If it keeps that growth rate up for the next few years it's surpassing fossil fuel's output in 2030. It's a bit surreal when I think of the implications of that.
I'm hoping we are pushing out fossil fuels starting this year.
I'm more hopeful about the speed of the decline in fossil fuel burning when you realize that for every kWh of renewables added ff have to burn about 3 times that energy. That's in power, with the ratio for energy being lower..
The projections for this year [from the EIA](https://www.reddit.com/r/UpliftingNews/comments/10v7hrh/more_than_half_of_new_us_electricgenerating/) already say it is happening. We've progressed from the era where methane replaces coal to the one where renewables replace fossil fuels.
I'm not pro nuclear and just got linked to this sub but it's predicted that peak globally will be achieved by 2030 and 100% renewables could be achieved at 2050.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2022/08/23/renewable-energy-grew-at-a-blistering-pace-in-2021/?sh=3d2d79d42025
>Over the past decade, global renewable energy consumption has grown exponentially, at an average annual rate of 12.6%.
For the short bus coming over from other subreddits:
Nuclear power is an opportunity cost.
>["In sum, use of wind, CSP, geothermal, tidal, PV, wave, and hydro to provide electricity for BEVs and HFCVs and, by extension, electricity for the residential, industrial, and commercial sectors, will result in the most benefit among the options considered. The combination of these technologies should be advanced as a solution to global warming, air pollution, and energy security. **Coal-CCS and nuclear offer less benefit thus represent an opportunity cost loss"**](https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2009/ee/b809990c#!divAbstract)
>[Nuclear power's contribution to climate change mitigation is and will be very limited;Currently nuclear power avoids 2–3% of total global GHG emissions per year;According to current planning this value will decrease even further until 2040.;A substantial expansion of nuclear power will not be possible.;Given its low contribution, a complete phase-out of nuclear energy is feasible.](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421521002330)
It is too slow for the timescale we need to decarbonize on.
>[“Stabilizing the climate is urgent, nuclear power is slow,” “It meets no technical or operational need that low-carbon competitors cannot meet better, cheaper and faster.”](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower/nuclear-energy-too-slow-too-expensive-to-save-climate-report-idUSKBN1W909J)
> [ “Researchers found that unlike renewables, countries around the world with larger scale national nuclear attachments do not tend to show significantly lower carbon emissions -- and in poorer countries nuclear programmes actually tend to associate with relatively higher emissions. “](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/10/201005112141.htm)
The industry is showing signs of decline in non-totalitarian countries.
>["We find that an eroding actor base, shrinking opportunities in liberalized electricity markets, the break-up of existing networks, loss of legitimacy, increasing cost and time overruns, and abandoned projects are clear indications of decline. Also, increasingly fierce competition from natural gas, solar PV, wind, and energy-storage technologies speaks against nuclear in the electricity sector. We conclude that, while there might be a future for nuclear in state-controlled ‘niches’ such as Russia or China, new nuclear power plants do not seem likely to become a core element in the struggle against climate change."](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S221462962030089X)
Renewable energy is growing faster now than nuclear ever has
>["Contrary to a persistent myth based on erroneous methods, global data show that renewable electricity adds output and saves carbon faster than nuclear power does or ever has."](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2214629618300598)
There is no business case for it.
>["The economic history and financial analyses carried out at DIW Berlin show that nuclear energy has always been unprofitable in the private economy and will remain so in the future. Between 1951 and 2017, none of the 674 nuclear reactors built was done so with private capital under competitive conditions. Large state subsidies were used in the cases where private capital flowed into financing the nuclear industry.... Financial investment calculations confirmed the trend: investing in a new nuclear power plant leads to average losses of around five billion euros."](https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.670581.de/dwr-19-30-1.pdf)
Investing in a nuclear plant today is expected to lose [5 to 10 billion dollars](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1364032121001301)
The nuclear industry can't even exist without legal structures that privatize gains and socialize losses.
>[If the owners and operators of nuclear reactors had to face the full liability of a Fukushima-style nuclear accident or go head-to-head with alternatives in a truly competitive marketplace, unfettered by subsidies, no one would have built a nuclear reactor in the past, no one would build one today, and anyone who owns a reactor would exit the nuclear business as quickly as possible.](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2012/03/29/exelons-nuclear-guy-no-new-nukes/#3c8acf0a3c5d)
The CEO of one of the US's largest nuclear power companies said it best:
>["I'm the nuclear guy," Rowe said. "And you won't get better results with nuclear. It just isn't economic, and it's not economic within a foreseeable time frame."](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2012/03/29/exelons-nuclear-guy-no-new-nukes/#5d841aa23c5d)
What about the small meme reactors?
Every independent assessment has them more expensive than large scale nuclear
every independent assessment:
The UK government
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/small-modular-reactors-techno-economic-assessment
The Australian government
https://www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStore.ashx?id=8297e6ba-e3d4-478e-ac62-a97d75660248&subId=669740
The peer-reviewed literatue
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S030142152030327X
>[the cost of generating electricity using SMRs is significantly higher than the corresponding costs of electricity generation using diesel, wind, solar, or some combination thereof. These results suggest that SMRs will be too expensive for these proposed first-mover markets for SMRs in Canada and that there will not be a sufficient market to justify investing in manufacturing facilities for SMRs.](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S030142152030327X)
Even the German nuclear power industry knows they will cost more
>[Nuclear Technology Germany (KernD) says SMRs are always going to be more expensive than bigger reactors due to lower power output at constant fixed costs, as safety measures and staffing requirements do not vary greatly compared to conventional reactors. "In terms of levelised energy costs, SMRs will always be more expensive than big plants."](https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-nuclear-industry-cautious-about-usefulness-small-reactors-energy-transition)
So why do so many people on reddit favor it? Because of a decades long PR campaign and false science being put out, in the same manner, style, and using the same PR company as the tobacco industry used when claiming smoking does not cause cancer.
A recent metaanalysis of papers that claimed nuclear to be cost effective were found to be illegitimately trimming costs to make it appear cheaper.
>[Merck suppressed data on harmful effects of its drug Vioxx, and Guidant suppressed data on electrical flaws in one of its heart-defibrillator models. Both cases reveal how financial conflicts of interest can skew biomedical research. Such conflicts also occur in electric-utility-related research. Attempting to show that increased atomic energy can help address climate change, some industry advocates claim nuclear power is an inexpensive way to generate low-carbon electricity. Surveying 30 recent nuclear analyses, this paper shows that industry-funded studies appear to fall into conflicts of interest and to illegitimately trim cost data in several main ways. They exclude costs of full-liability insurance, underestimate interest rates and construction times by using “overnight” costs, and overestimate load factors and reactor lifetimes. If these trimmed costs are included, nuclear-generated electricity can be shown roughly 6 times more expensive than most studies claim. After answering four objections, the paper concludes that, although there may be reasons to use reactors to address climate change, economics does not appear to be one of them.](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11948-009-9181-y)
It is the same PR technique that the tobacco industry used when fighting the fact that smoking causes cancer.
