I'm 100% convinced there is an oil/coal lobby conspiracy here. Nuclear used to cost $3000/kw in the fucking 80s, still does in China.
America needs 700GW of Nuclear power for 100% nuclear energy AND to charge EVs. That's just $2.1 trillion to COMPLETELY decarbonize both energy and transport. That's 3 years of military budget, we could have done this 40 years ago :agony-consuming:
For the UK, even assuming a conservative $5k/kW cost of construction, it would cost $250 billion to fully nuclearize the electricity grid. That's 1% of the GDP over 10 years. This 1-2% over 10-15 years figure applies more or less to all developed countries.
There is ample evidence of coal/oil interests frustrating nuclear power construction through sockpuppet environmental NGOs, lobbying to hamper nuclear development, anti-nuclear propaganda etc.
Here are 5 reasons why capital doesn't want nuclear:
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Nuclear is structurally unprofitable. It requires massive initial capital investment, and there are very little running costs to profit from. Nuclear power has never been profitable anywhere, BUT IT DOESNT MATTER. It is still massively beneficial to humanity. It is living proof that profitability is not the only metric for a better society, and in fact can actively hamper building a better society.
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Nuclear lasts 60-80 years, modern designs could even last 100 years. Coal, Oil and even wind turbines, solar, need continual gradual replacement. See why fossil interests support wind and solar, and oppose nuclear? It's better for them to have a constant stream of revenue. :capitalist-laugh:
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Virtually all reactors are owned by the state, for reasons of profitability. Nuclear is a socialist source of power, private corporations HATE that! There is a reason why China is going all in on nuclear. The Soviet Union also was planning on making nuclear it's primary source.
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Resource extraction industries also extract rent, i.e super profits (according to Ricardian theory of differential rent). Uranium is a tiny fraction of nuclear costs, can't have that, gotta get that oil/coal/gas rent.
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Solar/Wind requires trillions in energy storage, that's another massive cost to humanity, but for capital - a massive source of profit :capitalist:
Edit : China built a 6000MW nuclear power plant for $10 billion. At that cost, it would cost USA just $1.2 trillion to go full nuclear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yangjiang_Nuclear_Power_Station
one of the greatest hoodwinks in history was getting environmentalists anti-nuclear
It probably helped that one of the most high profile nuclear meltdowns came from an "evil communist" country so anti nuclear propaganda could slide into pre existing anti communist propaganda.
Waiting on the HBO series on Fukushima, where the faults lie on the shoulders of those peddling the immortal science of Akihito-Capitalism
Shin Godzilla just utterly mocks the entire Japanese government for over 50% of the movie. The whole movie is a very bold-faced metaphor for the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Not exactly a historical fiction miniseries, and ignoring the hilariously bad sound design its a great movie
I want the sequel where Godzilla assimilates the universe and becomes a god
"See what happens when the government does energy power?? This is why we need good wholesome unregulated coal plants."
-A capitalist probably
Hilarious considering the environmental disasters in the US are just hidden (and mainly bc of our weapons manufacturing)
The worlds largest nuclear clean up site is in the US, look up the Hanford clean up site. I know a lot of engineers from that area, here's a story about the big project right now
The story behind it is that some scientists dropped some Cesium on a Friday afternoon in a sealed room, one problem though: it was beer thirty and spilling nuclear material was sounding like Monday’s problem. They got there on Monday, mess magically cleaned itself! and by cleaned itself it actually corroded down into the soil and that patch of dirt is so hot that if the radiation didn’t kill you then temperature would. I shit you not this is what happened
Fun fact, the early opposition to nuclear power from environmentalists was not because of safety but because they were afraid that cheap power would contribute to overpopulationEDIT : This may be false. I got it from reading multiple blogs that said the same thing but gave no source
That's bad and all, but The Atomic Malthusians would be a great band name
I’ve always tied it to anti-war intermarriage with eco movements and that nuclear waste had a habit of finding itself on native lands.
