Photovoltaic cells are even less efficient, I think they're somewhere between 10-20% efficient. I think the way to go would be a solar collector, like the Archimedes death ray, but much much bigger.

I would remind you that Aukus is a mess of the Coalition's making - after they made a mess of the original submarine replacement project under Abbott and Turnbull, insisting on Diesel.

But for Labor to withdraw from Aukus would cause a shitstorm of unseen proportions.

Pumped hydro? Or one of the many other non battery storage options, or just over production

Redox flow, sodium ion, iron air, etc.

There are some 600+ current chemical-based battery technologies out there.

Hell for me, once sodium is cracked, that shit is so abundant that production wouldn't have many bottlenecks to get started.

Price driven consumption has been done by industrial users for decades. And countries like UK has been storing energy in storage heaters at home for decades as well. EVs can do wonders here.

You can't cut the red tape. The red tape is why we're able to say nuclear is safe.

the weird part is most people do think nuclear fusion plants are a good thing and can solve stuff. But they have almost all of the downsides nuclear fission plants have in terms of red tape, complexity and cost

Huh? Nuclear fusion doesn't have any downsides or upsides. Because it doesn't exist. We've never been able to generate net power with fusion. (No, not even that story from a couple of years ago, which only counted as 'input' a small fraction of the total energy used overall. It was a good development, but just one small step on the long journey to it being practical.)

Being anti-nuclear was a poor stance to have 20, 30 years ago. At that time, renewables weren't cost effective enough to be a big portion of our energy generation mix, and we should have been building alternatives to fossil fuels since back then if not earlier. But today, all the analysis tells us that renewables are far cheaper and more effective than nuclear. Today, being pro-nuclear is the wrong stance to take. It's the anti-science stance, which is why it has seen a recent rise among right-wing political parties and media organisations.

If however a country would be prepared to cut through the red tape and have a standard design developed for say 10 plants at the same time, the price and construction time would be decreased greatly.

That's a pretty big ask for a democratic government where half of the politicians are actively sabotaging climate initiatives....

The only countries where this is really feasible are places where federal powers can supersede the authority of local governments. A nuclear based power grid in America would require a complete reorganization of state and federal authority.

The only way anyone thinks nuclear energy is a viable option in the states is if they completely ignore the political realities of American government.

For example, is it physically possible for us to build a proper deep storage facility for nuclear waste? Yes, of course. Have we attempted to build said deep storage facility? Yes, since 1987. Are we any closer to finishing the site after +30 years.......no.

It's possible to do nuclear in cheaper sense, just do not ask for US ones

A very uninformed take

First, no, that's not what I said. If you're only going to be arguing in bad faith like that this will be the last time I engage with you.

Second, baseload power is in fact a myth. And it becomes even worse when you consider the fact that nuclear doesn't scale up and down in response to demand very well. In places with large amounts of rooftop solar and other distributed renewables, nuclear is especially bad, because you can't just tell everyone who has their own generation to stop doing that, but you also don't want to be generating more than is used.

Third, even if you did consider it necessary to have baseload "until we have adequate storage", the extremely long timelines it takes to get from today to using renewables in places that don't already have it, spending money designing and building nuclear would just delay the building of that storage, and it would still end up coming online too late.

I used to be a fan of nuclear. In 2010 I'd have said yeah, we should do it. But every time I've looked into it over the last 10 years especially, I've had to reckon with the simple fact that all the data tells us we shouldn't be building nuclear; it's just an inferior option to renewables.

Biggest, not all.

Wasn't one of these built and ended up being a huge failure?

I mean, spent fuel is actually quite lethal when not packaged, but you get something like 300-400MWh out of a kilo of fuel. And that's significantly more than I'll use in my lifetime.

I'd gladly keep a kilo of dry-casked spent fuel in my house. It'd make an excellent coffee table or something, if a bit hard to move. I would absolutely not put a lifetime supply of benzene anywhere near my house.

Edit: it would make a shitty coffee table. 1 kilo of uranium oxide is just under 100ml

That's uhh, not what that says. One of the two mentions of half life are your body converting cyanide into thiocyanate, which will kill you and depending on your last bowel movement, make your corpse into hazardous waste itself.

The other mention is hydrogen cyanide in air, which is lighter than air and will decompose back into cyanide eventually, scattering it over a large area. Which will technically make it go away from your site, but spreading toxic waste over the countryside is illegal for a reason.

In addition to hazardous materials regulations, I also do workplace safety, and this doesn't surprise me at aaaaall. People get really casual around stuff that kills you slowly.

Yeah but how is the Kremlin going to control us with their gas & oil if we have nuclear?

