Fuel isn’t easy to source and will put us into a new dependency like gas did with russia. That’s not desirable.
Building a reactor takes a lot of time that we don’t have right now. We need to build that capacity and we need to build it fast.
Look at France and their shit show of new and old nuclear projects. The company building new reactors went insolvent because it’s insanely expensive and last year they had to regularly power down the reactors because the rivers used for cooling got too hot
There is still no valid strategy for securely containing the waste produced for the needed amount of time
The reason people don’t answer to that bs anymore is because it has been discussed to death with no new arguments on either side.
The german solution was to build more coal power and shutter nuclear power and then pretend that by using accounting sleight of hand you had a “net-zero” carbon solution. But that’s bullshit.
That is true but that isn’t a constructive way of arguing about what we should be doing now to benefit the future. You can have the right of saying “told you so” if you need it so badly. I don’t really care. We need to solve this problem though and arguing about the chances nuclear could have had in the past is just distracting.
And the solution to that will not be nuclear power. Not in the near future because it takes too long to build and we need to cut CO2 now. And I’m also not convinced it’s a good long-term strategy based on the other points I’ve mentioned.
If we could magically build reactors in time with the needed capacity to replace coal and gas (which it doesn’t really btw starting and stopping nuclear plants takes way longer than necessary to react to demand changes) this would be a different discussion. But as it stands now it’s just a distraction from what we need to do: build renewable energy sources.
Sure but if we succeed at mitigating cimate change effects to a reasonable degree, civilization will survive for centuries, during which a reactor that uses itmight become available. It’s a minor problem blown out of proportion, as opposed to CO₂ emissions, which are the opposite.
Even if this were true this doesn’t help with the very real issue that we can’t build the nuclear capacity fast enough whereas renewable energy can be built fast, is already being built, and doesn’t have that problem that needs wishful thinking for it’s solution.
Because batteries aren’t as dangerous as reactors, are still making massive improvements on energy density and seem feasible to me. Doing anything useful with nuclear waste has been discussed for decades and no-one has come forward with any really promising results. The waste has been around for long enough if anyone could have done something productive with it it likely would have happened already.
It’s just an example number. No matter what if you are building a grid that has 0 baseload power generation, you need some amount of storage capacity for each KWh of consumption. We can argue how much you actually need, but the fact remains that when you start storing large amounts of power, which you would need in-order to keep a city running during times of reduced generation, it takes a large amount of space.
In order to demonstrate that, I chose a pretty straight-forward scenario of a city of 1million for just one day. Let’s assume that this amount of stored energy would be sufficient for a 100% renewable grid for say New York City.
So how much energy storage would be needed and how much space would such a storage facility take up?
Answering from a German perspective:
Fuel isn’t easy to source and will put us into a new dependency like gas did with russia. That’s not desirable.
Building a reactor takes a lot of time that we don’t have right now. We need to build that capacity and we need to build it fast.
Look at France and their shit show of new and old nuclear projects. The company building new reactors went insolvent because it’s insanely expensive and last year they had to regularly power down the reactors because the rivers used for cooling got too hot
There is still no valid strategy for securely containing the waste produced for the needed amount of time
The reason people don’t answer to that bs anymore is because it has been discussed to death with no new arguments on either side.
The german solution was to build more coal power and shutter nuclear power and then pretend that by using accounting sleight of hand you had a “net-zero” carbon solution. But that’s bullshit.
No, that wasn’t the solution and it’s not what happened, coal is in decline in Germany since the 90s with a rather steep decline since 2018.
https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&interval=year&year=-1&legendItems=ly5y7&source=public
That is true but that isn’t a constructive way of arguing about what we should be doing now to benefit the future. You can have the right of saying “told you so” if you need it so badly. I don’t really care. We need to solve this problem though and arguing about the chances nuclear could have had in the past is just distracting.
And alas, we continue to put more CO2 into the air and the planet keeps warming.
And the solution to that will not be nuclear power. Not in the near future because it takes too long to build and we need to cut CO2 now. And I’m also not convinced it’s a good long-term strategy based on the other points I’ve mentioned.
If we could magically build reactors in time with the needed capacity to replace coal and gas (which it doesn’t really btw starting and stopping nuclear plants takes way longer than necessary to react to demand changes) this would be a different discussion. But as it stands now it’s just a distraction from what we need to do: build renewable energy sources.
watch us be repeating the same excuse in another 50 years. yes, nuclear takes a long time to build but that doesn’t mean we should just not do it.
also at the bare minimum we should not be shutting down functional reactors which is happening in europe.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository
Sure but if we succeed at mitigating cimate change effects to a reasonable degree, civilization will survive for centuries, during which a reactor that uses itmight become available. It’s a minor problem blown out of proportion, as opposed to CO₂ emissions, which are the opposite.
Even if this were true this doesn’t help with the very real issue that we can’t build the nuclear capacity fast enough whereas renewable energy can be built fast, is already being built, and doesn’t have that problem that needs wishful thinking for it’s solution.
Why do you not include city-scale energy storage as wishful thinking? Unlike nuclear reactors, that amount of storage doesn’t exist.
Because batteries aren’t as dangerous as reactors, are still making massive improvements on energy density and seem feasible to me. Doing anything useful with nuclear waste has been discussed for decades and no-one has come forward with any really promising results. The waste has been around for long enough if anyone could have done something productive with it it likely would have happened already.
How big would a battery need to be to power a single city of 1000000 for 1day?
Why would you want to do that? Do you fear that there might be absolutely pitch black days with absolutely zero wind?
It’s just an example number. No matter what if you are building a grid that has 0 baseload power generation, you need some amount of storage capacity for each KWh of consumption. We can argue how much you actually need, but the fact remains that when you start storing large amounts of power, which you would need in-order to keep a city running during times of reduced generation, it takes a large amount of space.
In order to demonstrate that, I chose a pretty straight-forward scenario of a city of 1million for just one day. Let’s assume that this amount of stored energy would be sufficient for a 100% renewable grid for say New York City.
So how much energy storage would be needed and how much space would such a storage facility take up?