https://www.commondreams.org/news/us-nuclear-power-plants
Calling the vote "disappointing," one campaigner warned: "Nuclear is, at best, a waste of resources. At worst, it's a meltdown."
This is the one side of the aisle I think Bernie is always on the wrong side of. Nuclear power of some form will be required for a full transition away from fossil sources, and it should be telling how fast other nations like China are dumping money into it. It is cleaner and causes fewer accidents per GWh than any fossil source ever has- it's just been demonized for decades by those who stand to benefit from it being restricted and painted as a "non-green" energy source.
The problem is that humans cut corners for power and profit, and the nuclear industry is no exception.
i’m not sure what you’re talking about… The nuclear energy industry has a track record of safety and extensively regulated engineering that surpasses virtually any other industry
Those are two within the last 15 years. I'm glad when things are happy happy joy joy nuke plants are safe, but don't think for a second that it's a steady state. Ready to see what happens when a spent fuel pool gets hit with a bunker buster?
That’s ONE in 15 years. In fact 18 years, because the previous one was in 2006.
But look at this list of oil spills https://response.restoration.noaa.gov/oil-and-chemical-spills/oil-spills/largest-oil-spills-affecting-us-waters-1969.html and list of most contaminated coal ash disposal sites https://earthjustice.org/feature/coal-ash-contaminated-sites-map#top10
We have seen what happens to oil infrastructure in a war: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/04/08/sunday-review/exposures-kuwait-salgado.html
Solar power, as great as it is, is only available during the day and wind is also not a constant source of electricity either. Solar panels are also made through slave labor in China. The cobalt needed for a lot of our batteries to store renewables also comes from slave labor, though we’re working on that part. And almost all of the renewable sources don’t have parts recycled and instead put their heavy metals into landfills.
They’re still a lot better than fossil fuels but they’re by no means perfect. That’s why we need at least some nuclear to help with those issues
Nuclear disasters vs not producing consistently due to nighttime.
I do find it interesting the method of resource extraction matters for solar components, but rarely any other minerals mined inhumanely for energy.
Like human rights policies are inherent to a solar panel.
So, Fukushima was a story of incompetence and bribery, not under-engineering. It was perfectly safe when built. In the 30 years after that, the owners bribed investigators again and again to cover up deficiencies that were known.
I'm not sure what the nuclear plant being occupied by Russians who forced the entire safety team out at gunpoint has to do with the plant not being safe. The team was willing, by their own words, to keep working even with the Russians occupying the plant, even just keeping a minimum skeleton crew there to safely shut down the plant if necessary. That was shot down, almost literally - and Ukraine has been VERY careful about shelling that plant for political and infrastructure reasons even though enemy combatants are using it as a shelter to launch their own artillery strikes from.
sure, and you think this isn't also happening in every single other industry right now?
That's a regulatory problem and not a fundamental mechanics problem. the logic of "well it's good but humans will cut corners" means we should never do anything at all.
And our primary examples of its danger come from countries that are famed for either overworking staff or under-regulating industries. We’ve always done better, but honestly I wouldn’t trust nuclear if Project 2025 took hold.
We have not in fact always done better
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Rock_uranium_mill_spill
We have not in fact always done better
It should be said that most of our accidents don’t result in Chernobyl like death tolls, but then, Chernobyl is in a class all its own.
As bad as TMI was, and it’s the first one that came to my mind, it didn’t have any direct deaths. It was ridiculously close to having a massive death toll, and it cost like 2 billion to clean up over… decades…?
There are industrial accidents, like fossil fuel plants catching fire and/or exploding, with more casualties than every nuclear 'disaster' combined.
Pretty sure people kill more people than any other cause combined.
Could be wrong. Depends if you count manufactured famine and healthcare crises as part of that.
We should get off fossil fuels, but I don’t see nuclear as a way of doing that. Solar, wind, and hydro (tidal is interesting. Micro hydro could have uses without destroying entire ecosystems.)
.you just can’t get around needing consistent base load capacity. I wonder if the cost of a few GWh of batteries or complicated pumped dam/lake systems is reported in solar/wind figures to make an apples-to-apples comparison.
maybe once we have a huge fleet of plugged in EV‘s serving as battery storage, variable sources will make sense as primary generation
I'll be the one to point out that TMI is exactly what you want to happen in a "nuclear disaster". Nobody got seriously hurt that we know of, the problem was found and dealt with quickly once identified, and we've implemented TONS of extra safeties to make sure that can't happen again without massive alarms and Serious Lights. Could it have not happened at all? Absolutely. But in a disaster, it's the perfect "disaster" - nobody died, nobody got seriously injured directly, the plant got screwed up, and $2b to clean up ANY disaster site is honestly pretty damn cheap when we're talking radioactive heavy metal remediation.
The BP Deepwater Horizon spill cost like $60B to clean up, so even with inflation $2B is comparatively small.
