People who want nuclear plants should also vote for having a nuclear waste storage in your area if that is possible. In germany we still dont have a solution for the waste we already have and the states who want Nuclear Plants are already said no to havin a storage in their state. You cant make this shit up
We can do all three things at once
Submitted 6 months ago by Forester@yiffit.net to [deleted]
https://yiffit.net/pictrs/image/4b0b7a74-da7c-4443-a7ec-97f5e13140e6.jpeg
Comments
Sniatch@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world 6 months ago
As someone who has actually looked into nuclear waste and the current storage techniques instead of relying on knee-jerk fear mongering, yes. Store it in my area. Hell, store the casks underneath my house for all I care. If you are surprised by this answer, it’s because you don’t know shit about nuclear waste and how little of a problem it is.
MisterFrog@lemmy.world 6 months ago
(Below is my opinion, I respect you have yours, and I’m not having a go at you. I just want to take part in the discourse friendo!)
To me, if they wanted to store it in my area by encasing it now (or, any time in like the last 40 years), I wouldn’t mind either.
The issue that isn’t fear-mongering that people continually overlook because of all the knee-jerking people lamenting that it’s “unsafe”, is that we then have to maintain containment for thousands upon thousands of years.
That’s the issue, permanent storage, not all the temporary storage that is happening now.
Nuclear is not a great solution to immediately reducing emissions, in my opinion. Takes way too much capital and way too much time to get operational. Don’t close still operating plants, but damn, we need to be building the fastest shit possible, right now. Not something that takes a decade to build. We have solutions ready, governments just aren’t getting their act together and build it. Even if the business-case doesn’t make complete sense; we don’t have time.
Sand batteries, liquid air energy storage, lithium ion batteries, flow batteries, (plus a bunch of other contenders) they’re all immature technologies but they do work right now, anywhere, no terrain for pumped-hydro required. Sure they’re not very efficient, or have crap lifespan in the case of Li-ion, but solar plants literally aren’t being built in some places because prices go negative during the day, and plants are being curtailed.
We need to build storage, now, even if it’s not a silver bullet. And we can’t wait for expensive-as-fuck nuclear.
Someone should call me when we decide re-enriching spent nuclear fuel is fine and we can do nuclear waste recycling, actually getting our money’s worth. Or when thorium gets good.
My personal opinion conclusion:
- Nuclear waste is not immediately that concerning for safety, it’s the fact we’re signing up to store it for longer than recorded history.
- It’s expensive and takes to long to build
- The technology needed for the energy transition already exists
- Also agree, that turning off operating nuclear doesn’t make sense.
Thanks for reading, looking forward to hearing people’s thoughts.
DraughtGlobe@feddit.nl 6 months ago
The waste doesn’t pose any danger as long as it’s stored securely and doesn’t cost that much space. The only downside of the waste is that it needs to be stored forever, but that’s a very, very, small price to pay for not destroying the planet…
Sniatch@lemmy.world 6 months ago
But its also possible without nuclear waste. You are just pushing the problems with the waste to the future generations.
Lumisal@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Weird how y’all haven’t figured it out yet considering Finland had and Germany has had nuclear power plants for longer.
But I suspect it’s more of a lack of wanting to do what’s needed for storage because ‘politics’ and boomers than it is because it’s not possible.
Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Nobody has. Nuclear casks need maintenance for their life time. We haven’t invented any kind of nuclear proof forever material that’s immune to entropy. Everything in life slowly degrades overtime and the longer the life span of something the more it degrades. We are expecting a private company to continue a maintenance cycle that brings in zero profit and all costs for a few thousand years without cutting corners. I don’t like the idea of the elon musks of his world being the smaug of nuclear waste
Sniatch@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Could be that Finland is a big country with only 5,5 million people living there compared to 83million in germany. Easier to find a place.
capital@lemmy.world 6 months ago
The US has a fuckton of space not being occupied by anyone or anything.
