cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/50691754
Ugh, all the nuclear nonsense popping up lately… such nonsense, and now with the “but it’s so clean” bullshittery too… 🙄
A fossil-fuel plant seeing nuclear coming...
Submitted 2 days ago by GolfFoxtrotLima@ani.social to science_memes@mander.xyz
Comments
Natanox@discuss.tchncs.de 2 days ago
hash@slrpnk.net 2 days ago
Nuclear power is a toppic dripping with nuance… which we’re totally great at dealing with these days…
Natanox@discuss.tchncs.de 2 days ago
With renewables being branded as “woke” (or “western degeneracy” for the few people in Russia with access to Lemmy), political LLMs being rampant, misinformation being spread as efficient as never before, the industrial interest of certain nations to either sell their Uranium or being able to build nukes, Nuclear Power being ~kinda~ more clean than Coal, Gas and Oil at least (but hellishly expensive and water-gobbling like hell, which apparently most people didn’t get the memo of), the price of refined oil products going through the roof, data centers making energy almost scarce…
I don’t know what you’re talking about, sounds like a great foundation for civilized discussions! 🥴
starlinguk@lemmy.world 2 days ago
The fossil fuel industry wants more nuclear because it takes a lot of money and a lot of time to build. It gives them more time to make more money. Renewables are too fast and too cheap.
llii@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
Also decentralised. Everyone can install some PV panels and a battery.
Natanox@discuss.tchncs.de 2 days ago
Possible. Though I’d wager there’s also a lot of culture war and actual war involved (Russia sells both Oil and Uranium, Iran also sells Oil).
bier@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
7ct per kwh vs ~50ct per kwh and a build time of 10 - 15 years just speaks for itself not even talking about the potential risk vs basically no risk with renewables
Waryle@jlai.lu 10 hours ago
vs basically no risk with renewables
Except for:
- the fact that it consumes a colossal amount of resources, so if the world decides to seriously shift toward renewables, it will lead to competition for the metals and other materials needed to build them
- the fact that it consumes a colossal amount of resources, so it takes a huge amount of oil to extract them—oil that we’re running out of
- the fact that they require an enormous amount of space, so current NIMBY issues will increase tenfold
- the fact that we still don’t have even the beginnings of a storage solution capable of lasting more than a few hours, and therefore a 100% solar + wind scenario is science fiction
In comparison, nuclear has been proven to work reliably and cheaply for entire nations, its problems are political and therefore way easier and realistical to solve than the law-of-physics problem solar and wind need to solve.
Redjard@reddthat.com 5 hours ago
consumes a colossal amount of resources […] so it takes a huge amount of oil
Solar is the main source of interest, since it’s gotten so cheap. And solar is fundamentally a thin slice of silicon with trace amounts of mystery elements. The entire thing can be made extremely thin, but it doesn’t really matter. Because silicon is just fancy sand, and we have enough, it’s not a concern. The trace amounts of mystery elements (dopants) are so minor they don’t matter, regardless of what they are and how they are sourced. Then there are conductors and structural elements, for which you can use what is available. This would be say aluminum for contacts (though they are very thin so you can still use fancier elements), aluminum and epoxy for the frames and protective layers, …
In sum solar has no problematic elements, and the amounts involved are minor on the scale of large construction projects.Wind I want to say is similar. Mainly bulk construction materials like resin, concrete, steel. With some electrical components. The main difference is that here you have generators that might need a lot of copper. Though that is changing, I am not sure how far that is in the rollout but it won’t a concern into the future. Generators won’t need nearly as much copper in the future.
The only thing relevant for pollution, oil use, cost, supply, … in the constituent resources are the batteries. If you put electric car batteries from 10 years ago into a box, you’ll have a bad time.
Since then though, we’ve seen chemistries that make good lithium batteries without problematic elements like cobalt or nickel.
Making batteries that don’t move lets you optimize things even further than for cars in that respect. The production for car vs grid batteries are now also separate due to that.
The main issue of current grid batteries is thus lithium. Which is environmentally problematic to refine, and is expensive, but is readily available and does not depend on oil to my knowledge. The existing production also does not emit enough CO₂ to matter in the ultimate CO₂/kWh numbers when those go into grid use for decades, especially under overprovisioning where you need less batteries per renewable power production to begin with.
And ofc there are many developments in battery tech. Lithium is not inherently necessary for all batteries, there will be alternate chemistries available not too far into the future.
If you are thinking of building a nuclear plant now, then you need to consider what batteries you would need to buy in 10 years when it would be done, not which batteries are available now. In 10 years I’d expect something like molten metal or iron batteries that don’t have any even slightly problematic elements.the fact that they require an enormous amount of space
Loosely about 0.1% of current agricultural land. Even if you don’t want to build some solar farms in place of existing farms for various reasons, it’s not that much compared to other large infrastructure like cities, roads, agriculture, so you can find mixed use situations where they fit well.