Debatable. I think it’s good environmentalist policy to oppose capitalist nuclearization.
But all nuclear reactors are either state-owned or govt granted and regulated monopolies. This is my point, there is no capitalist nuclear power plant due to their very nature
And that’s why there will be no new nuclear plants in the US because the government doesn’t do anything anymore.
Yeah but bogiousie states always fuck this up (and even late revisionist states... chernobyl). Im still pro nucleur though, it just seems like it needs to be implemented by a strong socialist state.
I mean part of the problem is there's a serious lack of capital in nuclear. And both capital and capitalist governments don't want to invest in things that won't make mountains of cash. Any real nuclear energy plan has gotta have governments footing the bill & ideally running the plants.
but uh pound for pound I'd take a nuclear plant run by capital over the equivalent coal plant tbh
Right now private enterprises are asking historically neutered governments to bankroll and subsidize their nuclear. Western states have passed their ability to run things on their own.
And we’re not just talking about coal vs nuclear but wind, solar and geothermal too. None of those work well enough on their own but they all need to be utilized. It’s not like nuclear is the worst thing ever and I’m not saying this is you but I notice it’s becoming like a weird leftist thing to be smug about how nuclear is just the no brainer fix for fossil fuels.
We want to turn western states into ones capable of running things on their own, right? The same attitude toward renewables is just doing subsidies for renewable companies and that's equally not a solution.
And its totally a weird leftist thing, its 'i believe science' smug crossed with advocacy for a maligned thing. Definite techbro energy sometimes but we're all out here just desperate for solutions so lets not be too hard on each other
I’ll also say those renewable subsidies would generally be dispersed because of low capital costs and can more easily go to direct consumers/taxpayers, which is more decentralized and democratic, somewhat mitigating capital accumulation.
Oh believe me I agree - I think we’re all here because we all hope to get actual communism working someday in the future. I just don’t know if doing exactly what a bunch of tech moguls are clamoring for right now is a great vehicle for public sector empowerment.
I’m being somewhat contrarian. If this were an anti-nuclear thread I would be arguing for some role within a larger system. It’s consistent and efficient, which is important for baseline power minimums and is also the least bad fuel-based power system. But it’d have to be a limited role for all the other reasons I brought up especially given the realities of right now.
While there is a lot to be critiqued about energy policy and while nuclear reactors did indeed deliver a good baseload in the past (and some were used to produce material for nuclear weapons which made us not die in the cold war), the current studies (you can look up the journals, but the graphic here is the relevant part ) show that photovoltaic and wind are actually pretty good - and better than nuclear in a lot of aspects (even with storage and grid costs factored in).
For utility generation - even with storage (which really isn't such a big problem in a large decentralized grid) during usage, contrasted with storage after usage (for nuclear) - there is no other cheap and scalable way to generate electricity that is fast to implement. The costs are so low for photovoltaic it is absurd.
Typical nuclear projects are centralized, need huge investments in terms of how the grid is built and how electricity gets generated (in a different way to "solar"), and still could've delivered a good amount of base loads. Since the projects are typically a lot over budget and (contrary to what is written the storage isn't completely priced in in the 12 cents per kwh) effects of scale are to be estimated to deliver less gains than those of infrastructure development for so called "renewables", the uses of nuclear electricity generation are:
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ships
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weapons
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long term base load of less than 1/8s of a countries demands to substitute liquid gas and such (coal ought to be phased out by now, not only in 2035/38)
However in practice (report form the German Energy Agency) the nuclear power plants weren't the ones in capitalism to use adapt to base or spike loads (in the amount that was expected).
All that said, I agree that there was anti communist propaganda used to argue against nuclear electricity, but I really don't see why we should go 95%+ nuclear now. Though expansion for nuclear electricity (in fact energy) makes sense, looking at their profile - which is not driven by maximum price efficiency.
vast majority of resources required for nuclear are just concrete. so many rare earth materials that will need to be mined in south america and africa to get solar and wind mass produced. then you have to come up with a way to recycle it all, which doesnt exist
You need capital, you need the grids (those are a big part), you need quite a bit of planning. Those things might overwhelm the need for building resources handily.