Sniatch@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Then why dont you have 100 nuclear plants on that space
Forester@yiffit.net 6 months ago
It just needs to be buried deep enough. Problem solved. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository
Iron_Lynx@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Even better: reprocess the fuel. The linear fuel life time decommissions nuclear fuel as useless while it still has 90-something percent of energy potential left. Having a more cyclical life cycle allows for the spent fuel to be reconstituted into new fuel, and to be used anew. All the waste that does end up being produced is only a fraction of the waste produced in a linear process, and only dangerous on a societal timescale instead of a geological one.
HaywardT@lemmy.sdf.org 6 months ago
And uranium mines. Nuclear is an energy transport medium rather than a source. You have large dirty dangerous destructive mining.
Sorgan71@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Nuclear waste is stored in water tanks. Its quite safe there.
FinishingDutch@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I’ve got solar panels on my roof, and being Dutch windmills are in my blood. But I’m also not blind to the reality that both wind and solar will only get you so far. And there’s already a lot of opposition to wind farms - they ruin the view, endanger birds and there’s health concerns due to noise and shadow projection.
If we just build even one nuclear powerplant, we could basically just… not do wind. And we’d have pleeeenty of power for the coming energy transition, change to electric vehicles, etc.
But noooo… nuclear is scary. Especially to the people who only cite Fukushima and Chernobyl in regards to safety. That’s the same as banning air travel because of 9/11 and the Tenerife disaster. Nuclear power is safe, cheap and we owe it to the planet to use it wisely instead of more polluting alternatives.
henfredemars@infosec.pub 6 months ago
You know what’s scary? The existential threat of climate change.
FinishingDutch@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Absolutely that’s scary. Heck, we’re seeing the effects of it every day. If more nuclear means less coal and other polluting options, I’m all for it.
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Are you really saying that to a Dutch? They are the first ones that get affected by rising sea levels, don’t worry, they know it’s scary.
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
“Endanger birds”
A whole lot less than most alternative solutions
Default_Defect@midwest.social 6 months ago
Aren’t stray cats more dangerous than windmills for birds?
bstix@feddit.dk 6 months ago
Nuclear is not cheap.
FinishingDutch@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Even the link itself mentions how it’s not really a good metric to use as it doesn’t factor in whole lot of externalities. I.e coal is cheaper, but when it creates air pollution that shortens your lifespan, is it worth the tradeoff? Nor does it factor in things like energy density: a nuclear power plant is far smaller than the amount of lsnd needed to put up enough wind turbines to match its output.
Basically… LCOE looks like a neat gotcha, right up until you look past that first diagram.
Forester@yiffit.net 6 months ago
Its cheaper than climate change.
Forester@yiffit.net 6 months ago
Its expensive to build new bespoke massive, built on site reactors. I’m not arguing for more of them I’m saying lets run them for their full service lives as they were so expensive to produce. However if we are discussing new installations i’d love to start making a lot of small modular light water reactors in factory conditions. Economies of scale.
Strykker@programming.dev 6 months ago
Power from nuclear plants in Ontario is some of the cheapest to produce in the province, because the plants have been running for literal decades.
stebo02@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 months ago
building new nuclear plants is barely an option though because it costs tons of money and, more importantly, takes like 10 years to build. However I agree we shouldn’t decommission the existing ones if they still are in a good state
FinishingDutch@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Well, here in the Netherlands we definitely need far more energy in the near future. We’re moving away from natural gas for heating and fossil fuels are going away in favor of electric vehicles. Add in things like heat pumps, more people getting airconditioning, data centers and other growing energy needs.
Basically, right now we have ‘just about’ enough electricity available, but soon it won’t be.
Nuclear plants are expensive and take a long while to build. Which is why I hold politicians responsible for not pushing them through years ago. The best time to build a nuclear plant was ten years ago. The second best time is today.