Radioactive materials (particularly gases,) were released so, it’s not quite perfect, but yes. TMI was much, much to be preferred over other possible outcomes of the accident.
all reactors are built near water and susceptible to some sort of flooding though. i realized that after German Biblis was hit by a flood earlier this month
So is nearly every coal/gas thermal power plant ever built. Steam turbines need water and cooling, thr type of thermal generation used doesn't change that.
Nuclear is the most expensive energy technology used, so expansion is only useful if all renewable sources are already built out to the limit
This is not the case, so investing in renewable is the smarter choice environmentally and fiscally
Of course, the route we took in Germany reducing nuclear to upscale coal is even stupider, but it is far too late to reverse that
It is not the most expensive for any intrinsic reason. It's not necessarily that complex to operate. It's expensive because bureaucracy that has been strapped to it to make switching to it harder, which was designed to keep dirty energy in demand longer. It is the safest power source we have available (including renewables). There's no reason it's so expensive except to attempt to kill it.
I'm pretty sure that bureaucracy was also about controlling nuclear materials because they're dangerous and potential weapons.
It's the most expensive if you don't already have the infrastructure & experience needed to support it. Of course in places where nuclear is barely used or not used at all, it's going to be more expensive than others. But the US doesn't have such a problem – in large part due to lifetime extensions (which allow plants to operate for another 20-40 years, up to a maximum of 80 years), which bring nuclear's cost down to comparable to renewables. Without lifetime extensions though, nuclear indeed would be more expensive than renewable energy.
Renewable energy also gets subsidized significantly more than any other form of energy – in the US, solar and wind both get roughly about 16x the $/MWh of nuclear, and 2x the total amount of budget. The EU also puts like half of its total energy subsidies into renewables (and a third into fossil fuels) and almost none in to nuclear. That should probably be taken into account too.
I'd love to see more nuclear power generation. Nuclear power is the densest form of power on earth, it's safer than even renewables and doesn't have the huge e-waste or energy storage problems that come with it. It's very, very safe even compared to windmills depending on where you draw the box. I have never met anybody who actually understands nuclear power safety or waste disposal who is against it. At best, they say "renewables are currently cheaper so let's focus there" but they're not like "Nuclear is bad".
I don't think nuclear is bad. It's really great for deep space and deep sea operations. It's just expensive in terms of both time and money.
I'm usually against Sanders on this, but I very much respect the risky part of that sentence. Because I just don't have a lot of faith in the future right now, and I don't know if I trust any nuclear options going forward. I mean after Trump wins the election and implements his project f, or whatever it was called, who's going to be the head of the nuclear regulatory agency? One of his shitty kids friends? Maybe Sanders is right and it's a bad time.
Would you be surprised that we have dozens of nuclear plants all over the United States? Modern reactors that can withstand the mistakes of the past without the disaster? Media makes the public think the risk is higher than it is when in reality, more people have died per year installing renewables than all the nuclear disasters combined (per GW/H).
Nuclear is simply too energy dense to ignore.
Where do you put the waste? For how long and at what cost?
What about the cost of decommissioning nuclear sites at the end of their life?
Right now the volume of waste is low enough that they store it on-site. Coal ash disposal is far more of a problem, and has led to major contamination incidents.
What figures do you have on decomissioning? How much does a coal or natural gas plant or oil refinery cost to decommission? Do plants need to be decommissioned or can they be incrementally upgraded?
Have you done any background on this or are you sealioning?
I wish it was more widely known by the average person that coal ash is radioactive and contains heavy metals like lead and arsenic due to concentration of elements that were found in trace amounts in the coal and remain once the coal is burnt. It's horrible how poorly coal ash was handled (or purposefully used in construction) in the past and how contamination events still happen with little meaningful consequence to energy companies.
In the UK, the decommissioning plan is to take at least 120 years, at an estimated cost of £126 billion pounds.
£126B would buy a lot of renewable sources... (fuck coal, gas or oil)
That’s for one plant?
Edit: Oh. 17 of the earliest plants starting from the 50s. This has nothing to do with the construction and maintenance of modern nuclear power infrastructure.
There are 2-3 million abandoned oil and gas wells in the US. https://www.nrdc.org/stories/millions-leaky-and-abandoned-oil-and-gas-wells-are-threatening-lives-and-climate
Solar and wind are cheaper, but are variable, and have geographic limitations or high land use (45,000 acres of solar to equal the output of a modern nuclear plant). There is a place for nuclear, along with other carbon-free generation sources.
In the ground, very deep, forever, for not nearly as much money as you might think. It takes up very, very little space. It's not green liquid that can spill, it's pieces of glass.
We did that in Germany, and it's now contaminating groundwater, as the very deep hole is flooding with water.
You put things around the glass so that groundwater never touches the 'glass'. Again, very different now from the days we started.