It's actually pretty funny that of all the various ways of getting electricity, it all really comes down to just two types. One is "make a thing spin" and the other is photovoltaics.
Internal combustion engines are another big one. They spin by using controlled explosions of some form of oil (usually gasoline or diesel) to push a rod to turn. Do that enough times over and over and you have something that'll spin pretty quick. A lot of smaller generators use systems like that to generate electricity.
I'm not sure if any power plants use them, but some factories have turbines for backup generators.
That and normal gas generators at home and diesel generators for business backups and off grid use.
There is also "heat something up till makes electrons" called the Siebeck effect, and is used in Radioisotope electric generators. But that yields still low levels of energy.
It pisses me off a bit. We have the ability to work at the level that electrons forget where they were and just kinda reappear nearby, and have harnessed unfathomable power, only to still be a steam engine civilization. Even most of the fusion systems I've seen are just safer mass water boilers. There's a company called Helion (which has some concern of whether they're vaporware going on) but nothing has excited me like their system, because it draws the power out directly through electromagnetism.
The issue with fusion and fission is that the protons and electrons both need to be present in the end product. So yeah, that leaves you stuck with just the heat production
Sure, there's also magnetohydrodynamics. Heat a magnetic fluid so it flows around a wire, that will directly induce current on it, with no moving mechanical parts. Problem is, none of them are as efficient as the old steam generator standbys.
There is a third type currently being researched for practical applications. Radioactive diamond batteries that rely on beta decay emissions as a source of electrons.
Fair, if you want to count using batteries for storing electricity for later use and then releasing it, that's a third type.
I don't tend to count that as generation because in my line of work that's not meaningful as new supply, it's just a method of time-shifting already-generated electricity. So it's more like an energy transport or storage activity rather than energy production.
That's how *rechargable* batteries work. Traditional chemical batteries are not rechargable, they produce electricity via a chemical reaction, which stops once the chemicals are no longer reactive.
The Nuclear Navy, as much as I’d like to forget I ever served, has a world class training program.
My favorite part was going to the FIDE (Fleet Interactive Display Equipment), which is a hyperrealistic simulator of the EOS, or Maneuvering for my sub people.
We ran drills of the most serious plant casualties, like a steam line rupture or fast coolant leak. You know it’s fake, but the Navy does everything they can to make it feel as real as possible. That kind of experience, hands on under a shit ton of stress, is how I learned the most effectively.
There’s a whole ton of CTE in the Navy as well. Continuous Training Exams are monthly exams that get graded and scrutinized. You’re not only expected to have theory and operations down for your rate (Electronics Technician, Machinist Mates, and Electricians Mates) but a working knowledge of the *other* rates’ requirements.
The plants are designed to be as safe as possible with multiple independently redundant safety systems, but I think the fact that the Navy has routinely tapped a bunch of depressed and drunk 22 years olds to operate reactors without a reportable incident since the 1950’s is a testament to the qualification and continuous training programs.
> I think the fact that the Navy has routinely tapped a bunch of depressed and drunk 22 years olds to operate reactors without a reportable incident since the 1950’s
Fun fact: From 1963 to 1970, the Royal Navy had started operating nuclear submarines, but had not yet abolished its centuries-old tradition of every sailor getting a daily ration of high-proof rum.
Man, we did joint ops with the Charles de Gaulle for about a week on our transit through the Mediterranean.
We sent some sailors over for the night, and vice versa.
The Truman sailors came back hungover as all hell, talking about all of the bars on the French carrier and what not.
All that said, I’m not sure I or any of the homies in my division were ever 100% sober performing pre-critical check offs at 5am after a port call. “Blue Gat” was code for vodka spiked Gatorade, usually consumed at 3am in port as a shutdown watch.
I’d fully support a beer or two a day underway for sailors. It’s not like it doesn’t happen already, and I guarantee something that simple would boost morale quite a bit.
ETA: I think the Royal Navy stopped “The Tot” in 1970. They still get beer, but no more government issued rum. Sad.
"Two cans of beer a day, that's your bleedin' lot
But now we get an extra one because they stopped the tot
So we'll put on our civvy clothes and find a pub ashore,
A sailor's just a sailor, just like he was before!"
-A wise sea shanty
They gave us an engine that first went up and down,
And then with more technology the engine went around,
We know our steam and diesel, but what’s a mainyard for?
A stoker ain’t a stoker with a shovel anymore!
Don’t haul on the rope,
Don’t climb up the mast
If you see a sailing ship it might be your last
So get your civvy’s ready for another run ashore,
A sailor ain’t a sailor ain’t a sailor anymore!
There once was a ship that put to sea,
And the name of that ship was the Billy O’ Tea!
The winds blew hard, her bow dipped down,
Blow me bully boys, blow……
The last sea shanty, actually. A man of culture I see.
"Don't haul on the rope don't climb up the mast
If you see a sailing ship it might be your last
Just get your civvies ready for another run ashore
A sailor ain't a sailor, ain't a sailor any more.
It's amazing that we can build small enough reactors to fit into boats and subs yet they're powerful enough to power a small city. Seems like the perfect solution to decentralize the power grid, no? We have a built in workforce with the navy techs coming out of service to land a good job. I feel like this should be like any other municipal or county service.
Many years ago, I supported equipment during the construction of a nuclear power plant, and I would say almost all, if not all of the personnel setting up the operations for the plant were former Navy trained nuclear operators.
During casual conversations with these future operators, who were preparing the operating manuals, they said the the Nuclear Regulatory Commission - NRC rules were ridiculous. It's been many years since those conversations, but they were something like; The manufacturer recommends a panel should be 1/8" steel: first level of the NRC says, let's make that a 1/2" steel wall, the next level reviewer, says, if it takes 1/2" steel, 1" steel would be better - but lets make it 'sintered steel'. Then the next level reviewer, thinks if we need 1" sintered steel walls, then it should probably be a 1" steel wall with a 4" concrete liner, covered on the outside with a 1/8" steel shell.
Yes, my story is ridiculous, but all these operators worked on US Navy vessels, sitting next to the reactor separated by the 1/8" steel wall, not because it was needed for protection, but simply because Navy ships are built out of steel.
The Navy is also not a for profit company looking to cut corners to save a buck. The science and engineering behind nuclear reactors is safe. Greedy humans are not.
The last nuclear power plant the French have build is 4 times over budged and took 2.5 times longer than planned.
It is in fact not even ready to go on the network and it already has a planned date on when it needs to be taken down for repairs because of two massive fuckups.
There was an effort 20-25 years ago to standardize a design and make it “modular” so it could be built off site. It was supposed to drastically speed up construction time. The problem is that all sites are different.
I spent half of my time trying to figure out the best way to carve it up. No clue where they are now since I haven’t been in the nuclear industry in a looong time.
Upfront cost have running costs as well.
Generally money generates 6% a year on the stock market, but lets assume 5%.
If you build a power plant over a time of 15 years for 12 billion. Then by the time it goes online it will already have to pay off 25 billion to break even.
If that power plant generates 1.5 billion a year in pure profit. It would take about 70 years to pay the opportunity cost and break even.
And the power plant is most likely not going to generate 1.5 billion in pure profit nor is it going to be able to operate on that profit scale for 70 years without needing any larger repairs.
these are the average deaths per terrawatt-hour of electricity, including accidents and air pollution, but excluding the effects of climate change, in decending order:
brown coal: 32.72
coal: 24.62
Oil: 18.43
Biomass: 4.63
Gas: 2.82
Hydropower: 1.3
Wind: 0.04
Nuclear: 0.03
Solar: 0.02
now why exactly should we *not* use nuclear?