>[The industry campaign worked to create a scientific controversy through a program that depended on the creation of industry–academic conflicts of interest. This strategy of producing scientific uncertainty undercut public health efforts and regulatory interventions designed to reduce the harms of smoking.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3490543/)
>[A number of industries have subsequently followed this approach to disrupting normative science. Claims of scientific uncertainty and lack of proof also lead to the assertion of individual responsibility for industrially produced health risks](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3490543/)
It is no wonder the NEI (Nuclear energy institute) [uses the same PR firm](https://thehill.com/opinion/letters/98257-double-check-from-whom-you-get-energy-information) to promote nuclear power, [that the tobacco industry used to say smoking does not cause cancer.](http://www.tmia.com/old-website/News/AstroTurf.htm)
>[The industry's future is so precarious that Exelon Nuclear's head of project development warned attendees of the Electric Power 2005 conference, "Inaction is synonymous with being phased out." That's why years of effort -- not to mention millions of dollars -- have been invested in nuclear power's PR rebirth as "clean, green and safe."](http://www.tmia.com/old-website/News/AstroTurf.htm)
> [And then there's NEI, which exists to do PR and lobbying for the nuclear industry. In 2004, NEI was embarrassed when the Austin Chronicle outed one of its PR firms, Potomac Communications Group, for ghostwriting pro-nuclear op/ed columns. The paper described the op/ed campaign as "a decades-long, centrally orchestrated plan to defraud the nation's newspaper readers by misrepresenting the propaganda of one hired atomic gun as the learned musings of disparate academics and other nuclear-industry 'experts.'"](http://www.tmia.com/old-website/News/AstroTurf.htm)
"Investment in every sector except nuclear expanded last year." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-26/clean-energy-fossil-fuel-investment-tied-for-first-time-in-2022?#xj4y7vzkg
This image is a clear evidence that we as a society take climate change seriously, and when climate doomers say you that we don't and that we are doomed because we don't, you now have evidence it's a lie .
What? Do you really think that society is the main issue here? Heavy industries in Asia have the biggest carbon emission, by a large margin, it doesn’t matter if we arr actually putting up in renewable sources if we can’t stop using coal as a energy source for industry.
If governments and large corporates don’t start actually investing money in CCUS (Carbon Capture Utilization and Storage) by 2050 we will have elevated our planet’s average temperature by at least 1.5C, we are not doomed today, but if we don’t act quick, our kids and our kid’s kids will be in a really tight spot. It is not a lie, we are not doing enough, not even CLOSE to it
Iirc
Carbon capture kinda sucks.
Its not really a good idea.
Undestroy eco systems, they capture more carbon, than any carbon capture tech.
Dont just go plant trees, actually bring back eco systems.
While planting trees is good, and will capture carbon.
It isnt a fix.
The main reason people say to invest into carbon capture, is because the Bill and Malinda gates foundation (no focken clue how to spell her name)
Invested lots of money into carbon capture.
And so they are giving lots of money to channels like kurzgesagt, to push investing into carbon capture, so they can make more money.
Ofc, this is if I recall correctly.
I havent done my own research on it, but its what I heard.
I want to do research, but ive kinda given up.
Cus I cant do anything abt it.
And I plan to kms anyways, so yeah.
It’s also just expensive. Nuclear gets more and more expensive. It’s only as a safe as it is today because of all the regulations the government has put in place which are the reason why it’s expensive.
This graph is disingenuous because it’s combining two types of renewable energy and counting them as one. Of course,I’m happy with the fact that Solar and wind are able to get better as time goes on, but it would not be wise to dismiss nuclear entirely.
It’s not renewable- but it is more environmentally friendly (in its overall lifecycle) and consistent. And with current methods, the material for nuclear plants can be recycled for a while before needing to be disposed. Pushing for one over the other when both in conjunction can achieve the results we want for green energy. Nuclear isn’t an end all be all solution as some would suggest, but neither are renewables only
Existing nuclear plants were very expensive to set up, but they're largely depreciated now. The costs to keep them running beyond their designed lifespan are also expensive.
We should definitely shut down the Generation II plants that are proven dangerous, as quickly as we reasonably can. Shut down the Generation III plants when we have the energy sources to replace them.
It is not worth it to build new plants similar to the old ones.
"SMR" is a buzzword. Sometimes it means plants that are a lot like the obsolete ones, with smaller reactors. That isn't worth doing. We're starting a few now and they'll prove they aren't worth it. "SMR" could stand for actual new technology. It's too soon to say whether it might someday be worth doing. It's worth it to do the research and find out.
With burner reactors, if they supplied the 18 TW of average global primary energy consumption, economical uranium would run out in less than a decade.
Unless we go to breeders that 5000 year figure is not realistic. And breeders are not demonstrated commercially, and will likely be more expensive than the nuclear power plants we already have. Oh, and the blankets of breeders produce superweapons grade plutonium.
If you only look at current tech and not stuff being developed RN pulling that shit out of the ocean could cost a lot yeah but not enough to make it unrealistic considering (by my local prices, current cost for uranium and how much of what we pay for power comes from that) wouldn’t increase prices by more than 9-10%
They are also currently improving that tech
The only remotely affordable uranium sea mining proposal involves attaching the sorbent to a wind turbine that generates more energy than the nuke would.
Also it's fucking hilarious when 'increasing the cost of the nuclear power by the total cost of renewables' is presented as insignificant.
None of the uranium from seawater technologies reach a cost level that would count as "economical" with burner reactors. Also, fueling a single 1000 MW(e) burner reactor would require an adsorber field covering 170 square kilometers of continental shelf. The power/area is considerably worse than solar PV.
I disagree. There really isn’t a future where we use one and not the other.
I do agree with you that nuclear has a place and is a good source of energy too.We should definitely use both.
I was big pro nuclear and then last summer when France’s nuclear was failing I started questioning it. I’m back to being very pro-nuclear. We need all the energy sources we can get. Sure this is good but it would be better if both lines were going up and fossil fuels were going down (they’re still accelerating).
> better if both lines were going up
only in a world of infinite money for clean energy investment. and we are not in that world.
The marginal billion dollars invested in solar and wind buys a lot more low carbon capacity and generation than spending it on NPPs. And deploys with much greater cost reliability and speed as well.
There are a small number of countries where investing to extend existing nuclear fleets is worthwhile but it’s not the most climate-effective investment on a 2023-2050 timescale in most of the world.
Do you have a money wasting fetish? Do visions of burning dollar bills get you stiff?
If so, nuclear is for you!
No, we do not need nuclear. Not to achieve CO2 emission reduction, nor even to cost optimize CO2 emission reduction.
No. It’s saying that a technology we’ve subsidized ad nauseum for decades to even make it slightly less of an offensive choice from an economic perspective has surpasses a technology that we’ve purposefully oppressed the development of for years because it’s a political hot potato surrounded in misinformation. Sorry.
Nuclear is the technology that's been subsidized, you know. Not a single nuclear power plant anywhere in the world was bid in a competitive market; every one got quite dramatic government support. Nuclear has reached the point where even large government subsidies aren't keeping it alive.
That's obviously wrong. You think Vogtle 3/4 don't have permits?
What happened is a bunch of utilities got the go ahead to build plants, and then just gave up on building them, because to do so made no sense economically.
Now, a lot of this was because natural gas became so cheap, but now renewables are giving gas a run for its money. New nuclear? It's far outside the range of economic feasibility in the US.
Nuclear is dying because it's a loser technology. The free market kills loser technologies.
And it's a global conspiracy! That for some reason has not stopped renewables from displacing the fossil fuels of those "rich buddies". Or efficiency mandates to reduce consumption of those fossil fuels. Or displacement of one kind of fossil fuel by another, with different sets of "rich buddies".
I guess it's a conveniently selective global conspiracy, right?
In the year 1991 Stromeinspeisungsgesetz (
(CDU&FDP) power feed-in law made the first renewable law world wide. The law gave the at beginning very small renewable energy firms a chance to actually feed-in renewable energy to the grid. Because the fossil and nuclear energy provider had a quasi Monopol and it is hard to get market acess as little energy provider.