Resonosity@lemmy.world 6 months ago
One of the ways solar and wind can become more reliable is by expanding the grid.
I’m not sure where you’re from, but in the US we have three grids: the Eastern Interconnect, the Western Interconnect, and Texas. These grids aren’t connected despite their names, and there have been many attempts in the past to connect them to little avail.
The benefit of larger grids with distributed energy resources is that even if local environments are cloudy or calm, those conditions usually are locally concentrated. This means that if one DER is underproducing, another DER can make up for the loss if that DER’s locale is sunny and windy.
This gets better the wider a net you cast to collect energy (i.e. grid).
On your counterpoints to wind, “the view” is in the eye of the beholder - I’m young and I love the look of modern wind turbines; wind turbines reduce the overall amount of bird deaths from the energy industry as we transition away from fossil fuels; no significant evidence has been found to link wind turbine noise to health issues; and shadow flicker has not been correlated with any adverse health outcomes either, leading me to believe that this propaganda is being propagated by either NIMBYs or the fossil fuels industry or both.
Point is: solutions to climate change will come in a silver buckshot, not in a silver bullet. We need an all hands approach to this so we reverse damage as soon as possible and get to restoration as soon as possible.
Other I agree with you though. I would love to have a backbone of nuclear through the American Great Plains where population centers are low. Only issue there though is groundwater use, but I’d imagine future reactors could make use of geothermal-type solutions to cool instead of surface waters. Maybe there’s a radiation risk there. Idk, need to research more
SapientLasagna@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
It’s kinda the same though isn’t it? Opposition to nuclear power, opposition to wind, solar, geothermal, hydro. Seems like maybe what people want most of all is to stick their heads in the sand and just have everything stay the same forever. It was a multi-decade effort to get people off of leaded gas FFS.
Harbinger01173430@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Yet those two places are not nuclear wastelands
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 6 months ago
No, absolutely decommission old and out-of-date plants to avoid anything catastrophic. There is an argument for keeping some of the ones that are there now and even building new ones, but what is happening with the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine is souring me on the idea of nuclear power in general. Not when a war could cause a catastrophe. You can’t really war-proof every nuclear power plant.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 6 months ago
what is happening with the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine is souring me on the idea of nuclear power in general
The problem with nuclear power is that it can cause very large problems very quickly if a plant is mismanaged. By contrast, coal plants cause marginal problems played out over 30-50 year lifespan of the facility. One makes for big scary flashy headlines and the other is just a drip-drip-drip of under-the-radar bad news.
Also, it should be noted that nuclear power is too efficient. When you turn on a nuke plant, the amount of new electricity tanks the market. This is awful for cartels and profit-seeking energy retailers. By contrast, gas plants allow you to generate energy on a marginal scale (MWhs instead of GWhs) and only sell into the market when the price is peaking. ERCOT has turned Texas gas plants into absolute gold mines, as electricity selling for $25/MWh in the morning surges to $3000/MWh by late-afternoon.
Solar and Wind plants have similar problems. They generate when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, rather than when the price of electricity is peaking.
So while nuke/solar/wind plants are efficient, they are also economically self-defeating. They don’t function well in a cartel. They don’t let you fix prices and maximize the cost for retail consumers. And they don’t help you corner the market to press out competition.
This isn’t a problem for Ukrainians (who are lucky to have any amount of electricity any time of day). But its a huge problem for stable western nations inside the imperial core.
Thrashy@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I don’t like that Russia is using the ZNPP as more-or-less a dirty bomb threat against Europe, but at the end of the day the VVER-1000 reactors there are relatively modern GenIII pressurized water reactors. An intentional or accidental meltdown there would not create a Chernobyl-like event. It’d probably end up being more like Fukushima, which if I remember correctly lead to a couple orders of magnitude more deaths due to the stress of evacuation than it’s anticipated to create from radiation exposure.