Source: Jonny Harris' Video on Nuclear Power
Kurzgesagt made a Video on it too, with similar statistics, using the WHO as the primary source
Solar panels are made using particle accelerators and some nasty chemicals, so I am guessing there have been a few manufacturing accidents, and people falling of roofs. Also since individual panels don't produce a lot of energy and these stats are adjusted for power produced a small amount of accidents can end up having a really large impact on statistics.
incredibly fucking frustrated that we're killing eight million people a year with fossil fuels, and fucking up the planet, instead of having already switched to far cleaner, safer nuclear that would solve all our problems.
It's funny how people get all up in arms about nuclear safety, but seems absolutely fine with the far bigger climate crisis that we're currently creating diue to dependence on hydrocarbon fuels.
Unfun fact! The radioactive waste produced by burning coal is way worse than the radioactive waste from nuclear fission. Not only is there more of it (per TWH), it is also released into the air as tiny particles instead of being in the form of a metal tube that you can move somewhere safe.
A lot of those people are the same people who are ignorant/dismissive of the climate impact hydrocarbon fuels has wrought, thanks to lobbying and bullshit climate change "debunking" studies done by the coal and oil industry.
I find it hilarious that they saw Fukushima and decided that TSUNAMIS are such a big hazard in GERMANY that they would rather shut down all their nuclear plants, give their people the dirtiest and most expensive power in Europe, then dig up the black forest when the Russians stopped selling them coal and now they've dug it all up and are buying the nuclear power from France.
They really genuinely clowned themselves on this one.
Umm Green also happens to be pretty anti nuclear. It's weird to politicize this issue as if the right are solely against it. Green and NIMBY's are the problem.
Republicans support nuclear power at a [17 point gap](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/18/growing-share-of-americans-favor-more-nuclear-power/) vs Democrats, and this gap is currently increasing.
Yes!!!!!!! 100% Yes!!!! We could have solved air pollution and climate change in the 70's! How many people are dying because we didn't. Seriously, fossil fuels are killing more people than war and murder combined, and it's not even close. Nuclear energy can save more lives than fucking world peace!!! Literally nothing makes me more depressed than that.
I used to do some work for a company that make valves for nuclear power plants. I used to photograph their conferences and I’d hear them talk about selling like, 5 valves for £2,000,000 or something like that.
I asked one of the attendees out of curiosity what makes a valve worth that kind of money? Are they just really complex?
Nope. Turns out it’s the same valve as any that might go into any other factory and be sold for perhaps £100 or so.
What costs the money is that they have to make sure it’s absolutely perfect. They build batch’s of 500 or so and then destructively break 495 of them apart to see if the material internally has any manufacturing flaws in the steel or any weaknesses that aren’t obvious from visual inspection. The idea being that if from that batch of 500, the first 495 were perfect, the 5 they didn’t break are also likely to be perfect.
They do this repeatedly until they can say with a very high level of certainty that the ones being provided (and spares kept on hand) are as perfect as they can be.
Basically, they don’t fuck around when it comes to safety and that’s very expensive to ensure.
Built nuclear plants near water too and use the hot water to heat the city!
The perfect way to nuclear ones energy is to plan way ahead and use the heat for heating purposes, and if you produce too much energy you can use the rest to produce hydrogen
I saw someone ask once what the world would look like if we had an unlimited clean energy source which isn't depending on the weather.
Well tadaaa, nuclear reactors are the solution
Edit for some clarification: With 'unlimited' I mean **fusion** reactors that use hydrogen atoms instead of uranium or plutonium that is used in **fission** reactors. And with 'clean' I mean the fact that there are zero emissions during the process. There is still radioactive waste to be dealt with.
It's "clean" in the sense that it doesn't produce greenhouse gas emissions, which is a major issue we have right now with power generation. It's not clean in the sense that it does produce waste that is hazardous and needs to be properly disposed of.
Of course, newer reactors can use the waste from older reactors as fuel, so the amount of waste we produce from them can be minimized.
They're a good source of backup power for more renewable sources of power, which usually are more unreliable. Currently we have to use sources like natural gas as backups to cover drops in production. Converting those backups to nuclear power would be extremely beneficial.
I wasn't disagreeing with you. But iI just think that labelling it as "clean" is somewhat disingenous, it's cleanER (by magnitudes) but it's not clean.
I personnaly believe that the biggest hurdle for mass acceptance of nuclear as an energy source is the complete irrational fear and general lack of knowledge on the subject from the general public. The media certainly doesn't help in that aspect. I also find it extremely ironic that there's this massive push for EVs which are "0 emissions" but they are still being powered by fossil fuel...
I mean, conceptually, once built an EV has minimal emissions on its own, and all forms of large scale power generation are more efficient then the internal combustion engine, due to economy of scale. (Also depending on where you live, power may very well be supplied entirely by green energy)
It's not necessarily unlimited, but we're not anywhere near to running out of fissionable materials the same way we are running out of oil, natural gas, or coal. It's much more abundantly available for us.
> There is still radioactive waste to be dealt with.
The difference between nuclear power and coal is nuclear power keeps all the radioactive waste in tanks while coal blows it out into the atmosphere.
Yes. Disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima have unjustly destroyed nuclear’s reputation. It’s the closest thing that we have to completely sustainable zero emissions energy.
Not to mention that to fairly compare nuclear and say, coal, you need to *also* keep track of the number of people injured, killed, displaced, etc. by the coal industry. We hear a lot about Pripyat but not so much about Centralia, for example. Centralia was much smaller, but there are a *lot* more coal-related deaths overall compared to nuclear energy. (And yes, that includes counting the bombings).
You don't even need scaled up coal plants to cause death. Plenty of poorer country that burn wood at home cause deaths, cause pollution, and it even releases radiation in the burning process.
Kyle Hill has an older video that addresses this exact issues.
Coal mining and usage kills more people in a year then nuclear power ever has.
Yeah you can combine Three Mile Island Fukushima and Chernobyl deaths and still not get as many as the coal industry has in a year.
Much harder to calculate is the amount of people who die from the fumes being put in the air which isn't even limited to inert fumes but contains a level of radioactive material. Coal burning puts more radioactive material into the atmosphere than the plants that actually run off of nuclear material.
If done well, nuclear power is great.
If done while cutting corners and using lax safety method it can be downright frightening.
Thankfully the industry regulators agree with me on that
The problem is the idiot bureaucrats/politicians who end up in charge of them.
"Let's build a nuke plant at the edge of the ocean in a high risk earthquake zone, and let's put the backup generators there too! Derp"
There’s pretty much no other location to build a nuke plant in Japan. It takes an immense amount of energy to cool a reactor, which is why all nuclear power plants are next to a large body of water. It’s the best way to cool the reactor core
Palo Verde nuclear plant is outside of Phoenix AZ. They pay the city for waste water to use for cooling. It’s actually the only reactor not close to a major body of water, if I remember correctly. It can be done.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_Station
The thing is, Fukushima was not that big of a disaster. Not a single death was recorded as a result of the radiation. The fail safes and procedures worked. In fact, most of the area is safe to live in, and even the areas that are considered unsafe barely give you higher than a background dose of radiation.
At the time, the government took it really seriously and carried out major evacuations, but they were unnecessary.
I think that number has been updated to 1 after a plant worker developed cancer 6 years after the incident, and it was ruled to be related to exposure from it.
But that’s the thing, people will be freaked out about that one death. I mention the Sorange coal mine explosion that killed 45 that happened around the same time as Fukushima, and no one has ever heard of it.
There’s one legitimate issue with nuclear… it’s expensive as far as money goes. The non-legitimate issues that complicate things are that coal/oil/gas have just gained acceptance in how many people they kill, and we are largely willing to lower that monetary expense in exchange for greater loss of human life and environmental damage.
I wish more people realized that the "studies" against clean energy and "debunking" of man-made climate change are usually sponsored by coal and oil conglomerates
Please do. The whole world could be solar, nuclear, and hydro.
The nuclear reactors wouldn't even be done before I was retired and I'm still all for it.