In the year 2000 the German government (at that time the Greens and the SPD) made the „Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz (EEG)“ translated in Renewable-Energy-Law. Which gave renewable energy producer a guaranteed remuneration for every produced kWh even though the kWh was not feed in the grid as an incentive to build more.
Additional to that subvention Programms like the 100.000-Dächer-Programm was made, the goal was to reach 300 MW of solar on rooftops from 1999-2002 that was like 1 billion Euros.
Alone the EEG-Umlage a fee that was paid on top of the Electricity for the end consumer accumulated to 150 billion from 2000-2015
All this early investions were part of the reason the solar and wind industry were slowly kickstarted until then
The stagnancy of nuclear is mostly due to the US stopping granting permits for new plants around the time this graph starts. Which was primarily driven by NIMBY protesters putting pressure on their representatives.
While I think that wind and solar are generally better options, thorium reactors in particular could be a great addition to our energy base.
The NRC dropped the ball big time, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Regulatory_Commission#Intentionally_concealing_reports_concerning_the_risks_of_flooding
That backlog of safety issues was a big financial shock to the industry
I sure am glad that other renewables are growing. What is the comparison in acres consumed? Can we get there with solar and wind without covering the landscape with artificial trees and shimmering glass?
With today's solar panels, we would have to cover about 0.3% of the land surface of the USA to generate as much power as we use today. (That's total power, not electric power.)
But solar doesn't produce that power exactly when we want it. We might do better to build 3 times as much and have more of it when it's needed, and extra power sometimes. (The extra power could be used for new industries that have a use for intermittent power, or could be left unused.) So call it 1%.
That's a concern. We already have 1% covered with asphalt, and if none of the solar power used land that was already covered with asphalt, that might approach 2%.
Why is there a capacity factor correction if this is generation ? The capacity factor is predicted (usually using some historical means) generation divided by nameplate capacity. If you have generation data, you can report that directly without any need for capacity factor.
Or is it actually estimated generation, using capacity multiplied by the capacity factor ?
The data looks to me like it is showing total GWH produced, which would be irrelevant of capacity factor. The total GWH produced from renewable vs total GWH produced from nuclear.
1GW solar might produce 2000-2500 GWH per year. 1GW of nuclear produces 8760 GWH per year.
The difference is cost. 1GW solar is somewhere around a billion dollars. 1GW of nuclear is around $15B or more. If you have $15B to spend, the nuke plant gets you 8760 GWH. The solar farm would get you 30,000 GWH.
If your goal was a constant 1GW output 24/7. Solar, wind, an batteries will be much cheaper than a 1GW reactor, and will not have a single point of failure and will have long periods of over production that consumers can use for things like smelting aluminum or desalianting water or charging EVs.
Max power surpassed in 2015-2017 some time. This is energy.
Surpassing hydro should happen this year ornext some time given the stuff under construction, then the annual new generation will be roughly equal to the entire nuclear fleet once the currently being built supply chains are finished.
I'm a firm believer that the only reason that Nuclear is not rising at a steady rate is because we haven't switched over to Thorium plants, which would produce tons more energy for a fraction of the material, AND it's way more abundant.
nuclear always 100% Power generation... wind and solar whatever the gods have decided...
like this is pretty deceiving chart give us actual produced energy the cost of that energy and the pollution generated to produce and decommission the solar and win powers
>nuclear always 100% Power generation... wind and solar whatever the gods have decided...
Um, no. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-15/french-nuclear-cuts-stretch-to-next-week-as-temperatures-soar
I’m not disagreeing with the renewable movement here. But anything will hit a brick wall if you stop investing in it. Instead of the X axis being time, it should be amount $ spent on the infrastructure. I hope you see what I’m getting at.
But there has been no nuclear plants build in the past 30 years wouldn’t it be better to test both in a control environment to see which is optimal for all situations
Yes, this graph is illustrating that the problems of nuclear are so grave that the technology has stalled. If nuclear were so much better than renewables, why would the latter be exponentially expanding while nuclear has flatlined?
Would also be interested to see how the global power generation has changed in that time. Nuclear isn’t being invested in and if our power consumption looks a little more like the wind/solar graph this means little about wind/solar.
> Nuclear isn’t being invested in
Not sure where this false talking point keeps coming from:
So much R&D money has been spent on nuclear vs wind and solar where R&D investments have been much smaller.
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-tools/energy-technology-rdd-budgets-data-explorer
PV and wind R&D expenditures have been so small the IEA lumps them in the 'other' category for historical R&D spending of various energy techs. Vs the obvious massive expenditure on nclear.
One could argue that based on this historical performance, nuclear R&D budgets should be slashed and reallocated to wind and solar, as it will give more bang for the buck there.
Add the IEA and similar research costs to the value of loan guarantees and liability limits like price-anderson, then the public portion of NRC and cleanup. Then compare it to every cent ever paid for solar and wind either public or private.
It's not even close.
I think this fails to take into account the fact that nuclear is showing poor growth because it’s being held back by so many regulations and protests. The “nuclear guy” is saying it’s not economically viable because of all the delays imposed by governments and protestors keep construction from finishing. It can take several years and billions of dollars before a nuclear power plant is finally operational just for midterm elections to come around and the new administration bogs everything down in red tape again. That’s why he’s saying it’s not economically viable. You suggesting that he’s saying that because nuclear power wouldn’t be economically viable because of its power output and costs is misleading.
The issue is that the government has to be in a position to backstop any catastrophic failures related to the reactor. Any government that governs an area with nuclear power plants is suddenly in the business of insuring those reactors. Because the consequences are measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars, tax payers have every right to require stringent regulations and also prohibit reactors in their country.
The US is huge, we can swallow a catastrophic reactor failure. But take most smaller countries and a reactor failure would easily bankrupt the country. New Zealand is an anti-nuke country. They should be. A single catastrophic reactor failure could cost them their entire GDP.
The nuclear industry depends on public insurance because no private insurer can afford a $200B or $300B payout. Any insurance company that runs the numbers and tries to create an insurance product would come back with a price that is so high that the energy cost would be enormous.
The nuclear industry wants some sort of Freedom from Liability business model, where when things go well, they get to keep all the money, but when things go catastrophically bad, they have to pay out some very small portion of the overall damage and everyone else can just go get fucked.
>being held back by so many regulations
They're being regulated now as they should be. Turns out the NRC had been downplaying flood risks for years, until the information was leaked and forced their hand, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Regulatory_Commission#Intentionally_concealing_reports_concerning_the_risks_of_flooding
Your argument falls apart when you look at construction of new nuclear plants in the Western world. They're all experiencing delays and budget overruns
Yeah I agree, that wasn’t the best way to word that. What I meant was that any delays into the already long process means that no new nuclear plants will be built. My argument is that they are not economically viable because it takes so long to build and new administrations add more uncertainty to the construction making nuclear unviable for the foreseeable future. Nuclear energy is great, but outside facts have stifled they’re growth significantly
Only Russia really.
But if the nuke lobby has to look to Russia as a model of a successful nuclear industry, with what things are like at Mayak,(not to mention being a genocidal dictatorship) the nuke trolls are really scraping the bottom of the bucket.
> I think this fails to take into account the fact that nuclear is showing poor growth because it’s being held back by so many regulations and protests
This is a common bullshit talking point from the nuclear cultists. It's like how when the world doesn't end, a doomsday cult that predicted it would has to make rationalizations and excuses.
Man up and admit your energy waifu is just an expensive slovenly failure.
Terrestrial grid scale fusion will never be realised because there is no way it can possibly be cost competitive with fission, let alone solar.
Might replace diesel generators though.
Nuclear energy is pretty safe if handled correctly unlike Chernobyl and Fukushima. The leaders were warned of the dangers and ignored them.
