Nuclear is dirt cheap if you level the playing field and also make all other sources pay to store waste eternally. The damage caused by climate change is ranging into the trillions, but no other fossil fuel pays for it.
Only nuclear power is expected to nearly package their waste, everyone else gets to spread it around the entire planet, slowly killing every living species.
Renewables are cheaper and also faster to build. Advocating for nuclear now is a delay tactic benefitting fossile fuels.
Renewables don’t create a permanent waste problem.
(Also CO₂ is not as long-term as nuclear waste. It’s not easy or doable near-term, but you can let nature pull it out of the air and store the results. This can be done with none of the risks of failed nuclear storage.)
It’s the other way around. Nuclear is not competing against renewables’ spot, it competes with fossil fuels. Advocating for nuclear doesn’t try to use it instead of renewables, it tries to use it instead of fossil fuels. The opposition to nuclear is what benefits fossil fuels.
The choice is what you want renewables combined with, nuclear or fossil. Those are the choices.
There is a set amount of budget for replacing power infrastructure, and a set amount of capacity to be filled.
Any time a nuclear plant is starting to be built now, they could have instead already finished a renewable plant.
There is no longer any exclusive niche nuclear plants can fill, renewables and batteries beat it on all metrics now, even where stable baseload is needed.
If you need a GW of plants, you won’t build both a nuclear and a renewable GW plant, you pick one. If that GW replaces a coal plant, then nuclear will see the coal being burned for 10 more years while under construction.
The grid produces as needed, prices don’t vary enough anyone will use less power because low-emission sources are not yet available. Any nuclear power capacity under construction that could have been renewables will cause their equivalent capacity in fossile sources to be used an additional 10 years compared to if renewables had been built.
There is no longer any exclusive niche nuclear plants can fill, renewables and batteries beat it on all metrics now, even where stable baseload is needed.
I would love to see a source on that, and how much overdimensioning it would take to achieve.
Any time a nuclear plant is starting to be built now, they could have instead already finished a renewable plant.
And every time they build a train, they could have easily built 10.000 bicycles instead. Not saying bikes aren’t incredibly useful, because they are. Not saying you shouldn’t build bikes, but I am saying they are very different things. If you try to replace cars with bikes, you’ll fail every time someone wants to travel more than 20km. If you try to replace cars with trains, you’ll fail ever times someone wants to travel less than 20km and not spend a billion bucks.
What you need to do is replace cars with trains AND bikes. But if you oppose trains “in favour of bikes”, you’re actually promoting cars. And vice versa.
I’ll try to find some more sources later, for now I only have appeal to authority, sorry. I took a lecture on modern grid design for renewables and had a lot of coverage specifically on the state of renewable production, storage, and the pricing.
At a cursory look the numbers online are hard to parse because articles usually are not clear on the specifics they base their costs on, like what sort of stability the renewables can achieve at a stated cost. From what I have seen a lot of numbers do have to be about still varying supply over the day and accross seasons.
There is another argument (that used to be used before this recent price crossover), which maybe makes it easier to accept without up to date numbers: Because of the long build-time, you can buy the batteries 10 years from now, comparing to a nuclear plant that starts construction today. Surely you can see that the battery improvements over the next decades, specifically for grid batteries, will be huge. Currently batteries are still often very similar to car batteries, there are entirely new chemistries that will be in production 10 years down the line.
It’s not like I am saying we should scrap ongoing constructions.
Edit: Low tier source, probably ai generated, no citations, site is funded by the solar industry. This thing claims 100usd/MWh for “sunny” cities.
I also remembered I should mention my point of comparison is anchored in mainland europe, as that is what my lecture and my own focus is centered on. Mainly this means nuclear is more expensive than if you were willing to become dependent on russia for fuel and maintenance, or even make military concessions (like say turkey is). I think a fair optimistic number for nuclear here is 100€/MWh i.e. 10¢/kWh, assuming the country is already familiar in constructing nuclear plants in the not too distant past.
Because of the long build-time, you can buy the batteries 10 years from now, comparing to a nuclear plant that starts construction today.
Sure, but that’s a shitty comparison, because I can also build 20 nuclear powerplants, and bring costs WAY down. And that’s the thing. These comparisons are always “If we keep boosting X, and supressing Y, then X will perform better!”. Yes. Duh.