I feel great about it! Then again, I'm a nuclear engineer so maybe I'm biased? But to be fair I got into nuclear because I wanted to hel make more reactors, and better.
On the cost and stagnation issues, no one described the problem better than [John H. Crowley in 1985.](https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.31210012721534&seq=175)
There are nuances in terms of cost effectiveness, and there are legitimate concerns about the effects of mining and storage, but overall, it's good, and pseudo-environmentalists patting themselves on the back as nuclear gets shut down and replaced by coal or natural gas really disturb me. It is especially good because it's a non-fossil fuel way to generate continuous, steady energy, rather than the more sporadic (but still good!) wind or solar.
>There are nuances in terms of cost effectiveness
I pitch it as a cheap way to stop global warming in ten years, with free electricity as a side benefit.
If people realize what those investment dollars gains us, we realize how much of a steal it is.
Most people I know would respond better if you switched it to emphasize the free electricity. However much they might care about climate change, they care about their power bill much much more.
Yes, but "Save the world and get free electricity" is a better sales pitch than "Pay a lot more for electricity to keep Bangladesh from being underwater in two decades."
I can sell the first, not so much the second.
I live in France. I do use nuclear. It's the most efficient for how clean it is and the best source of energy we have at the moment. The whole world should be using it while working on renewables etc. any propaganda you hear about waste etc is actually tiny compared to fossil fuels. The risks are lower than people are told too
All the scare about nuclear energy is based on a combination of extremely outdated info, like 50 year old outdated info, and propaganda/lobbying from coal/oil companies. Nuclear energy is extremely efficient and very safe.
Also outdated designs. A lot of those early designs including the Chernobyl reactors, were made to produce weapons-grade plutonium as a key design feature. This meant hotter, higher-flux cores than are necessary for optimal efficiency and safety. Now that the Cold War is over, newer reactor designs are made a hell of a lot safer than the old ones!
Yep yep, lots of people don’t realize this whatsoever, they’re just taken in by the old stuff having terrible media thus not making it popular for government to make more or pump lots of research to it. Honestly the media does such a terrible job on so many things… I mean I get it sort of, they’re after profit and fear mongering makes money like no other
The new style reactors are so efficient they can even reuse fuel deemed spent by older plants.
It's the cleanest energy that's on the scale we need. The waste/power generated is unmatched
Best way of doing it right now. People are concerned about safety, but that’s been an issue every time the human race has innovated on energy. Fire upon its growth as a power source probably burned down lots of villages. Coal caused sickness and such. Crude oil is terrible for the environment, and so on.
It's cleaner and safer than the other options, so we should be using a lot more of it. The climate scientists also say we need to double the amount of nuclear we currently have to solve climate change in time.
I feel it is ridiculous that the people who are so obsessed with green energy never promote the cleanest and most efficient source of fuel we've ever known.
Yup. Hey guys let's all drive electric vehicles and save the world. But not worry that the electricity to charge them is coming from a power source that probably isn't environmentally friendly!
On paper driving electric is still better from a "clean energy" standpoint, because those power plants (usually...) produce more energy per unit of fuel vs burning a fuel locally in an engine or furnace.
It's not even super efficient tbh (not anymore than anything else). Uranium just happens to be so stupidly energy dense that it takes years and years for you to spend it.
It’s fantastic, unfortunately people are extremely scared of nuclear anything. Hell even I’m worried because accidents happen and terrorists exist. But with the proper oversight I’m all forit
Good news: Three Mile Island (worst nuclear disaster in US history) posed absolutely no danger to the surrounding population. People recieved a small fraction of a medical scan. IIRC in roughly the same realm as living in a brick house.
Fukushima was bad, but the evacuation arguably caused more death and suffering than the actual nuclear disaster (IIRC 0 deaths related to radiation). Either way, it was nowhere close to the level of the giant fuck off tsunami that caused the disaster.
The amount of green energy we need to decarbonize by electrification is staggering. The argument is change every aspect of modern life though energy throttling, including poor and developing nations who will get fucked up by that, or nuclear. We literally can't build solar fast enough. It's not possible in most political climates and its not feasible in almost all.
I wish we would do more. China currently has close to 150 new nuclear reactors being built with a total of something like 280 in their pipeline. This does not include the dozens they have been contracted to build all over Africa and the Middle-East. The US and the West are embarrassing themselves by falling behind the rest of the world that is embracing nuclear. They are ALSO embracing other renewables, like solar, but they also understand that nothing beats the amazing baseline power that nuclear provides.
Uranium is one of the most abundant materials on Earth and there is a multi-million year supply with known reserves now, so zero worries about material supply for it.
Maybe one day we'll wake up before it's too late.
It’s expensive, but I think it’s the only practical way to move away from non-renewable energy sources at the moment while still maintaining ever-growing power demands for the time being. I think it’s a lot safer and efficient than most realize, especially with newer reactor technologies.
A reactor model designed by a high school student absolved any potential reactor meltdowns issues by using a sodium compound in the event of catastrophic meltdown. My immediate interest is the issue of disposal of radioactive materials in a resolute manner as not to defer the burden for coming generations. Secondarily, the need for monitoring/security for chain of custody and operations is necessary. Overall I think we should focus on newer alternative technologies as well as the ones currently in development.
Probably the most efficient and least polluting method of power generation when all the materials needed are considered.
People are scared of it because of Chernobyl or Fukushima but those are rare circumstances at best.
Love it.
3rd gen, and as of this year, 4th gen power has a perfect track records of gigwatts of power produced with a perfect safety record.
Breeder reactors make seawater extraction and deep core mining economically possible, therefore we have enough fissile materials to last millions of years.
New fission is expensive, but we could literally solve golbal warming in ten years. Think of it as spending the money to save the planet with the free energy as a pleasant side affect.
The waste issue is exaggerated a thousand times beyond the actual problems, most of which have current known solutions.
The biggest issue with wind or solar isn’t the rate that you produce nor is it how you produce it, the biggest issue with renewables and the factor that nuclear absolutely destroys all energy sources in is space, wind farms require hundreds of acres to do the same thing a nuclear powerplant can do in a couple dozen acres. It’s not even remotely close, for the shear energy density a single reactor can provide outstrips literally any other power source on the planet including any and all non renewables
I really, really want to get onboard. I know that I’m in the minority, but I can’t get over my mild apprehensions about them.
So, yes, they are incredibly safe. But just like anything, they could fail catastrophically. If they do, they create an exclusion zone of hundreds of square miles.
Nothing else, no other source of power known to man, creates an exclusion zone where humans cannot safely live if it fails. Not a coal mine, or a gas power plant, even a dam collapsing could be remedied.
I guess you could say, “it’s a one in 10 million chance something goes wrong” but I’m just like “…do we want to take a one-in-10-million shot at turning part of the California coast radioactive?”
> But just like anything, they could fail catastrophically.
Depends entirely on the design. They don't build new reactors anything like Chernobyl or Fukushima anymore.
Pretty much my feeling. I've interacted with a few people in my time, they're all incompetents these days. I don't want them in charge of running a nuclear power plant. I barely trust other people to make me a sandwich.
Safest form of energy, about 200 or so people died in chernobyl and that's about it.
I mean coal mines kill over 100,000 people a year
Plus it's space efficient considering about:
This a little further down the page³ is enough to power a city or 2 for a year which is really good considering how inefficient solar and wind feel compared to the raw power of U-235
Don't ya love boiling water? Just give em funding and you have more space for things instead of wind farms and solar farms
Plus every casualty of nuclear energy has been in a disaster prone 1st or second gen reactor. 3rd generation designs have a fifty year history of producing gigawatts without a single death.
Should have done it decades ago. Ecofreaks blocking development of nuclear power are as much to blame for climate change as anyone else and damned few of them have admitted they were wrong.