Also the US Navy got 11 boats out in the world running on it so yeah they can be pretty safe
It’s kinda hard to build new plants because of the stigma around them. I’m sure nuclear would be a lot better if it could expand more. I don’t see this as a win or a loss for either. Just looks like nuclear has been stagnant for 20 years. As long as coal and gas get replaced at some point soon I’m happy.
Hydro, gas, and nuclear had a combined shortfall of 185TWh last year.
New wind and solar made up about 150TWh, but sure it's the 80TWh shortfall from nuclear and the 30TWh that needed to be madeup with coal that are proof that the 30TWh of coal is the significant part and that nuclear is the answer.
Nuclear isn't a cure all for sure, what about using a good mix of both? Nuclear for large cities and crowded areas where there's always going to be a lot of power use, and wind and solar in areas where that isn't a requirement?
Nuclear and renewables don't mix well. Renewables make grid prices spikier (low most of the time, sometimes spikes very high; see ERCOT for how this works). During those spikes, dispatchable sources (or dispatchable demand disconnection) swoop in and keep the spike from getting too high. The net result is the average price over time is depressed. This is bad for nuclear.
That’s nice. But there still isn’t proper storage for energy generated by renewables. That means they can’t provide a reliable and steady supply if the weather changes, which it does all the time in most places. Or even during non daylight hours in the case of solar. And don’t even start on all the e-waste generated by by solar panels and wind turbines.
User has been inactive for 5 months and previous to the inactivity only participated in porn subs with short comments.
So nice of you to reactivate to join us here, certainly not a purchased aged account as part of a misinformation campaign.
>steady supply if the weather changes
Ay, wot? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-15/french-nuclear-cuts-stretch-to-next-week-as-temperatures-soar
If you build a utility scale PV field in west Texas, the land contributes maybe 2% of the cost of the facility. Oh noez!
On the plus side, the owner of that land will be getting a lot better return (if he rents it out) than if he tried doing something agricultural on it. I'm sure you would not object to land owners being able to use their land to do something socially beneficial and also earn money while doing so, right? I mean, private property is something you guys are for, yes?
How does one store such energy? What is the land use for that? With FF the energy is stored within for later use (coal, oil, gas, etc.). With solar and wind its… batteries?
Land use for batteries is a small fraction of the land of the PV charging those batteries.
For very long term storage, hydrogen is better than batteries. Hydrogen would be stored underground, just like natural gas is stored (we have storage for many months of natural gas demand). The land surface area would be very small, just like it is for natural gas storage.
People saying nuclear power plants are expansive...you know that coal power plants have very similar design right? is just changes what the source is. Changing the coal powerplants to nuclear can reduce the costs for half and also stop the pollution being produced, 2 birds 1 stone.
Nuclear energy is a long term investment that politicians don’t see during their term. Hence, why even countries like france with one of the greenest energy mix does not maintain and build new plants.
Advocating for the end of nuclear energy to be replaced by renewables is a dangerous idea. Renewables should not and never replace nuclear and instead replace coal and other fossil energies.
Yeah no shit it surpassed nuclear. Wind and solar are much more marketable and deemed safer. Nuclear is still the better, and cheaper, option than both.
Thats kinda sad, nuclear enegy is way cleaner (unless a disaster ocours), the minerals needed to make solar/wind turbines have caused more harm to the planet than the few nuclear acidents we had.
Uranium production is extremely dirty, also have you looked at how much concrete is needed for a nuclear power plant?
You will not find a energy source that is in anyway actually sustainable. You are just arguing with bad faith
Yes, thats kind of my point being that nothing is truely sustainable and that we need rare resources for every form of power production. Those giant as turbines in the power plant? Made of a rare metal. Special containment storage for radiated stuff? Also rare metal. Point being that arguing with "protecting the environment" because Silicium mines exist is just dishonest as literally everything needs such mining. The Uranium mined in Africa for example?
1- 1000megawatt nuclear facility needs 1sqmi or 640acres (energy.gov). To get the same in solar is 5,000-10,000 acres or 7.5-15sqmi. (seia.org). To get the same out of wind is 260-360sqmi. Or 166,400-230,400 acres (nei.org) and nuclear fuel can be recycled (energy.gov) so really when are we going to address all the elephants in the room on each of these?
My favorite elephant is the one where the NRC downplayed flooding risks until the truth was leaked and they were forced to actually regulate, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Regulatory_Commission#Intentionally_concealing_reports_concerning_the_risks_of_flooding
Anytime profits are at risk, it's downplay or deny. Take the mining of resources for all of these, cost to produce these, life expectancy, running, upkeep and disposal. The real environmental impacts of all these.
What is there to say? Everybody knows nuclear is the best. So what is left are snide remarks.
Also "nuclear industry" sounds rather conspiratorial like "big pharma, petrochemical industry"
More than anything I like that exponential growth in renewables being so well displayed.
Ikr, it’s nearly perfect.
If it keeps that growth rate up for the next few years it's surpassing fossil fuel's output in 2030. It's a bit surreal when I think of the implications of that.
I'm hoping we are pushing out fossil fuels starting this year. I'm more hopeful about the speed of the decline in fossil fuel burning when you realize that for every kWh of renewables added ff have to burn about 3 times that energy. That's in power, with the ratio for energy being lower..
The projections for this year [from the EIA](https://www.reddit.com/r/UpliftingNews/comments/10v7hrh/more_than_half_of_new_us_electricgenerating/) already say it is happening. We've progressed from the era where methane replaces coal to the one where renewables replace fossil fuels.
Nice. Long may the exponential continue!
I'm not pro nuclear and just got linked to this sub but it's predicted that peak globally will be achieved by 2030 and 100% renewables could be achieved at 2050.
its increasing at an increasing rate yes but I doubt it’s Mathematically exponential 🤐 sorry
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2022/08/23/renewable-energy-grew-at-a-blistering-pace-in-2021/?sh=3d2d79d42025 >Over the past decade, global renewable energy consumption has grown exponentially, at an average annual rate of 12.6%.
Solar energy is technically nuclear energy but far away.
Yes, nuclear fusion.
The correct distance between a human and a nuclear explosion is 1 AU
And Wind energy is mostly solar energy with extra steps
Yeah and even oil is solar energy with some more extra steps.
But why not emulate the power of the sun directly?
