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?
Fun fact: nuclear waste can be used again, it isn’t a widely spread practice but some countries do it (i forgot which tho), oh and wel all forgot about the fact that in the next years thorium could be used instead of uranium?
I can see why people have been scared by the waste, but it’s really not a concern. There are long term storage solutions, but they just haven’t been implemented in many places. Kyle Hill actually just did a video on one the other day.
The waste just isn’t a big enough concern to have put the resources into long term storage yet. The radiation level around the casks is so low that you can be around them and hug them without concern. Flying in a plane is more concerning. This argument is mostly fear mongering so we don’t phase out dirty energy. We could have thousands of reactors running, but they’ve made us scared of the solution so we don’t replace them.
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…
The anti-nuclear crowd still doesn’t have an answer for base load power when there is no wind or solar. What are you going to do, have massive back up batteries? For an entire electric grid? Of an entire country? And do that worldwide?
We can’t even mine lithium fast enough to make enough batteries for all the cars to switch to EV’s in the next decade.
I’m open to alternatives, but I haven’t heard any yet.
There’s pumped hydro, geothermal energy, and biofuel, in the future we’ll likely see some wave power as well. The point isn’t to have one technology for the entire grid but to have a diverse and distributed energy system.
For storage there are also many more options than just lithium ion batteries. We have sodium ion if you just want to swap battery for battery, but then there are also for example iron-air batteries that are projected to be dirt cheap, redox flow batteries, pressurized air, cryogenic energy, sand batteries for storing heat, hydrogen electrolysis, etc.
Not only will this make this a power grid that is less dependent on supply chains that are impacted by geopolitical conflicts, but it will also make it more resilient as the weather continues becoming more extreme.
I’m not saying we need one technology for the entire grid. Of course you diversify. That is out of the question.
But the solutions you mentioned aren’t ready yet.
Pumped hydro isn’t feasible everywhere, nor is geothermal and is wildly expensive. Biofuel burning emits greenhouse gases. Sodium ion batteries are a new technology and we don’t know how well it scales and we don’t have the production capacity. And the others aren’t proven technologies, so they may not be around for decades.
No, the point is that the anti-nuclear crowd is trying to make it seem like there is no role for nuclear energy in the future alongside renewable energy. They haven’t thought about baseload power and they think putting giant battery parks everywhere will be fast and easy, as well as —somehow— great for the environment.
Pumped hydro isn’t feasible everywhere, nor is geothermal
That’s the whole point of diversifying, use the sources that are available in the places where they are available.
Biofuel burning emits greenhouse gases
The point is that the greenhouse gases that they emit have already been captured from the atmosphere, which makes them carbon neutral.
Sodium ion batteries are a new technology and we don’t know how well it scales
It uses a lot of the same type of production as lithium ion, it is already being produced by some of the largest battery manufacturers on the planet, and being sold on the market, and we have years of research to give us a good idea of how it will evolve.
And the others aren’t proven technologies, so they may not be around for decades
Neither will fission plants. Even if we decided to start building out today, there are years before we actually see construction start, not to mention commissioning and eventually power production. We’re probably talking about the 2040s at that point.
No, the point is that the anti-nuclear crowd is trying to make it seem like there is no role for nuclear energy in the future alongside renewable energy
Some people, sure. But the person above wasn’t talking about completely removing all fission, just that we should have started building nuclear plants twenty years ago because it’s slow and comes with a massive up-front cost, and at this point we have other alternatives that are cheaper and faster to install. Nuclear fission plants are also a very centralized source of energy, so if there are issues in the future as a result of climate change (similar to what they’ve been experiencing in France) then you lose a lot of grid capacity all at once while trying to resolve it.
I think nuclear is a reliable source of power, I’ve been an advocate for it, but I don’t believe it’s the right solution at this point in time.
That’s the whole point of diversifying, use the sources that are available in the places where they are available.
Yes, but they are more niche solutions rather than widely available.
which makes them carbon neutral.
Only in theory, and only with some crop types. And as with all agriculture, it takes up a lot of space. If we simply used that space to plant trees we wouldn’t have to release those GHGs into the atmosphere at all. And then there is the labour intensive process of sowing, watering, harvesting, processing and transportation that emits GHGs of its own.
give us a good idea of how it will evolve.
Yes, but small scale projects do not tell you how it scales to grids worldwide. Nor how it holds up after years, or when these batteries reach the end of their lifecycle. And it may be decades until we can make it on the scale that is necessary. We already know all this for NPPs due to decades of experience.
We’re probably talking about the 2040s at that point.
Possibly, although SMR’s may be built quicker. The point is it’s not the same for a technology that still needs to be developed. All these ideas still need to be developed and then be produced and implemented. So that’s more like 2050s-2060s.
and at this point we have other alternatives that are cheaper and faster to install.
Yeah but the person above didn’t realize that these are not competing technologies. The NPP provides base load power, e.g. at night when the solar panels produce none. And solar panels provide peak load power during the day. They meet different demands, but the NPP is more stable and can also be turned up or down during the day depending on the weather.
NPPs are way more reliable than solar, so the current shutdown is big news just because it never happens. And when extreme droughts happen there will probably be lots of sun around.
There are some good ones and diverse ideas for many locations. The reason they are not yet implemented is because they are not prioritised. Base load is not the concern. Adaptive load is what needs to be there to supplement the grid. Nuclear can not provide that.
Of course there are a lot of good ideas and I don’t think we should not explore them. But we need more than ideas. We need available solutions. We need scalable solutions.
