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[Reelya]

Lots of people oppose nuclear power. Why? While it's not renewable, at least it doesn't fuck the environment nearly as much as fossil fuels if you don't horribly mismanage the power plants themselves.

There are several reasons other than being scared of accidents.

It has one of the longest time of any fuel type of payoff, including economic and emission reductions; uranium at sufficient qualities to use in existing designs is severely limited and wouldn't even last the lifetime of the plants if they had been scaled up enough to meet the global warming challenge*; and it's actually one of the most expensive options when you look at it. A lot of the costs end up being born by the taxpayer, for example, dealing with the huge nuclear waste dumps we have no idea what to do with. All of those things need to be factored into the lifetime costs.

If nuclear actually made economic sense then private industry would be clamoring towards nuclear power en masse barely withheld by government regulators and you'd see a proliferation of nuclear power in places with less regulation. We don't see any of that. The only people promoting nuclear are industry lobbyists who make a profit from building and operating the plants. No other segment of industry is calling out for nuclear energy, and that's because they know it's not something that makes anyone else any money. If it made sense, then some big industries who use a lot of electricity would be on the nuclear bandwagon, but there's really nobody in there except for nuclear salesmen. They're the monorails of energy production. The stuff's only even viable with a huge and ongoing influx of taxpayer's money, that goes well beyond the lifespan of the plants themselves. That's why when we bemoan the lack of nuclear, who do we point the finger at? We say "the government" should be doing more to build nuclear plants and roll out the red carpet. If any of it made sense, then that wouldn't make sense. Tesla, for example, makes electric cars, because electric cars make economic sense to make, so they get made, government or no government, and solar gets rolled out with or without the government, because it makes economic sense. Nuclear basically doesn't exist at all unless we pour insanely huge subsidies into it, to make it barely break even with other alternatives. This is why it's not happening, it doesn't make any economic sense for investors. They only even try and build nuclear plants in places with large government infrastructure because then you can leverage the taxpayer to pay for the things. They are a boondoggle.

If John Galt built his libertarian city on the hill, privately funded, there's no way in hell they'd have nuclear, because you couldn't trick other people into paying for the building of it, the security and anti-terrorism, and the safe storage of the inevitable mountains of waste. It's only viable if somebody else is paying for it.

* there are several techs that could make the fuel availability more plausible, however they are all sci-fi basically as none of them are in use. If we need to fix the emissions problem ASAP in the next 20 years we cannot afford to bet on stuff that hasn't been proven to work yet, so at most, those get test projects. Currently we know about 70 years worth of viable fuel for working reactor types, and nuclear makes up 10% of total world electricity generation. Scaling that up by 4 times means the known fuel runs out in less than 20 years, and it'd take 15-20 years to build the plants anyway. There are solid physical reasons we haven't scaled up nuclear much more than it already is scaled up, and just building more plants doesn't solve those problems. We'd already have had more plants if it made any sense to do so. We need to wait 30-40 years until the hypothetical super efficient uranium and/or thorium plants can be built for it to make any sense, and by then we could have just built out all the solar we need since it has a very short time to being emissions positive compared to nuclear.

[Rolan7]

I don't have the effort or qualifications necessary to refute you properly, but  I'm just going to share the impression I've got - worth negative 5 (or more) cents:

Nuclear does take a long time to pay off, but that's supposedly irrelevant under capitalism.  The entire supposed idea is that long-term investments are feasible, as people trade based on future value.

But is nuclear more or less profitable than fossil fuels?  Storing the nuclear waste is a problem (for the forseable future, not necessarily forever) but I don't know if you're weighing the incidental costs of fossil fuels the same way.  You mention governments paying to house the waste, but everyone suffers the effects of emissions.  Worldwide, which makes it a very thorny international problem.  Cap-and-trade is actually good for getting people to SEE this, but even that is controversial for "some reason".

I'm also skeptical about depletion, but this is one of the first times I've heard it brought up.  We're ramping up fracking and looking at coal sands, but I don't hear about uranium ore being a problem.

All that aside, I agree we can't bet on possible technologies to get us out of this.  We miiiight be saved by something like cold fusion, but we can't rely on it getting discovered and eventually rolled out.  To me that suggests that we should have should ramp up nuclear energy in order to survive the more pressing threat.  The disposal of nuclear waste is a longer-term problem, which we can approach once the climate is at all stabilized.

[Reelya]

https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019/



Nuclear is way up there in price. Commercial grade rooftop PV solar comes in cheaper per unit generation, let alone utility scale thin film tech, which is an order of magnitude cheaper again. Even residential-grade solar is rapidly reaching the point where it's going to be cheaper than nuclear generation within a few years.

