higher energy dense materials, because then we can use less of them. Humanity is not going to magically lower its energy usage, and the human population will keep increasing and becoming more developed. So if you do not like the impacts of uranium (however small they may be) why would you be against Fission? You would use even less materials to acquire more energy.
We would run out if we were to transition the world to mainly or solely nuclear as some of those who don’t like renewables advocate. I’ll have to post the section from HES for you to read (and critique if there is need) later. For now, I’m curious what you think about this: https://m.soundcloud.com/empire-files/atomicdays
Here’s the half earth socialism chapter on nuclear:
spoiler
pover plant was enemied less out of control, and the dia. poser Fukushima sermed less elet in thesel and ont it. set his have ben offerill recorded in the gears since the his. dea again, this is almost certainly an underestimate. Two tete times more caesium-t37 was released at Fukushima tar Al Chernobyl. Caesium-137, like the better known sonog. strontium-go, easily lodges itself in the human body, where stan cause radiation poisoning and cancer. The estimate 1,000 excess cancer deaths seems more realistic, 46 Given the size, secret venes, and strategic importance of nuclear industries, it is hard to hold them to account even when they fail. Cleaning up Fukushima is predicted to cost up to $736 billion and last forty years. *7 It took eight years to construct a bespoke robot able to survive the conditions of the disaster’s epicentre, and even then, it has merely made contact with the ‘corium’ - the magma-like amalgam of con-crete, uranium, and the reactor itself. 48 The company that ran the Fukushima plant, TEPCO, was caught lying when it said during the early days of the crisis that the problem was only minor core damage rather than a full meltdown. During the trial held on this self-confessed ‘cover-up’, the judge leniently agreed with the defendant that it would be impossible to operate a nuclear plant if operators are obliged to predict every possibility about a tsunami and take necessary measures". This ignores how the company’s own in-house models showed three years before the disaster that they were underestimating the risk of a tsunami, 19 In the end no one was convicted, but as an act of contrition TEPCO’s president imposed upon himself a to per cent pay cut for a month.so There is good reason to be sceptical of the pro-nuclear environmentalists’ second claim of nuclear power being ‘carbon-neutral’. There is a wide range in estimates of nuclear power’s carbon impact because few agree on how much carbon is released during the mining and processing of uranium, decommissioning of reactors, and permanent storage of toxic
I apologize for the great difficulty which posting this is taking me. I don’t know if it’s possible to post the rest.
TLDR: prominent nuclear advocates call for a huge rollout of new nuclear power plants. This will not go well because it vastly increases the possibility of nuclear accidents and dangerous substances like Strontium 90 in our bodies. The damage caused by past nuclear accidents is greatly underestimated. Fast breeders and fusion don’t seem possible in the foreseeable future. The environmental movement has been it’s strongest while anti-nuclear so we shouldn’t throw that away.
My personal criticisms would be that I’m more optimistic about future nuclear technology, the Fukushima disaster was mostly poorly handled because of capitalism (though I’m not sure if the same can be said for Chernobyl), and the environmental movement can run on socialism and doesn’t have to focus on nuclear (though we don’t have to put pro-nuclear at the front of our advocacy). Otherwise the argument seems to hold up.
It’s better than fossil fuels in moderation, but we don’t have enough uranium to last too long on it. Some people use nuclear to deflect away from renewables, but the reality is we need to be mostly renewable to be sustainable. I think fast breeders and fusion are worth continuing to look into, but since it doesn’t exist now we shouldn’t act like we already have them. It’s important to consider the waste and the fact that many countries just keep nuclear around to make nukes. highly recommend everyone read Half Earth Socialism which has a good chapter debunking claims nuclear energy will save us from climate change.
