Ask Lemmy

It's great and we should have more of it.

Unjustified fears of it blowing up and destroying the world are ridiculous and overblown, especially given modern advances in reactor design and safety. Nuclear waste isn't really an issue, so much as it is an issue of bad policy based on fear mongering about waste being stolen and turned into nuclear weapons/dirty bombs. Which has never happened... it's utterly stupid that due to these stupid fears we don't re-process fuel, which would reduce it's volume by 80%.

There are 431 reactors, and 360 of them are based on 1960s technology, designed and built mostly in the 1970s. They are 50+ years old. Thanks to Chernobyl, reactors are basically stuck in time. Esp when you realize that non-nuclear plants only last about 30 years before they are replaced

There are only 4 Gen 3 reactors in service, and 2 gen 4. Why we don't have 200+ gen 3/4 reactors is... insane. We just keep re-fueling the less safe Gen 2 reactors.

But this is generally just a problem with all our infrastructure in the developed world in general... we don't renew or upgrade it... we just keep patching it and then we wonder why everything is so shitty and inefficient... because we refuse to actually upgrade things in a real way

I'm a mechanical engineer working on the operations side of a large power plant. I've worked in a few different types of plants but ultimately landed in a big Co-Generation plant. Knowing what I do, the actual arguments against nuclear are pretty flimsy. It's just better in almost every way especially compared to solid fuel. I strongly believe that there is a place for every method of generating we currently use (excluding coal for the most part). Main generating electricity can and should come from nuclear on the most wide scale with hydro, solar and wind being a large chunk where geographically most viable. While nat gas and liquid fuel should mostly be used in peaker plants and large scale essential buildings like hospitals. I hope to work in a nuclear plant eventually and have positioned myself to be qualified to do so.

The nuclear everyone is afraid of was from an era where priorities 1-9 were making plutonium for nukes or justifying massive uranium centrifuge farms for making weapons grade material.

Priority #10 was making safe electricity. It honestly was more of a waste product from making nukes instead of the point of the plant... It's not a coincidence that nuclear build out matches the cold war era perfectly. Once the cold war ended the US and allies didn't need more nukes to make weapons with... The priority became stabilizing the Petro dollar, which nuclear helps undermine by decoupling nations from being dependant on USD and US treasuries.

Fast reactors and LFTRs are god awful for nuclear weapons (why they weren't made beyond pilot plants or a few examples that exist purely to complicate my point) but are some of the safest designs for new gen IV reactors.

Fast reactors literally burn nuclear waste from Gen 2 plants...

Liquid core reactors can be built in two halves—the heat retaining high reactivity core, and the heat dissipating passively safe container you drain into in an emergency through a freeze plug. That plug works as long as gravity doesn't go away.

Fast reactor waste is safe in 300-500 years, and they can actually be designed to run on existing nuclear waste as fuel. Even the stuff we can't burn currently that has half lives in the hundreds of thousands of millions of years.

Thorium breeder reactors are the future for long term base load stability I think. Its not the only solution to our energy needs though but it's a very attractive option.

I think wind/solar first priority. Nuclear wherever it makes sense. I may trust Canadians to run them properly and in places not prone to natural disasters like Earthquakes and Tsunamis, but we live on a planet full of assholes. Downside is potential invaders bombing nuclear power plants in the future.

I'm nuclear industry adjacent, and I work in public safety. My thoughts, which are only my own:

1. Renewables are the future. Nuclear power is expensive and takes a long time to build, mostly because people don't like the idea of a reactor near them. While that's also true of things like wind farms, the lawsuits on those don't take as long, I guess.
2. Small modular reactors may have a place in our future energy landscape, but the specifics remain to be seen. SMRs are (obviously) smaller, so they have less fuel in them, generate less waste, and would be easier to build (like modular homes, they'd be all made basically the same in a factory and shipped to their site). They are in a race against good enough battery technology to carry the base load. Who will win? Well, nuclear is getting a lot of extra support currently, but still, who knows?
3. Nuclear power is so much safer than people assume. Nuclear reactors have reactor buildings which are big thick concrete monstrosities (part of the reason they're so dang expensive to build). It's quite hard for them to leak, so releases will end up being little amounts out of limited area. Yes, even Fukushima, which while very bad and very expensive to clean up, wasn't the thing killing people. One person officially died, years later from lung cancer. Cancer he might have gotten anyway; we can't know. In the US at least, a lot of money goes into emergency preparation at nuclear power plants, trying to mitigate the impacts of any kind of event, but the concern is cancer, not radiation poisoning. 3.5 interestingly, SMRs will probably not get big thick concrete structures around them, or at least not as big or as thick. It's because the risk is lower in those designs but also because there's just not as much material that could be flung around. This may have changed though (this is not my specific area, just something I hear a lot about). Maybe it will be more akin to naval reactors or something. Those are very small, and very very safe.
4. Nuclear waste storage is a political problem. The nuclear industry has been paying for a long-term storage solution for decades and recently sued the US government over it. We absolutely built a house without a toilet, but we could change that with enough political will. Until then, the waste sits at the plant under guard. It's not great but none of the plants are going to run out of room or anything.
5. The US government is going away from certain standards that are generally recognized as being the safest approach to radiological exposure. This, quite frankly, may be disastrous, but likely not immediately. Eventually I could see it leading to eroded safety culture and that could be a problem long term. But I'm a notorious pessimist, so...
6. Renewables are the future. Anyone telling you anything different is selling something. Probably stock in an SMR company.