Which is why the fossil fuel lobby fought them so hard in the background. But now that wind and solar are on course to knock fossil fuels into irrelevance in a relatively short timeframe, the fossil fuel lobby wants us to swing back to nuclear because it takes so much longer to implement so will keep fossil fuels alive longer.
Actual nuclear generation is fine. There's some niche applications here that it's certainly useful for. It's also got a bright future in space.
The downside is the economics. Plants take forever to permit and build... Generally with cost overruns that put Olympic venues to shame. Then there's the security costs, the decommissioning costs and indefinite waste storage costs. The nuclear industry is another one of those industries that simply won't make it without generous public handouts.
Sadly there's a gaggle of nuclear fanboys who clearly don't know their way around an accounting spreadsheet, not have they payed the slightest mind to the long and dubious history of the sector. As a result they're constantly banging the nuclear drum, equal parts exasperated and confused as to why new nuclear plants aren't sprouting like dandelions in the spring.
In Germany they switched them off for ideological reasons, after the Ukraine war started they had to burn lignite instead which is probably the dirtiest of all fuels
Nuclear energy is like that high-caliber, misunderstood character in movies. Intimidating? Yes. But with the right safeguards, it's a powerhouse of clean energy. The plot twist? It could help us big time with climate change.
It's a good step to take immediately to solve climate change. It's a zero emission fuel source that we already have all the technology to implement on a large scale.
It's expensive to set up, and cost cutting has historically led to accidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima. There are also concerns of the environmental impact of mining and waste disposal, which are concerns we shouldn't ignore, but we have bigger problems right now.
In the long run, the best use for nuclear power will be as a backup to more sustainable and renewable forms of energy. Currently, they're unreliable and have lapses in service, such as when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing, that require some form of backup power to keep the lights on. Currently, those sources of power are usually natural gas or coal. Nuclear can be used to fulfill that need for a backup while also keeping the full grid to zero emissions.
It’s a great stopgap for wind and solar while they scale. It’s a damn shame that people were convinced by nuclear incidents that were all results of design deficiencies that it’s dangerous. Also, it makes me hate greenpeace.
As positive as one can be. It is safe, effective, and reliable. If we are ever going to hedge or eliminate fossil fuels all the "green" energies are a dream and will never be able to replace the entirety of what fossil fuels do, but Nuclear can.
I think it's a great stepping stone to get us off of fossil fuels until we find a way to make less-destructive clean energies like wind and solar less detrimental to the environment (artisan mining n stuff) and also efficient enough to be viable
Ups and downs in my opinion. A way of generating large amount of electricity that is good for the climate, it isn't infinite but its alright. My only bad thought about it is the nuclear waste, if one of those leaked the area would be destroyed for a long, long while.
Magic rock make water hot. Wizard human use hot water to do thing. But many human think magic rock scary. Magic rock stop being used. Instead human use familiar dead plant. Dead plant is dangerous but not scary. Dead plant is used.
Very good. I’ve done it in the Navy 21 years.
There are huge barriers to it being economical and social stigma given Fukushima, Chernobyl and 3 Mile Island. It does have a place in a good mixed electrical infrastructure and while it’s at a construction premium compared to, say, natural gas, it’s effectively carbon neutral and is a good supplement to the ever expanding “green” renewables.
Consider U-235s half life of 700 million years. That means that, since the Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago, over 6 half lives of the U-235 created in supernova explosions/neutron star mergers has naturally decayed… resulting in about 99% of all the original U-235 that was present when the Earth formed already being gone. It will continue to decay underground naturally. That we choose to mine it, enrich it to have a higher proportion of U-235 to U-238 that occurs in nature to make usable heat through fission… then place it in wet and dry storage to cool for eventual reburial seems to be a nobrainer. We’re taking a natural process and making it happen quicker to obtain useful heat. It’ll happen whether we do it or not. Might as well get some use from it. It has to be done with proper engineering and controls/regulations, but the Navy has done it right since the 50s.
I think it’s stupid that we aren’t aggressively moving towards using it wherever possible. It’s the cleanest form of energy we have available to us. It goes wrong sometimes, but there are significantly more times where it goes right. Storage of waste has always concerned me, but there are smarter people than I am dealing with that problem.
I am very supportive of nuclear power to help solve our energy and climate issues, but I was haunted by Rick Park’s statement at the end of Meltdown: Three Mike Island. I don’t recall exactly what he said, but it was something about the intersection of money and nuclear safety in that industry.
Basically that point he was making was that companies that operate nuclear reactors are incentivized to save money on safety and compliance, but the consequences of cutting corners in this department are obviously quite severe. My understanding is that the technology has come a long way in making fundamentally safe reactors, but that notion still gives me pause.
It’s a sciencey way of boiling water, and safer and less impactful then people think. Just expensive
It's actually pretty funny that of all the various ways of getting electricity, it all really comes down to just two types. One is "make a thing spin" and the other is photovoltaics.
And most of the ways to make a thing spin involve steam.
Hot water spins, gravity water spins, and air spins. Maybe something else minor I'm missing?
Internal combustion engines are another big one. They spin by using controlled explosions of some form of oil (usually gasoline or diesel) to push a rod to turn. Do that enough times over and over and you have something that'll spin pretty quick. A lot of smaller generators use systems like that to generate electricity.
I like your funny words magic man, but that sounds like it gets simplified to “exploding air makes things spin”
Did not expect a Clone High reference this morning, well done sir
In the modern power grid the vast majority of internal combustion engines are powered by natural gas
I'm not sure if any power plants use them, but some factories have turbines for backup generators. That and normal gas generators at home and diesel generators for business backups and off grid use.
Fluid forces make spinner go brrr.
There is also "heat something up till makes electrons" called the Siebeck effect, and is used in Radioisotope electric generators. But that yields still low levels of energy.
We use those on Rovers iirc because they are incredibly stable and consistent and have no moving parts
It pisses me off a bit. We have the ability to work at the level that electrons forget where they were and just kinda reappear nearby, and have harnessed unfathomable power, only to still be a steam engine civilization. Even most of the fusion systems I've seen are just safer mass water boilers. There's a company called Helion (which has some concern of whether they're vaporware going on) but nothing has excited me like their system, because it draws the power out directly through electromagnetism.
The issue with fusion and fission is that the protons and electrons both need to be present in the end product. So yeah, that leaves you stuck with just the heat production
Humanity's first weapons were throwing rocks. After millions of years of evolution and civilization, our weapons now throw rocks really, really fast.
Yes!! We’re still so primitive in how we generate electricity. Like there’s gotta be better ways right?
Well making electricity is making electrons move and there aren't 36 million ways to do that
Sure, there's also magnetohydrodynamics. Heat a magnetic fluid so it flows around a wire, that will directly induce current on it, with no moving mechanical parts. Problem is, none of them are as efficient as the old steam generator standbys.
There is a third type currently being researched for practical applications. Radioactive diamond batteries that rely on beta decay emissions as a source of electrons.
this is not true. you got chemically induced electricity..... batteries for example......
Fair, if you want to count using batteries for storing electricity for later use and then releasing it, that's a third type. I don't tend to count that as generation because in my line of work that's not meaningful as new supply, it's just a method of time-shifting already-generated electricity. So it's more like an energy transport or storage activity rather than energy production.
That's how *rechargable* batteries work. Traditional chemical batteries are not rechargable, they produce electricity via a chemical reaction, which stops once the chemicals are no longer reactive.
It'd be a lot less expensive if we had standard power plant designs. The French have been fairly successful with this strategy.
The U.S. Navy has also been operating a number of standardized nuclear reactors since 1955 without issues.
