Nuclear energy good
In my opinion, yes. Very safe. And state owned so electricity prices were kept low
The only reasonable argument I've heard against nuclear is about water waste for cooling. How much water does it require?
Waste water? Zero. Basically the plant has three water loops, which exchange heat, but none of them interact(mix) with one another. Loop A is the nasty one. Very hot and at a high pressure. 450 degrees C, 4.5 MPA. Stays liquid all the time. This is heavy water or D2O. It's not radioactive by nature, but ends up radioactive by touching the fuel rods all the time. This is a closed loop system water never changes state, or leaves the loop. Loop B is the steamy one. Interacts with A in boilers, gets heated to becomes steam and goes through the turbine to make power. Not radioactive, although still pretty nasty as it has a lot of chemicals to prevent pipe corrosion. Just regular water though. Never leaves the loop. Loop C is seawater. Fresh and cold out of the ocean, gets pumps through through heat exchangers to condense loop B. The two never actually touch. All of loop C gets pumped back into the ocean. About 2 degrees warmer, but other than that it's the exact same.
No water waste at all.
That sounds awesome. So once they’re filled they don’t need anymore water for A and B, and C is just heat sink unaltered. Thanks for the in depth explanation!
I had this misconception from something I read about freshwater use in nuclear plants in France, but I just looked it up and it says they return 98% of all water used to the source. Nuclear energy? Yes, please!
What's the thing that's closest to convincing you that nuclear energy is bad? (I don't think it's bad, btw, but I don't know anything about it.)
Its very, very regulated. And it should be cause there's not really any room for error. But it drives the cost of everything up. Construction, maintenance, operation, testing, everything is so regulated and convoluted and expensive. I don't know if there is a better way to do that all though, I'm not really smart enough to say.
There isn't enough lithium on the planet to run the world on wind and solar with current battery technology, so critical support for nuclear.
I support nuclear, but I don’t think this is a great argument. There are a lot of batter chemistry options other than lithium, and lithium isn’t a great choice for things like fixed power generation anyway.
Which are the better currently-available options for battery-based large-scale storage of energy generated by wind and solar?
Obviously non-battery options like pumped storage exist, but this requires very specific geographic features to be practical, and can't be done everywhere.
Well for one, pumping water uphill during the day using solar/whatever. And then at night the pumps become hydroelectric turbines as the water flows back down.
That's what I meant by pumped storage. This requires hilly terrain.
Yeah didnt read my bad. Another system could be compressing air/some other gas. During the day and using the compressed gas to turn a turbine.
In theory that sounds like a pretty good option, but in the 30 seconds or so it took to type this reply obviously I couldn't research it lol
I mean idk if it exists. Energy storage just means potential energy creation/efficient extraction. Could put a huge heavy fucking weight and lift it up a tower. Then letting it spin motors (maybe some gearing so weight moves slow while turbine spins fast as it falls. Problem with everything is just optimizing efficiency.
The non battery options are often the most cost effective when available. For batteries the molten salt ones look really promising; they are huge and run hot but are very cheap per kWh. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_battery
nuclear energy > everything else by a long shot
yes i will proselytize chapo until there is a 100% nuclear acceptance rate
Coal literally leaks more radioactive waste into the environment than nuclear ever will. When you burn coal, you also burn trace amounts of uranium or thallium, making it uncontainable. Nuclear waste is containable.
If the sun is bad, why does it try to actively give Kissinger, Obama, and Trump cancer whenever they go outside?
Kickstarter to find people to stand around with powerful focusing mirrors when?
Fuck yeah this is actually one of my favorite things to talk to chuds about to completely sidestep the whole dumbass conversation about coal and gas
Generally I think nuclear energy is useful and should be an important part of our energy infrastructure, however nuclear plants require a lot of time before they become carbon efficient, and we don't have all that much time. I think micro generation with solar and wind will be a much more important part of the decarbonization process personally.
this is wrong, solar takes more co2 than nuclear. wind is decent on co2 production but still requires fossil fuel mining because the blades are made out of plastics
Do you have a source for those claims? I think this video is very informative and provides a good overview of the pros and cons.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k13jZ9qHJ5U
im not gonna watch the video, but i can tell you no energy source can stop climate change because our governments are trash. nuclear is best out of all the options. google energy co2 production per kwh, land use, and animals dead per kwh
simply put: nuclear confines electricity production into a relatively small space. solar and wind require a lot of maintenance (including continual extraction of rare earth materials which arent unlimited and can be ablated) and take up a lot of land. they require way more laborers that could be doing other things
fission isnt the end goal either. fusion can use water to produce energy for billions of years, and in order to achieve fusion we need nuclear scientists to do things
also: bolivia was couped over lithium. we need to avoid mass use of lithium and other rare materials in order to not perpetuate imperialism over resource wars. with proper research into breeder reactors and small scale reactors, every country on the planet would have the resources to power themselves with nuclear
and thats not say that some solar or wind is a bad idea. those are currently the best options for rural, disconnected regions that would require a high cost to build a nuclear station in. but thats somewhat rare in western countries