I live in Taiwan and we are actively shutting down our nuclear facilities. Now the majority of our electricity is from fossil fuels.

I much rather work towards clean energy but at the same time only use nuclear power.

Safety issues aside, I don’t like the power grid topology they create—where power is distributed radially from a single centralized source. Systems like that are fragile and inflexible, with a single point of failure; and they promote similar institutions to control them.

Networks are more robust when they’re distributed and redundant, with lots of interconnected local sources. Solar and wind are a lot more amenable to that kind of structure.

I am extremely pro. Hear me out. For instance in Scandinavia, we have some of the largest uranium deposits in the world. Yet we import most of our fissile material from Australia. By boat.

The Scandes (mountain range) happens to be one of the best places to store spent fissile material on the planet.

We also have a highly educated workforce, and some of the best universities and colleges in the world.

We also have regional depopulation in the areas where this would be relevant, and suffer from brain drain, because there is more money to be made abroad for the whole range of academic disciplines, so the smartest people, and a fair chunk of the lesser smart people, move abroad. Because lack of opportunities and money.

Furthermore we are addicted to not only fossil fuels like carbon and gas, we (Europe) import most of our energy from Russia (famously). And we are making a lot of geopolitical concessions for the privilege (Nordstream springs to mind).

My proposition is that we expand nuclear power in the nordics, massively. We mine our own uranium deposits, store the spent fuel in our own mountains (think Moria, Nords would make for great LOTR dwarves), create a massive surplus of energy, then sell it off to the rest of Europe, creating basically an energy export hegemony. The energy basket of Europe.

We'd be fucking kings.

Then we'd create a Nordic Union, and get nukes, but that's a different story.

(Just as a fun fact, Sweden had one of the worlds most advanced nuke programs after WW2. They got talked out of it bc USA)

Most countries would rely on other countries for the fuel, like european plants rely on russia. Being sovereign for your power generation is very important in my opinion.

I think we are making big mistakes ditching it.

Renewables have two problems that need to be complemented by other type of energy source.

1.- they take a lot of land. As energy demand increases the amount of land taken is going to reach a limit. Then what?

2.- Most renewables have low momentum. Mostly only hydro have great momentum. This is critical for net safety. My country recently falled into a total blackout among other things because our energy composition (high on renewables) had low momentum and couldn't handle some inestabilities.

For a complementary energy source we have 2 options, burning coal/gas or nuclear. Out of two options I prefer nuclear Sadly every country that ditched nuclear because "renewables are the future" ended upping up their gas/coal consumption for energy production. Most famous example being Germany.

I do think a mix of renewables and nuclear is the future we need to achieve.

Sadly most western societies only look on the short term. And a good national nuclear plant is a long term investment, most governments won't look so far after the next election, so here we are.

I would gladly live next door to a nuclear plant

Where nuclear plants have been built to a safe standard, sweat them for their useful life. The costs are paid down, and the energy is cheap to produce, creating only a truckload or so of waste (which can be reprocessed into fuel) for a year’s power.

Where there aren’t usable nuclear plants, you’re probably better off building renewables and/or energy storage. The upfront costs of nuclear are steep. (Also, some nuclear plants built when the climate was cooler are having to shut down on hot days due to the temperature of water used to cool them being too high.)

In either case, I’d rather have modern nuclear power than coal.

I don’t think the technicals even matter.

What matters now is:

• Popular public perception.

• Incentives for decision makers.

• And lobbying funds to sway both.

And this makes it tricky:

• Fission looks bad to a layman. It’s scary, and failures and the waste feel dangerous no matter what the reality is. It’s a perfect fit for social media clickbait too.

• New fission plants are a long term investment. They’re expensive, up front. In other words, they don’t yield any political points before a governor’s or mayor’s or or CEO’s term ends, basically, while even renewables like solar or wind are faster to set up.

