If America hadn’t responded to Chernobyl with fear of atomic power and instead adopted a “this is why communism will fail, look how much better we can do it” attitude, the climate crisis would be a non-issue right now
Perfect. Now that renewable technology is finally cheap and quick to build, the oil and gas lobby is trying to redirect attention to nuclear, which takes decades to build in most places.
We can do both. There’s nothing preventing us from doing both, and the most effective way for the oil and gas lobby to get what they want is to divide us.
If pro-renewable people say “we must only have renewables, nothing else!” It makes us seem like ideologues. If we seem like ideologues, moderates get confused because they think “well I do like to hedge my bets and try all things out.” And pro-nuclear advocates (who are all over the spectrum) get louder, complain more, and swing more moderates and politicians back toward nuclear and away from renewables. Then you can repeat the cycle in reverse.
The conservative trick is not to substitute something that doesn’t work for something that does. It’s to keep us divided, blaming each other, and going back and forth between different solutions so often that we never get anything done. Chaos is a ladder.
A decade ago, two decades ago, I was all for nuclear.
But something that takes 20 years from start to finish isn’t going to cut it when we’re already nearing 1.5 degrees.
Again, we can do both. This is not a zero sum game, there are nuclear physicists and people who are passionate about nuclear who will either be working on nukes, OR pivoting to software engineering so they can make money on the crypto/AI/whatever boom. I have met them.
The enemy is not the person who wants to build a parallel solution to the same problem. The enemy is the person who says “oh oops, there’s just not enough money 😬 we gotta fund only one, which one should we do? Figure it out and then we can move forward, in the meantime we’ll just keep using these fossil fuels.”
They are playing us with divisive politics. My expectation if we fund both is one of the following happens:
- We reach 20 years from now, and between storage breakthroughs and renewables scaling out we are 100% renewable capable. We stop construction of new nuclear plants, we keep the few that came online for a while and then we decommission. We win.
- We reach 20 years from now. We have made significant progress on renewables and storage, but we still haven’t been able to replace base load entirely. Storage breakthroughs didn’t happen, and we have to keep funding more research. In the meantime, we’re able to decarbonize and rely on nukes instead of fossil fuels. We win.
Hedging bets is smart in all cases, especially when it’s not a zero sum game. Don’t let them divide us.
Agreed. I was never saying it was, but that oil and gas companies are pushing nuclear instead of renewables because of this very reason.
Sure, both can be true though. What I don’t see very often from the pro-nuke crowd, right or left, is that we should defund renewables. Pro-nuke types tend to be pretty technical and very in the weeds so they see the benefits of both. They just get bent out of shape by their pet project being defunded.
On the pro-renewable side, there’s more partisanship because it’s a wider base, it appeals to the crunchy side of the left, AND nuclear has been character assassinated with fear around meltdowns. Most people with concerns around timelines and technical constraints on nuclear, like yourself, are flexible too.
It’s the crunchy folks and the moderates we need to convince. If they log onto a post here on Lemmy and see a bunch of pro-nuke people and pro-renewable people arguing and not agreeing that both forms are awesome and we should do both, those people are much more likely to fall for one of the forms of propaganda from the fossil fuel lobbyists. After all, we can’t even agree!
I think it’s generally people online talking about one or the other, or trying to advocate for nuclear over renewables. If it had to be one, renewables are cheaper, faster to build, already having industry scaling up. We can’t afford to slow this train down.
I’m more than happy to jump on we need all the non-fossil energy generation we can get, but we can’t afford to be any slower than we already are. We can’t put off progress we can have now for some potential in a decade or two.
I’m also not convinced we can make nuclear affordable and safe, but it has enough advantages that we should certainly try …. Only if it doesn’t slow down where we’re already making progress
That kind of thinking was wrong a decade ago and is still wrong now. If we have any chance of stopping climate change we are going to have to massively decarbonise not only electricity production, but also transport and heating. That’s going to mean a massive electrification of those sectors and a huge increase in demand over decades. Putting off large fixed investment now as it wont help out immediately but will help significantly during the time that electricity demand is growing is just nonsense.
We can do both
Can we? As you said, a lot of it is trying to divide us…. The next step is “we don’t need these renewables here, we should build nuclear” [continuing to pollute for 14 years, multiple billions of dollars]
We’ve postponed nuclear for +40 years, causing climate change to get further and further out of hands.
Thanks Greenpeace /s
Greenpeace funded by the Rockefeller family trust. Literally.
And Friends of the Earth funded by Atlantic Oil.
The 1970s were full of oil companies throwing money at environmental groups who were anti-nuclear.
Except the money kept rolling in for decades.
About fucking time.
People who think Nuclear is very safe and impossible to fuck up forget they will have a government department called Doge being run by a fuckwit
I used to be pro-nuclear and I am still not worried about the safety issue. However, fissile material is still a finite resource and mining for it is an ecological disaster, so I no longer am in favor of it.
fissile material is still a finite resource
We have reserves that will last centuries, and it can literally be extracted from seawater just like lithium if the economics allow for it. Can’t comment on the mining impact, though. Is it any worse than rare earth metals?
There is no economical way to extract fissile material from sea water. This is no different from people saying you can mine gold that way. Technically, yes. Practically, no.
The only way we know to get the uranium necessary for reactors in the quantities we need to do it is to mine it. And we don’t even have enough to mine to last for a century at current consumption.