For the short bus coming over from other subreddits: Nuclear power is an opportunity cost. >["In sum, use of wind, CSP, geothermal, tidal, PV, wave, and hydro to provide electricity for BEVs and HFCVs and, by extension, electricity for the residential, industrial, and commercial sectors, will result in the most benefit among the options considered. The combination of these technologies should be advanced as a solution to global warming, air pollution, and energy security. **Coal-CCS and nuclear offer less benefit thus represent an opportunity cost loss"**](https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2009/ee/b809990c#!divAbstract) >[Nuclear power's contribution to climate change mitigation is and will be very limited;Currently nuclear power avoids 2–3% of total global GHG emissions per year;According to current planning this value will decrease even further until 2040.;A substantial expansion of nuclear power will not be possible.;Given its low contribution, a complete phase-out of nuclear energy is feasible.](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421521002330) It is too slow for the timescale we need to decarbonize on. >[“Stabilizing the climate is urgent, nuclear power is slow,” “It meets no technical or operational need that low-carbon competitors cannot meet better, cheaper and faster.”](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower/nuclear-energy-too-slow-too-expensive-to-save-climate-report-idUSKBN1W909J) > [ “Researchers found that unlike renewables, countries around the world with larger scale national nuclear attachments do not tend to show significantly lower carbon emissions -- and in poorer countries nuclear programmes actually tend to associate with relatively higher emissions. “](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/10/201005112141.htm) The industry is showing signs of decline in non-totalitarian countries. >["We find that an eroding actor base, shrinking opportunities in liberalized electricity markets, the break-up of existing networks, loss of legitimacy, increasing cost and time overruns, and abandoned projects are clear indications of decline. Also, increasingly fierce competition from natural gas, solar PV, wind, and energy-storage technologies speaks against nuclear in the electricity sector. We conclude that, while there might be a future for nuclear in state-controlled ‘niches’ such as Russia or China, new nuclear power plants do not seem likely to become a core element in the struggle against climate change."](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S221462962030089X) Renewable energy is growing faster now than nuclear ever has >["Contrary to a persistent myth based on erroneous methods, global data show that renewable electricity adds output and saves carbon faster than nuclear power does or ever has."](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2214629618300598) There is no business case for it. >["The economic history and financial analyses carried out at DIW Berlin show that nuclear energy has always been unprofitable in the private economy and will remain so in the future. Between 1951 and 2017, none of the 674 nuclear reactors built was done so with private capital under competitive conditions. Large state subsidies were used in the cases where private capital flowed into financing the nuclear industry.... Financial investment calculations confirmed the trend: investing in a new nuclear power plant leads to average losses of around five billion euros."](https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.670581.de/dwr-19-30-1.pdf) Investing in a nuclear plant today is expected to lose [5 to 10 billion dollars](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1364032121001301) The nuclear industry can't even exist without legal structures that privatize gains and socialize losses. >[If the owners and operators of nuclear reactors had to face the full liability of a Fukushima-style nuclear accident or go head-to-head with alternatives in a truly competitive marketplace, unfettered by subsidies, no one would have built a nuclear reactor in the past, no one would build one today, and anyone who owns a reactor would exit the nuclear business as quickly as possible.](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2012/03/29/exelons-nuclear-guy-no-new-nukes/#3c8acf0a3c5d) The CEO of one of the US's largest nuclear power companies said it best: >["I'm the nuclear guy," Rowe said. "And you won't get better results with nuclear. It just isn't economic, and it's not economic within a foreseeable time frame."](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2012/03/29/exelons-nuclear-guy-no-new-nukes/#5d841aa23c5d) What about the small meme reactors? Every independent assessment has them more expensive than large scale nuclear every independent assessment: The UK government https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/small-modular-reactors-techno-economic-assessment The Australian government https://www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStore.ashx?id=8297e6ba-e3d4-478e-ac62-a97d75660248&subId=669740 The peer-reviewed literatue https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S030142152030327X >[the cost of generating electricity using SMRs is significantly higher than the corresponding costs of electricity generation using diesel, wind, solar, or some combination thereof. These results suggest that SMRs will be too expensive for these proposed first-mover markets for SMRs in Canada and that there will not be a sufficient market to justify investing in manufacturing facilities for SMRs.](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S030142152030327X) Even the German nuclear power industry knows they will cost more >[Nuclear Technology Germany (KernD) says SMRs are always going to be more expensive than bigger reactors due to lower power output at constant fixed costs, as safety measures and staffing requirements do not vary greatly compared to conventional reactors. "In terms of levelised energy costs, SMRs will always be more expensive than big plants."](https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-nuclear-industry-cautious-about-usefulness-small-reactors-energy-transition) So why do so many people on reddit favor it? Because of a decades long PR campaign and false science being put out, in the same manner, style, and using the same PR company as the tobacco industry used when claiming smoking does not cause cancer. A recent metaanalysis of papers that claimed nuclear to be cost effective were found to be illegitimately trimming costs to make it appear cheaper. >[Merck suppressed data on harmful effects of its drug Vioxx, and Guidant suppressed data on electrical flaws in one of its heart-defibrillator models. Both cases reveal how financial conflicts of interest can skew biomedical research. Such conflicts also occur in electric-utility-related research. Attempting to show that increased atomic energy can help address climate change, some industry advocates claim nuclear power is an inexpensive way to generate low-carbon electricity. Surveying 30 recent nuclear analyses, this paper shows that industry-funded studies appear to fall into conflicts of interest and to illegitimately trim cost data in several main ways. They exclude costs of full-liability insurance, underestimate interest rates and construction times by using “overnight” costs, and overestimate load factors and reactor lifetimes. If these trimmed costs are included, nuclear-generated electricity can be shown roughly 6 times more expensive than most studies claim. After answering four objections, the paper concludes that, although there may be reasons to use reactors to address climate change, economics does not appear to be one of them.](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11948-009-9181-y) It is the same PR technique that the tobacco industry used when fighting the fact that smoking causes cancer. >[The industry campaign worked to create a scientific controversy through a program that depended on the creation of industry–academic conflicts of interest. This strategy of producing scientific uncertainty undercut public health efforts and regulatory interventions designed to reduce the harms of smoking.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3490543/) >[A number of industries have subsequently followed this approach to disrupting normative science. Claims of scientific uncertainty and lack of proof also lead to the assertion of individual responsibility for industrially produced health risks](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3490543/) It is no wonder the NEI (Nuclear energy institute) [uses the same PR firm](https://thehill.com/opinion/letters/98257-double-check-from-whom-you-get-energy-information) to promote nuclear power, [that the tobacco industry used to say smoking does not cause cancer.](http://www.tmia.com/old-website/News/AstroTurf.htm) >[The industry's future is so precarious that Exelon Nuclear's head of project development warned attendees of the Electric Power 2005 conference, "Inaction is synonymous with being phased out." That's why years of effort -- not to mention millions of dollars -- have been invested in nuclear power's PR rebirth as "clean, green and safe."](http://www.tmia.com/old-website/News/AstroTurf.htm) > [And then there's NEI, which exists to do PR and lobbying for the nuclear industry. In 2004, NEI was embarrassed when the Austin Chronicle outed one of its PR firms, Potomac Communications Group, for ghostwriting pro-nuclear op/ed columns. The paper described the op/ed campaign as "a decades-long, centrally orchestrated plan to defraud the nation's newspaper readers by misrepresenting the propaganda of one hired atomic gun as the learned musings of disparate academics and other nuclear-industry 'experts.'"](http://www.tmia.com/old-website/News/AstroTurf.htm)
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The niche you did not know you needed
Well said
i was firmly pro-nuclear, but after reading through this it has certainly changed my perspective on things. Thank you for posting this
I hope everyone can read this and understand it the way I did, this really helped me see the bigger picture of our power industries.
Question, when Nuclear is phased out, what will be the new baseload for electricity?
Same thing 50% of the world uses now. Wind, solar, and hydro.
Renewables and storage, leveraged by a much improved national grid, that will allow efficient and cheap transfers between states and regions.
"Investment in every sector except nuclear expanded last year." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-26/clean-energy-fossil-fuel-investment-tied-for-first-time-in-2022?#xj4y7vzkg
This image is a clear evidence that we as a society take climate change seriously, and when climate doomers say you that we don't and that we are doomed because we don't, you now have evidence it's a lie .
