We should be pouring money into fusion instead of datacenters
If we had nuclear fusion, we could produce so much power with so little fuel that it would be economical to literally scrub the atmosphere of carbon dioxide and chemically refine it back into gasoline. You could keep your vroom vrooms and we wouldn’t be facing a dying planet.
But no, everyone thinks it’ll be like The Jetsons when is going to be like every Black Mirror episode combined.
Thanks for the future, assholes
Solar power + battery? Or hydropower? That way there won’t be, well, nuclear waste at the end? You know, the kind of waste that’s highly radioactive? The waste that doesn’t have a plan to be safely stored away for tens of thousands of years?
It’s not even the waste, that we still need to learn how to recycle. Or the apparent incapacity of any operator to reliably follow the theoretical safety guidelines…
If we put all our effort into a nuclear boom today, the plants will only arrive a decade or two after the planet has been cooked, it won’t be enough to replace anything, and we will have to learn entire new ways to mine the fuel in a few decades before the stuff we can get easily is gone.
Meanwhile we are about half-way done with renewables, and the nuclear fans keep denying that…
Forget it, i tried that argument a bunch of times. Also, you are depended on other countries, big plants are an easy target for a drone with some explosives, cost of nuclear is rising while all others are down, etc. People want to believe in a magic, water heating rock
Doesn’t Sweden or someplace have a giant abandoned salt mine to store a thousand years of nuclear waste somewhere?
Not that I’m in favor of building nuclear anymore, we should’ve done that in the sixties.
Yes, but you need something with turbines to regulate power flow during off-peak. Hydropower can do that in some places, but not everywhere. That’s the gap that nuclear should be aiming for (replace coal plants as minimum power regulator)
Coal and nuclear re very bad for regulating power spikes because they are inflexible and can’t be turned on or off very fast. That’s why most country’s build gas as an intermediary power source right now
Solar+battery is not an actual thing. We’re talking society scale here, not remote cabin.
Hydro, although great in many ways, causes immense ecological devastation and is not suitable for all places.
Nuclear also has issues but a mix of wind+solar on a base of hydro+nuclear is probably the ideal.
This guy has no idea what he’s talking about.
Solar+battery is not an actual thing. We’re talking society scale here, not remote cabin.
Germany opened a new battery storage just this week. It has so much capacity that it can power a city like Leipzig over a night completely. And there are plans to upgrade it from 500 megawatthours to 800 megawatthours before 2026 ends. That’s not just remote cabin scale to me.
Hydro, although great in many ways, causes immense ecological devastation and is not suitable for all places.
Okay, here i gotta agree with you.
Nuclear also has issues but a mix of wind+solar on a base of hydro+nuclear is probably the ideal.
“Issues”. Yeah. The deadly waste nuclear plants produce is just a minor “issue”. And I’m not even talking about safety in general (Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island).
You named 3 incidents. Now name all nuclear power plants ever. Compare the numbers.
I’m not even necessarily against nuclear, but this is a weird argument. How many times have solar panels blown up and made entire cities uninhabitable for decades, and how many are there total in use ever?
The percentage of failures of nuclear power plants may be low, but the fallout (literally) is incredibly devastating.
I’m sure batteries will play an important role in the future, but it’s not significant today and I don’t see any indication of this changing rapidly in a meaningful way. I’d love to be wrong though.
Regarding the issues with nuclear power, the ecological impact is far better than hydro and health impact/deaths is also significantly better. I’m not trying to badmouth hydro here, but I think it’s important to be fair and acknowledge that on those two issues (ecological impact, human health) nuclear has a better track record.
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/global-battery-storage-capacity-additions-2010-2023
Well fortunately you are wrong
For context, global energy output is 30k TWh/year. That’s T for tera.
For context, that’s growth, not total capacity. And after covid one would suspect ppl would understand exponential growth and to understand what that means for a business Modell $$$
Also we don’t need capacity for the whole output of a year.
Like Fukushima, three miles island or Tschernobyl?
Yes, like those. Your three examples show how benign nuclear power is, factoting in the absolute worst of circumstances and most ridiculous levels of incompetence.
Oh, there are so many more incidents.
Maybe you should do your own homework before linking Wikipedia at me. Nuclear is safer than hydro in terms of human casualties per energy produced as well as per land mass destroyed, and if you want to make a counter-argument or add any other variable the burden of proof is on you.
Grid battery storage is booming right now, one of the biggest scaling technologies right now. No cabins involved.
Do you have a moment to talk about our Lord and Savior, Wind and Solar Power?!?