The world’s present measured resources of uranium (6.1 Mt) in the cost category less than three times present spot prices and used only in conventional reactors, are enough to last for about 90 years.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/uranium-resources/supply-of-uranium
Sure, maybe some new practical way to make a reactor without uranium or to find uranium elsewhere might happen. But that’s a MIGHT. With what we know now, we need uranium and we need to mine it and there isn’t enough.
Dude. Read the rest of your source.
Thus, any predictions of the future availability of any mineral, including uranium, which are based on current cost and price data, as well as current geological knowledge, are likely to prove extremely conservative
In recent years there has been persistent misunderstanding and misrepresentation of the abundance of mineral resources, with the assertion that the world is in danger of actually running out of many mineral resources. While congenial to common sense if the scale of the Earth’s crust is ignored, it lacks empirical support in the trend of practically all mineral commodity prices and published resource figures over the long term. In recent years some have promoted the view that limited supplies of natural uranium are the Achilles heel of nuclear power as the sector contemplates a larger contribution to future clean energy, notwithstanding the small amount of it required to provide very large amounts of energy.
Of course the resources of the earth are indeed finite, but three observations need to be made: first, the limits of the supply of resources are so far away that the truism has no practical meaning. Second, many of the resources concerned are either renewable or recyclable (energy minerals and zinc are the main exceptions, though the recycling potential of many materials is limited in practice by the energy and other costs involved). Third, available reserves of ‘non-renewable’ resources are constantly being renewed, mostly faster than they are used.
Literally half the page you linked discusses how we’re not going to run out of resources anytime soon.
Known reserves are sufficient for 90 years because nobody wants to bother with further prospecting when supply hugely exceeds demand.
I did read that, which is why I said this:
Sure, maybe some new practical way to make a reactor without uranium or to find uranium elsewhere might happen. But that’s a MIGHT.
Building tons more nuclear reactors in the hopes that we’ll find new resources to power them all because we haven’t spent enough time prospecting does not make much rational sense to me.
You appear to be severely misunderstanding the source. You may want to take the time to read through it again.
Also, did you think we checked each and every resource we industrialised to make sure we had a few millenia worth before we started using them? Last I heard, our known lithium resources are only sufficient for a decade or two at current rates, never mind the increasing usage.
Are you asking if we did smart things before we began exploiting resources? Because the answer is no, never. Not once.
You’re missing the point, which is that we don’t normally measure reserves in centuries. We prospect as needed, and there is no reason to think that we would be unable to locate new deposits as necessary. All this and more is covered in the source you linked.
Breeder reactors produce more fissile material than they consume.
As far as I can tell from looking, there are no breeder reactors for large scale power generation, there never have been, and while multiple countries are trying, none of them have actually done it.
There have been plenty. For example, the CANDU series of reactors developed in the 1950s and 60s. Breeder reactors were quite popular during the early days of nuclear power, as it was initially thought that there was maybe only 100 years’ worth of (easily accessible) nuclear material on earth, rather than the thousands (or tens of thousands) of years’ worth we know of now, due to both more reserves being discovered and also easier methods of fuel enrichment being developed. The fact that breeder reactors have fallen out of favour due to abundant fuel reserves certainly says something.
I know there have been plenty of breeder reactors. What I can’t find is a breeder reactor in a scale large enough to generate power for a city. In fact, from what I read, that’s been tried more than once without success. Can you point me to a breeder reactor that was actually a useful test case for powering a city?
The Wikipedia page for breeder reactors has a whole list you can even sort by output capacity. For example, the BN-800.
What I’m reading on Wikipedia is that none of them have been used for large scale power generation yet. Which was what I was saying. Wikipedia showing what their output capacity is does not show how long that output capacity can be maintained or how much it might fluctuate.
Otherwise, what do you think the reason is that no country has yet to use one to power any cities?
Here’s the generation statistics of the BN-800 reactor I mentioned before: https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails.aspx?current=451 It’s been operating at about 70% of it’s rated capacity basically since it was first turned on, that’s large scale power generation. Breeder reactors have been in commercial use for decades (see also: Phenix and Superphenix).
The simple reason why breeder reactors aren’t the default is because most reactors don’t need to be breeders. The two main upsides of a breeder reactor is a) breeding of nuclear material, which as I said before was only ever a concern in the very early days of nuclear power. We have thousands of years’ worth of fuel available now. b) The reuse of nuclear waste for additional power generation. Of course you have to have nuclear waste to reuse first, which necessitates many other, non-breeder reactors already being in use, so breeder reactors are usually restricted to countries that already have significant investment into nuclear power, like France, Russia, China, etc… If you don’t need to breed more nuclear fuel, and you don’t have waste to reprocess you might as well keep it simple and build a regular LWR reactor.
Most human acticity requires some degree of mining. Lithium, copper, uranium etc. The impact of that however pales in comparison to the sheer volumes of land that are destroyed by climate change and fossil fuel extraction. Besides, when mines finally do shut down they often become havens for wildlife.
Once you use up all the heavy elements by fission you just put the newly created light elements into fusion reactors and get the originals back
Plus ruzzians are shooting Ukraine with hyper rockets.
From November 15.
Fuck
Thats what happens when they become more financially viable. Shouldn’t really surprise anybody.