Bottom line, when you’re talking about reactors that aren’t pants-on-head stupid designs like the RBMK the actual health risk of radiation exposure due to accident is lower than the health risks of most other forms of power, including some non-fossil-fuel alternatives. Long term storage of spent fuel is another issue, but one that’s reasonably solvable as long as we treat fission as a transitional base load power source as other alternatives like storage and/or fusion power become more viable.
ridethisbike@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Ootl… What’s going on with that particular power plant?
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 6 months ago
It’s being fought over by Ukraine and Russia and somebody (Russia, but they blame Ukraine) keeps shelling it. It’s incredibly dangerous.
jaschen@lemm.ee 6 months ago
I live in Taiwan and we are decommissioning our last 4 nuclear plants. We also scrapped a newly built nuclear plant because people just don’t understand how safe new nuclear plants are. Instead 97% my stupid country is burning fossil fuel for electricity and our citizens are doing Pikachu faces because of the bad air quality.
It’s even more stupid is that we are gearing up to electrify the country… Using fossil fuels… Which is worse for the environment.
AA5B@lemmy.world 6 months ago
At least electrifying means that you’ll be ready for renewables- that has to be done as well
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 6 months ago
jaschen@lemm.ee 6 months ago
That’s great but what about other countries unrelated to Taiwan?
ThatWeirdGuy1001@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Every time I’m in a thread about nuclear power it’s the same shit.
Y’all really have no fuckin clue how much safer it is than fossil fuels. But go ahead and keep letting the oil industry convince you otherwise.
janet_catcus@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 months ago
whats your problem? who said we want to keep using fossil fuels forever? to me, the thing about nuclear power is its waste products and the timescales on which that degrades into something less but still as dangerous as before slow clap
did you know? getting insurance for a nuclear power plant is possible! but you might as well build a new nuclear power plant every year to spend that money more wisely… source some german paper: spiegel.de/…/kernkraft-ist-nachhaltig-nachhaltig-…
we need to get off fossil fuels and nuclear fuels are one of them.
i mean sure, choose a timescale large enough and even the sun becomes a fossil fuel, but thats silly: sipping-off-the-suns-emissions itself, the operation of solar panels is not really degrading anybodies quality of life, except perhaps those who might look down onto now reflecting rooftops… making them is of course power consuming, but we are making stuff that makes power which takes power… and instead of just nodding at each other and chugging along we start bickering about the not tasty, not smelly stuff that makes your hair fall out all funny like…and ogle at it? wtf?
but ok you know what?: sure but only if you are personally responsible to have that thing in your backyard and fix it when it inevitably shits itself. also: garbage days are all yours now
Sorgan71@lemmy.world 6 months ago
the waste products are a non issue. Even if we chucked the waste products of every power plant into hospitals for terminally ill orphans who have nobel prizes the damage would not even come close to a hundredth of the damage coal and oil have caused already. Waste products are put into water until they become stable enough to be disposed of. Its not dangerous
fne8w2ah@lemmy.world 6 months ago
The unholy trinity of “environmentalists”, lobbying and the fossil fuel industry.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Y’all really have no fuckin clue how much safer it is than fossil fuels
It’s safer but much more expensive to install and administer.
Forester@yiffit.net 6 months ago
I think you replied to the wrong person.
Korne127@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Every dollar / euro / whatever invested in nuclear power should have been invested in real renewable energy for a bigger impact and a better sustainable transition to green energy.
It gets especially funny when you can’t use the powerplants in the summer anymore because it gets too hot for the cooling water like it has been in France.
Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Would you put your own money into nuclear power these days?
slaacaa@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Exactly. It’s not about building new ones, that’s incredibly expensive with modern Western safety standards. But at least keep the ones already built running as long as it’s safe. Germany really fucked up with this due to populism
LordKitsuna@lemmy.world 6 months ago
It’s just not going to happen, it’s way too slow to become profitable. There are plenty of nuclear power plants in production that have been in production for 40 years that still aren’t profitable.