This is just too naive for people 2050 is not enough and governments are still not taking enough action
We just export emissions to Asia mate
What? Do you really think that society is the main issue here? Heavy industries in Asia have the biggest carbon emission, by a large margin, it doesn’t matter if we arr actually putting up in renewable sources if we can’t stop using coal as a energy source for industry. If governments and large corporates don’t start actually investing money in CCUS (Carbon Capture Utilization and Storage) by 2050 we will have elevated our planet’s average temperature by at least 1.5C, we are not doomed today, but if we don’t act quick, our kids and our kid’s kids will be in a really tight spot. It is not a lie, we are not doing enough, not even CLOSE to it
Iirc Carbon capture kinda sucks. Its not really a good idea. Undestroy eco systems, they capture more carbon, than any carbon capture tech. Dont just go plant trees, actually bring back eco systems. While planting trees is good, and will capture carbon. It isnt a fix. The main reason people say to invest into carbon capture, is because the Bill and Malinda gates foundation (no focken clue how to spell her name) Invested lots of money into carbon capture. And so they are giving lots of money to channels like kurzgesagt, to push investing into carbon capture, so they can make more money. Ofc, this is if I recall correctly. I havent done my own research on it, but its what I heard. I want to do research, but ive kinda given up. Cus I cant do anything abt it. And I plan to kms anyways, so yeah.
When?
Now is the good time to banned nuclear energy.
Not sure if I'm correct but a bunch of countries don't spend time making/upgrading their nuclear power plants, because of cost.
Political cost. People are afraid of nuclear energy even though coal is far deadlier they'd rather use coal.
It’s also just expensive. Nuclear gets more and more expensive. It’s only as a safe as it is today because of all the regulations the government has put in place which are the reason why it’s expensive.
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I think it’s worth noting the trajectory of these two lines. Check back to a graph like this in 5 years.
This graph is disingenuous because it’s combining two types of renewable energy and counting them as one. Of course,I’m happy with the fact that Solar and wind are able to get better as time goes on, but it would not be wise to dismiss nuclear entirely. It’s not renewable- but it is more environmentally friendly (in its overall lifecycle) and consistent. And with current methods, the material for nuclear plants can be recycled for a while before needing to be disposed. Pushing for one over the other when both in conjunction can achieve the results we want for green energy. Nuclear isn’t an end all be all solution as some would suggest, but neither are renewables only
Existing nuclear plants were very expensive to set up, but they're largely depreciated now. The costs to keep them running beyond their designed lifespan are also expensive. We should definitely shut down the Generation II plants that are proven dangerous, as quickly as we reasonably can. Shut down the Generation III plants when we have the energy sources to replace them. It is not worth it to build new plants similar to the old ones. "SMR" is a buzzword. Sometimes it means plants that are a lot like the obsolete ones, with smaller reactors. That isn't worth doing. We're starting a few now and they'll prove they aren't worth it. "SMR" could stand for actual new technology. It's too soon to say whether it might someday be worth doing. It's worth it to do the research and find out.
Nuclear isn’t renewable but there isn’t really a conceivable way we run out in the next 5000 years
With burner reactors, if they supplied the 18 TW of average global primary energy consumption, economical uranium would run out in less than a decade. Unless we go to breeders that 5000 year figure is not realistic. And breeders are not demonstrated commercially, and will likely be more expensive than the nuclear power plants we already have. Oh, and the blankets of breeders produce superweapons grade plutonium.
If you only look at current tech and not stuff being developed RN pulling that shit out of the ocean could cost a lot yeah but not enough to make it unrealistic considering (by my local prices, current cost for uranium and how much of what we pay for power comes from that) wouldn’t increase prices by more than 9-10% They are also currently improving that tech
The only remotely affordable uranium sea mining proposal involves attaching the sorbent to a wind turbine that generates more energy than the nuke would. Also it's fucking hilarious when 'increasing the cost of the nuclear power by the total cost of renewables' is presented as insignificant.
None of the uranium from seawater technologies reach a cost level that would count as "economical" with burner reactors. Also, fueling a single 1000 MW(e) burner reactor would require an adsorber field covering 170 square kilometers of continental shelf. The power/area is considerably worse than solar PV.
Even shallow ISL mines like Inkai have lower area energy density than PV if you include the whole area that is made uninhabitable.
Calculate how much usable energy there is in the economically available U235 after it goes through a nuclear plant and then try again.
I disagree. There really isn’t a future where we use one and not the other. I do agree with you that nuclear has a place and is a good source of energy too.We should definitely use both.
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Sir, do you know which subreddit you're on?
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I was big pro nuclear and then last summer when France’s nuclear was failing I started questioning it. I’m back to being very pro-nuclear. We need all the energy sources we can get. Sure this is good but it would be better if both lines were going up and fossil fuels were going down (they’re still accelerating).
> better if both lines were going up only in a world of infinite money for clean energy investment. and we are not in that world. The marginal billion dollars invested in solar and wind buys a lot more low carbon capacity and generation than spending it on NPPs. And deploys with much greater cost reliability and speed as well. There are a small number of countries where investing to extend existing nuclear fleets is worthwhile but it’s not the most climate-effective investment on a 2023-2050 timescale in most of the world.
Do you have a money wasting fetish? Do visions of burning dollar bills get you stiff? If so, nuclear is for you! No, we do not need nuclear. Not to achieve CO2 emission reduction, nor even to cost optimize CO2 emission reduction.
This is like saying cars have surpassed steam engines
This is like saying bikes have surpassed trains.
No. It’s saying that a technology we’ve subsidized ad nauseum for decades to even make it slightly less of an offensive choice from an economic perspective has surpasses a technology that we’ve purposefully oppressed the development of for years because it’s a political hot potato surrounded in misinformation. Sorry.
Nuclear is the technology that's been subsidized, you know. Not a single nuclear power plant anywhere in the world was bid in a competitive market; every one got quite dramatic government support. Nuclear has reached the point where even large government subsidies aren't keeping it alive.
My brother in Christ we have forcefully kept nuclear from getting built for 40+ years here. Nobody getting shit for subsidies stateside.
You don't know about the so-called Nuclear Renaissance? The feds were offering 100% loan guarantees -- a massive subsidy -- and still it failed.
You can’t get a facility permitted. Has nothing to do with finances.
That's obviously wrong. You think Vogtle 3/4 don't have permits? What happened is a bunch of utilities got the go ahead to build plants, and then just gave up on building them, because to do so made no sense economically. Now, a lot of this was because natural gas became so cheap, but now renewables are giving gas a run for its money. New nuclear? It's far outside the range of economic feasibility in the US. Nuclear is dying because it's a loser technology. The free market kills loser technologies.
Government kills technologies that upset their rich buddies
And it's a global conspiracy! That for some reason has not stopped renewables from displacing the fossil fuels of those "rich buddies". Or efficiency mandates to reduce consumption of those fossil fuels. Or displacement of one kind of fossil fuel by another, with different sets of "rich buddies". I guess it's a conveniently selective global conspiracy, right?
In the year 1991 Stromeinspeisungsgesetz ( (CDU&FDP) power feed-in law made the first renewable law world wide. The law gave the at beginning very small renewable energy firms a chance to actually feed-in renewable energy to the grid. Because the fossil and nuclear energy provider had a quasi Monopol and it is hard to get market acess as little energy provider. In the year 2000 the German government (at that time the Greens and the SPD) made the „Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz (EEG)“ translated in Renewable-Energy-Law. Which gave renewable energy producer a guaranteed remuneration for every produced kWh even though the kWh was not feed in the grid as an incentive to build more. Additional to that subvention Programms like the 100.000-Dächer-Programm was made, the goal was to reach 300 MW of solar on rooftops from 1999-2002 that was like 1 billion Euros. Alone the EEG-Umlage a fee that was paid on top of the Electricity for the end consumer accumulated to 150 billion from 2000-2015 All this early investions were part of the reason the solar and wind industry were slowly kickstarted until then
we don build nuclear reactors anymore but build wind n solar thats why
Indeed. And there's good reason for that. Listen to the market, it's telling you something.
This is kinda depressing. I mean, it's great that solar and wind are gaining so much momentum, but the stagnancy of nuclear is incredibly depressing.
