this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2024
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Things have gotten somewhat better after some high-profile messes, but we're still basically just shoving tens of thousands of gallons of toxic wastewater into holes and hoping it stays there and doesn't go anywhere else. Which, of course, uh, water likes doing, so it's very much not a good permanent solution to anything.
I'm pro-nuclear myself, given that of a long list of mediocre (wind, solar, hydro) to bad choices (coal, biomass) it's probably the best and most reliable option that relies the least on highly contentious resources (lithium) and the waste problem isn't entirely insurmountable given the progress on fuel recycling that's been being made in recent years.
And I'm sure I'm going to get shit for calling wind, solar and hydro mediocre, and that's probably reasonable. But the problem is solar and wind aren't good base loads, and building a large hydroelectric plant is incredibly impactful for wherever you're building it, since it kinda requires you to make a giant-ass lake on an area that's probably not already one.
And we have a lot of empty land here in the US. I'm in Utah, and people here push back against nuclear, but we literally live next to a massive desert. Nobody cares if we dig a big hole in W. Utah or E. Nevada, we can bury it however deep we need and it's not going to impact the water table at all (we don't really have a water table here anyway...). Likewise in California. E. US is a bit more difficult, but there are plenty of trains that go through very unpopulated areas that we could use to transport hazardous material for burying.
Processing it is obviously better, but we really shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of better here. Yeah, nuclear isn't perfect, but it works really well at providing a base level of energy and can help us phase out coal and natural gas that much sooner. Utah already sells electricity to California, so it's not like we need a power plant right next to major population centers, we can move electricity relatively effectively over long distances. So stick the plants in the middle of nowhere so nobody has to be worried about nuclear fallout (which isn't going to happen anyway).
Even if battery storage gets way cheaper, nuclear will still help us phase out fossil fuels as storage ramps up. And for costs, my understanding is that most of the issues are due to delays, so surely there's something we can do about that.
If you don't have water nearby, you're not going to be able to use nuclear power in any utility grade scale there.
It's all NIMBYism. We absolutely could shit out a standardized reactor design and build as many as we need but you can't get people to agree that we should do that, and even a lot of the people who DO want nuclear power want it as far away from them as possible.
Too many decades of mis/disinformation around things like TMI and Chernobyl have ruined several generations of people's opinions on being near nuclear even if they generally approve of it. (And by near, I mean in the same state as them, even.)
This is strictly a public opinion problem, and one reason solar and wind is expanding so rapidly is nobody has any major objections to those.
Yup. But like any good solution to a complex problem, it's best if we have a lot of options. We're putting tariffs on China, which will increase the cost of solar and probably wind, as well as battery imports (and yes, we're making more batteries here, but it's going to be small potatoes for a while).
Nuclear really shouldn't be impacted by any of this, so the time to really nail down the specifics is right now, or preferably several years ago.