• There is a sizable nuclear lobby. This is a plus. But Oil will crush it like a bug if it gets “too big” and appreciably threatens petro power.

So as much as I love it, I thinks the best we can hope for in most regions is “recommissioning old plants.”

And to be clear, fusion is a completely different category to me.

I think it’s a waste of precious funds, and is “hopium” for the public. It’s theoretically interesting, but even with a breakthrough, in best-case scenarios, it’s still gonna be expensive to maintain and have many drawbacks. Some are even worse than fission (like more extreme neutron radiation irradiating and eroding components, and stupendously high up-front costs).

I think the funds would be better allocated towards maser drilling for geothermal and cheaper solar cells. And these would yield quicker political points, too, like coal/gas plants quickly converted to geothermal, or mass produced, cheap “backyard solar” the average person can buy and make money with.

They aren't nearly as unsafe as people think they are and I think they are completely fine.

BUT it still doesn't make sense to build them, because renewables (especially solar) is so much cheaper, so we should focus all our energy on expanding that instead of nuclear.

I like the idea of nuclear power, but I think the cost is not justified as it is currently implemented.

Now, the cost for nuclear power can come down. The Trump admin already reduced the cost for setting up nuclear power plants in the US, but that cost reduction comes with increased risk. The reason why I would be fine living near a nuclear power plant, is because the whole thing is designed and run with safety as the first priority. If you haven't yet, check out the Smarter Everyday video Destin filmed inside a nuclear power plant. You can tell from watching the video that safety at that plant is a constantly improving process, and it comes at a cost. Extra concrete to protect the building, extra environmental studies to look for contamination, round the clock armed security... All these things make nuclear power safer, and they are all things that every investor and board member would love to cut to make some extra margin on their billion dollar power project. TBF, I don't think the profit/rent seeking line-go-up management and political culture in the US today is condusive to running safe and reliable nuclear power, and I would much rather see our power come from lower-consequence renewables.

It's expensive and unnecessary and doesn't work when it's hot out.

Germany literally had to help France and its nuclear power stations out with its renewables because they couldn't cool down the nuclear power stations during the heatwave.

It would have been great if there was not the questions of;

• costs: to operate and to build one.
• safety (unfortunately, the times are less and less safe and having a big target that can devastate a huge are isn't ideal).
• there is no real plan for what to do with the nuclear waste. => shipping everything to and old salt mine is no longer viable.
• yes it's C02 neutral, but the impact on the enviroment to enrige the materials and later cool the radiactive material is also considerable.
• are there even enough people that can operate one?
• you still have realiance on others for the radiactive materials.
• Just like other renewable energies the nuclear power plants are often not operating and out of the grid. (During this haat wave for example to river water was too hot to be used as coolant and the nclear powet plants had to be put of the grid.

For all this I think it's a waste of resources to invest on an old technology thats sounds cool but has been proven to have many major drawbacks, compared to what it has to offer. So I'm all for using these resources in renewable energy sources, how to be more efficient with them, how to improve the accumulation capacities and how to have grids that are cimpatible with them.

I recently watched this video and learned so much!

Yes, my country has at least three nuclear power plants.

I assume you are talking about fission. We (Germany) somewhat famously don't have nuclear power anymore and I think that is a good thing. IMO the risks overweigh the benefits, and I don't only mean the risk of a nuclear power plant blowing up. Aside from that there are two mayor downsides.

First they are fucking expensive to build at least any recent projects I have heard of are billions over cost.

Second is the waste problem which specifically is a hot topic in germany, there just doesn't seem to be a good way to get rid of it. I have read some comments saying that there are ways to deplete them even more but never heard of such a system being actually used.

A minor point for me is also that I think, that less centralised infrastructure using wind and solar energy is a better way to go.

Some proponents (especially online) love to talk about "small" reactors, but I've never heard of one actually being in use, at most there were tests of it is actually feasible (as far as I know at least, and I am not an expert)

I used to think it was the way to go for base load generation, but now I'm more excited about sodium batteries because they seem safer and cheaper.

From the US:

Nuclear power represents the intermediate stage between hydrocarbon/petrochemical/fossil fuels and fully renewable (solar/wind/geothermal) energy; an eventual full transition to nuclear power, even as a de facto stopgap until renewable energy infrastructure can handle the power demands of today, is ultimately the correct course of action, especially if the intention is to reduce and ultimately eliminate CO2 & other greenhouse gas emissions to slow global warming & climate change.

just don't give it to Ghandi and everything should be fine

It should be managed by international committee and installed/managed anywhere that can afford it and have a proven history of low turmoil.

Giving people access to cheap, clean energy fixes a lot of problems.