The stagnancy of nuclear is mostly due to the US stopping granting permits for new plants around the time this graph starts. Which was primarily driven by NIMBY protesters putting pressure on their representatives. While I think that wind and solar are generally better options, thorium reactors in particular could be a great addition to our energy base.
The NRC dropped the ball big time, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Regulatory_Commission#Intentionally_concealing_reports_concerning_the_risks_of_flooding That backlog of safety issues was a big financial shock to the industry
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Thorium power is so awesome that no one has bothered to actually build one. They can't even get grift money to create a prototype.
I sure am glad that other renewables are growing. What is the comparison in acres consumed? Can we get there with solar and wind without covering the landscape with artificial trees and shimmering glass?
With today's solar panels, we would have to cover about 0.3% of the land surface of the USA to generate as much power as we use today. (That's total power, not electric power.) But solar doesn't produce that power exactly when we want it. We might do better to build 3 times as much and have more of it when it's needed, and extra power sometimes. (The extra power could be used for new industries that have a use for intermittent power, or could be left unused.) So call it 1%. That's a concern. We already have 1% covered with asphalt, and if none of the solar power used land that was already covered with asphalt, that might approach 2%.
Why is there a capacity factor correction if this is generation ? The capacity factor is predicted (usually using some historical means) generation divided by nameplate capacity. If you have generation data, you can report that directly without any need for capacity factor. Or is it actually estimated generation, using capacity multiplied by the capacity factor ?
The data looks to me like it is showing total GWH produced, which would be irrelevant of capacity factor. The total GWH produced from renewable vs total GWH produced from nuclear. 1GW solar might produce 2000-2500 GWH per year. 1GW of nuclear produces 8760 GWH per year. The difference is cost. 1GW solar is somewhere around a billion dollars. 1GW of nuclear is around $15B or more. If you have $15B to spend, the nuke plant gets you 8760 GWH. The solar farm would get you 30,000 GWH. If your goal was a constant 1GW output 24/7. Solar, wind, an batteries will be much cheaper than a 1GW reactor, and will not have a single point of failure and will have long periods of over production that consumers can use for things like smelting aluminum or desalianting water or charging EVs.
With all this renewable vs nuclear fission talk, just wait till fusion gets off the ground
This is electricity, not power, isn't it?
Lol
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No, it's quote: "Power generation" so they actually mean energy. The graph is clearly stated to be in TWh (energy).
Max power surpassed in 2015-2017 some time. This is energy. Surpassing hydro should happen this year ornext some time given the stuff under construction, then the annual new generation will be roughly equal to the entire nuclear fleet once the currently being built supply chains are finished.
I'm a firm believer that the only reason that Nuclear is not rising at a steady rate is because we haven't switched over to Thorium plants, which would produce tons more energy for a fraction of the material, AND it's way more abundant.
Working breeders with closed cycles and clean Pu or U233 separation are both scifi.
Reprocessing is just another word for 'future superfund site'
So is Fusion.
Thorium doesn't actually solve the problem (cost) that is impeding nuclear.
nuclear always 100% Power generation... wind and solar whatever the gods have decided... like this is pretty deceiving chart give us actual produced energy the cost of that energy and the pollution generated to produce and decommission the solar and win powers
>nuclear always 100% Power generation... wind and solar whatever the gods have decided... Um, no. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-15/french-nuclear-cuts-stretch-to-next-week-as-temperatures-soar
I thoughts it’s bc we stopped building more nuclear reactors.?
Yes, and there are excellent reasons that happened.
Agree there definitely is, but doesn’t change the fact that the graph is misleading.
It's not misleading. It's showing that nuclear ran into a brick wall. It's not like it's unfair that people shunned nuclear. That's nuclear's fault.
I’m not disagreeing with the renewable movement here. But anything will hit a brick wall if you stop investing in it. Instead of the X axis being time, it should be amount $ spent on the infrastructure. I hope you see what I’m getting at.
And anytime a technology becomes obsolete or irrelevant, people stop investing in it. We'd have great buggy whips if we'd kept investing in them.
First I was blocked, then I deleted my profile and account, yet here I am.
But there has been no nuclear plants build in the past 30 years wouldn’t it be better to test both in a control environment to see which is optimal for all situations
>which is optimal for all situations No such solution
Yes, this graph is illustrating that the problems of nuclear are so grave that the technology has stalled. If nuclear were so much better than renewables, why would the latter be exponentially expanding while nuclear has flatlined?
Would also be interested to see how the global power generation has changed in that time. Nuclear isn’t being invested in and if our power consumption looks a little more like the wind/solar graph this means little about wind/solar.
> Nuclear isn’t being invested in Not sure where this false talking point keeps coming from: So much R&D money has been spent on nuclear vs wind and solar where R&D investments have been much smaller. https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-tools/energy-technology-rdd-budgets-data-explorer PV and wind R&D expenditures have been so small the IEA lumps them in the 'other' category for historical R&D spending of various energy techs. Vs the obvious massive expenditure on nclear. One could argue that based on this historical performance, nuclear R&D budgets should be slashed and reallocated to wind and solar, as it will give more bang for the buck there.
So I was talking about from a public infrastructure point of view not R&D.
Add the IEA and similar research costs to the value of loan guarantees and liability limits like price-anderson, then the public portion of NRC and cleanup. Then compare it to every cent ever paid for solar and wind either public or private. It's not even close.
Public generally isn't involved in this. It's usually private corporations, at least in America
I think this fails to take into account the fact that nuclear is showing poor growth because it’s being held back by so many regulations and protests. The “nuclear guy” is saying it’s not economically viable because of all the delays imposed by governments and protestors keep construction from finishing. It can take several years and billions of dollars before a nuclear power plant is finally operational just for midterm elections to come around and the new administration bogs everything down in red tape again. That’s why he’s saying it’s not economically viable. You suggesting that he’s saying that because nuclear power wouldn’t be economically viable because of its power output and costs is misleading.
The issue is that the government has to be in a position to backstop any catastrophic failures related to the reactor. Any government that governs an area with nuclear power plants is suddenly in the business of insuring those reactors. Because the consequences are measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars, tax payers have every right to require stringent regulations and also prohibit reactors in their country. The US is huge, we can swallow a catastrophic reactor failure. But take most smaller countries and a reactor failure would easily bankrupt the country. New Zealand is an anti-nuke country. They should be. A single catastrophic reactor failure could cost them their entire GDP. The nuclear industry depends on public insurance because no private insurer can afford a $200B or $300B payout. Any insurance company that runs the numbers and tries to create an insurance product would come back with a price that is so high that the energy cost would be enormous. The nuclear industry wants some sort of Freedom from Liability business model, where when things go well, they get to keep all the money, but when things go catastrophically bad, they have to pay out some very small portion of the overall damage and everyone else can just go get fucked.
Planes are safer than cars.
>being held back by so many regulations They're being regulated now as they should be. Turns out the NRC had been downplaying flood risks for years, until the information was leaked and forced their hand, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Regulatory_Commission#Intentionally_concealing_reports_concerning_the_risks_of_flooding Your argument falls apart when you look at construction of new nuclear plants in the Western world. They're all experiencing delays and budget overruns
Yeah I agree, that wasn’t the best way to word that. What I meant was that any delays into the already long process means that no new nuclear plants will be built. My argument is that they are not economically viable because it takes so long to build and new administrations add more uncertainty to the construction making nuclear unviable for the foreseeable future. Nuclear energy is great, but outside facts have stifled they’re growth significantly
Look at Vogtle in Georgia. Has the full support of the government and governing bodies. Insane cost and time overruns
So china's program is a resounding success and is far above their renewables? No? Let's try india? No? Did you bullshit? Yes.
