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- cross-posted to:
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When asked about the federal government’s role, 41% of Americans say it should encourage the production of nuclear power.
Let’s get those new construction contracts signed!
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Cool, now we just need to convince Americans 50 years ago of that and we might manage to save the planet yet.
You’re probably right, we’re fucked. May as well go harpoon some right whales.
Fossil fuel and monopoly utility owners desperately trying to direct resources away from the thing killing their profits to something they know is ineffective with astroturfing campaign. Fox news watchers parroting what they’re told.
News at 11
The one trick big carbon doesn’t want you to know about!
Confuse the only contenders to fight each other and maximize your profit while they decide whose “right”
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There’s only one contender, buddy. This “if only you’d stop fighting and just direct 10x the resources at a non-solution” schtick is even stupider than the rest of the lies.
The nuclear industry is owned by the same people as big carbon. The only people parroting this garbage are the same people that have been pushing coal and climate denial.
Yikes! It’s not about sticking it to the man. I don’t care who owns the nuclear industry.
I care about leaving an atmosphere to the children. Nothing can get in the way of that.
So stop trying to help the fossil industry get in the way of it. Very simple.
It’s simply not about the industry.
Why is gifting grifters trillions of dollars to make negligible impact on climate change in response to a fossil industry marketing campaign not about the grifters or the fossil industry?
Because it’s about the atmosphere. If we need more money, we’ll just print it like always. This is such a silly point you’re tryna make.
I want to see evidence of this vast rightwing conspiracy.
Now if only they can get the NIMBYs in Nevada to support yucca mountain so we have a safe place to store the waste.
“What do they do with these after we seal them?”
“I hear they dump 'em in an abandoned chalk mine and cover them with cement.”
“I hear they’re sending them to one of those southern states where the governor’s a crook.”
“Either way, I’m sleeping good tonight!”
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Those rods still contain something like 90% potential energy that we’re discarding.
10%
U238 is not fissile and no closed breeding fuel cycle has ever been demonstrated to the point of running even a single full fuel load.
Will only happend if Las Vegas runs out of water and lose population. Then they’ll want the related jobs, income, and tax revenue. Until LV dies, it’ll never happen.
Why is it on Nevada to deal with your shit (and the costs of cleanup when you fuck up like WIPP or the German repository)?
If it’s a solved issue, then execute the solution where you make the mess.
If it’s any consolation, Nevada and a lot of the landlocked states are probably gonna get teabagged by climate change anyways, haha. Arizona is running out of water. My city in Montana nearly ran out of water a handful years ago, the largest one in the state. Like, out out. The river was only six feet deep and very narrow.
We nearly ran out of water again this past year when all the snow melted at once due to an early heatwave and cause the river to jump over 16 feet, which destroyed the water treatment facility and destroyed entire towns and national parks along with it. I moved to a different state after that. Somewhere less volatile.
I don’t mind more nuclear if it’s done in a modern and safe fashion. The US has a tendency to build old fashioned water cooled reactors that output nuclear waste that we have to find a place for. And we do stupid things like building them on fault lines and flood zones.
Why not build a pebble reactor? Or molten salt?
The current gen nuclear reactors are the only ones that have a chance of being built with all the known drawbacks. And even if we started building them like crazy, it would still not be enough to meaningfully contribute to mitigating climate change. All the other designs, like Thorium or SMRs are just pure science fiction and at best decades away from being viable.
We went to the moon in 8 years.
And it was just dumb luck that all the guys made it back safely.
At least that’s what they want you to think
If this magical reliable, cheap, abundant, fast to deploy molten salt handling technology existed, the people with it would be dominating the storage industry with carnot batteries on every abandoned (and active) coal plant as well as the solar industry with 2c/kWh CSP.
The reason not to build those things is we don’t know how yet? Not well, for power production.
There is a clear path forward. The only place where nuclear fits in the puzzle is specific locations where wind and solar are non-viable.
They are funding modern reactor research/development. One example is x energy.
Well its not really a choice with climate change about to wreck most things.
Yeah cooling them with river water won’t work in the summer pretty soon and since it takes almost 10 years to build it really isn’t a reasonable choice if you see how many renewables you can rollout in that time with that money
Yeah, that’s what most people fail to grok. This summer, 2023, will be the coolest summer for the rest of your life. In frightfully few years, weather catastrophes will be as commonplace as gas station stickups, and all of the ‘modern conveniences’ will be doubtful at best.
The internet will be frequently and increasingly unplugged, highways will buckle, flying will be only for oligarchs, hospitals will be amateur efforts, Hollywood will be in flames, pro baseball will be untenable, and wild hoards will roam what used to be the cities, searching for food.
In this mix, it’s laughable to imagine there’ll be full, stable, well-trained staffing at nuclear power plants.
Interesting that you included baseball on that list
The whole comment was me retyping something I’d texted to my oblivious Republican nephew a few days ago, and he’s a baseball fan. :)
Sign me the fuck up for nuclear, especially sodium reactors. I want it in my backyard, especially if it means I get a fucking excellent deal on a house. I hate the smoke every summer and the extreme weather and the lack of snow for our glaciers.
Some good news for once. All it took was the hottest year on record and a global plague that wiped out a bunch of the elderly anti-science crowd.