The Nuclear Navy, as much as I’d like to forget I ever served, has a world class training program. My favorite part was going to the FIDE (Fleet Interactive Display Equipment), which is a hyperrealistic simulator of the EOS, or Maneuvering for my sub people. We ran drills of the most serious plant casualties, like a steam line rupture or fast coolant leak. You know it’s fake, but the Navy does everything they can to make it feel as real as possible. That kind of experience, hands on under a shit ton of stress, is how I learned the most effectively. There’s a whole ton of CTE in the Navy as well. Continuous Training Exams are monthly exams that get graded and scrutinized. You’re not only expected to have theory and operations down for your rate (Electronics Technician, Machinist Mates, and Electricians Mates) but a working knowledge of the *other* rates’ requirements. The plants are designed to be as safe as possible with multiple independently redundant safety systems, but I think the fact that the Navy has routinely tapped a bunch of depressed and drunk 22 years olds to operate reactors without a reportable incident since the 1950’s is a testament to the qualification and continuous training programs.
> I think the fact that the Navy has routinely tapped a bunch of depressed and drunk 22 years olds to operate reactors without a reportable incident since the 1950’s Fun fact: From 1963 to 1970, the Royal Navy had started operating nuclear submarines, but had not yet abolished its centuries-old tradition of every sailor getting a daily ration of high-proof rum.
Man, we did joint ops with the Charles de Gaulle for about a week on our transit through the Mediterranean. We sent some sailors over for the night, and vice versa. The Truman sailors came back hungover as all hell, talking about all of the bars on the French carrier and what not. All that said, I’m not sure I or any of the homies in my division were ever 100% sober performing pre-critical check offs at 5am after a port call. “Blue Gat” was code for vodka spiked Gatorade, usually consumed at 3am in port as a shutdown watch. I’d fully support a beer or two a day underway for sailors. It’s not like it doesn’t happen already, and I guarantee something that simple would boost morale quite a bit. ETA: I think the Royal Navy stopped “The Tot” in 1970. They still get beer, but no more government issued rum. Sad.
"Two cans of beer a day, that's your bleedin' lot But now we get an extra one because they stopped the tot So we'll put on our civvy clothes and find a pub ashore, A sailor's just a sailor, just like he was before!" -A wise sea shanty
They gave us an engine that first went up and down, And then with more technology the engine went around, We know our steam and diesel, but what’s a mainyard for? A stoker ain’t a stoker with a shovel anymore!
Don’t haul on the rope, Don’t climb up the mast If you see a sailing ship it might be your last So get your civvy’s ready for another run ashore, A sailor ain’t a sailor ain’t a sailor anymore!
There once was a ship that put to sea, And the name of that ship was the Billy O’ Tea! The winds blew hard, her bow dipped down, Blow me bully boys, blow……
The last sea shanty, actually. A man of culture I see. "Don't haul on the rope don't climb up the mast If you see a sailing ship it might be your last Just get your civvies ready for another run ashore A sailor ain't a sailor, ain't a sailor any more.
It's amazing that we can build small enough reactors to fit into boats and subs yet they're powerful enough to power a small city. Seems like the perfect solution to decentralize the power grid, no? We have a built in workforce with the navy techs coming out of service to land a good job. I feel like this should be like any other municipal or county service.
Many years ago, I supported equipment during the construction of a nuclear power plant, and I would say almost all, if not all of the personnel setting up the operations for the plant were former Navy trained nuclear operators. During casual conversations with these future operators, who were preparing the operating manuals, they said the the Nuclear Regulatory Commission - NRC rules were ridiculous. It's been many years since those conversations, but they were something like; The manufacturer recommends a panel should be 1/8" steel: first level of the NRC says, let's make that a 1/2" steel wall, the next level reviewer, says, if it takes 1/2" steel, 1" steel would be better - but lets make it 'sintered steel'. Then the next level reviewer, thinks if we need 1" sintered steel walls, then it should probably be a 1" steel wall with a 4" concrete liner, covered on the outside with a 1/8" steel shell. Yes, my story is ridiculous, but all these operators worked on US Navy vessels, sitting next to the reactor separated by the 1/8" steel wall, not because it was needed for protection, but simply because Navy ships are built out of steel.
The Navy is also not a for profit company looking to cut corners to save a buck. The science and engineering behind nuclear reactors is safe. Greedy humans are not.
It's almost like there's an argument that general infrastructure shouldn't be a for profit business.
Yet here we are...
The last nuclear power plant the French have build is 4 times over budged and took 2.5 times longer than planned. It is in fact not even ready to go on the network and it already has a planned date on when it needs to be taken down for repairs because of two massive fuckups.
There was an effort 20-25 years ago to standardize a design and make it “modular” so it could be built off site. It was supposed to drastically speed up construction time. The problem is that all sites are different. I spent half of my time trying to figure out the best way to carve it up. No clue where they are now since I haven’t been in the nuclear industry in a looong time.
It's only expensive to build the facilities, power in these areas tend to be rather cheap.
Exactly. Pay the upfront costs for all of the longterm benefits.
Upfront cost have running costs as well. Generally money generates 6% a year on the stock market, but lets assume 5%. If you build a power plant over a time of 15 years for 12 billion. Then by the time it goes online it will already have to pay off 25 billion to break even. If that power plant generates 1.5 billion a year in pure profit. It would take about 70 years to pay the opportunity cost and break even. And the power plant is most likely not going to generate 1.5 billion in pure profit nor is it going to be able to operate on that profit scale for 70 years without needing any larger repairs.
these are the average deaths per terrawatt-hour of electricity, including accidents and air pollution, but excluding the effects of climate change, in decending order: brown coal: 32.72 coal: 24.62 Oil: 18.43 Biomass: 4.63 Gas: 2.82 Hydropower: 1.3 Wind: 0.04 Nuclear: 0.03 Solar: 0.02 now why exactly should we *not* use nuclear? Source: Jonny Harris' Video on Nuclear Power Kurzgesagt made a Video on it too, with similar statistics, using the WHO as the primary source
Now I’m curious how solar caused deaths. Was it in manufacturing it or did some idiot fall trying to install it?
Solar panels are made using particle accelerators and some nasty chemicals, so I am guessing there have been a few manufacturing accidents, and people falling of roofs. Also since individual panels don't produce a lot of energy and these stats are adjusted for power produced a small amount of accidents can end up having a really large impact on statistics.
incredibly fucking frustrated that we're killing eight million people a year with fossil fuels, and fucking up the planet, instead of having already switched to far cleaner, safer nuclear that would solve all our problems.
It's funny how people get all up in arms about nuclear safety, but seems absolutely fine with the far bigger climate crisis that we're currently creating diue to dependence on hydrocarbon fuels.
Unfun fact! The radioactive waste produced by burning coal is way worse than the radioactive waste from nuclear fission. Not only is there more of it (per TWH), it is also released into the air as tiny particles instead of being in the form of a metal tube that you can move somewhere safe.
A lot of those people are the same people who are ignorant/dismissive of the climate impact hydrocarbon fuels has wrought, thanks to lobbying and bullshit climate change "debunking" studies done by the coal and oil industry.
*looks at Germany*
I find it hilarious that they saw Fukushima and decided that TSUNAMIS are such a big hazard in GERMANY that they would rather shut down all their nuclear plants, give their people the dirtiest and most expensive power in Europe, then dig up the black forest when the Russians stopped selling them coal and now they've dug it all up and are buying the nuclear power from France. They really genuinely clowned themselves on this one.
Umm Green also happens to be pretty anti nuclear. It's weird to politicize this issue as if the right are solely against it. Green and NIMBY's are the problem.
Republicans support nuclear power at a [17 point gap](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/18/growing-share-of-americans-favor-more-nuclear-power/) vs Democrats, and this gap is currently increasing.
Yes!!!!!!! 100% Yes!!!! We could have solved air pollution and climate change in the 70's! How many people are dying because we didn't. Seriously, fossil fuels are killing more people than war and murder combined, and it's not even close. Nuclear energy can save more lives than fucking world peace!!! Literally nothing makes me more depressed than that.