As you said "the entire supposed idea is that long-term investments are feasible, as people trade based on future value". But they're not doing that*. My point was - nobody is really super keen to invest in this, and these assholes will invest in baby-harvesting factories if that's where the profit is. They don't care about the ethics of this, they just care about ROI, and nuclear doesn't actually offer the ROI. If these were really an attractive money-maker they'd be popping them up everywhere community concerns be damned. They don't care about community concerns about any other tech, so why would they about nuclear power? Blaming grass-roots activists for the lack of movement on building more nuclear plants is just a nuclear industry lobbyist talking point to explain away why nobody really wants more nuclear plants (by "nobody" I mean - nobody with money).

They've already crunched the numbers for us years ago, it's not a good investment. you'd be beating them off with a stick if it made any economic sense.

* BTW my point about the long time to the payoff was more focused on the CO2 emissions. The break-even point would be something like 25-30 years from now before a nuclear plant you started today is emitting less than you emitted in building the thing. And that's not getting into the supply issue I mentioned, where there wouldn't be enough high-grade uranium in known deposits to run said plants for more than a fraction of their lifespan:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-global-uranium-deposits-last/

According to the NEA, identified uranium resources total 5.5 million metric tons, and an additional 10.5 million metric tons remain undiscovered—a roughly 230-year supply at today's consumption rate in total. Further exploration and improvements in extraction technology are likely to at least double this estimate over time.

So, 230 years but that includes 10.5 million metric tons worth which "remains undiscovered", so the 230 year analysis assumes we'll find those resources within the next 200 years. They're not accessible right now. Right now, we could pull up the 5.5 million metric tons worth, which would last ~ 80 year at 2009 level of consumption. The rest of the math is simple. Nuclear makes up 10% of world generation so if we double that, we have direct access to 40 years worth of usable fuel, and if we quadruple that, we know about 20 years worth. So we clearly can't just scale this up like we could with coal. We either need to start more prospecting, fast, but that only gets us a few years more, or we need currently experimental tech to come online - science fiction tech. My argument was that these solutions to this underlying issue are too speculative. They're as silly as the "clean coal" idea. I'd expect politicians to prioritize tech that actually exists, and resources we actually know where they are, over these speculative ones.

EDIT: the real reason they're not doing nuclear now is because the Cold War ended. Before, the government was entirely propping the industry up, it's basically a fake industry that exists to service the whole nuclear weapons thing. Since the Cold War ended however the interest in continuing to prop it up dwindled.

[Uthimienure]

There's another factor to consider: land area used. This is why I personally don't prefer proliferation of solar & wind. Go ahead and flame me, it's just my opinion.

https://www.strata.org/pdf/2017/footprints-full.pdf




(edit: These comments are not aimed at any particular person or side.)

[Maximum Spin]

There's another factor to consider: land area used. This is why I personally don't prefer proliferation of solar & wind. Go ahead and flame me, it's just my opinion.

No, you're right, solar and wind are terrible ideas and literally worse for the environment than fossil fuels. It's only by selectively ignoring the science that anyone can promote them.

[Reelya]

https://energycentral.com/c/ec/how-much-land-does-solar-wind-and-nuclear-energy-require

According to data collected by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory on dozens of U.S. wind farms completed before 2009, the land area permanently taken out of production by wind farms amounts to just about 1 percent of the total area spanned by the wind farm. Another 2 percent of the total area is temporarily impacted during construction activities, used for staging areas, temporary access roads, etc.

I mean, you can still use that land as pasture or similar uses. Basically zero land that is a wind farm was originally crop-growing land or other uses, so when considering the area covered by wind farms as if that area is now completely useless, that's a red herring in itself: presumably, nothing was built there and nobody was farming there to start with, and it's not like they go to the effort of chopping a forest down to make wind turbines or anything.

If the argument is that the entire area with wind turbines on it is now land we can't do anything else with that's wrong on two counts. The first count is: why weren't we doing anything with that land to start with? That land was so apparently useful to us that we didn't bother building anything there or farming there. So there's zero opportunity cost on that front.

And the second count is that the argument that the land now cannot be used for other purposes is also false. There was nothing there to start with, so the best use for that land is either to leave it fallow (which is what we were already doing with it) or to let sheep or cattle graze the land, which is barely impacted by the presence of the wind turbines.

[Maximum Spin]

https://energycentral.com/c/ec/how-much-land-does-solar-wind-and-nuclear-energy-require

According to data collected by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory on dozens of U.S. wind farms completed before 2009, the land area permanently taken out of production by wind farms amounts to just about 1 percent of the total area spanned by the wind farm. Another 2 percent of the total area is temporarily impacted during construction activities, used for staging areas, temporary access roads, etc.

I mean, you can still use that land as pasture or similar uses. Basically zero land that is a wind farm was originally crop-growing land or other uses, so when considering the area covered by wind farms as if that area is now completely useless, that's a red herring in itself: presumably, nothing was built there and nobody was farming there to start with, and it's not like they go to the effort of chopping a forest down to make wind turbines or anything.

The misconception here is that empty wilderness land is a bad thing. Land where "nothing was built there and nobody was farming there" is some of the most important land we have.

