this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2024
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If you hate nuclear energy because you think it's dangerous or polluting, that is as dumb as choosing to drive instead of taking the train for the same reasons.
Nuclear energy is one of the methods of generating electricity with the smallest environmental impact and also much, much safer than the alternatives. The number of nuclear accidents can be counted on one hand, while the number of people who have died from cancer from coal power plants is conservatively estimated to be in the millions.
Nuclear energy produces waste that burdens present and virtually all future generations. There is no operating repository anywhere in the world. And even if there were, the question of the risks to future generations will always be one that, from today's perspective, can only be answered in a projection-based manner. Positing that the issues of final disposal and long-term safety for the next one million years have been technically solved is thus insufficient. (https://www.base.bund.de/SharedDocs/Kurzmeldungen/BASE/EN/2021/1109-brussels-nuclear-energy-is-not-green.html)
I mean, comparing that to coal isn't a very impressive feat. Nuclear power is very expensive, fission material is limited and sourced from dodgy countries, storage is difficult etc. The emissions are the only good thing about it. There are good alternatives to that. I guess using the existing ones until they need to be decommissioned is still a good idea though.
Nuclear only has one caveat is the price.
It's the safest, bar none. More people died constructing the Hoover Dam than died in relation to Chernobyl and Fukushima combined.
It uses the least amount of land per megawatt produced. This applies both in raw terms of reactor size to generators, turbines or solar panels, or if you include all land needed to mine, process, refine, construct and decommission a form of energy. Cadmium based roof top solar is the only thing that comes close, which is not just niche use as no single building footprint can hope to produce enough power for a single floor, let alone high density structures, but cadmium based solar is also ridiculously expensive. And this metric fails to mention how inefficient battery storage for things like solar is, which further inflates the land use.
In terms of greenhouse gas emissions, be it carbon, methane and other climate devastating, Nuclear is the lowest in terms of emissions, and those emissions are all front loaded as part of the construction and mining process, which can theoretically be lowered with more RnD into greener practices for those industries.
So we have a source of power that is safe, efficient and proven that would allow us to put more land aside for conservation efforts which would help with carbon capture as well as lower emissions. And the only major downside is the higher upfront cost? Take a guess what's going to happen to energy costs if we continue the current course and climate collapse continues to happen.
You're glazing over a LOT of R&D accidents, not to mention the infrastructure that supports and facilitates nuclear power generation.
Yeah, the actual power generation plant is relatively small compared to a wind farm or solar plant, but you're skipping the nuclear material refinement centers, the environmental challenges and risks posed by transportation and storage of nuclear material, and completely ignoring the storage of spent radioactive materials. Yucca mountain nuclear waste facility was constructed for a reason.
I'm all for nuclear power, but you need to get into the gritty if you're going to make a good faith attempt at comparing it to other methods of power production. The entire process of producing fissionable materials is extremely expensive, power intensive, and uses incredibly toxic chemistry to get it done.
Fusion looks great on paper, but we're still having a hell of a time figuring out how to capture energy from reactions that last millionths of a second.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source
Nuclear land use is still below all other forms of energy generation when you take the whole lifecycle, from mining to refinement to production and construction, lile I said in my above post.
Most nuclear plants contain all their nuclear waste during their lifetime operation and transport after decommissioning. Yucca mountain was designed as a backup and assumed 30 years to fill if fuel rods were not reprocessed.
Lolol really? Taking into account the whole life cycle? Did they factor in how long it's going to take to decontaminate, say, Chernobyl? That's unfair, because that was an accident. How about Lake Karachay?
Nuclear has its advantages, but there is hardly anything as cheap and maintenance free as solar+batteries. Anyone can set it up, and it just runs all by itself for years and years.
In Europe, the price for electricity on the spot market regularly goes in the negative. Jep, you can get paid money to consume electricity because it's so abundant.
Look at France, their new NPP is taking 12 years and 12 billion euros more than planned. Is it really worth all that financial and environmental risk building something poisonous and explodey that needs constant attention?
Batteries scale horribly and are extremely toxic themselves.
SOME parts of Europe are cheap some are expensive and are subject to bad price spikes.
The reality is we need everything. More solar/wind is great! But we also need secure stable baseline generation that works. Nothing comes close to nuclear.
The number of kille people by coal is orders of magnitude higher over the same period (lets say 60 years) per GW generated.
Any other arguments?
datacenter are perfect for nuclear as they are generally a fixed load that never changes, solar needs expensive batteries as does wind, there are functionaly no* renewable options for covering extended periods on no wind or sun. datacenters bring in money partially because of their reliability, normal ones have huge generators to accomplish this, nuclear is much greener.