Why go nuclear when renewable is so much cheaper, safer, future proof and less centralised?
Don’t get me wrong. Nuclear is better than coal and gas but it will not safe our way of life.
Just like the electric car is here to preserve the car industry not the planet, nuclear energy is still here to preserve the big energy players, not our environment.
Renewable instead of nuclear, but nuclear instead of coal.
We need a mix. Centralization isn’t the biggest problem. Literally anything we can do to reduce emissions is worth doing, and we won’t be going 100% on anything, so best to get started on the long term projects now so that we can stop turning on new plants based on combustion.
Power generation and power use need to be synchronous. Renewables generate power at rates outside of our control. In order to smooth out that generation and bring a level of control back to power distribution we would need a place to store all the energy. Our current methods are not dense enough and are extremely disruptive/damaging to the environment. Nuclear gives us a steady and predictable base level of generation that we can control. Which would make it so we don’t need to pump vast quantities of water into massive manmade reservoirs or build obnoxiously large batteries.
Yeah, the cost is the real downside to Nuclear. However, for every Nuclear plant running, that’s a lot of batteries it other energy storage that don’t have to be built today in order to have clean energy. Because even if we were utilizing nuclear like we should, we would still need to be building a shit ton of batteries to keep the cost of energy coming down.
The cost of electricity dropping is bad news for nuclear power plants because they’ll be even less profitable when they’re finished. Especially since they take decades to construct, during which time renewables and storage become even cheaper.
And we’ll still need a way to store power from renewables when they overproduce.
Scalability problems. We need to make as many solar wind and battery installations as we can, but there’s only so much production and installation capacity. And eventually we’ll run short on materials, especially for batteries. Nuclear uses a different system, so we can scale that even as we have issues with other systems.
Because it gets dark and the wind stops blowing and industry still operates when those things happen. Nuclear is not a forever solution, but a necessary stop-gap.
Storage technology isn’t there yet. Nuclear is. The only viable approach is “all of the above.” Anything less is foolishness and oil industry propaganda.
The same people who run the oil companies also run nuclear plants, billionaires love a monopoly but what they hate is local communities being able to own and run solar farms and wind turbines, they hate the idea of someone that isn’t them being able to spend a million making a profitable offshore wind farm or a raised water energy storage facility – more than anything they hate the thought of houses and businesses having PV on the roof and being able to detach evenb just in part from the mechanisms owned by them.
50 yeas ago people couldn’t think of a future without fossile fuel. 100 years ago people thought ships would run on coal for eternity and 200 years ago or in fact up until WW2 horses did most of the work when it came to transportation.
Things change fast. Stagnation of technology is not the norm.
It’s not actually required at all though, thats all FUD from the big energy monopoly that hate anything that can be owned and run by people that aren’t them - there are endless options for making a stable grid using renewables and they’re all considerably cheaper, quicker to make and a lot more resilient.
Nuclear gets pushed so hard because it protects the billionaires monopoly that’s the only reason.
Why go nuclear when renewable is so much cheaper, safer, future proof and less centralised?
Don’t get me wrong. Nuclear is better than coal and gas but it will not safe our way of life.
Just like the electric car is here to preserve the car industry not the planet, nuclear energy is still here to preserve the big energy players, not our environment.
Renewable instead of nuclear, but nuclear instead of coal.
We need a mix. Centralization isn’t the biggest problem. Literally anything we can do to reduce emissions is worth doing, and we won’t be going 100% on anything, so best to get started on the long term projects now so that we can stop turning on new plants based on combustion.
Power generation and power use need to be synchronous. Renewables generate power at rates outside of our control. In order to smooth out that generation and bring a level of control back to power distribution we would need a place to store all the energy. Our current methods are not dense enough and are extremely disruptive/damaging to the environment. Nuclear gives us a steady and predictable base level of generation that we can control. Which would make it so we don’t need to pump vast quantities of water into massive manmade reservoirs or build obnoxiously large batteries.
Nuclear is a much more reliable power source, barring a breakdown, you know exactly how much a nuclear reactor will produce at any given time.
Renewables are much more finnicky, and you really need something like hydro, that has a large amount of energy storage, to back it up.
Yeah, the cost is the real downside to Nuclear. However, for every Nuclear plant running, that’s a lot of batteries it other energy storage that don’t have to be built today in order to have clean energy. Because even if we were utilizing nuclear like we should, we would still need to be building a shit ton of batteries to keep the cost of energy coming down.
https://youtu.be/0kahih8RT1k?si=PMtmP4edaGDcMy-R
The cost of electricity dropping is bad news for nuclear power plants because they’ll be even less profitable when they’re finished. Especially since they take decades to construct, during which time renewables and storage become even cheaper.
And we’ll still need a way to store power from renewables when they overproduce.
Scalability problems. We need to make as many solar wind and battery installations as we can, but there’s only so much production and installation capacity. And eventually we’ll run short on materials, especially for batteries. Nuclear uses a different system, so we can scale that even as we have issues with other systems.
Because it gets dark and the wind stops blowing and industry still operates when those things happen. Nuclear is not a forever solution, but a necessary stop-gap.
Yes renewables need to come with storage.
Storage technology isn’t there yet. Nuclear is. The only viable approach is “all of the above.” Anything less is foolishness and oil industry propaganda.
The same people who run the oil companies also run nuclear plants, billionaires love a monopoly but what they hate is local communities being able to own and run solar farms and wind turbines, they hate the idea of someone that isn’t them being able to spend a million making a profitable offshore wind farm or a raised water energy storage facility – more than anything they hate the thought of houses and businesses having PV on the roof and being able to detach evenb just in part from the mechanisms owned by them.
50 yeas ago people couldn’t think of a future without fossile fuel. 100 years ago people thought ships would run on coal for eternity and 200 years ago or in fact up until WW2 horses did most of the work when it came to transportation.
Things change fast. Stagnation of technology is not the norm.
There are urgent needs we can’t wait 50 years for.
France started to build their new power plant in 2007 and hope to connect it to the grid next year.
I guarantee you that climate change and industrial loads will still be a thing in 16 years.
It’s not actually required at all though, thats all FUD from the big energy monopoly that hate anything that can be owned and run by people that aren’t them - there are endless options for making a stable grid using renewables and they’re all considerably cheaper, quicker to make and a lot more resilient.
Nuclear gets pushed so hard because it protects the billionaires monopoly that’s the only reason.