Also, it's been proven that solar and wind degrade the environment in other ways such as actively changing weather patterns. Wait, isn't human-changed weather patterns exactly what we're supposed to be *preventing*?

[Reelya]

Yeah, but now it's empty wilderness land with some wind turbines on it.

And I feel like you jump on one thing and ignore other aspects of it, such as pointing out the land area of the turbines while wanting to ignore the fact that the turbines actually take up a relatively tiny amount of said land. They're quite spaced out, that's the point.

As for weather effects, well similar studies show that the effect of those things could reverse desertification too
https://theconversation.com/massive-solar-and-wind-farms-could-bring-vegetation-back-to-the-sahara-102745

What if the Sahara desert was turned into a giant solar and wind farm, for instance? This is the topic of new research published in Science by Yan Li and colleagues. They found that all those hypothetical wind turbines and solar panels would make their immediate surroundings both warmer and rainier, and could turn parts of the Sahara green for the first time in at least 4,500 years.

Also the points being discussed don't actually address the issue with the limited availability of nuclear fuel or the fact that to overcome that issue we need reactor designs that aren't proven to work yet.

[Maximum Spin]

Yeah, but now it's empty wilderness land with some wind turbines on it.

That is not how this works. The disruption of building and maintaining a wind farm irreparably alters the ecosystem, especially at the lowest (microbiome) levels.

And this is ignoring the embodied energy and material consumption needed to manufacture the turbines, photovoltaics, infrastructure, etc., which is another massive environmental load.

[Reelya]

Still how do those shortcomings overcome the fact that if we roll out nuclear large-scale we only get a few years of usable fuel (unless you promote hypothetical reactor designs that aren't in current deployment).

Like if you have two prospective dates and one is a zombie it doesn't matter how many shortcomings of the alternative date you bring up, that doesn't change the fact that the first date is a zombie. Nuclear has too many problems, by itself, to make it viable to scale up.

EDIT: and none of those counter-arguments negate the fact that rooftop commercial/industrial solar is already getting cheaper than nuclear. It's not like putting things on our roofs is going to an environmental crisis, is it?

[Maximum Spin]

Still how do those shortcomings overcome the fact that if we roll out nuclear large-scale we only get a few years of usable fuel (unless you promote hypothetical reactor designs that aren't in current deployment).

Well, the fact is, reactor designs like breeder reactors are perfectly tenable and the only resistance to them is based on an irrational proliferation fear that has never actually happened. We absolutely CAN roll out nuclear on a large scale with current technology with significantly more than "a few years of usable fuel".

But honestly, you're missing the real point here. The only solution is a massive reduction in the human population to considerably less than one billion. The current population level is unsustainable on many dimensions and energy use is only one. It's not about solar/wind (which are worse zombies than nuclear by far) vs nuclear, it's about for how many more years we try to string along the oncoming, inevitable disaster.

[Reelya]

They would have breeder reactors if the economics made sense. To blame greenies for the lack of success of that technology is dumb. Greenies don't have that power. If they did, the USA wouldn't have 10,000 nuclear weapons.

Ya think they let them build all those weapons of mass destruction, but the greenies are somehow culpable for the failure of civilian breeder reactors? that's idiotic. It's an industry lobbyist spin, to blame the fact that they failed to get that up and running on someone else. So yeah, if you think promoting a failed technology because its failure was clearly someone else's fault is a good strategy, then go ahead.

EDIT: note: to blame the failure of breeder reactors on the public protestors, you have to assume that this same thing happened in every country, including Russia and China. Take the big picture: they fucking failed in both democracies and in dictatorships. It's not the fault of the protest movement.

[Maximum Spin]

They would have breeder reactors if the economics made sense. To blame greenies for the lack of success of that technology is dumb. Greenies don't have that power. If they did, the USA wouldn't have 10,000 nuclear weapons.

Ya think they let them build all those weapons of mass destruction, but the greenies are somehow culpable for the failure of civilian breeder reactors? that's idiotic. It's an industry lobbyist spin, to blame the fact that they failed to get that up and running on someone else.

Yet they somehow work fine in other countries.

Honestly, it's not the "greenies", it's the NIMBY movement, but if you genuinely can't tell the difference between the massive government incentives to have a nuclear weapon arsenal, production facilities for which had already existed for more than fifty years now, versus civilian industrial incentives to build a more reliable and safer yet massively less profitable than fossil fuels electrical production system that does not exist in this country yet to begin with, I don't see how you'll tell the difference between those things either.

[Reelya]

You think the NIMBYS stopped breeder reactors working in every single country? Maybe they could in a few countries, but not in all 200 countries with their very different levels of public freedom. Again, if the economics made any sense then the breeder reactors would have worked somewhere.

[Maximum Spin]

You think the NIMBYS stopped breeder reactors working in every single country? Maybe they could in a few countries, but not in all 200 countries with their very different levels of public freedom. Again, if the economics made any sense then the breeder reactors would have worked somewhere.

... They do. I just said... there are actual breeder reactors online right now, you know?