For example over parking spaces providing shade, on top of roofs where you don’t usually see them, or on top of crops that benefit from the shade.If you look at countries that have a few tens of percent of their grid on solar at present (often with gas turbines instead of batteries), there will of course be a few panels visible when you get around, but it isn’t omnipresent.
the fact that we still don’t have even the beginnings of a storage solution capable of lasting more than a few hours
Overprovisioning. If you naively assume you build exactly as many solar panels as you need to average to the demand over the year, you get some very large numbers for storage. But given that solar is very cheap and batteries are expensive and problematic, there is no reason to do that. What you do in practice with both solar and wind, is you build more than you would need, enough so that under suboptimal production you still don’t need to draw from storage. Wind turbines don’t always spin when it’s windy, especially very windy, since then they produce so much power all demands are fulfilled and the rest would overload the grid. For solar it’s increasingly the same, you just can’t tell.
Private micro-solar often has a maximum power it can send to the grid, and home solar installations are over-specced for that and can send the maximum for far more of the day. Simply because overspeccing is minor increase if cost compared to everything else so financially the best decision.In short: The sun shines every few hours, you don’t have to store seasonal power.
JasonDJ@lemmy.zip 23 hours ago
Oil and coal are cheap because its cost doesn’t include externalities…which in itself is a form of subsidy.
If we subsidized nuclear the same way, we could build plants faster and have cheaper energy.
Redjard@reddthat.com 10 hours ago
We should charge fossils for them, else we are just disadvantaging everything but fossil and nuclear.
Green doesn’t get subsidies either and still competes on price with fossils, and it does not have home solar (except arguably residential solar in some places).
A CO₂ tax has been demanded by lots of organizations over the years, but in the EU (and I presume elsewhere) has been repeatedly obstructed by fossil lobyists.
ikidd@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 hours ago
Renewables often have storage issues since they aren’t on demand.
Redjard@reddthat.com 10 hours ago
Batteries need to be included if you want to compare renewables to batteries, yeah. Still by now they beat nuclear on price, including the batteries.
Hydro can be disregarded since it’s usually already built, as you mentioned.For solar and wind, especially solar, things have changed quite a bit. Of course mainly batteries just got a lot cheaper and better, but the power production got so ridiculously cheap that you can use over-provisioning. Meaning you build way more power than you’d need if you could store it, and them simply don’t store it all. For example you build enough solar to supply average power for a rainy day in winter, and then only build batteries for the night, completely disregarding seasonal and weather-based storage.
Overprovisioning compared to naive numbers (still thrown around by lobyists) can save you like 80% of battery capacity.
And as a bonus you can run power-based industry (aluminum, hydrogen, titanium, …) for free when you are otherwise not using the over-capacity, if you don’t mind running the machinery on-demand.
DeathsEmbrace@lemmy.world 2 days ago
At this point we should just accept we’re basically asking a trillion dollar industry with lobbyists to stop making money in a capitalist for profit driven world.
Bluegrass_Addict@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
then the world needs to stop asking and start stabbing
db_null@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
Oh no, the sun was too much and Mr Fancy Atom had to go to sleep because there was no water for the thirsty guy. Well, better asleep than leaking or blowing up again. Stupid sun throwing all this energy at the ground, so mean.
Photonic@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Well. This is a science meme community, but a science community nonetheless, so I’ll try to keep it somewhat scientific.
Like airplanes that crash, nuclear power plants get a bad rep, but in reality it’s one of the most reliable and safest forms of energy production. For example looking at deaths from power generation, it currently sits right near the bottom between solar and wind power and well below hydro power and the rest. And that includes the Chernobyl accident.
As for the water: yes, but when Mr. Sun is out the solar panels go vroom, so Mr. Fancy Atom isn’t necessary as much. So they compliment each other nicely. And the current extreme drought in Europe is hopefully a rare occurrence 🤞🏻
db_null@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Airplanes don’t have a bad rep, they are incredibly safe and if one occasionally crashes the death toll is generally limited to the passengers.
My issue with nuclear being presented as perfectly safe is that this is largely theoretical. In practice the list of nuclear and radiation accidents is quite long. If you dig a little into your deaths per terawatt-hour list you can find that they count 433 deaths from Chernobyl. The real death toll remains unknown, but ranges from the 30 officially reported by the Soviet government, the WHO estimate of 4000+, and the 35000 families receiving compensation for “owing to the loss of a breadwinner whose death was deemed to possibly related to the Chernobyl accident.” (en.wikipedia.org/…/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di…)
My point is, each of these nuclear accidents has the potential to kill tens of thousands and cause long-term increases in cancers and birth defects. And despite all the safety claims, we see a major incident about once a decade.
Additionally, we still don’t know where to store the nuclear waste and enriched uranium continues to bring cash to Russia, as we haven’t been able to shake dependance there either.
All in all, nuclear is another fossil fuel that has risks we can’t seem to manage properly and the price is much higher than most renewables. I’m not saying to shut all nuclear plants down immediately, especially if we then have to use coal or gas to make up for the loss in production. But let’s stop praising it as this amazing alternative by making safety and sustainability claims that are based on propaganda numbers.
kossa@feddit.org 1 day ago
Oh boy, do I have news for you.
SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
aaahahahhahahahahahahahaahahahha
I do love your optimism, tho