Look at what China is doing. They’ve built dozens of plants in the past years, and have >30 under construction right now, with ~150 planned. They’re building them for a fraction of the cost, because they’re not completely reinventing them every single time.
It’s not like I am saying we should scrap ongoing constructions.
Fair, we shouldn’t. But my worry is that even in 10 years, we’re still going to be using lots of fossil fuels, and that will always be lower if we ALSO build nuclear. Or at the very least stop heavily opposing it.
Gigá Whatts, inventor of the plant. To this day we honour his invention by using GW to refer to a plant the size of his first plant. It’s roughly equivalent to an oak with stem circumference of 20m.
But solar and nuclear aren’t the same thing. You can’t compare a solar kWh with a nuclear one. If you want to guarantee the same constant output from solar as you get from nuclear, you need immense battery storage or hugely oversized solar.
The choice isn’t “Solar/Wind OR Nuclear”, the choice is “Solar/Wind AND fossil fuels” or “Solar/Wind AND nuclear”. Every time someone opposes nuclear power in favour of something else, that something else is fossil fuels, even if you personally think you’re promoting renewables.
That is priced in yeah. Until recently that would have made it more expensive, but we now have the tipping point where overbuilt solar and batteries beat nuclear in price so finally there are no more caveats. Solar is cheaper, even at high latitudes like in northern europe, even for baseload application with big battery buffers right next to the solar farm.
I see a ton of them being spammed out like that now, solar fields with batteries in a small house in the middle, or in boxes along one side of the field.
Solar itself is so cheap, that overbuilding or latitude hardly factor in, it’s mostly about the batteries.
The solar costs are also mainly the land and the construction of the frames.
Solar is cheaper, even at high latitudes like in northern europe, even for baseload application with big battery buffers right next to the solar farm.
Honestly, that sounds extremely unlikely. I don’t live that far north in europe, and while I manage about 0kWh on my residental panels on a yearly basis. Thanks to seasonal changes, I would either need 4 more rooftops to keep the power on during january, or I would need to bank something like 700kWh to make it through 3 winter months. That’s not counting the electric car, or heating. Heating would roughly quadruple the numbers (being almost entirely clustered when solar isn’t producing), and the car would add roughly another house on top (assuming 50% is charged away from home).
Quick maths that I did because I wanted to try going off-grid: I would need ~100m2 of solar panels, and 2500kWh of battery storage. Or on a national level, 63 TWh of storage as well as just under a 1000km2 of solar panels if everyone lived as low-footprint as we do. And that’s just housing, it doesn’t include commercial buildings or industry.
The big buffers next to the solar farm are actually quite tiny. The largest under-construction battery park in the netherlands banks about 1200 MWh. With an average househould consumption, that’s just about enough to carry some ~4000 2-person households through the 3 winter months, assuming you put down enough solar to meet your yearly energy household energy demands (which we don’t have). They’re obviously not meant for long-term storage, but long-term storage is exactly what you need to make solar work.
And nuclear doesn’t have any of these issues. The only issue is that it’s expensive, because we stopped building them.
2 - Nuclear and renewables are the way to go. Renewables are the bicycles of energy, cheap, clean, easily to make and you can put em anywhere. But sometimes a bike won’t work. Nuclear are the trains, expensive to build and requiring lots of effort… but without trains, people will drive cars every time a bike won’t work.
If you oppose Nuclear, you’re promoting coal. If you oppose solar, you’re promoting coal.
1 if we stop debating the same dumb ideas for centuries maybe my anger will fade
2 I really hope you are ragebaiting, comparing nuclear to trains is sooo out there.
A train is good for the climate, good for socioeconomic fairness (cheap), easy to build, easy to change and has basically no waste at all.
Nuclear is bad for the climate, has the worst waste humanity can produce, is socioeconomically bad for everyone near the waste or working in the mines under inhumane coditions, the waste will last longer than the oldest human made structure, we do not have the tools to plan for that kind of timespan AT ALL, everyone saying he can build structures safe for that time is lying or mislead.
And nuclear is hard and expensive to build.
No, we dont need nuclear, no matter what your personal experience with bicycles is.
No, opposing nuclear is not promoting coal, dunno who told you this, but its wrong. Renewables are the way to go.
We already have ways to store renewable energy, and we have just started researching it there is a lot more to come, fission is basically optimized and still way worse.