Base load is definitely a concern. We still need base load power for when there is no sun, i.e. every night and when there is little to no wind. And especially when there is neither of those (no wind at night).
NPP’s can provide that base load power. During winter, but also during the night. On top of that, it is already adaptable:
Nuclear can not provide that.
This is simply not true.
Modern nuclear plans with light water reactors have strong manoeuvring capabilities. Nuclear power plants in France and in Germany operate in load-following mode, i.e. participate in the primary and secondary frequency control, and some units follow a variable load programme with one or two large power changes per day.
So, we can bet it all on unproven technologies that we don’t know the scalability of, or we can use a technology that has proven itself over decades, works on a large scale and is adaptable for baseload power and adaptable for when renewables aren’t available.
I’m a fan of both, but fully accept that fission is now too late to be useful. We also have fusion right on the tipping point of viability. That could likely fill the use cases of fusion quite well, with far less issues.
FYI, nuclear produces 3 sorts of nuclear waste. High activity is nasty, but short lived. Put it in a pool for a few years and it decays away. Low grade is the stuff like lab waste and contaminated pipes. You don’t really want it going in normal landfill, but it’s not going to kill anyone with radiation (heavy metal toxicity is another matter). It’s only the last type, medium activity that is problematic. It lasts a long time, while still putting out enough radiation to cause potential problems. Unfortunately, older “power” plants, were actually bomb factories. They were intended to make plutonium, and so produce a lot more of the medium activity waste than they could.
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.
Finland., although many places have looked at old mines for this purpose. It’s a fairly obvious solution.
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
That’s why it’s for baseline power. No one is claiming it handles spikes. We have solutions for that though. Solar and wind also obviously don’t handle spikes. Many types of batteries do, and they don’t care where the power came from.
Rotational energy is actually a pretty good battery, which has no conversion cost with nuclear, since rotational energy is what it produces with the turbine. You spin your flywheel up, and you drain power from it as you need it. Chemical batteries also work, with the conversation cost that all sources pay equally.
Crazy idea but what if we launch waste into space
Sure, until you oopsie a nuclear waste filled rocket and spread it over half a continent.
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.
In Finland we have a hydroelectric plant on every single river leading into the Baltic Ocean apart from Tornionjoki because half of it belongs to Sweden. We can’t have fish swimming upstream from ocean to lakes because of this. Don’t go overboard with hydro.
Exactly this. And remember, Finland has some of the best water resources on the planet (highest concentration of lakes anywhere in the world). So most countries couldn’t do what Finland is doing even if they wanted to, and Finland is still building new nuclear.
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.
Even comparing human deaths per unit of electricity, nuclear has a lower death count than wind and only slightly above solar, and that includes Chernobyl.
Solar panels have a lifespan of a decade or maybe two if you’re lucky, after which it becomes mostly e-waste. So there is more to consider than you would make it seem.
More like 2 to 3 decades minimum and then they can be recycled. Don’t forget the speed and the extreme low cost in which solar can be deployed. There really is no meaningful benefit of nuclear against solar.
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.
For even more context, the annual growth in electricity output is about 5x the addition of battery capacity.
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.
This guy has no idea what he’s talking about.
Ask the French and Romanians how well Nuclear Fission Power Plants are going for them rn lol
They’re going fine, relatively.
For anyone who didn’t see the reports, I believe this is what is being referenced.
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’s economy is doing fine though. Except for car manufacturers, but that’s not due to renewables.
German car manufacturing is doing badly partly because they suppressed electrical or even hybrid tech, but also because of high energy prices.
High energy prices are partly caused by an irresponsible energy policy. The war in Ukraine is the other part.
High energy prices also affect Germany’s two other staples, mechanical engineering and chemical engineering. The chemistry sector is flatlining.
For context, chemical separation methods alone account for roughly 20% of industrial energy consumption worldwide, and Germany is a major player in this field. So high energy prices have a very real impact which can not be offset onto the buyers forever - the factories will just relocate and once they’re gone, they won’t easily come back.
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.
Base load is a myth.
Bullshit. Germany and Denmark’s irresponsible energy policies are carried hard by their neighbors.
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
You know that nuclear fussion is not there yet and will probably not be there yet in about a century? In the 1980 they said we will be there in the 1990. In the 1990 they said it will in the 2000… and in 2026 they say it is possible but not with the materials we currently have so let’s see in about 10 or 20 years again. And than they will need once again another 10-20 years and again and again… guess what even if by some sort of miracle they succeded tomorrow. It would be already to late to create the infrastructrure and keep the plants running to have an impact on climate change.
no dirty emissions
Uhhhh…
They emit clean water vapor, that’s it
*spicy emissions
The NPP itself only emits water vapor
It all comes down to money. Those currently in power and the wealthy are funded by the institutional oil and coal companies.
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.
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.
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”.
I said nuclear doesn’t complement renewables well
And it is complete nonsense. Of course you need baseload power. Thinking you can supply the entire world with backup power from batteries alone is a ridiculous idea. We don’t have enough storage capacity as it is, not to mention when we want to switch the world to EVs.
people think who throw the word “baseload” around.
I used a word. I’m not throwing anything around, and I don’t have anything to do with what other people do or say.
And you said bad, I assumed scary, because that is the basic emotion many anti-nuclear people have about it, and clouds their judgment. Maybe you watched Chernobyl on HBO, but that is not something that can happen with modern reactors.
You haven’t made a single valid point and started off with personal attacks. That is not a way to have a discussion, with anyone, about anything.
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.