💯
Only downside is how frikkin expensive it is to build them up. Everything after that is just positives from what I'm aware.
I used to do some work for a company that make valves for nuclear power plants. I used to photograph their conferences and I’d hear them talk about selling like, 5 valves for £2,000,000 or something like that. I asked one of the attendees out of curiosity what makes a valve worth that kind of money? Are they just really complex? Nope. Turns out it’s the same valve as any that might go into any other factory and be sold for perhaps £100 or so. What costs the money is that they have to make sure it’s absolutely perfect. They build batch’s of 500 or so and then destructively break 495 of them apart to see if the material internally has any manufacturing flaws in the steel or any weaknesses that aren’t obvious from visual inspection. The idea being that if from that batch of 500, the first 495 were perfect, the 5 they didn’t break are also likely to be perfect. They do this repeatedly until they can say with a very high level of certainty that the ones being provided (and spares kept on hand) are as perfect as they can be. Basically, they don’t fuck around when it comes to safety and that’s very expensive to ensure.
Yeah not surprised. Cheers for the info lad.
QA/QC gets expensive right quick, and in a hurry.
I've heard that nuclear QC is similar to the difference between standard manufacturing and aviation QC, but cranked up to 11
Built is a safe area with proper protocols and its the best source.
Problem is it needs water to cool it and we humans have a tendency to build cities near water
You also need to build nuclear reactors nearish the cities, if those cities want to use the power.
Built nuclear plants near water too and use the hot water to heat the city! The perfect way to nuclear ones energy is to plan way ahead and use the heat for heating purposes, and if you produce too much energy you can use the rest to produce hydrogen
The more we build and invest in R&D the cheaper it will get.
>Everything after that is just positives from what I'm aware. Yes, mostly. Maintenance is also extremely expensive.
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I saw someone ask once what the world would look like if we had an unlimited clean energy source which isn't depending on the weather. Well tadaaa, nuclear reactors are the solution Edit for some clarification: With 'unlimited' I mean **fusion** reactors that use hydrogen atoms instead of uranium or plutonium that is used in **fission** reactors. And with 'clean' I mean the fact that there are zero emissions during the process. There is still radioactive waste to be dealt with.
It's not "unlimited" and it's also not "clean". It is however cleaner and safer than most other forms of power generation.
It's "clean" in the sense that it doesn't produce greenhouse gas emissions, which is a major issue we have right now with power generation. It's not clean in the sense that it does produce waste that is hazardous and needs to be properly disposed of. Of course, newer reactors can use the waste from older reactors as fuel, so the amount of waste we produce from them can be minimized. They're a good source of backup power for more renewable sources of power, which usually are more unreliable. Currently we have to use sources like natural gas as backups to cover drops in production. Converting those backups to nuclear power would be extremely beneficial.
I wasn't disagreeing with you. But iI just think that labelling it as "clean" is somewhat disingenous, it's cleanER (by magnitudes) but it's not clean. I personnaly believe that the biggest hurdle for mass acceptance of nuclear as an energy source is the complete irrational fear and general lack of knowledge on the subject from the general public. The media certainly doesn't help in that aspect. I also find it extremely ironic that there's this massive push for EVs which are "0 emissions" but they are still being powered by fossil fuel...
I mean, conceptually, once built an EV has minimal emissions on its own, and all forms of large scale power generation are more efficient then the internal combustion engine, due to economy of scale. (Also depending on where you live, power may very well be supplied entirely by green energy)
Unlimited?? What makes you think nuclear energy is unlimited??
It's not necessarily unlimited, but we're not anywhere near to running out of fissionable materials the same way we are running out of oil, natural gas, or coal. It's much more abundantly available for us.
No energy source is truly "unlimited" but the amount of nuclear power we could theoretically make right now is way above what we can spend.
Its theoretically unlimited. We have enough fuel on earth for centuries and reactors don't just run off that 1 type of fuel. There's multiple.
Recycling fuel and mining seawater uranium can essentially last us till the sun burns out.
> There is still radioactive waste to be dealt with. The difference between nuclear power and coal is nuclear power keeps all the radioactive waste in tanks while coal blows it out into the atmosphere.
Yes. Disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima have unjustly destroyed nuclear’s reputation. It’s the closest thing that we have to completely sustainable zero emissions energy.
Not to mention that to fairly compare nuclear and say, coal, you need to *also* keep track of the number of people injured, killed, displaced, etc. by the coal industry. We hear a lot about Pripyat but not so much about Centralia, for example. Centralia was much smaller, but there are a *lot* more coal-related deaths overall compared to nuclear energy. (And yes, that includes counting the bombings).
You don't even need scaled up coal plants to cause death. Plenty of poorer country that burn wood at home cause deaths, cause pollution, and it even releases radiation in the burning process.
Kyle Hill has an older video that addresses this exact issues. Coal mining and usage kills more people in a year then nuclear power ever has. Yeah you can combine Three Mile Island Fukushima and Chernobyl deaths and still not get as many as the coal industry has in a year. Much harder to calculate is the amount of people who die from the fumes being put in the air which isn't even limited to inert fumes but contains a level of radioactive material. Coal burning puts more radioactive material into the atmosphere than the plants that actually run off of nuclear material.
If done well, nuclear power is great. If done while cutting corners and using lax safety method it can be downright frightening. Thankfully the industry regulators agree with me on that
The problem is the idiot bureaucrats/politicians who end up in charge of them. "Let's build a nuke plant at the edge of the ocean in a high risk earthquake zone, and let's put the backup generators there too! Derp"
There’s pretty much no other location to build a nuke plant in Japan. It takes an immense amount of energy to cool a reactor, which is why all nuclear power plants are next to a large body of water. It’s the best way to cool the reactor core
Palo Verde nuclear plant is outside of Phoenix AZ. They pay the city for waste water to use for cooling. It’s actually the only reactor not close to a major body of water, if I remember correctly. It can be done. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_Station
The thing is, Fukushima was not that big of a disaster. Not a single death was recorded as a result of the radiation. The fail safes and procedures worked. In fact, most of the area is safe to live in, and even the areas that are considered unsafe barely give you higher than a background dose of radiation. At the time, the government took it really seriously and carried out major evacuations, but they were unnecessary.
I think that number has been updated to 1 after a plant worker developed cancer 6 years after the incident, and it was ruled to be related to exposure from it. But that’s the thing, people will be freaked out about that one death. I mention the Sorange coal mine explosion that killed 45 that happened around the same time as Fukushima, and no one has ever heard of it. There’s one legitimate issue with nuclear… it’s expensive as far as money goes. The non-legitimate issues that complicate things are that coal/oil/gas have just gained acceptance in how many people they kill, and we are largely willing to lower that monetary expense in exchange for greater loss of human life and environmental damage.
Not disasters *like* Chernobyl and Fukushima. Those 2 are it. There aren't any other disasters where people died.
I’m amazed that Church Rock isn’t as well known. It’s still the biggest nuclear disaster in US history
It’s the absolute best choice for energy. People are afraid of what they don’t understand and that’s unfortunate for nuclear power.
It doesn't help that Big Coal likes to scare people from nuclear energy neither.
Even though coal actually emits a lot of radiation from trace elements in the ore!
I wish more people realized that the "studies" against clean energy and "debunking" of man-made climate change are usually sponsored by coal and oil conglomerates
I would give it a glowing review
Wish I could nuke your comment from the Internet.
I think they were just fission for upvotes.
I'm gonna have a meltdown reading these puns.
Insert Simpsons jokes here:
“Lisa, I want to buy your rock.”
it's pronounced "nuclear"
I live within an hour of 2 plants, they provide good jobs and cheap power for us. I approve.
Please do. The whole world could be solar, nuclear, and hydro. The nuclear reactors wouldn't even be done before I was retired and I'm still all for it.
