Because it a a white elephant that allows governments to take longer to pivot to renewables allowing fossil fuel to continue for much longer than needed. It’s playing out in Australia. Australia is never going nuclear. But it allows governments to waste time debating and considering. Even when every forecasting body that isn’t tied to the nuclear lobby laughs them out of the room.
it’s to protect capitalism.
the swedish neoliberal government has defunded existing renewables like wind power and set into law that the government is not allowed to buy back the nuclear plants they are now funding with tax money for private enterprises. with the argument that renewable energy like solar, wind and water will break the economy because it runs in the negative with uncontrollable overproduction but nuclear power is a supply and demand resource based on fuel which will let the private owners maintain artificial scarcity to keep prices stable.
Neither the scientists working in the field, nor the public is laughing any longer. We want nuclear.
I don’t get it. Current nuclear power solutions take longer to set up, have an effectively permanently harmful byproduct, have the (relatively small) potential to catastrophically fail, almost always depend on an abundant supply of fresh water, and are really expensive to build, maintain and decommission.
If someone ever comes up with a functional fusion reactor, I could see the allure; in all other cases, a mix of wind, wave, geothermal, hydro and solar, alongside energy storage solutions, will continually outperform fission.
I suspect that the reason some countries like nuclear energy is that it also puts them in a position of nuclear power on the political stage.
In what universe do those other power generation methods even come close to nuclear power?
And the fissile material can be reprocessed after it’s been spent. Like 90% of the spent fuel can be reprocessed and reused, but the Carter administration banned nuclear waste recycling in the US for fears it would hasten nuclear proliferation.
Wind, hydro, solar, and geothermal are all great. Anything is better than coal or gas power generation. But to say these green power generation methods come close to nuclear… not a chance.
I can set up 20 GW of solar panels to match the capacity of a 4 GW nuclear power plant. And I can set up 20 GW of PV in a year. China installs about 30 GW of solar capacity in a quarter.
It takes about 8-10 years to build a nuclear power plant. In 8 years, I could have installed the equivalent of 8 nuclear power plants using Solar PV that it would take me to build one nuclear power plant.
Then get to work.
I’ve considered it, some renewables installation jobs I’ve seen are extremely well paid.
But then you don’t have power at night. Cost comparisons of renewables vs nuclear very often neglect storage. It is not a trivial cost. Nuclear doesn’t perfectly match demand either, but it can provide a baseload.
It’s not renewables or nuclear, it’s renewables and nuclear.
You may not be aware, but most governments now require storage to be added as part of solar projects.
The performance of nuclear power must be calculated in relation to its cost and risk. And here renewable energy is more than competitive.
deleted by creator
Those 800 wind turbines can be built in a month. Building a nuclear plant takes decades. And nuclear fuel reprocessing had never been economical by a long shot. Your pipe dreams will always regain just that and that’s before we even start talking about proliferation and nuclear waste.
That is the point. 30 years ago going nuclear was extremely viable. Now it is a distraction.
Nuclear takes 10 years to build. Renewables are extremely cheap and work directly.
By pretending to advocate for nuclear energy the fossil fuel industry can keep selling their trash for another 10 years. When the plants are almost done they will start fearmongering against nuclear to cancel the plants.
There’s a good youtube video from Sabine Hossenfelder that covers the benefits of nuclear. Definitely worth the watch.
That would be one of the only good videos from Sabine, unless she’s deleted all of her political and medical content.
One more aspect to nuclear power is its vulnerability to destructive forces, whether that be natural disasters or acts of war via either cyber attacks or direct bombing.
Given the abundance of safer alternatives, I don’t see why anyone would accept the risk associated with nuclear reactors.
Solar and wind are just too cheap to build, they are going to take over no matter what anyone does. And in areas with fossil fuels still in heavy usage, short-term putting all the money into building solar makes complete sense - every new solar panel means that much less fossil fuel burned. We still have lots and lots of low-hanging fruit.
With renewables will come battery storage to handle the unpredictability, on the short term, battery projects are going to be super profitable so there will be lots of them. But those profitable battery projects will only handle the easy problems - grid stabilization and a typical overnight cycle. It will leave the grid vulnerable to that freak 2-week long cold snap every 6 years (that may be more common as the climate goes insane and unpredictable)
I’m a big fan of nuclear, but at the current cost difference to solar and wind, it doesn’t have a chance. The role I see for nuclear is to reduce the amount of battery storage needed. If the cost to build nuclear with newer, smaller, more cookie-cutter reactors can come down to replace the cost of batteries long term (as they have to be cycled out after a decade or two) then it will slot in really nicely.
Nuclear power should be adopted more
But does the US have enough nuclear fuel?
Or is it gonna have to be bought from Russia still?Plenty of countries in the world with uranium deposits that they are denied the right to make use of. Some of them export uranium but barely have electricity.
Nuclear fuel is 97% renewable, so we already have enough spent fuel to last us several more decades at current capacity, if we got serious about nuclear.
Good, about time we look towards actual technological advancement
