IMHO I do not think nuclear will save us from climate change - it takes too long to get going to be effective - but this is going to really agitate some chud/nerd brains worms
it takes too long to get going to be effective
20 Years from now is exactly when we'll need those reactors the most. We should be building more of them right fucking now. The energy crisis is only going to worsen in the future, all the more reason to put into place the very good carbon neutral tech we have now instead of hoping for a hypothetical fast solution to implement someday.
very good carbon neutral tech we have now
:shrug-outta-hecks:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-stacked
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-percentage-change-nuclear
It's down because of regulation and bunch of Boomers who are still anti-nuclear.
France went from almost all fossils to about 75% nuke from 1975 to 2000 to the point that they power a lot of Europe now when the wind stops blowing. The US similarly built almost all of its nuclear capacity in the span of 25 or so years.
Similar with Canada, who actually developed a very safe fission reactor (a part of the byproduct being an isotope used in cancer treatments). So of course we stopped expanding the program and starved it of resources.
When you build a lot at the same time it gets cheaper and safer too. More is known about their operation as well as more mass production of parts is possible.
The reason it ranks fifth is because there's so few of them to begin with, not because of inefficiency.
geez - didn't mean to start a nuclear energy struggle session here
the simple reality is that nuclear could have been a useful stop gap if we had taken climate change seriously in the 70s-80s
that didn't happen, so we really can't avoid climate change at this point, only tamp down the bounds of how much it happens
there's going to be loads of climate disasters for the foreseeable future, and developing nuclear energy in that context (even if somehow we could ramp it via 'deregulation' 🙄 ) is asking for even more cataclysmic consequences during these events
other renewables don't really have this built-in risk factor and are actually quite resilient due to being more decentralized
China, the bleeding edge of nuclear energy research based on this news, has more Wind power than nuclear. Wind and Solar are growing y-o-y at 15%+ while nuclear only 5% ... in China.
So if China can figure it out safely and effectively ... sure that's awesome, but we have to be serious about where we are today.
https://chinaenergyportal.org/en/2020-electricity-other-energy-statistics-preliminary/
Nuclear is the only chance we have of stopping climate change in the next 20-30 years. Building a bunch of reactors is far easier than trying to replace fossil fuels completely with wind and solar and the attentive battery technology. Pure Wind/Solar is a form of austerity (look at Europe right now for a preview!)
BuT iT tAkEs A dEcAdE tO bUiLd.
As if we couldn't mass mobilize and get it done much quicker.
I mean, not under capitalism of course. No solution to climate change works under capitalism.
Regarding batteries, I've seen some interesting designs for low-tech energy storage. Stuff like flooding an old mine shaft then lifting a weight up it to store energy, and lowering it to release.
most of the thorium is in India, the US, Australia, and Canada (in that order)
most of the thorium is in India
Lol there is a non-negligible chance that India might cut a deal with China for this tech in exchange of Thorium that would be quite glorious (and quite good for both countries and the world ofc).
Thorium is an incidental biproduct of mining for rare earth minerals. It wouldn't cost much to separate it from dirt that we are already digging up anyway.
It could have saved us from climate change, sadly it didn't for a bunch of reasons. Anyways, nuclear good.
No perfect solution exists yet to handle nuclear waste for longer than all of recorded history, so we shouldn't do it. Let's cook to death and return to monke. I am a very serious science person.
Literally no serious person says that we shouldn't do it, their point is that the containment issues constrain how much capacity nuclear can actually provide to the grid in lieu of fossil fuels. There's also a limit to the construction of reactor vessels and cores because of the scarce materials they require which poses a further constraint. They're literally just trying to temper the expectations of terminally online science news readers who think nuclear is some magic solution to climate change because they don't understand its limitations properly
terminally online science news readers
TBF the type of person who reads most of the crap put out science magazines thinks we will have fusion tech in 5 years anyway, science journalism is trash, just a constant merry-go-round of "new materials found that in next 5 years will stop climate change/world hunger/gravity/cure cancer/male pattern baldness ", it's no wonder techbros think we can just science our way out of any problems, this shit will rot your brain.
Nuclear on a large scale is all well and good assuming we can develop permemant storage solutions that we can be certain won’t fail for millennia. If we perform a large-scale shift to nuclear now while this problem still isn’t addressed, we run the risk of destroying the planet hundreds or thousands of years into the future due to containment breaches, all to fuel capitalist growth in the face of climate change today. Plus, the planet already has a massive backlog of nuclear waste we can’t dispose of and it’s the source of only ~10% of our energy, and building storage for it is a massive massive undertaking. Also, once built, this storage will require constant maintenance until we manage to develop permemant storage, which in the worst case scenario means small, localised infrastructure collapse could have the potential to destroy the planet.