France is EU’s first importer of ‘Russian nuclear products’: study – Euractiv

Russian nuclear energy diplomacy and its implications for energy security in the context of the war in Ukraine | Nature Energy

New report shows Russia raking in revenue from state nuclear company | Fox Business

Russia faces threat of sanctions on nuclear power industry as Germany backs uranium ban – POLITICO

Bratislava to reject EU's latest sanctions package if it includes ban on Russia nuclear fuel

Russia's Rosatom Helps Putin Skirt Sanctions

Russia’s nuclear project in Hungary: France’s growing role | OSW Centre for Eastern Studies

https://www.greenpeace.de/...

They have more uranium than we do

An unfortunate reality is that while we CAN store things safely, that doesn't mean they always will be.

Yeah, back in 2010 and before nuclear was the way to go but with the incredible advancements in solar and wind it's no longer the best option.

Still shame on Germany for decommissioning nuclear reactors and deciding to build Nordstream 2 and burn coal as a replacement.

You don't need to tie grids to transfer energy between them.

Please understand that negative prices are the market for electricity breaking down! That is not a good thing. It should mean that if you have solar panels on your roof you have to pay to participate in the national grid because you are dumping energy into the grid when it can't use it, but special rules have been made for renewable plants. Literally, imagine a contract-to-supply for wind or solar...

Iceland, where I'm from, has had it for ages in pretty much every house.

That's why they mentioned "pumped hydro"

If you're suggesting using Nuclear as a peaker plant or to turn it off and on whenever wind/solar is not up for it then I'm sorry to say that it's not viable. Nuclear generators don't handle well being turned off and on.

The cost is less from the design and more from the safety regulations. Best case scenario the state just starts making nuclear power plants, it's just not a good idea to mix profit incentive with nuclear.

I'd like Nuclear power not to be thrown out with the bathwater because it is practically essential for space travel/colonization in the long term. Solar panels can only get us so far, and batteries are a stop-gap. We need nuclear power because it is the only energy source that can meet our needs while being small enough to carry with us.

All should praise the magic, hot rocks.

im fine with dropping AI for more humans right now, but apparently that wont generate shareholder value.

Agreed, dealing with the waste is a thing. But for me a solvable problem and something that doesn't need to be solved right away. We currently store a lot of nuclear waste in holding locations till we figure out a way to either make it less radioactive or store it for long enough. The alternative however is having coal plants all over the world spew all their dust (including radioactive dust) and CO2 straight into the atmosphere. This to me is a far bigger issue to solve. It isn't contained in one location, but instead ends up all over the world. It ends up in people's homes and bodies, with a huge impact to their health. It ends up in the atmosphere, with climate change causing huge (and expensive) issues.

The amount of money we need to handle nuclear waste would be orders of magnitude lower than what we are going to have to pay to handle climate change. And that isn't even fixing the issue, just dealing with the consequences. I don't know how we are ever going to get all that carbon back out of the atmosphere, but it won't be cheap.

Yeah, countries obtaining uranium really isn't that big of an obstacle.

One thing to remember about the mining issue is that coal mining is just as bad, and coal is often radioactive as well. More people have died from radiation poisoning due to coal power/mining than have died from radiation poisoning due to nuclear power, even when you include disasters like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.

Of course, we've also been mining and using coal a lot longer, but the radioactive coal dust and possibly radioactive particles in the smoke from coal plants is something that many people are unaware of.

But, like you said, the big thing is to move away from fossil fuels entirely, and nuclear power has its own issues. It doesn't so much matter what we go with so long as we do actually go with something, and renewables are getting better and better all the time.

Is that supposed to convince me that there's plenty of uranium left? Because based on the numbers shown with reserve vs. historical usage it kinda seems like it would last for a few decades at best.

I don't think it will. The large cost of a reactor will probably be shared, but fission plants don't deal with plasma, magnets, hydrogen/helium storage, lasers, or capacitors. And we don't even know the method by which a practical fusion plant will operate!

Like every other nuclear power plant ever built

time to start mining for crypto and running LLM AI servers.

They should have public fridges that are left open to help cool the planet.

They should build the Matrix.

Mine bitcoins. Or ditch capitalism. Wait, last one is opposite of wasting. Feed capitalism.

Nuclear power does not solve the issue here. Nuclear reactors take hours or even days to ramp up or down. They are not quick enough to react to such occasions.

There's always a way to fail. Always.

There are no unsinkable ships. No matter how safe the Titanic is, keep enough of them on the sea and one will eventually sink the way least people expected. If life on Earth depends on a Titanic never sinking...we're fucked eventually.

Life on Earth depends on no more than a couple on nuclear plants blowing up catastrophically.

That's a single single war, and not indicative, power supply remains and always has been a high priority target.