Storage is going to have to be the thing that makes up for the instability of solar and wind, whether it be in the form of heat storage, hydrogen production, fly wheels, or some breakthrough in Battery Tech.
blind3rdeye@lemm.ee 6 months ago
I found this story to be informative, about why Germany closed their nuclear power plants. I think that context can defuse a lot of arguments about Germany’s decision.
GiddyGap@lemm.ee 6 months ago
I do think that nuclear power is necessary for the green transition. For now at least.
But two things: 1. It creates radioactive waste that will destroy storage sites for centuries to come. 2. Mining and preparing the fuel needed for the reactors is far from green.
atro_city@fedia.io 6 months ago
The greens are principle over matter.
Harbinger01173430@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Build more nuclear plants and have the road for fusion reactors. Let the power of the stars be at our fingertips
Resonosity@lemmy.world 6 months ago
He has a point!
Siegfried@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Enter the IAEA web page, there you will find that not even IAEA rhinks of nuclear energy as a replacement. Thats because uranium reserves arent infinite. Once conventional uranium mines run out of uranium, we will have to go for the non conventional ones and prices will go up the paradigm IAEA professes is nuclear is excellent as a transition techonology (they also include natural gas as a transition techonology) to a fully renewable energy market.
Also, its generally not advisable to have more than a 10% of nuclear energy.
We have to cut the demand.
Broken_Monitor@lemmy.world 6 months ago
The number of people who still think nuclear is bad and solar / wind will make up for it is really depressing. We could have had an unrivaled nuclear power infrastructure but those NIMBY assholes stopped it 50 years ago and now we rely on extending existing plants past their lifetimes while running in fucking circles about how to save the planet. Has anyone who wants to “go green” without nuclear ever looked at the power output of these things?? It’s not even the same league! AaagggghHhHhhhhhhhh
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 6 months ago
The problems with nuclear power aren’t meltdowns, but the facts that it often takes decades just to construct a new plant, it creates an enormous carbon footprint before you get it running, it has an enormously resource-intensive fuel production process, it contributes to nuclear proliferation, it creates indefinitely harmful waste, and even if we get past all of that and do expand it, that’s just going to deplete remaining fuel sources faster, of which we only have so many decades left.
It’s not a good long term solution. I agree we should keep working plants running, but we can’t do that forever, and we still need renewable alternatives - wind, hydro and solar.
And it wasn’t some nebulous group of NIMBYs that worked against nuclear power, it was the fossil fuel lobby. I don’t know why people keep jumping to cultural explanations for what is clearly a structural issue.
Also there is good science on why we actually can switch to entirely renewables: theguardian.com/…/no-miracles-needed-prof-mark-ja…
lethargic_lemming@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Thank you for providing a bigger bigger
Liz@midwest.social 6 months ago
Re: Remaining fuel.
If we built breeder reactors we could use the spent waste fuel to power the entire US for 1000 years. That runs into plutonium existence problems, but it’s a political problem, not a resource problem.
However, I still agree with what you’ve said. We should limit our nuclear footprint to key isotope production, but we really shouldn’t be doing that until we’ve gone full carbon neutral.
gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
While those are all fair points, it’s also important to note that Gen IV reactor technology has projected generation efficiencies of very roughly 100-300x the energy yield from an identical mass of fissile material when compared to Gen II and Gen III reactors.
uzay@infosec.pub 6 months ago
The number of people who still think nuclear power is a manageable risk in any capacity is really depressing. We still have no idea what to do with all the nuclear waste we’re creating even now. And that’s not even considering the impact of having a nuclear plant when you’re in a war.
Forester@yiffit.net 6 months ago
Ukraine seems to be fine, beyond Russians digging up their own fuck up dirt from the past to dig trenches
Milk_Sheikh@lemm.ee 6 months ago
The entire French nation begs to differ. Look at that map! Power generation alllll over the country, not tucked in an unpopulated area or clustered in one spot ‘just in case’.