The only problem with photovoltaic and wind energy is that they are highly dependent on your location. The biggest problem with nuclear (as far as I understand, hopefully someone smarter can correct me if needed) is the mining of the fuel and other resources needed, but these same problems carry over to solar and wind with the battery technology needed (although I don't know how these compare to nuclear, again hoping someone can correct me).
Global levelized cost of generation (US$ per MWh) Lazard[1] Solar (utility) 36 Wind onshore 40 Nuclear 164 Gas 175If you create a North American super grid you have 3 hours of time differential, this means that at any given time there will be plenty generation of solar as well as wind energy. The loss over long term transmission exists, but is much less than the difference between say Gas and Solar (139$ per MWh)*.
Storage is an engineering problem and we already have technologies that easily store energy (anything that lifts anything else for example, e.g. pumps) and we know how much it costs to deploy on scale. This is still cost efficient if you take into account current solar and nuclear prices.
Would I use a small amount of nuclear as potential baseload? Sure, but I would focus on decentralized electricity generation first and foremost. There is no engineering problem that has to be solved before the world could become 100% renewable (even with a bit nuclear for added benefits), what has to be solved is the issue of capital distribution, of property, of consumption (by the rich), etc.
*: this here is the biggest caveat. If you look at the fictive projections you might have good cases for an energy mix (which I am a friend of).
This is all well and good, but there's people outside of US. The conclusion is correct, it's communism or barbarism and I really hope we reach the right solution before the global working class suffers too much (well, it's already too much) from the inevitable climate catastrophe, but we also have to start fixing the problem while we are living in the capitalist system.
Outside the US it is even more easy. You have to rehaul your electricity grid anyhow every 30-50/60 years (depending on components), this means the push for decentralization can be done everywhere. For Northern Africa you can have the Pan-European-Supergrid, for Western African countries you can have a nice grid, too (and it might be more easy for the non central urban areas to go for hard pushes for renewables and bridge technologies). The construction of nuclear reactors and the grids they need do tend to take much longer than thought and get much more expensive, if not done under experienced management (which currently means China, and even then the projects take longer and cost more, but not to the amounts the new reactors in France or Finland did cost).
You could have currently remote small cities in Egypt in which you can achieve electricity independence within 5-7 years without having to connect them to the grid (though that should be goalpost).
After writing it down, I would like to underline another point. Most people are within a couple of areas, in those grids are not a problem (and nuclear might be sensible).
Most electricity is consumed where most people are and the consumption is high OR where production happens. If this is at a place of bad grid connectivity then renewables are more attractive (so basically in South Africa outside the east cost, the very south, Gauteng and thus Pretoria). Though with another company that isn't fucking Eskom nuclear energy generation might be a good step for in 20-30 years.
It always blows my mind how low the population in Europe and the USA are.
Yeah, this would be all well and good if this kind of cooperation was possible under capitalism, but especially for northern countries solar is unusable for most of the year, and not all countries get enough wind for continuous production. Unfortunately for short term solutions (30-60 years) we have to do the planning on the assumption that borders and capitalism exists. Even with that taken into account, we could do way more with solar and wind, but there still exists a need for nuclear. I don't think we actually disagree that much, just wanted to bring up the edge case for nuclear power. The problems with the Finnish and French nuclear projects stem from the profit motive, and the same problems exist with renewables aswell.
I don’t think we actually disagree that much
Believe that, too.
just wanted to bring up the edge case for nuclear power
Yeah, it definitely is good to have a good material politics about it instead of a hippie one. Though it is important to look at the material conditions and subjective consciousnesses of the politics when speaking about energy generation in the future.
especially for northern countries solar is unusable for most of the year, and not all countries get enough wind for continuous production
Sure, but honestly the remote places can be basically ignored for such analysis (as very few people live there and even in Seattle / Torronto you can get sensible wind and even PV generation). For Norway the problem doesn't even quite ask cause they are effectively 100% hydroelectric (but could do more in terms of total energy consumption).