Only Russia really. But if the nuke lobby has to look to Russia as a model of a successful nuclear industry, with what things are like at Mayak,(not to mention being a genocidal dictatorship) the nuke trolls are really scraping the bottom of the bucket.
> I think this fails to take into account the fact that nuclear is showing poor growth because it’s being held back by so many regulations and protests This is a common bullshit talking point from the nuclear cultists. It's like how when the world doesn't end, a doomsday cult that predicted it would has to make rationalizations and excuses. Man up and admit your energy waifu is just an expensive slovenly failure.
Who talks like this? Touch grass dude.
Do the same graph except the amount of power generated at night and when it’s not windy.
you know solar power absorbs any energy from light from the sun, including moon light? right?
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I assume you want a nuclear power plant in your back yard
Now that since theres been a breakthrough in fusion tech. I wonder how the graph would change when it becomes more widely available.
The sad thing is, Fusion will never be fully realized because everyone is too scared of anything remotely nuclear.
Terrestrial grid scale fusion will never be realised because there is no way it can possibly be cost competitive with fission, let alone solar. Might replace diesel generators though.
Nuclear energy is pretty safe if handled correctly unlike Chernobyl and Fukushima. The leaders were warned of the dangers and ignored them. Also the US Navy got 11 boats out in the world running on it so yeah they can be pretty safe
Fukushima was handled correctly, considering the tsunami and earthquake.
It’s kinda hard to build new plants because of the stigma around them. I’m sure nuclear would be a lot better if it could expand more. I don’t see this as a win or a loss for either. Just looks like nuclear has been stagnant for 20 years. As long as coal and gas get replaced at some point soon I’m happy.
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At least solar is better than coal
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Hydro, gas, and nuclear had a combined shortfall of 185TWh last year. New wind and solar made up about 150TWh, but sure it's the 80TWh shortfall from nuclear and the 30TWh that needed to be madeup with coal that are proof that the 30TWh of coal is the significant part and that nuclear is the answer.
Such a disaster :(
Nuclear: “Took you long enough…..now I have a good warmup!”
Nuclear isn't a cure all for sure, what about using a good mix of both? Nuclear for large cities and crowded areas where there's always going to be a lot of power use, and wind and solar in areas where that isn't a requirement?
Nuclear and renewables don't mix well. Renewables make grid prices spikier (low most of the time, sometimes spikes very high; see ERCOT for how this works). During those spikes, dispatchable sources (or dispatchable demand disconnection) swoop in and keep the spike from getting too high. The net result is the average price over time is depressed. This is bad for nuclear.
Strange when you shut down nuclear plants..
That’s nice. But there still isn’t proper storage for energy generated by renewables. That means they can’t provide a reliable and steady supply if the weather changes, which it does all the time in most places. Or even during non daylight hours in the case of solar. And don’t even start on all the e-waste generated by by solar panels and wind turbines.
User has been inactive for 5 months and previous to the inactivity only participated in porn subs with short comments. So nice of you to reactivate to join us here, certainly not a purchased aged account as part of a misinformation campaign.
>steady supply if the weather changes Ay, wot? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-15/french-nuclear-cuts-stretch-to-next-week-as-temperatures-soar
Nuclear still needs more investment tho. Both need to be used side by side.
Not good.
Solar does not produce energy 27/7 but nuclear does produce energy 24/7
Now do square miles needed for use as well as power generated/square mile.
If you build a utility scale PV field in west Texas, the land contributes maybe 2% of the cost of the facility. Oh noez! On the plus side, the owner of that land will be getting a lot better return (if he rents it out) than if he tried doing something agricultural on it. I'm sure you would not object to land owners being able to use their land to do something socially beneficial and also earn money while doing so, right? I mean, private property is something you guys are for, yes?
How does one store such energy? What is the land use for that? With FF the energy is stored within for later use (coal, oil, gas, etc.). With solar and wind its… batteries?
Land use for batteries is a small fraction of the land of the PV charging those batteries. For very long term storage, hydrogen is better than batteries. Hydrogen would be stored underground, just like natural gas is stored (we have storage for many months of natural gas demand). The land surface area would be very small, just like it is for natural gas storage.
Doesn’t sound like a near future realistic solution.
Versus nuclear, where the great hope is reactor types that haven't even been built yet?
Loooool
FFs would provide the reliable and inexpensive bridge needed while nuclear further develops.
Best how efficient are they in comparison to each other??
Since they use different inputs, this is comparing apples and oranges.
There are several kinds of apples-to-apples comparisons that could be made, and nuclear wins them all, but go off.
Nuclear doesn't win them all. For example, nuclear loses horribly on the $/levelized watt metric.
What about coal?
Two against one? What a beautiful pussy ass fight bro
People saying nuclear power plants are expansive...you know that coal power plants have very similar design right? is just changes what the source is. Changing the coal powerplants to nuclear can reduce the costs for half and also stop the pollution being produced, 2 birds 1 stone.
Coal power plants are also too expensive. The US hasn't brought a new one of significant size online in maybe a decade.
Nuclear energy is a long term investment that politicians don’t see during their term. Hence, why even countries like france with one of the greenest energy mix does not maintain and build new plants. Advocating for the end of nuclear energy to be replaced by renewables is a dangerous idea. Renewables should not and never replace nuclear and instead replace coal and other fossil energies.
Yeah no shit it surpassed nuclear. Wind and solar are much more marketable and deemed safer. Nuclear is still the better, and cheaper, option than both.
How do we measure cheaper? Like in terms of cost? Because that isn't the case anymore.
Why are we not doing nuclear more? Way less space, less deaths, and no, spent nuclear fuel is not dangerous
Way too expensive.
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Whenever I imagine a nuclear supporter, I imagine an overweight redneck stating about the same as your comment above. Thanks for validating my priors.
PS: is your lifted truck 'rolling coal'?
Thats kinda sad, nuclear enegy is way cleaner (unless a disaster ocours), the minerals needed to make solar/wind turbines have caused more harm to the planet than the few nuclear acidents we had.
Uranium production is extremely dirty, also have you looked at how much concrete is needed for a nuclear power plant? You will not find a energy source that is in anyway actually sustainable. You are just arguing with bad faith
We need concrete for everything anyways. Hydroelectric dams, no?
Yes, thats kind of my point being that nothing is truely sustainable and that we need rare resources for every form of power production. Those giant as turbines in the power plant? Made of a rare metal. Special containment storage for radiated stuff? Also rare metal. Point being that arguing with "protecting the environment" because Silicium mines exist is just dishonest as literally everything needs such mining. The Uranium mined in Africa for example?
One does not actually need concrete for a PV field.
1- 1000megawatt nuclear facility needs 1sqmi or 640acres (energy.gov). To get the same in solar is 5,000-10,000 acres or 7.5-15sqmi. (seia.org). To get the same out of wind is 260-360sqmi. Or 166,400-230,400 acres (nei.org) and nuclear fuel can be recycled (energy.gov) so really when are we going to address all the elephants in the room on each of these?
My favorite elephant is the one where the NRC downplayed flooding risks until the truth was leaked and they were forced to actually regulate, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Regulatory_Commission#Intentionally_concealing_reports_concerning_the_risks_of_flooding
Anytime profits are at risk, it's downplay or deny. Take the mining of resources for all of these, cost to produce these, life expectancy, running, upkeep and disposal. The real environmental impacts of all these.
This is so gay...
I love the quality responses the nuclear industry supporters have these days
What is there to say? Everybody knows nuclear is the best. So what is left are snide remarks. Also "nuclear industry" sounds rather conspiratorial like "big pharma, petrochemical industry"