Then look across the border at Germany. The CND and Greens did a number on then generations ago, and Russia has kept up the fear over nuclear so they were able to keep Germany dependent on Gazprom. Until Ukraine.
BreadOven@lemmy.world 6 months ago
The vast majority of “nuclear waste” is just common items that have come into contact with radiation. The really radioactive portions can be, and are safely stored within the facilities themselves.
Sure, the barely radioactive waste components do need to be buried (or it seems like that’s the current trend), but they pose no risk to anyone as long as they’re not digging them up.
Harbinger01173430@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Why aren’t Hiroshima, Nagasaki or Chernobyl nuclear wastelands?
Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social 6 months ago
I don't think nuclear power was killed by NIMBYs, at least not entirely. In the 1970s and 80s the financial world started taking a much more short-term view. Nuclear power plants have such a huge up-front cost that you aren't going to see returns for decades. When the market wants numbers to go up every quarter they're not going to finance something that won't make a profit for 20 years.
Strykker@programming.dev 6 months ago
That’s why we have governments though, for the long time low return infrastructure, like power grids.
Somehow we are willing to spend billions yearly on new roads but can’t be assed to build a new nuke plant once a decade to grow power production.
Signtist@lemm.ee 6 months ago
If only it were as exciting as the shitty startups that sell for millions a few years after being founded despite never making any profit…
cooopsspace@infosec.pub 6 months ago
The problem with nuclear is it gives fossil fuel giants a free pass to try speedrun killing the planet before it even arrives.
If we plan for nuclear, we plan to do nothing for 50 years.
Rakonat@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about. Nuclear displaces fossil fuels at a better rate than renewables and is just as low carbon impact as them. We could replace the entire fossil grid with nuclear in 10 years if there was public support and demand for it, but fossil giants have been parroting the same antinuclear myths and fears dor the last 70 years and its so widely spread even pro renewable people have been deluded into thinking nuclear is bad for the planet when it might very well be our last best hope of fixing greenhouse emissions without the entire world reverting to pre industrial lifestyles.
Blackmist@feddit.uk 6 months ago
Suspect a lot of those NIMBYs were led by fossil fuel producers in a NIMBY hat…
IchNichtenLichten@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Please provide valid sources to back up your comment. Thanks.
MrVilliam@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I’ll be a source. I worked at Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant in MD for over 10 years. Because of the trend of shutting down nuclear, I shifted over to operating a combined cycle power plant. Calvert with 2 units did about 1800MW combined, base loaded 24/7 except for outages, and those were staggered so that when one went down for maintenance and refueling, the other unit was still throwing 900MW to the grid. My current plant has 2 gas engine turbines and 1 STG, and on a good day when we’re fully up 2x1 with ducts in, we can hit about 800MW when it’s called for. Balls to the wall in perfect conditions on a plant that’s not even ten years old, we can’t do half of what Calvert was doing and they’ve been operating since the 70s.
Imagine what modern nuclear tech could do. We should’ve been a step ahead of everybody with this.
Honytawk@lemmy.zip 6 months ago
I just don’t get why they can close down nuclear power plants while still keeping coal power plants open. Coal is so much worse.
HaywardT@lemmy.sdf.org 6 months ago
I don’t understand why individuals are so set on centralized generation. We suddenly have the capabilities to decentralize generation and greatly reduce the need for the grid. I think it is worth it for the aesthetic advantages alone.
Broken_Monitor@lemmy.world 6 months ago
My opinion is that to be truly decentralized we should do both. Not just physically decentralize by location, but decentralized in a sense of having multiple options. We should do solar, and wind, and nuclear power. The power output of solar and wind is just not where it needs to be to replace both nuclear and fossil fuels, so I do have to argue in favor of building more nuclear power, but that doesn’t mean I am against building any other renewables as well.