Just cause putin and Kiev avoid chernobyl isn't really evidence to the contrary

This is a shocker for many on social media but you can accept that something you want is not perfect but still want it, or see good in a bad person, but still not want them on the throne.

Just because I can be realistic about it's pros and cons instead of blindly parroting that I have been told to parrot doesn't mean I can't be pro nuclear.

Other power sources have more problems. And I say just launch the waste into space and eventually the reactors will just be out of the stratosphere and it won't matter if it explodes.

But you got to walk before you can run.

I just dislike when people pretend there are no downside to nuke, EV, wind, etc, because if they make one little comment on a con suddenly they're some anti enviro Trump sucker and get dogpiled

If you start building a new nuclear plant today, it’ll start generating power around the year 2045, by which time renewables with storage will have gotten even cheaper.

Bet you the public will be on the hook to pay for that white elephant because utility companies privatize profits and socialize losses.

Except we have better options than we did 10 years ago.

I'd be all for nuclear if we rolled back the clock to 2010 or so. As it stands, solar/wind/storage/hvdc lines can do the job. The situation moved and my opinion moved.

Cost is a proxy for productivity and resources. So while it is stupid to say that the energy transition is too expensive, shouldn't we rather invest our productivity and resources into a faster and cheaper solution? Drawing focus away from renewables is dangerous as others have mentioned, because it is too late to reach our goals with nuclear.

Correct, but don't forget that renewables is an umbrella term.

If you use solar, wind, hydropower, geothermal and bioenenergy, you're diversified and it's all renewable. Add in storage and there's not much of an issue anymore.

We already have 30% nukes. Right now we need more solar and wind. I’m not saying shut down nukes. They are good. They are just a waste of money and time to build new when we have cheaper and easier to produce alternatives.

This, this should be common sense, and I don't understand why it's not.

Okay, so, say I need some energy that's pretty dense in terms of the space that it takes up, say I need a large amount of constant energy draw, and say that I need a form of energy that's going to be pretty stable and not prone to variation in weather events. I.e. I seek to power a city. This isn't even really a far-fetched hypothetical, this is a pretty common situation. What energy source seems like the best for that? Basically, we're looking at hydropower, which generally has long term environmental problems itself, and is contextually dependant, or nuclear.

Solar also makes sense, wind energy also makes sense, for certain use cases. Say I have a very spread out population or I have a place where space is really not at a premium, as is the case with much of america, and america's startling lack of population density, that might be the case. But then, I kind of worry that said lack of population density in general is kind of it's own ongoing environmental crisis, and makes things much, much harder than they'd otherwise need to be.

I think the best metaphor for nuclear that I have is the shinkansen. I dunno what solar would be, in this metaphor, maybe bicycles or something. So, the shinkansen, when it was constructed, costed almost double it's expected cost and took longer then anyone thought it would and everybody fucking hated it, on paper. In practice, everybody loves that shit now, it goes super fast, and even though it should be incredibly dangerous because the trains are super light and have super powerful motors and no crash safety to speak of, they're pretty well-protected because the safety standards are well in place. It's something that's gone from being a kind of, theoretical idiot solution, to being something that actually worked out very well in practice.

If you were to propose a high speed rail corridor in the US, you would probably get the same problems brought up, as you might if you were to plan a nuclear site. Oh, NIMBYs are never gonna let you, it's too expensive, we lack the generational knowledge to build it, and we can patch everything up with this smaller solution in e-bikes and micromobility anyways. Then people don't pay attention to that singular, big encompassing solution, and the micromobility gets privatized to shit and ends up as a bunch of shitty electric rental scooters dumped in rivers and a bunch of rideshare apps that destroy taxi business. These issues which we bring up strike me as purely being political issues, rather than real problems. So, we lack generational knowledge, why not import some chinese guys to build some reactors, since they can do it so fast? Or, if we're not willing to deal with them, south korean?

I'm not saying we can't also do solar and renewables as well, sure, those also have political issues that we would need to deal with, and I am perfectly willing to deal with them as they come up and as it makes sense. If you actually want a sober analysis, though, we're going to need to look at all the different use cases and then come up with whichever one actually makes sense, instead of making some blanket statement and then kind of, poo-pooing on everything else as though we can just come up with some kind of one size fits all solution, which is what I view as really being the thing which got us into this mess. Oooh, oil is so energy dense, oooh, plastic is so highly performing and so cheap and we don't even have to set up any recycling or buyback schemes, oooh, let's become the richest nation on the planet by controlling the purchasing of oil. We got lulled into a one size fits all solution that looked good at the time and was in hindsight was a large part in perhaps a civilization ending and ecologically costly mistake.