The biggest consumers are the people with the most capital and also the US.
Yeah, we have a pretty extensive hydroelectric system in my home country aswell. It fucks up the rivers and surrounding nature with the reservoirs, but that's another struggle session for another day. The tidal and wave generators seem pretty effective, hopefully they get more support in the future (please, don't tell me that they destroy the local ecosystems where they are installed).
It fucks up the rivers and surrounding nature with the reservoirs
Yeah, that does happen. My favorite is lignite mining, though which you can even see from space.
There are ways to mitigate quite a bit of it and there are associated problems, which will not solve the core contradictions. However I am not fond of doing a "natural" argument, there are few pieces on earth were nature is not antropogenized/human imprinted for centuries or even millennia.
this is subsidized stuff within the USA though so government is still footing a hefty bill
also wind and solar work best in western countries but is dogshit in western china africa and most of latin america
also wind and solar work best in western countries but is dogshit in western china africa and most of latin america
I am not quite sure what you mean with works best. The prices for photovoltaic are so low that at most places on earth it is cheaper to produce some yourself than to buy it from your municipal or private electricity generating company.
https://www.irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Publication/2020/Jun/IRENA_Power_Generation_Costs_2019.pdf (careful older report, the numbers for wind and PV are much better now than they were in 2019 - a result of how levelized it is, new built modules and installations are cheaper and more efficient than what is written there).
The hefty bill of renewable energy laws you mention is mostly a thing of the past - and is actually not as hefty as many think. It did lead to faster effects of scale for PV generation, though. Let us ignore the subsidies for gasoline and such, too.
For around 2 years now it is even cheaper for electricity generating companies to plan for PV/wind than for other technologies.
no, you arent understanding environmental effects and subsidies. like i know nuclear physicists its just functionally impossible to produce solar and wind at the scale needed without absolutely fucking the environment. it will require rare earth materials from exploited nations, it will require building in perfect locations (even deserts are not good places to build solar panels because of surface ablasion, so it needs to not be windy, not dusty, and sunny! and we need to predict with good accuracy what will change the weather with climate change. theres only a handful of good places like that, if you dont get places like that, you will have a bad time with replacement costs). for wind, you also need wind at speeds of, and dont quote me on this, excess >6kmph. very few places are good for this, and its mostly places that are already decently developed (argentina, china, europe, america, south africa, and so on). and you cannot have those places produce electricity for the interior of many continents for a variety of reasons, mostly because of dimishing returns of transporting electricity over long distances. so at minimum you would need a significant nuclear infrastructure in africa and the interiors of every continent, with north america being the exception to that rule due to the great wind production the great plains has to offer.
to be completely anti-nuclear is stupidity. and its also completely stupid to be anti renewables. its just the bulk of our electricity needs will have to be from nuclear. and hopefully, if we have a ton of nuclear scientists, we will be able to develop fusion faster.
and im not even talking about how we have no clue how to build wind turbines without oil extraction. most of the outer body of each wind turbine is made out of petroleum products, and we havent devised a way to recycle it. and lets not forget the land use required for wind and solar generation, do not act like this wont disturb environments if it is on a grand scale like youre suggesting. it will demolish entire ecosystems. it will require land use equal to the size of a fairly large US state.
no, you arent understanding environmental effects and subsidies
Yeah I only know what I had in 2 Master / Graduate level courses of electricity generation and courses for STEM in particle physics and energy generation for human use.
Therefore I just think that there is a gap between what knowledge authorities imparted me and the body of knowledge you hold. I just think your data is dated.
If you say there are advantages for nuclear - sure. If you say PV+wind+renewable generation isn't able to meet the global demand - this is not true and not a materialistic point anymore. Most points given are not on the current state of discourse (abrasion happens and then you just look at the lifetime electricity production of those cells and divide it by the lifetime cost and you see that they are viable - this was done for all relevant places on Earth and can be read in the linked documents) .