I’m doing a PhD in green energy materials so I do get the issues with renewables, but we are waaaay better off focussing efforts on the degrowth of energy sectors in the global North, rescinding intellectual property rights, and rolling out massive China-esque renewable energy generation projects globally instead, because nuclear is seriously not this magic solution that it's being presented as. It’s just capitalism not wanting to hit the brakes on energy growth by switching from the waste that cooks us in the short term to a waste that gives everything on the planet cancer in the long term. Fair enough if we were even remotely ready to deal with the waste with the certainty we need in the longevity of its storage facilities, but we're not, and we can't even deal with the waste we already have.
Edit: I'm not saying we should get rid of all nuclear generation, I'm saying that the containment issues, among many other limitations, constrain how much capacity nuclear can actually provide to the grid in lieu of fossil fuels. Again, it is not the magic solution that science journalists are saying it is.
:thurston:
If we perform a large-scale shift to nuclear now while this problem still isn’t addressed, we run the risk of destroying the planet hundreds or thousands of years into the future due to containment breaches
Huh? A leak/breach of nuclear waste containment would be bad for the local environment surrounding the containment facility, but nothing dramatically worse than your typical oil spill or coal plant exploding other than radioactivity. And considering that long-term storage generally consists of "find a spot of inhospitable desert, dig really far down, dump it there, seal the lid" and local storage consists of "store it in a pool in literally the most secure bunker we can build staffed with armed guards 24/7" I'm failing to see a situation in which there's a dramatic leak of radioactivity into the local environment.
Even if we scale up nuclear usage a hundred-fold the concern would be sourcing enough fuel and figuring out an acceptable form of long-term storage. The failure of the latter is purely due to neoliberal governments not wanting to come off of fossil fuels or spend money on infrastructure, not a lack of ability to do so. There's no concerns that we "risk destroying the planet."
This fairytale idea of "the most secure bunker we can build" being sufficient to store highly corrosive materials for millennia without massive containment breach has absolutely no academic basis in materials science that I know of. Also I don't think you appreciate the dynamics of radioactive materials when leeched into a "local environment", because they don't stay "local" for very long. I don't know of a single colleague actually working on this problem that would share your optimism and confidence about anything you've said.
The difficulties in developing "acceptable" long-term storage go way beyond being "purely due to neoliberal governments". Yes neoliberal governments don't help, but issues of we don't actually have the technology aren't just solved magically with more money, especially when they aren't even close to being solved in a laboratory environment despite many well-funded and capable teams working on it, let alone upscaled to industrial use which is an even bigger issue. People just think science works like that because science journalists and YouTubers don't sufficiently address this point, so people make vapid dismissals like this while not understanding the actual underlying issues and the very real reasons why the Hot New Technology Distraction might not actually save the planet.
This fairytale idea of “the most secure bunker we can build” being sufficient to store highly corrosive materials for millennia without massive containment breach has absolutely no academic basis in materials science that I know of.
The "most secure bunker we can build" was referring to onsite short-term storage at nuclear power plants, not a long-term solution. The long-term solution is still "find inhospitable area that's geologically stable and doesn't share a water table with anything important, build giant concrete bunker inside a mountain, throw lead-wrapped spent fuel rods in there and close the door until it's no longer radioactive."
If I'm missing information, please let me know, but as far as I'm aware the only major concerns with this is that the containment shells around the fuel rods may break down over thousands of years and potentially leech radioactivity into the water table or someone stumbling across the storage bunker and thinking it's something valuable and taking it elsewhere. Both of these are very, very long-term issues that aren't even guaranteed, and even if they occur the damage would still be miniscule compared to what fossil fuels are doing actively right now. We're talking about something that we would have thousands of years to go back and fix even if it does become a major issue, as opposed to us hotboxing our entire biosphere right here and now.
I completely agree with you that degrowth is absolutely fundamentally necessary for dealing with climate change, but even with degrowth we're still going to need to produce a shitload of energy that is currently provided by natural gas, coal, and oil, and renewables alone are not going to fill that gap. Nuclear is consistently one of the least carbon-producing energy sources, has been around for decades of real use, does not rely on changing conditions like solar/hydroelectric/wind, and works well with our existing centralized energy grids. It's not the Hot New Thing Here to Save Us, it's the tool that's been sitting in the back of our toolbox underutilized for far too long.