Even in unicorn situations where our storage is not sufficient there are better alternatives than nuclear, bio-gas for example.
The only reason someone would want nuclear is to offload costs of building bombs and submarines to the public otherwise needed to be played for by military budget.
There is not a single reason someone to build reactors, especially not trains and bikes.
Nuclear has basically no CO2 output, so that’s wrong.
has the worst waste humanity can produce (…) we do not have the tools to plan for that kind of timespan AT ALL, everyone saying he can build structures safe for that time is lying or mislead.
There’s one super simple method. We just don’t use it, because it flies in the face of regular waste disposal and remediation methods: Grind up the waste, pour it in concrete pellets, mix it with the mining tailings and chuck it back into the hole you found it. You’re basically restoring the status quo if you do that. The only reason we don’t do this is because legal frameworks don’t allow this. In a way, long term geologic storage is exactly this. Drill holes in the ground, stuff the spent fuel inside, cap the hole. You can do that far easier, but it’s legally not allowed because people like greenpeace (and you) think radiation is magically dangerous.
And nuclear is hard and expensive to build.
There is not a single reason someone to build reactors,
There are 62 nuclear plants in china right now, most from the past 10 years, and there are 34 being built now, with 150 planned. They are basically disproving every “Expensive and slow” stereotype, simply by doing what nuclear proponents have been saying since the 50’s: “Build more, and it’ll get cheaper”. It’s the exact same way solar, wind and batteries are getting cheaper. China builds nuclear because it hugely improves air quality, because the alternative is coal.
We used to be able to build nuclear plants quickly and affordably in the west too, but eeeeeveryone stopped doing it when chernobyl happened, which was basically specifically built to explode.
Hahaha nuclear has basically no co2 output so its not bad for the climate
Dont even need to read further.
Lead is also not bad for your health, because it doesn’t contain cyanide - same level of arguing
Things that produce co2 in large amounts are bad for the environment and need to be abandoned, no question, but that doesn’t mean everything which doesn’t produce co2 is good for the environment lol
ah yeah tell me more how neat uranium mines are cleaned up and how they not spread radioactive dust over the landscape. tell me more about how solar pannels cant be recycled and have to be watched for millions of years so nobody touches em
Nuclear is dirt cheap if you level the playing field and also make all other sources pay to store waste eternally. The damage caused by climate change is ranging into the trillions, but no other fossil fuel pays for it.
Only nuclear power is expected to nearly package their waste, everyone else gets to spread it around the entire planet, slowly killing every living species.
Renewables are cheaper and also faster to build. Advocating for nuclear now is a delay tactic benefitting fossile fuels.
Renewables don’t create a permanent waste problem.
(Also CO₂ is not as long-term as nuclear waste. It’s not easy or doable near-term, but you can let nature pull it out of the air and store the results. This can be done with none of the risks of failed nuclear storage.)
It’s the other way around. Nuclear is not competing against renewables’ spot, it competes with fossil fuels. Advocating for nuclear doesn’t try to use it instead of renewables, it tries to use it instead of fossil fuels. The opposition to nuclear is what benefits fossil fuels.
The choice is what you want renewables combined with, nuclear or fossil. Those are the choices.
There is a set amount of budget for replacing power infrastructure, and a set amount of capacity to be filled.
Any time a nuclear plant is starting to be built now, they could have instead already finished a renewable plant.
There is no longer any exclusive niche nuclear plants can fill, renewables and batteries beat it on all metrics now, even where stable baseload is needed.
If you need a GW of plants, you won’t build both a nuclear and a renewable GW plant, you pick one. If that GW replaces a coal plant, then nuclear will see the coal being burned for 10 more years while under construction.
The grid produces as needed, prices don’t vary enough anyone will use less power because low-emission sources are not yet available. Any nuclear power capacity under construction that could have been renewables will cause their equivalent capacity in fossile sources to be used an additional 10 years compared to if renewables had been built.
I would love to see a source on that, and how much overdimensioning it would take to achieve.
And every time they build a train, they could have easily built 10.000 bicycles instead. Not saying bikes aren’t incredibly useful, because they are. Not saying you shouldn’t build bikes, but I am saying they are very different things. If you try to replace cars with bikes, you’ll fail every time someone wants to travel more than 20km. If you try to replace cars with trains, you’ll fail ever times someone wants to travel less than 20km and not spend a billion bucks.