On the same hand just looking at what we could achieve by tapping into fusion and fission, without looking at what newly constructed projects actually deliver and cost, isn't materially either.
PV potential map (everything below 60° is viable for grid parity, most of under 55° is viable commercially), everything in very high generation areas is just awesome.
Wind potential generation is awesome, too. Even onshore. Though there are areas in which the other technologies will benefit. In terms of "the wind doesn't always blow", this is not really a problem if you go to 100m or higher.
If you do look at the maximum distance to be travel to find a potential site for a wind turbine park over the world you will find that this distance is much smaller than the economic grid reach, therefore on most places on earth (and all the places that matter cause many people are there or there is high electricity demand) it is feasible.
cool i know 3 phds that work in a nuclear field to contridict you, neat
Go to them and ask them how much is the total lifetime cost per kwh per electricity source, how much is the estimated potential by the iea for the energy sources and you will be good. Cause what I tell isn't some magic, but easily verifiable if you spend a dozen hours talking to experts, reading the reports or asking your friends about the relevant reviews.
But just for fun and being contrarian: What exactly do you think your friends (who hold the PhD not you) would contradict?
theyll respond that labor costs are lower for nuclear, which is a net good for humanity. also less carbon produced. youre making a capitalist argument.
https://www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of-generating-electricity-2020
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With current battery technology, there isn't enough lithium in the ground to run the world on wind and solar. I'm not comfortable relying on technology that doesn't exist yet to decarbonize, so critical support for nuclear.
(I am aware of pumped storage. It's inefficient and relies on specific geographic features that aren't available in many places.)
This is true, but there are some people on this site who are completely opposed to nuclear. My comment was more addressed to them. I'm not in favor of abandoning wind and solar to pursue only nuclear.
My biggest problem with wind and solar is that they still require fossil fuels to construct. Plastics, chemicals, etc. With nuclear it's just in the concrete and controls, stuff that should last for a long time because it's in an air conditioned building and being constantly maintained without exposure to the elements.
the main problem with fossil fuels is when you burn them, so extracting them only to use them for plastics and chemicals to make solar panels doesnt contribute to climate change any more than any other industrial process would.
But there is enough sun. I think you could theoretically power the world with solar, wind, hydroelectric, and geothermal, particularly since those together are basically the origin of all energy on Earth anyway. And there are different battery technologies too.
I agree with critical support for nuclear, but we could go completely "clean" if we actually cared enough.
The problem with wind and solar is that the sun isn't always shining and the wind isn't always blowing. You need batteries, or some other kind of energy storage, to use that energy when and where it isn't being generated. We don't currently have the battery technology to store enough energy for everything to be run on wind and solar. Like pumped storage, geothermal is geographically restricted.
We can go completely "clean" eventually, but decarbonizing as soon as possible should be our main priority.
Well, the Sun IS always shining over most of Earth at any given point. You COULD, just as an example, have a network of cables to transport power from major solar farms around the world. Whether that is the best approach, I don't know. But it could be done. You could also do a mix of something like that and batteries. And then on top of that, you could do a mix of lithium batteries and other types of batteries.
You can't move power over distances after a certain point without room temperature superconduction. Modern power transfer tech runs into physics causing loss due to imperfect conduction and voltage needing to go so high it spontaneously ignites nearby objects.
If you theoretically had an excess of energy, couldn't you convert some of the electrical energy into mechanical energy (or thermal, etc) then back into electric? Obviously the energy loss would be high, but if you really had an excess of energy, you might not care.
Also, you might not need a room temperature superconductor if you were sending the energy over a wire deep in the ocean (which is considerably colder than room temperature), though they did recently discover the first known room temperature superconductor (obviously nowhere near the point yet where it could be reliably produced and used in any sort of application.)
