Captain_Baka 53 points 5 days ago

Solar power + battery? Or hydropower? That way there won't be, well, nuclear waste at the end? You know, the kind of waste that's highly radioactive? The waste that doesn't have a plan to be safely stored away for tens of thousands of years?

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marcos 26 points 5 days ago

It's not even the waste, that we still need to learn how to recycle. Or the apparent incapacity of any operator to reliably follow the theoretical safety guidelines...

If we put all our effort into a nuclear boom today, the plants will only arrive a decade or two after the planet has been cooked, it won't be enough to replace anything, and we will have to learn entire new ways to mine the fuel in a few decades before the stuff we can get easily is gone.

Meanwhile we are about half-way done with renewables, and the nuclear fans keep denying that...

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Photonic -7 points 4 days ago

The anti-nuclear crowd still doesn’t have an answer for base load power when there is no wind or solar. What are you going to do, have massive back up batteries? For an entire electric grid? Of an entire country? And do that worldwide?

We can’t even mine lithium fast enough or make enough batteries for all the cars to switch to EV’s in the next decade.

Edit: as usual, the downvote bandwagon has nothing of value to add. I’m open to viable alternatives, but I haven’t heard any yet.

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Pelicanen 8 points 4 days ago

There's pumped hydro, geothermal energy, and biofuel, in the future we'll likely see some wave power as well. The point isn't to have one technology for the entire grid but to have a diverse and distributed energy system.

For storage there are also many more options than just lithium ion batteries. We have sodium ion if you just want to swap battery for battery, but then there are also for example iron-air batteries that are projected to be dirt cheap, redox flow batteries, pressurized air, cryogenic energy, sand batteries for storing heat, hydrogen electrolysis, etc.

Not only will this make this a power grid that is less dependent on supply chains that are impacted by geopolitical conflicts, but it will also make it more resilient as the weather continues becoming more extreme.

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Photonic -2 points 4 days ago

I’m not saying we need one technology for the entire grid. Of course you diversify. That is out of the question.

But the solutions you mentioned aren’t ready yet.

Pumped hydro isn’t feasible everywhere, nor is geothermal and is wildly expensive. Biofuel burning emits greenhouse gases. Sodium ion batteries are a new technology and we don’t know how well it scales and we don’t have the production capacity. And the others aren’t proven technologies, so they may not be around for decades.

No, the point is that the anti-nuclear crowd is trying to make it seem like there is no role for nuclear energy in the future alongside renewable energy. They haven’t thought about baseload power and they think putting giant battery parks everywhere will be fast and easy, as well as —somehow— great for the environment.

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Pelicanen 4 points 4 days ago

Pumped hydro isn’t feasible everywhere, nor is geothermal

That's the whole point of diversifying, use the sources that are available in the places where they are available.

Biofuel burning emits greenhouse gases

The point is that the greenhouse gases that they emit have already been captured from the atmosphere, which makes them carbon neutral.

Sodium ion batteries are a new technology and we don’t know how well it scales

It uses a lot of the same type of production as lithium ion, it is already being produced by some of the largest battery manufacturers on the planet, and being sold on the market, and we have years of research to give us a good idea of how it will evolve.

And the others aren’t proven technologies, so they may not be around for decades

Neither will fission plants. Even if we decided to start building out today, there are years before we actually see construction start, not to mention commissioning and eventually power production. We're probably talking about the 2040s at that point.

No, the point is that the anti-nuclear crowd is trying to make it seem like there is no role for nuclear energy in the future alongside renewable energy

Some people, sure. But the person above wasn't talking about completely removing all fission, just that we should have started building nuclear plants twenty years ago because it's slow and comes with a massive up-front cost, and at this point we have other alternatives that are cheaper and faster to install. Nuclear fission plants are also a very centralized source of energy, so if there are issues in the future as a result of climate change (similar to what they've been experiencing in France) then you lose a lot of grid capacity all at once while trying to resolve it.

I think nuclear is a reliable source of power, I've been an advocate for it, but I don't believe it's the right solution at this point in time.

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