What you need to do is replace cars with trains AND bikes. But if you oppose trains “in favour of bikes”, you’re actually promoting cars. And vice versa.
I’ll try to find some more sources later, for now I only have appeal to authority, sorry. I took a lecture on modern grid design for renewables and had a lot of coverage specifically on the state of renewable production, storage, and the pricing.
At a cursory look the numbers online are hard to parse because articles usually are not clear on the specifics they base their costs on, like what sort of stability the renewables can achieve at a stated cost. From what I have seen a lot of numbers do have to be about still varying supply over the day and accross seasons.
There is another argument (that used to be used before this recent price crossover), which maybe makes it easier to accept without up to date numbers: Because of the long build-time, you can buy the batteries 10 years from now, comparing to a nuclear plant that starts construction today. Surely you can see that the battery improvements over the next decades, specifically for grid batteries, will be huge. Currently batteries are still often very similar to car batteries, there are entirely new chemistries that will be in production 10 years down the line.
It’s not like I am saying we should scrap ongoing constructions.
Edit:
Low tier source, probably ai generated, no citations, site is funded by the solar industry. This thing claims 100usd/MWh for “sunny” cities.
I also remembered I should mention my point of comparison is anchored in mainland europe, as that is what my lecture and my own focus is centered on. Mainly this means nuclear is more expensive than if you were willing to become dependent on russia for fuel and maintenance, or even make military concessions (like say turkey is). I think a fair optimistic number for nuclear here is 100€/MWh i.e. 10¢/kWh, assuming the country is already familiar in constructing nuclear plants in the not too distant past.
Sure, but that’s a shitty comparison, because I can also build 20 nuclear powerplants, and bring costs WAY down. And that’s the thing. These comparisons are always “If we keep boosting X, and supressing Y, then X will perform better!”. Yes. Duh.
Look at what China is doing. They’ve built dozens of plants in the past years, and have >30 under construction right now, with ~150 planned. They’re building them for a fraction of the cost, because they’re not completely reinventing them every single time.
Fair, we shouldn’t. But my worry is that even in 10 years, we’re still going to be using lots of fossil fuels, and that will always be lower if we ALSO build nuclear. Or at the very least stop heavily opposing it.
Who is GW? And why do you bring him in?
Gigá Whatts, inventor of the plant. To this day we honour his invention by using GW to refer to a plant the size of his first plant. It’s roughly equivalent to an oak with stem circumference of 20m.
Thanks, that makes sense. I’m not used to see abbreviation of units without a number next to it.
What I’m seeing is that renewables farms are being built AND fossil fuel plants. Nothing is being substituted only added more of the same.
But solar and nuclear aren’t the same thing. You can’t compare a solar kWh with a nuclear one. If you want to guarantee the same constant output from solar as you get from nuclear, you need immense battery storage or hugely oversized solar.
The choice isn’t “Solar/Wind OR Nuclear”, the choice is “Solar/Wind AND fossil fuels” or “Solar/Wind AND nuclear”. Every time someone opposes nuclear power in favour of something else, that something else is fossil fuels, even if you personally think you’re promoting renewables.
That is priced in yeah. Until recently that would have made it more expensive, but we now have the tipping point where overbuilt solar and batteries beat nuclear in price so finally there are no more caveats. Solar is cheaper, even at high latitudes like in northern europe, even for baseload application with big battery buffers right next to the solar farm.
I see a ton of them being spammed out like that now, solar fields with batteries in a small house in the middle, or in boxes along one side of the field.
Solar itself is so cheap, that overbuilding or latitude hardly factor in, it’s mostly about the batteries.
The solar costs are also mainly the land and the construction of the frames.
Honestly, that sounds extremely unlikely. I don’t live that far north in europe, and while I manage about 0kWh on my residental panels on a yearly basis. Thanks to seasonal changes, I would either need 4 more rooftops to keep the power on during january, or I would need to bank something like 700kWh to make it through 3 winter months. That’s not counting the electric car, or heating. Heating would roughly quadruple the numbers (being almost entirely clustered when solar isn’t producing), and the car would add roughly another house on top (assuming 50% is charged away from home).