You need superconduction because current conduction tech isn't good enough to transfer power over vast distances, and there isn't a way to efficiently harvest lost heat energy. It isn't an economics / capitalism thing, it's just physics to have more and more evenly distributed power generation systems.
This site has a heavy ML tilt so ofc they're big fans of nuclear power, and nuclear is good, but you need state violence to keep the radioactives safe. Solar power is a much more anarchist form of energy because it allows a large degree of independence from centralization.
I'm no expert on how far power can reasonably be supplied across long distances, but I'm sure if this were a practical solution for the duck curve problem, it would be at the front of discussion instead of energy storage.
I'm not so sure. I think a solution that necessitated long term infrastructure investment and planning, involved sharing resources, was super globalist in nature, threatened oil companies, etc etc might encounter a few headwinds that aren't just technological/physics based.
You should look into redox flow batteries: https://youtu.be/CSawQl8Lf1Y
With current battery technology, there isn’t enough lithium in the ground to run the world on wind and solar.
Nuclear plants solved this problem ages ago. You literally just pump water up a hill with your energy surplus and when you want the energy back you run it back down through a turbine. Or, if you want to be marginally more efficient, do it with something more dense. Like lead ball bearings or blocks of granite.
Wind and Solar energy conservation can work the same way. You don't just need lithium to store energy.
You can use near-frictionless flywheels. Or generate hydrogen/oxygen gas via Electrolysis. Or dump the surplus into desalination plants to generate abundant fresh water, that you can then run through electrolysis machines. Or finally build that space elevator everyone's been asking for and use it to launch matter into orbit. Or just run steel smelters 24/7 and generate a massive surplus of useful materials.
Like, there's no such thing as "too much energy" in the modern economy. "Oh no! What are we going to do with this periodic energy surplus!" is a thing no sane macro-economist says.
Gravity batteries (fancy weights underground with pulleys and gears attached) outclass all of these except flywheels and pumped water storage in most cases.
Those are extremely good too, so you're welcome.
Every home should have a gravity light.
yeah, nuclear power plants in relatively stable spots like... I don't know; kansas or iowa, would be VERY MUCH NECESSARY
I just don't trust capital to implement it, because it WILL blow up. it needs to be socialized.
Can someone smarter than me explain what happens with the waste? The only things I've seen boils down to "bury it underground and deal with it later" but assuming the whole grid switches to nuclear.... That's a lot of waste, right?
Yes it's an issue. Nuclear fission isn't "the answer" for this reason, but it's definitely harm reduction until renewables progress further or other tech comes along.
whole point is to use fission until we hit the holy grail, nuclear fusion.
True, but I don't think it would be wise to take the risks of fission waste lightly with a literal Holy Grail like that.
literally possible to get rid of the waste within 5 years through recycling its just no one wants to do the upfront costs because the capitalist mindset is a fuck
china already does this
can you spell this out some more? How does the recycling process work, and what stands in the way of doing it the US? All I ever hear about is the proverbial Yucca Mountain or whatever
id have to wait until my nuclear physicist buds are online to give you a full explanation. china is currently in the process of recycling shit and have hired a lot of the world's nuclear physicists who are experts on the subject, that i know. essentially you make a couple of reactors to burn off the excess 'waste' (re: it isnt actually waste it can be used for fuel to generate a lot of electricity) and then there is something left over that dissolves within 5 years, rather than hundreds of years. it requires a hefty upfront cost and its totally worth it, its just capitalists are stupid pieces of shit and use the 'waste' argument to bolster shittier energy forms because theyre more profitable. you can also build these near already built reactors to avoid transportation issues.
This might be too big picture to figure out right here, but why is China doing renewable megaprojects at the same time then? I suppose there are valid reasons, but I feel like dealing with the waste is the critical drawback of nuclear, and it sounds like things have been figured out on that end.
china is undergoing a massive growth spurt rn and has a lot of power outages in many regions, theyre focusing on getting energy first and foremost. look at their nuclear roadmaps, iirc theyre building 100 new nuclear plants by 2030. dont quote me on it, i just remember it was an absurd number that no western country would undertake at the same time.
i just remember it was an absurd number that no western country would undertake at the same time.