(sorry if my last message came across a bit pissy btw dude, I'm having a rough day but I didn't intend for that to come across like I worry it might have done)
I get what you meant about the bunker, but the long-term solution still hinges on some type of bunker that doesn't exist yet. Some of the issues with projects like you mentioned: areas like you described are very rare. Very little of the planet is a decent distance away from human settlements and habitats, and even if the local water table isn't adjacent to anything important, the nature of the hydrological cycle and the patterns of settlements and habitats mean that contaminated water from some inevitable, unforeseen failure modes will eventually run somewhere that there's wildlife, and then everywhere that there's wildlife. Also, digging giant caves both in mountains and other rock, ensuring they're structurally sound (even just for centuries), then shipping the building materials out to the site, constructing a sealed container large enough to be useful, then ensuring the safe transport of nuclear waste to the site is an overwhelmingly enormous infrastructure project filled with failure modes, and all that for what amounts to creating a single landfill. We don't even know how to build enough of these to store the enormous amount of waste we already have, let alone enough to accommodate the massive amount from any serious increase in nuclear's generation capacity. All this is to say that yeah we can temporarily manage some amount of nuclear waste, but we really can't deal with a huge increase in energy generation like we can with renewables without creating the absolutely colossal problems that insufficient containment of massive amounts of nuclear waste would cause. And even if we could store it all in ideal conditions, our lack of sufficient containment technology would require its continued monitoring and maintenance, possibly long after we're even capable of performing it. Landfills in the event of actual social collapse WILL at some stage (albeit over a very long period of time, but if nobody is around to stop it then that becomes arbitrary) release their contents across the planet alongside all the other landfills, most likely killing everything on it.
How come you don't think that renewables would be able to fill the gap in a degrown energy landscape? And yeah the current most commonly generated forms of renewable energy suffer from intermittancy and (at the moment) curtailment issues, but accompanied by storage systems like flow batteries etc. they're just as compatible with the grid network as the highly tunable generators from coal and nuclear plants. While materials and energy are consumed in the production of solar panels and wind turbines etc., to me at least it's far more preferable to use abundant materials for clean, scaled-back energy generation without the logistical nightmare of creating huge landfills for ticking time bombs we're then charged with maintaining for millennia.
No worries, in hindsight I'm vaguely being that :reddit-logo: nerd arguing with an expert on their own field so I can imagine how that wouldn't help lol
I hadn't considered the sheer expense and effort involved in those long-term storage solutions, and you are correct that it's hard to be sure that a water table is actually isolated especially over extremely long time periods. It's a shitshow, but I think our back is already against the wall with climate change and it seems like the lesser evil.
Other renewables are quickly getting better, but they still fundamentally fall into issues of not doing enough fast enough or being too dependent on good conditions. Photovoltaic solar cells have a frontloaded carbon footprint that takes a few years to "pay off" by replacing fossil fuels (admittedly this is getting much better than it used to be) and only works in sunlight, reflective solar plants are massively space-wasteful and only really work in desert settings and also only work in sunlight, hydroelectric exasperates water conflicts, wind farms are okay but have the same issues as reflective solar. Low-tech battery infrastructure is a hard requirement either way but I don't think you can entirely cover the required minimum load on the grid with water pumps and such; you need something that can pump out consistent loads no matter what at least until we figure out fusion. Nuclear is the only real option that I see there.
It is basically kicking the can down the road, but at least the can gets smaller and doesn't cause megahurricanes.
Nuclear is all well and good assuming we can develop permanent storage solutions that we can be certain won’t fail for millennia
OK, so reprocess the waste and you won't have to wait millennia for 99% of the waste to be insignificant. This also has the benefit in that you don't need to mine/enrich as much Uranium.
The medium lived isotopes can be vitrified and stored in glass underground for a few thousand years, or we can wait until there's enough for it to be worth transmuting into something useful and also more or less energetic.
I agree that reprocessing and vitrification methods should be scaled up and used, but the requirements to store waste for years beforehand while it cools and continue storing afterwards still constrain how much we can increase generation capacity before running into containment issues.
neither will the elucid fusion reactors. tell me, what difference did the breakthrough of nuclear power did in the first place? jack shit. recreate that situation with a more powerful variant? jack shit but cool TM
Nuclear is good and if you disagree I will personally give you a hug.
Can't we just send that nuclear refuse into space? Or is it crazy massive
sending stuff into space is never a viable solution because for every kg of stuff you need probably 1000 kg of rocket
? You can make rocket fuel from just sucking shit out the air, which just goes back into the air when you burn it.
The fuel in a rocket is a small percentage of the actual cost to launch, the rocket itself costs millions of hours of labor to make and is single use. Space is not a viable solution for any kind of waste disposal.
They reuse 1st stages all the time now, and millions of hours?
It takes years to construct them and hundreds of thousands of people working on them, its a really big undertaking. The ones that reuse first stages can only do so a dozen times at most before its too fucked to use or misses a landing. Compare the ideal 30 tons or so per launch to the sheer mass of human waste and youll see space is not a solution for our trash, or even a small fraction of our most hazardous industrial waste (which is coincidentally extremely heavy material). Another issue is if you just place it in low earth orbit, it will be coming back down in a century, and if you place it in a higher orbit or send it off into solar orbit, youll drastically reduce the mass per launch making it an even more expensive undertaking.