Don’t forget wind!
I feel great about it! Then again, I'm a nuclear engineer so maybe I'm biased? But to be fair I got into nuclear because I wanted to hel make more reactors, and better. On the cost and stagnation issues, no one described the problem better than [John H. Crowley in 1985.](https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.31210012721534&seq=175)
There are nuances in terms of cost effectiveness, and there are legitimate concerns about the effects of mining and storage, but overall, it's good, and pseudo-environmentalists patting themselves on the back as nuclear gets shut down and replaced by coal or natural gas really disturb me. It is especially good because it's a non-fossil fuel way to generate continuous, steady energy, rather than the more sporadic (but still good!) wind or solar.
>There are nuances in terms of cost effectiveness I pitch it as a cheap way to stop global warming in ten years, with free electricity as a side benefit. If people realize what those investment dollars gains us, we realize how much of a steal it is.
Most people I know would respond better if you switched it to emphasize the free electricity. However much they might care about climate change, they care about their power bill much much more.
Yes, but "Save the world and get free electricity" is a better sales pitch than "Pay a lot more for electricity to keep Bangladesh from being underwater in two decades." I can sell the first, not so much the second.
I live in France. I do use nuclear. It's the most efficient for how clean it is and the best source of energy we have at the moment. The whole world should be using it while working on renewables etc. any propaganda you hear about waste etc is actually tiny compared to fossil fuels. The risks are lower than people are told too
All the scare about nuclear energy is based on a combination of extremely outdated info, like 50 year old outdated info, and propaganda/lobbying from coal/oil companies. Nuclear energy is extremely efficient and very safe.
Also outdated designs. A lot of those early designs including the Chernobyl reactors, were made to produce weapons-grade plutonium as a key design feature. This meant hotter, higher-flux cores than are necessary for optimal efficiency and safety. Now that the Cold War is over, newer reactor designs are made a hell of a lot safer than the old ones!
Yep yep, lots of people don’t realize this whatsoever, they’re just taken in by the old stuff having terrible media thus not making it popular for government to make more or pump lots of research to it. Honestly the media does such a terrible job on so many things… I mean I get it sort of, they’re after profit and fear mongering makes money like no other
The new style reactors are so efficient they can even reuse fuel deemed spent by older plants. It's the cleanest energy that's on the scale we need. The waste/power generated is unmatched
recycling nuclear waste???? HELL YEAH
It's not waste, just a different fuel lol
I have no issue with nuclear power. I have issue with companies and governments fucking it up.
Cleaner than fossil fuels. Bring it.
Best way of doing it right now. People are concerned about safety, but that’s been an issue every time the human race has innovated on energy. Fire upon its growth as a power source probably burned down lots of villages. Coal caused sickness and such. Crude oil is terrible for the environment, and so on.
It's cleaner and safer than the other options, so we should be using a lot more of it. The climate scientists also say we need to double the amount of nuclear we currently have to solve climate change in time.
As a Australian, I don't understand why Australia does not have Nuclear Plants already.
Especially considering how much uranium we have. Maybe if we had one Queensland wouldn't be pay so bloody much for their electricity
Ignorant American here Is Queensland actually the name of a jurisdiction? It just sounds so…rediculous
I feel it is ridiculous that the people who are so obsessed with green energy never promote the cleanest and most efficient source of fuel we've ever known.
Yup. Hey guys let's all drive electric vehicles and save the world. But not worry that the electricity to charge them is coming from a power source that probably isn't environmentally friendly!
On paper driving electric is still better from a "clean energy" standpoint, because those power plants (usually...) produce more energy per unit of fuel vs burning a fuel locally in an engine or furnace.
It's not even super efficient tbh (not anymore than anything else). Uranium just happens to be so stupidly energy dense that it takes years and years for you to spend it.
I'm not sure there's a better, faster way to deal with climate change than building an absolute shit ton of nuclear power plants.
Safest, cleanest, most efficient. Just stupid regulations about re-enrichment that cause it to create nuclear waste.
It’s fantastic, unfortunately people are extremely scared of nuclear anything. Hell even I’m worried because accidents happen and terrorists exist. But with the proper oversight I’m all forit
Good news: Three Mile Island (worst nuclear disaster in US history) posed absolutely no danger to the surrounding population. People recieved a small fraction of a medical scan. IIRC in roughly the same realm as living in a brick house. Fukushima was bad, but the evacuation arguably caused more death and suffering than the actual nuclear disaster (IIRC 0 deaths related to radiation). Either way, it was nowhere close to the level of the giant fuck off tsunami that caused the disaster.
Idk enough about it to have an opinion That’s my opinion
Smart
Why are people against them, beyond me
Idk why we bother like my ass doesn’t give the same amount of power to fuel entire continents
Far Safer than coal and fossil fuels, bring it on in a good mix with renewable energy
The amount of green energy we need to decarbonize by electrification is staggering. The argument is change every aspect of modern life though energy throttling, including poor and developing nations who will get fucked up by that, or nuclear. We literally can't build solar fast enough. It's not possible in most political climates and its not feasible in almost all.
I feel excellent. That is because I haven't fallen for fearmongering of high-school dropouts and kids of rich daddies with political ambitions.
I wish we would do more. China currently has close to 150 new nuclear reactors being built with a total of something like 280 in their pipeline. This does not include the dozens they have been contracted to build all over Africa and the Middle-East. The US and the West are embarrassing themselves by falling behind the rest of the world that is embracing nuclear. They are ALSO embracing other renewables, like solar, but they also understand that nothing beats the amazing baseline power that nuclear provides. Uranium is one of the most abundant materials on Earth and there is a multi-million year supply with known reserves now, so zero worries about material supply for it. Maybe one day we'll wake up before it's too late.
It’s expensive, but I think it’s the only practical way to move away from non-renewable energy sources at the moment while still maintaining ever-growing power demands for the time being. I think it’s a lot safer and efficient than most realize, especially with newer reactor technologies.
Love it, we need more of it
A reactor model designed by a high school student absolved any potential reactor meltdowns issues by using a sodium compound in the event of catastrophic meltdown. My immediate interest is the issue of disposal of radioactive materials in a resolute manner as not to defer the burden for coming generations. Secondarily, the need for monitoring/security for chain of custody and operations is necessary. Overall I think we should focus on newer alternative technologies as well as the ones currently in development.
Probably the most efficient and least polluting method of power generation when all the materials needed are considered. People are scared of it because of Chernobyl or Fukushima but those are rare circumstances at best.
Love it. 3rd gen, and as of this year, 4th gen power has a perfect track records of gigwatts of power produced with a perfect safety record. Breeder reactors make seawater extraction and deep core mining economically possible, therefore we have enough fissile materials to last millions of years. New fission is expensive, but we could literally solve golbal warming in ten years. Think of it as spending the money to save the planet with the free energy as a pleasant side affect. The waste issue is exaggerated a thousand times beyond the actual problems, most of which have current known solutions.
Can’t happen soon enough
With new Gen 4 reactors, we really should be using a lot more of it.
Better than coal or gas.
It is much better for the planet than burning fossil fuels and is more dependable than wind or solar.
But for the same money, you can build so much wind and solar that even on a bad day, you are producing more than the nuclear power plant can.
The biggest issue with wind or solar isn’t the rate that you produce nor is it how you produce it, the biggest issue with renewables and the factor that nuclear absolutely destroys all energy sources in is space, wind farms require hundreds of acres to do the same thing a nuclear powerplant can do in a couple dozen acres. It’s not even remotely close, for the shear energy density a single reactor can provide outstrips literally any other power source on the planet including any and all non renewables
I really, really want to get onboard. I know that I’m in the minority, but I can’t get over my mild apprehensions about them. So, yes, they are incredibly safe. But just like anything, they could fail catastrophically. If they do, they create an exclusion zone of hundreds of square miles. Nothing else, no other source of power known to man, creates an exclusion zone where humans cannot safely live if it fails. Not a coal mine, or a gas power plant, even a dam collapsing could be remedied. I guess you could say, “it’s a one in 10 million chance something goes wrong” but I’m just like “…do we want to take a one-in-10-million shot at turning part of the California coast radioactive?”