If they're good at anything, I'd expect it to be something like building 100 nuclear plants in 10 years
wait what does "harm reduction" mean here? wouldn't the harm reduction be not producing the waste? or are we just comparing it fossil fuels and shrugging and saying it's better than doing nothing?
I mean it in the sense of comparing it to fossil fuels. We can find ways to dispose of nuclear waste, but we can't keep creating it indefinitely. It's a better challenge to solve than global warming/air pollution imo.
check out thorium reactors , they can run on long-term (240k year half-life) waste and turn it into <500 year waste
Transmutation of nuclear waste: the ADS process has been proven to transmute long-term nuclear waste, harmful for 240,000 years or more, into short-term radioactivity waste of less than 500 years toxicity. The technology would solve the intractable problem of very long-term radioactive waste storage.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/11/destroying-nuclear-waste-to-create-clean-energy-it-can-be-done/
Just curious, has a modern thorium reactor ever been built recently? Do we know how long it might take to build one, including R&D?
https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/nuclear-wastes/radioactive-wastes-myths-and-realities.aspx
TLDR: not a lot of waste is produced, the tech already exists to store them safely, the cost is baked in and is only 10% of the total cost, future reactors can minimize waste
Vitrification is a decent option. It's obviously not perfect but it sure as hell gets rid of a lot of issues
Too expensive up front to the point it requires centralization and top down organizing, which cannot be responsibly done in a market system. Requires a ton of money and resources to keep going too. A lot of the pro-nuclear media you consume are generally backed by people like Richard Branson, which deserves some sober consideration.
It also has other indirect effects including concrete, transport, and mining. Don’t forget the really long construction times.
Ideally, sure maybe that’s the best way. But if we’re looking down the barrel of global collapse during neoliberal mismanagement, any organized efforts to make nuclear happen won’t do.
concrete, transport, and mining also apply to other energy sources. We literally do not have enough lithium on the planet to cut out coal without nuclear
Too expensive up front to the point it requires centralization and top down organizing, which cannot be responsibly done in a market system.
TIL France is not a market system?
Nuclear has a massive lobby as well that astroturfs and spends tons of $$. I won't debate the science of nuclear vs renewables. The problem with nuclear in the US is no one wants a plant in their backyard. The red tape from lawsuits and counter-lawsuits means every nuclear plant will be slowed down by years.
Nuclear>Coal for sure, but Renewables>Nuclear.
De Gaulle had pushed nuclear as a national French pride issue and managed to get it done
Otherwise everyone is too scared
Yes Nuclear>Coal is true
And Renewables>Nuclear is also trueBut on a line it looks more like
. v Renewables
<-*----*----------------------------------------------------------------------------------*->
.______^ Nuclear ____________________________________________________________ ^ Coal
Actually it's because France is doing a colonialism in Africa.
Haiti
is still payingpaid France reparations over “lost property” (slave plantations) and they overthrew the last guy who asked if they could uh return it.They actually finished paying that off in 1947, only took 122 years since the first payment.
What am I thinking of then related to the 2004 coup.
Oh ok - so Aristide was asking for that money back. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Bertrand_Aristide?wprov=sfti1
Isn't their economy totally reliant on IMF exploitation to keep running?
Apparently that fact about France assassinating 22 presidents isn't true.
I'm gonna make a post and see if we can compile a list.
Sylvanus Olympio - Yes
Shermake - no
Karume - not that I have found
Sankara - yes
Ironsi - Not that I have found
Is what I've got so far
And now our army is in Mali (I'm French). But of course, it's to "fight terrorism", not to secure uranium supplies for Areva (now renamed Orano) both in Mali and in nearby Niger.
I would. Coal power plants fuck up the environment when working as intended.
