Haha yeah, those who don’t agree with me must surely be stupid.
That will show them.
I know for some reason it is never popular to argue against the pro nuclear propaganda that keeps getting posted both here and on the old site, but I just hate how it tries to make anyone seem stupid that is afraid of the myriad of problems with this technology that are still unsolved to this day.
Especially considering how nuclear energy gets dominated so hard by renewables.
We could shut down every coal fired plant and replace the coal fired apparatus with a modern reactor and keep the current steam turbine facility in place. But tell me more about how keeping Cole burning and spewing radioactive nuclei into the atmosphere as preferable than hypothetical meltdown situations.
And that will take just, what, 200 years? Nuclear reactors aren’t diesel engines, they take a while to build.
Also, assuming the only option besides nuclear is coal, is stupid at best, but I’d assume, you’re misleading on purpose here.
If only we could use an assembly like process on a proven modular self contained reactor design to turn them out of a factory like clockwork. It’s almost like you don’t have to build an entire condensing tower if you already have one from a coal fired plant and it’s basically a direct engine swap. Does this gloss over a lot of complications Yes Yes it does is it a realistic solution Yes it is. You’re complaining that there isn’t an economy of scale will also stopping an economy of scale from existing…
the myriad of problems with this technology that are still unsolved to this day
Like what?
Shut up with your facts and logic this is clearly an emotional response only zone
Your post is clearly based on emotion only, so I don’t think you’re doing yourself many favors trying to be sarcastic here.
Cost. Simple as that.
Nuclear power is not economically viable, never has been, probably never will. The only reason it exists are massive subsidies.
You really really should look into how much subsidies get thrown at Coal oil and natural gas
Long term storage and/or reprocessing of fuel. On site storage is not a viable long term solution. We need some way to safely store expended fuel or change the rules to allow reprocessing. Commercially, we need to figure out an economical way to build power plants that doesn’t die under the weight of its own regulations. Vogtle 3 & 4 went waaayy over budget, and almost bankrupted the partners (Westinghouse I believe). Solar and wind are seeing reduction in cost due to expanding market and the economy of scale that goes with it, along with generous subsidies. For nuclear to get those benefits it would have to be constructed at a rate not seen since Three Mile Island. We lost all of those benefits accrued during the 60s 70s and 80s. We would be starting at least 10 years behind wind and solar.
I might be misunderstanding this image, but it seems anti-nuclear by suggesting even modern designs are basically as dangerous as Chernobyl’s reactor. I know nothing about nuclear reactors so I have no opinion on the matter.
So, are those small modular reactors in the room with us now?
I’m not certain what you mean by that but if you are asking how small they would be and where they would be placed the normal recommendation would be you would want a warehouse sized facility with an Olympic sized swimming pool to submerse a standard container sized reactor. You would probably house one to three reactors per facility. You would probably want an exclusion zone of 1 mi. Minimum. Depending on the model a single reactor would be able to power roughly 50,000 to 100,000 homes. Ideally you would build one of these 20 miles from a city. Plug in the SMRs and after 15 to 20 years unplug them and replace with newer models ship them off to a long-term storage facility and eventually process them for fuel once a we have functional thorium salt reactors at scale.
I don’t even know how to argue with that viewpoint. Are they denying that we have small modular reactors what? It’s a technology that’s been employed since the '50s. I literally have a link at the top of the post.
The biggest, best argument against nuclear energy is the limited fuel supply.
If the world replaced base load power with nuclear (as a nuclear plus solar plus wind energy mix) we would only have enough uranium for something like 50 years
The waste storage problem isn’t worth it for so little time, but OTOH we need to solve the storage problem anyway, and 50 years of CO2 clean power would be useful for aiding decarbonising the energy supply
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spent fuel can be recycled and it isn’t a terrible complex process to do so
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even if we didn’t recycle spent fuel there’s far more than 50 years worth left on land
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even if we ran out of land sources spent fuel there’s 4.5 billion tons of uranium dissolved in the ocean
- Doesn’t that require breeder reactors? They’re a nuclear proliferation risk, so can’t really be allowed in untrusted countries
- I think the 50 year number excludes resources that are unavailable, for example an enormous uranium deposit in Australia, which cannot be extracted because the indigenous owners of the land have traditions about the area which make it untouchable
- Extracting elements from sea water is stupidly expensive
- No, not breeders, but reprocessing. There is still a lot of usable fuel left in an “expended” fuel cell, just not in enough concentration.
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no, just simple reprocessing. Breeder reactors are even better and can generate fuel from u-238, but wouldn’t be necessary for several centuries at least
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I think the 50 year number comes from anti nuclear activists, there’s about 8 million tons of uranium out there only considering proven reserves, if we restarted prospecting we could find more
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if you’re desalinating anyways and reprocessing spent fuel you don’t need much, the average nuclear plant needs 27 tons per year per 1000 MW of capacity, and 95% of that can be recycled without breeder reactors
They are Scary if you don’t do any research into it to find out that the amount of scare mongering in the world right now is unjust.
I’m gonna say it!
thorium