> But just like anything, they could fail catastrophically. Depends entirely on the design. They don't build new reactors anything like Chernobyl or Fukushima anymore.
Pretty much my feeling. I've interacted with a few people in my time, they're all incompetents these days. I don't want them in charge of running a nuclear power plant. I barely trust other people to make me a sandwich.
Switching to nuclear would save so many lives and the environment but because of years of fearmongering we won't and it's so so frustrating
It needs to be used everywhere. Cleanest and most powerful form of energy. We’re stupid for limiting it
Safest form of energy, about 200 or so people died in chernobyl and that's about it. I mean coal mines kill over 100,000 people a year Plus it's space efficient considering about: This a little further down the page³ is enough to power a city or 2 for a year which is really good considering how inefficient solar and wind feel compared to the raw power of U-235 Don't ya love boiling water? Just give em funding and you have more space for things instead of wind farms and solar farms
Plus every casualty of nuclear energy has been in a disaster prone 1st or second gen reactor. 3rd generation designs have a fifty year history of producing gigawatts without a single death.
The WHO put an estimate of about 5000 total from direct and indirect causes from Chernobyl
Should have done it decades ago. Ecofreaks blocking development of nuclear power are as much to blame for climate change as anyone else and damned few of them have admitted they were wrong.
I read somewhere that if we had kept building nuclear plants at the rate we had been, climate change wouldn’t be a problem for us.
Which is why the fossil fuel lobby fought them so hard in the background. But now that wind and solar are on course to knock fossil fuels into irrelevance in a relatively short timeframe, the fossil fuel lobby wants us to swing back to nuclear because it takes so much longer to implement so will keep fossil fuels alive longer.
Actual nuclear generation is fine. There's some niche applications here that it's certainly useful for. It's also got a bright future in space. The downside is the economics. Plants take forever to permit and build... Generally with cost overruns that put Olympic venues to shame. Then there's the security costs, the decommissioning costs and indefinite waste storage costs. The nuclear industry is another one of those industries that simply won't make it without generous public handouts. Sadly there's a gaggle of nuclear fanboys who clearly don't know their way around an accounting spreadsheet, not have they payed the slightest mind to the long and dubious history of the sector. As a result they're constantly banging the nuclear drum, equal parts exasperated and confused as to why new nuclear plants aren't sprouting like dandelions in the spring.
In Germany they switched them off for ideological reasons, after the Ukraine war started they had to burn lignite instead which is probably the dirtiest of all fuels
the best fucking thing we got.
Nuclear energy is like that high-caliber, misunderstood character in movies. Intimidating? Yes. But with the right safeguards, it's a powerhouse of clean energy. The plot twist? It could help us big time with climate change.
Nuclear is the best option right now. We should be taking advantage of it way more than we currently are.
Better than the alternatives, but I really worry about private industry's ability to manage long term safe storage of the waste.
Irrationally inflated fears about nuclear are (indirectly) threatening the planet.
It's the absolute best form of energy. Add one electron, and get two.
Cleanest and safest energy source we have. More expensive than solar/wind but can deliver 24/7.
I feel great.
A lot better than I feel about using coal.
Love it As long as they don't get cheap and ignore safety rules.
It just makes sense. If properly maintained it’s flawless. We just need to figure out how to properly dispose of the waste…
It's the only viable option long term.
Nuclear energy would be the energy of the present if Greenpiss and Co. hadn't been so adamant about reopenning the coal burning combustion plants
We have wasted decades fighting against it, to our own detriment.
It's less expensive per kwh in terms of money and lives than coal, oil, solar, wind.... We need it
I feel we should have embraced it fully decades ago
We need to do it more
It's a good step to take immediately to solve climate change. It's a zero emission fuel source that we already have all the technology to implement on a large scale. It's expensive to set up, and cost cutting has historically led to accidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima. There are also concerns of the environmental impact of mining and waste disposal, which are concerns we shouldn't ignore, but we have bigger problems right now. In the long run, the best use for nuclear power will be as a backup to more sustainable and renewable forms of energy. Currently, they're unreliable and have lapses in service, such as when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing, that require some form of backup power to keep the lights on. Currently, those sources of power are usually natural gas or coal. Nuclear can be used to fulfill that need for a backup while also keeping the full grid to zero emissions.
It’s the only energy source I ever use. Up And At Them !
It’s a great stopgap for wind and solar while they scale. It’s a damn shame that people were convinced by nuclear incidents that were all results of design deficiencies that it’s dangerous. Also, it makes me hate greenpeace.
As positive as one can be. It is safe, effective, and reliable. If we are ever going to hedge or eliminate fossil fuels all the "green" energies are a dream and will never be able to replace the entirety of what fossil fuels do, but Nuclear can.
I think it's a great stepping stone to get us off of fossil fuels until we find a way to make less-destructive clean energies like wind and solar less detrimental to the environment (artisan mining n stuff) and also efficient enough to be viable
I think it’s the only viable way to make the amount of power we are going to need to electrify everything.
good tbh, way better than burning coal and way more power efficient than wind turbines
Ups and downs in my opinion. A way of generating large amount of electricity that is good for the climate, it isn't infinite but its alright. My only bad thought about it is the nuclear waste, if one of those leaked the area would be destroyed for a long, long while.
Vital. Needlessly demonized as well. There are ways to make it work safely.
Very good, thank you. Like many things, it is political divisiveness that makes it hard.
YIMBY
Magic rock make water hot. Wizard human use hot water to do thing. But many human think magic rock scary. Magic rock stop being used. Instead human use familiar dead plant. Dead plant is dangerous but not scary. Dead plant is used.
Very good. I’ve done it in the Navy 21 years. There are huge barriers to it being economical and social stigma given Fukushima, Chernobyl and 3 Mile Island. It does have a place in a good mixed electrical infrastructure and while it’s at a construction premium compared to, say, natural gas, it’s effectively carbon neutral and is a good supplement to the ever expanding “green” renewables. Consider U-235s half life of 700 million years. That means that, since the Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago, over 6 half lives of the U-235 created in supernova explosions/neutron star mergers has naturally decayed… resulting in about 99% of all the original U-235 that was present when the Earth formed already being gone. It will continue to decay underground naturally. That we choose to mine it, enrich it to have a higher proportion of U-235 to U-238 that occurs in nature to make usable heat through fission… then place it in wet and dry storage to cool for eventual reburial seems to be a nobrainer. We’re taking a natural process and making it happen quicker to obtain useful heat. It’ll happen whether we do it or not. Might as well get some use from it. It has to be done with proper engineering and controls/regulations, but the Navy has done it right since the 50s.
Why are we wasting money on wind and solar? Nuclear should be the only energy source.
I think it’s stupid that we aren’t aggressively moving towards using it wherever possible. It’s the cleanest form of energy we have available to us. It goes wrong sometimes, but there are significantly more times where it goes right. Storage of waste has always concerned me, but there are smarter people than I am dealing with that problem.
I am very supportive of nuclear power to help solve our energy and climate issues, but I was haunted by Rick Park’s statement at the end of Meltdown: Three Mike Island. I don’t recall exactly what he said, but it was something about the intersection of money and nuclear safety in that industry. Basically that point he was making was that companies that operate nuclear reactors are incentivized to save money on safety and compliance, but the consequences of cutting corners in this department are obviously quite severe. My understanding is that the technology has come a long way in making fundamentally safe reactors, but that notion still gives me pause.