Edit: in case people didn't know, coal power plants emit more radioactive material than nuclear power plants and they emit it directly into the air, rather than easily contained pellets. The idea that nuclear power is environmentally unsound is a product of big oil astro-turfing environmental movements, full stop.
but the pro-nuclear stuff is the result of astroturfing and propaganda by the nuclear lobby...
oh shit... is it ALL astroturfing? what if I'M astroturfing... oh noooooooo
We don't really have a nuclear power industry in the US, certainly not one with anywhere near the lobbying power of the fossil fuel industry.
maybe, maybe not. but the comments here almost literally alternate between people saying "it's the nuclear lobby" and "it's the anti-nuclear lobby" and it's kind of funny.
Michael Parenti was/is very anti-nuclear and anti-GMO. He wrote about it in Contrary Notions, which was a collection of essays. At least some anti-nuclear sentiment has permeated or was created by, the left.
the anti-nuclear movement and anti-globalization were the last lefty causes to fold before the left's complete implosion in the 90s
Nuclear also requires fuel extraction by mining, and also a ton of concrete.
More to the point it really need a lot of up front money. Only the people you don’t like can pay for nuclear, and by the time those plants have finished being built it’ll be too late.
it takes like 5-8 years to build modern nuclear plants, that's not too late at all
Are we going to start building 120 nuclear plants in the next 3-5 years?
no but we could build a few dozen while also massively expanding wind and solar energy, I don't think our whole energy supply should be nuclear because the world only has like 80ish years of uranium left for nuclear power and expanding the amount of nuclear energy used will reduce that obviously, but we can definitely up our nuclear energy usage alot from what it is now
Yeah that’s fine, a few is helpful sure. But OP is saying 1.2T to make the US all nuclear? I’ve posted elsewhere in the thread the pros and cons of nuclear and how it needs to be looked at critically for a bunch of reasons. Mainly I’m arguing because leftists need to shed themselves of this monolithic techbro solution in nuclear.
dont need uranium for it, there are other options which are far more abundant
are we going to start invading every poor country with lithium on the planet, genociding their population, and using them as slaves for building tens of billions of solar panels in the next 3-5 years? i sure hope not.
reddit voice Lithium is for the batteries, but yeah I appreciate your point. Energy storage is a different and equally irritating problem. That said, same thing with mining happens for uranium and other needed materials for nuclear.
There’s problems with every method, but pretending nuclear is the best one doesn’t help anyone. There’s been one nuclear plant built in the US in the last 25 years.
to much lesser degree, though. and mining uranium is not the ideal for the vast majority of countries, there are other fissile materials that are more common
You have to mine for the materials to do nuclear power, and solar panels don't require lithium. Solar panels actually seem pretty simple in terms of materials (aluminum,. glass, silicon). Sure storing energy is a problem, but that will have to be tackled no matter what, and solar panels can at least be placed anywhere including on buildings, which means energy travels less distance, etc.
solar panels certainly do require lithium if you want to power things at night time
There's also development of alternative energy storage like gravity based storage. They only have to store the energy that will be used during the night, and there's always wind and other forms of renewable energy that can further reduce energy storage needs (at least I think that's how it works).
Per capita, nuclear results in less deaths than solar. It's not too late, we can build both nuclear and solar/wind together. China and South Korea solved the cost problem through standardization, economy of scale and removing political bottlenecks ike being forced to accept high interest rates
Yeah and sharks are less deadly than vending machines but there are some factors that obscure why.
Long term nuclear may be a good idea, but it won’t help us wrt the IPCC report when it takes at least 10 years to get a plant online. We need faster solutions to realistically staunch the bleeding.
SK is weird and China is not really a capitalist country either, which is part of my larger point. Responsible and ideal nuclear power requires political and economic reform.
It's already too late, we can do nuclear as a long term option as well as more short term options
Do you want to go into the dark future relying on Virgin Nuclear(R) to power the oxygen scrubbers though?
I always enjoy the "but how will we explain to people in 10,000 years what radiation is?" when the answer is probably a easy "the same way we'll explain to them about climate change."