Nuclear is actually promoted by old guard mining and energy oligarchs because it provides a centralised means of control.
The peoples needs can be met with 100% renewables and battery storage. The oligarchies needs can never be met, because they are a malignant cancerous parasite.
This is conspiracy level misinformation. You can’t do 100% wind+solar with batteries, many countries have tried and failed. Germany and Denmark are great examples of highly industrialized nations with high population density that has tried to do what you’re suggesting, and they’ve proven that it’s a fantasy.
Wtf are you talking about, we have only just started building out renewables
Who are “we”? Because Scandinavia didn’t just start.
Germany, one of the two countries mentioned
Germany’s energy policy is dogshit and it’s basically committing suicide. It’s great that Germany is finally displacing some of its coal plants but killing your economy in the process is hardly an example of a successful transition to green energy. Good luck with your chemical and mechanical industries on wind and batteries.
Germany has tried no such thing lol. Actually there are appliances for gigantic amounts of battery storage because it’s a simple buy low sell high business case that everybody wants to get into.
It all comes down to money. Those currently in power and the wealthy are funded by the institutional oil and coal companies.
no dirty emissions
Uhhhh…
*spicy emissions
The NPP itself only emits water vapor
There is no nuclear Power plant in the whole world, that’s entirely run by a private corporation. They are all heavily subsidized by the states. And all of those states either have nuclear warheads or want to build some. Nuclear is just too expensive.
Completely false. Many countries have nuclear power with no nuclear weapons. Most of Europe, much of Asia. Africa is about to build many nuclear power plants too.
Global nuclear power growth is a hoax. Doesn’t change the rest of my Statement that nuclear is always subsidized by the state and super expensive
Irrelevant.
There are plenty of countries that have nuclear power plants but no nuclear warheads or intention to get them. Like Japan and many European nations.
Nuclear is costly, but its the only green form of electricity production that is both feasible everywhere and can provide baseload power. As of yet, an energy transition towards renewables does not seem feasible without it. On top of that, SMR and MSR technologies will greatly reduce costs.
What is it with nuclear proponents and completely misunderatanding what baseload means
Renewables need the exact opposite of a baseload as a complement
SMR and MSR technologies will greatly reduce costs
might or would not will. If we go by hypotheticals, then any of the twenty promising new battery technologies “will” make battery storage so cheap that we will go with 100% renewables
Where did I mention we shouldn’t also use wind and solar?
Maybe I’m not the one misunderstanding….
And you’re making assumptions based on your own misguided beliefs and biased opinion.
The technology isn’t there yet but it’s not as impossible as you would make it seem: we have been using molten salt in solar powered plants for a while now. We are getting close to using it in commercial NPPs and there are many test projects already running. Luckily governments worldwide have seen the potential benefits and are investing heavily in them. If we leave everything to the “nuclear scary and bad” crowd we wouldn’t get anywhere…
Where did I mention you mentioning we shouldn’t also use wind and solar?
I said nuclear doesn’t complement renewables well, unlike a lot of people think who throw the word “baseload” around.
I also didn’t say “nuclear scary and bad”.
Are there any functioning SM or MS reactors?
I think only China and Russia have ones that generate power. Other than that, test reactors.
I concede the nuclear warheads part. Still true fir a lot of countries tho.
The fun thing about smr is that investors are fleeing and the start ups are going bancrupt. Additionally when the nuclear power plants were initially developed they had to upscale the to high size because the big overhead of maintenance, safety measures and poor yield from heat power coupling only gives a small net power output. So to make it work they had to make it big. Now they try to make it small again. Apart from some niche use they won’t make a big difference.
You’re comparing technology of the 1980s to today’s technology. Nuclear power research has come a long way since then.
Part of the reason NPPs (as in, conventional PWRs, as we use in the west) had to be so big is the giant containment structure to keep pressurised water inside the reactor. Molten salt does not need to be pressurised and is much more efficient because it runs at much higher temperatures than water does. So these two technologies combined definitely have the ability to reduce the size of NPPs.
Yeah, also you have to keep mining and enriching uranium or thorium to keep them running. At least with renewables most of the materials are recyclable so you only have to mine once. Nuclear would have made a great stop gap between fossil fuels and renewables though.
Yeah unfortunately nuclear doesn’t make any sense anymore today. It’s way too expensive and its not nearly as renewable as you’d think. 20-50 years ago? It should have been something huge.
At this point solar is so cheap and easy almost everything else looks silly in comparison.