Global leader in nuclear is also China. They are actually building the reactors that cannot meltdown, but you also can't make weapons from them, and they can run on the nuclear waste we have already produced with the crappy cheap reactors we use. We designed the reactors that China is now building 60 fucking years ago, and just shelved the design.

dude I say nuke when I microwave things

That's the fun part about being in a place where you can hold a discussion. Some people don't agree with you, but they can still see the benefits of the option you are talking about or even agree that they are a great solution for now.

No, you just pay out the nose up front.

If I had money to invest in the energy sector, I don't know why I should pick nuclear. It's going to double its budget and take 10 years before I see a dime of return. Possibly none if it can't secure funding for the budget overrun, as all my initial investment will be spent.

A solar or wind farm will take 6-12 months and likely come in at or close to its budget. Why the hell would I choose nuclear?

In the US we already have something like 30% which alleviates pretty much all the storage concerns. For our dollar right now, solar and wind are the best place to invest.

Ok so, realistically, if we all agree on this today, when would new nuclear power plants begin generating electricity? With all the regulations which are in place today?

If you're going to do that, then also consider the co2 output of all the concrete needed for nuclear power plants.

I’m curious how you think adding nukes have an advantage here. You understand that nukes are not easily shut down? If we have a problem with an over abundance of energy, adding nukes to the grid only makes that problem worse.

... it's currently not possible to store the renewables anywhere

Every time someone argues this, it's immediately obvious they haven't actually paid attention how the storage market has been progressing.

Next, you'll probably talk about problems with lithium, as if it's the only storage technology.

Has this been demonstrated to last as long as the waste is radioactive?

We just had a failed insurrection four years ago, wtf are you doing pretending like this can’t happen

Nuclear is the worst possible option to fill said gaps. Nuclear reactor need to run at a mostly stable output permanently, they are slow to react to changes and can't be switched on or off at will.

You could use them to generate a stable base power level, but that's the opposite of what we need. It wouldn't change anything regarding the need of energy storage.

The best option currently as a gap filler is gas cause it can be turned on or off in minutes when needed.

Not keeping up with demand is a self-made problem. Multiple EU countries already have multiple days a year where they use 100% renewables.

And wind and hydro.

Digging hole. Problem solved.

You posted a 18 min Youtube video, sponsored or at least supported and sanctioned by a nuclear power plant operator.

At least point to the section of the video where the source of your claim is.

I could not find the 47 grams figure on the page you linked, where is that stated exactly?

World Nuclear Association’s mission is to facilitate the growth of the nuclear sector by connecting players across the value chain,

I would not ca that trustworthy. There not even close to independent.

Germany Imports 0,5% of the Electricity from France. It’s not that we are depending on it. The day ahead prices for electricity are lower in Germany than they are in France. The Coal Plant are not running on full capacity, cause it is cheaper to import electricity through the European electricity Grid. Level of burning coal is the same level that it was in the 60’s. The most imported electricity is Norway water power and Danish wind Power.

The cheap news that we depend on France are just wrong. No idea why everybody is riding this dead horse. Even in the summer 2022 when gas prices where high caused by the Ukraine war and the summer was hot, we had to help our France with energy, cause their nuclear power plants couldn’t get enough cooling water from the rivers, cause the water lvl in it was to low and the most power plant needed maintenance.

And the CO2 thing. The emissions are infinite high, cause there is not a solutions for it. Not even close! I just don’t buy the shit, that the EU declared nuclear as co2 free. That’s bullshit.

I like to discuss and get new ideas. But the whole nuclear thing is just stupid and so many people are ignoring the facts about that.

More nuclear plants means more capacity and diversification in supply chains, i.e. it's easier to acquire technology and supplies through dark channels. That will lead to more proliferation. Where do you think North Korea got its nukes? The answer is Pakistan, by the way.

I still prefer 47 grams of nuclear waste over 1950 Kg of coal pollution in the air.

That is for the same amount of energy.

200 years vs. 70 years. IDK if this is comparable. Also it is so that with nuclear accidents theres a lot of additional environmental damage, not just the human casualties.

Not defending coal mining here, coal is no good energy source by all means.

This is just so fucking dumb. Yeah coal sucks. We should get rid of coal as quickly as possible. But saying nuclear is safer than coal while ignoring all other forms of energy that are orders of magnitude safer is as disingenuous as it gets.

If it is so that a human mistake can cause a big number of casualties and massive environmental damage it is far from safe, even if you are very careful.

I work with people. Human mistakes are inevitable

You mean the modern reactors who are still not in a commercial productive state? But even if these would be NOW ready to actually be available it's still so that there are a vast overwhelming majority of the old reactors which are not as safe as the meme was insinuating.