Quick maths that I did because I wanted to try going off-grid: I would need ~100m2 of solar panels, and 2500kWh of battery storage. Or on a national level, 63 TWh of storage as well as just under a 1000km2 of solar panels if everyone lived as low-footprint as we do. And that’s just housing, it doesn’t include commercial buildings or industry.
The big buffers next to the solar farm are actually quite tiny. The largest under-construction battery park in the netherlands banks about 1200 MWh. With an average househould consumption, that’s just about enough to carry some ~4000 2-person households through the 3 winter months, assuming you put down enough solar to meet your yearly energy household energy demands (which we don’t have). They’re obviously not meant for long-term storage, but long-term storage is exactly what you need to make solar work.
And nuclear doesn’t have any of these issues. The only issue is that it’s expensive, because we stopped building them.
Nobody is saying we should build coal plant instead of nuclear, that’s the strawman. Every godamm nuclear defender always uses.
“but there are worse energy sources”
Yes we fckin know, doesn’t make your energy good.
Keep you strawman false arguments to yourself until nuclear has less cost and less contamination then renewables (forever).
1 - stop being so angry.
2 - Nuclear and renewables are the way to go. Renewables are the bicycles of energy, cheap, clean, easily to make and you can put em anywhere. But sometimes a bike won’t work. Nuclear are the trains, expensive to build and requiring lots of effort… but without trains, people will drive cars every time a bike won’t work.
If you oppose Nuclear, you’re promoting coal. If you oppose solar, you’re promoting coal.
1 if we stop debating the same dumb ideas for centuries maybe my anger will fade
2 I really hope you are ragebaiting, comparing nuclear to trains is sooo out there. A train is good for the climate, good for socioeconomic fairness (cheap), easy to build, easy to change and has basically no waste at all. Nuclear is bad for the climate, has the worst waste humanity can produce, is socioeconomically bad for everyone near the waste or working in the mines under inhumane coditions, the waste will last longer than the oldest human made structure, we do not have the tools to plan for that kind of timespan AT ALL, everyone saying he can build structures safe for that time is lying or mislead. And nuclear is hard and expensive to build.
No, we dont need nuclear, no matter what your personal experience with bicycles is. No, opposing nuclear is not promoting coal, dunno who told you this, but its wrong. Renewables are the way to go. We already have ways to store renewable energy, and we have just started researching it there is a lot more to come, fission is basically optimized and still way worse. Even in unicorn situations where our storage is not sufficient there are better alternatives than nuclear, bio-gas for example.
The only reason someone would want nuclear is to offload costs of building bombs and submarines to the public otherwise needed to be played for by military budget.
There is not a single reason someone to build reactors, especially not trains and bikes.
Nuclear has basically no CO2 output, so that’s wrong.
There’s one super simple method. We just don’t use it, because it flies in the face of regular waste disposal and remediation methods: Grind up the waste, pour it in concrete pellets, mix it with the mining tailings and chuck it back into the hole you found it. You’re basically restoring the status quo if you do that. The only reason we don’t do this is because legal frameworks don’t allow this. In a way, long term geologic storage is exactly this. Drill holes in the ground, stuff the spent fuel inside, cap the hole. You can do that far easier, but it’s legally not allowed because people like greenpeace (and you) think radiation is magically dangerous.
There are 62 nuclear plants in china right now, most from the past 10 years, and there are 34 being built now, with 150 planned. They are basically disproving every “Expensive and slow” stereotype, simply by doing what nuclear proponents have been saying since the 50’s: “Build more, and it’ll get cheaper”. It’s the exact same way solar, wind and batteries are getting cheaper. China builds nuclear because it hugely improves air quality, because the alternative is coal.
We used to be able to build nuclear plants quickly and affordably in the west too, but eeeeeveryone stopped doing it when chernobyl happened, which was basically specifically built to explode.
Hahaha nuclear has basically no co2 output so its not bad for the climate Dont even need to read further.
Lead is also not bad for your health, because it doesn’t contain cyanide - same level of arguing
Things that produce co2 in large amounts are bad for the environment and need to be abandoned, no question, but that doesn’t mean everything which doesn’t produce co2 is good for the environment lol
ah yeah tell me more how neat uranium mines are cleaned up and how they not spread radioactive dust over the landscape. tell me more about how solar pannels cant be recycled and have to be watched for millions of years so nobody touches em