Maybe we can build a few more before we all fucking die
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I feel ya and think it’s strange that everyone is OK burning coal an methane while the planet literally burns. Yes, a nuke could make a 200 sq mile area uninhabitable. Isn’t what we’re doing instead demonstrably worse?
You may be interested in knowing that Georgia just brought a new one online a few months ago. Wyoming is building one. TX and SC have put money aside to study nuclear development in each state.
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Russia was reusing a government reactor that wasn’t designed for the it. The US has had one major incident out of over a 100 plants in operations for decades. Japan faced an earthquake that was an order of magnitude higher than anyone planned for and still managed it very well given how badly it could have gone.
I have gotten to work on a few small projects in the nuclear sector they make the government and pharm look efficient and risk adverse. Just a tiny taste of it: all tape used on wires had to be a specific brand of tape and not only no splicing no terminal blocks either. Wires had to be run fully point to point. We are talking football fields of distance a single set of cables had to be run.
I see we’re back to pretending santa susanna didn’t exist again.
We’re also pretending rules like the specific brand of tape aren’t there to prevent hundred million to billion dollar cleanups like when someone used the wrong brand of cat litter at WIPP
There’s plenty of diversity available without flooding yet another native town with uranium tailings from a mine you refuse to clean up in order to support a technology that can provide at most a 5% contribution to the total.
Wind, PV, solar-thermal, tidal, wave, hydro, agricultural waste based biofuel, waste methane, even orange hydrogen are all options that are less harmful and have fewer externalities.
Damn, those are some fine looking swimming pools
They’re heated (and cooled) swimming pools
Cool nuclear power is in again.
A tad too late. Those nuclear power plants won’t mean much by the time they are built
Good! We need more nuclear now more than ever.
Ah, the Americans, who don’t understand that nuclear power in the US needs massive subsidies (23 billions) to keep from going bankrupt. That the old power plants are falling apart and prone to drought and that new ones will be too late when built and just come right to replace an old one and so won’t add to the grid.
While the $6 billion in the Infrastructure law is helpful to stem a potential flood of closures, it is still not enough, King said. In their modeling, the Rhodium Group pairs the $6 billion with the proposed existing nuclear production tax credit that’s part of the Build Back Better Act, which the Joint Committee on Taxation score estimates to be $23 billion.
Imagine that money being spent on research into better energy storage, while renewable energy sources are built, quickly, reliably and without subsidies, AND they are local sources of power that make money for local communities and give them independence from big energy producers - oh wait, America can’t have that much freedom.
Now just imagine if people were actually educated on Nuclear Power and how it actually compares to Solar, Wind, and Fossil fuels. Nuclear beats them and it particularly trounces Solar and Wind when you consider what it takes to power high density homes and business, making it a double win in the ecological friendly factor.
People are educated. That’s why they’re buying solar panels even in places where laws are being written to make it harder and 10x more expensive.
Nuclear is great and the best path forward at this time is a mix of both nuclear and renewables. We don’t have to choose one over the other, both have advantages.
i prefer having both as well. a good mix of industrial renewables with most if not every home having solar and batteries would be a very robust system with nuclear powering heavy applications and as a backup renewables.
also i greatly prefer building new nuclear power plants with the learning we have had since 3 mile island, chernobyl, and fukushima and other incidents along with other advances in tech.
I have no idea about the US power grid, so your comment may still apply there - though I guess also not for much longer.
The new problem is that in Europe we now occasionally get more than 100% of power needed generated by renewables, so we’d either need storage or fast reacting power plants to compensate for spikes and drops in the renewable supply. We’re at a point where we no longer really need new nuclear plants for some ‘base load’ - which is something they’d be good for. But as cost for operating a nuclear plant is pretty much fixed independent of power output they’re very expensive when used for compensating spikes, something Finland just learned the hard way this year.
Nope, almost nowhere in US has anywhere near that high a portion of renewable energy. Storage is just so people use as an excuse to stop building out renewables. “It’s impossible to have more than 10% renewables”. “The grid will collapse if we have 20% renewables”. Etc
“Fast reacting plants” means natural gas to those in the business ;)
Nuclear is also effectively ‘fossil fuel’ in the way that there are limited supplies if we can’t magically make new reactor types work. But if the whole world switched to nuclear tomorrow we have like a few years of uranium.
if the whole world switched to nuclear tomorrow we have like a few years of uranium
I didn’t know that! Where’d you come across that nugget?
In the context of burner reactors (the only fuel cycle that has ever been demonstrated for a full fuel load and the only cycle with any serious proposal for a new reactor).
The amount of uranium the industry thinks they might be able to find (not the stuff already found) before the fuel alone costs more than renewable energy is about 10 million tonnes. Bear in mind the ore for the lower end if this holds so little uranium that you get less energy per kg of material processed than you do by digging up coal.
Each kg of natural uranium produces about 140GJ of electricity in the current fleet or 80-120GJ in an SMR (which is the main proposal for expanding generation).
Current world primary energy is about 550EJ/yr. Electrifying could reduce this to 300EJ, but demand is also increasing.
If you dug up all the known and inferred uranium reserves today and put it in SMRs like a nuscale or last energy one to produce 10TW (the average annual energy goal for renewables), it would run out halfway through 2025. It wouldn’t even be enough for a full initial fuel load.
If it were all EPRs and AP1000s (which have an amazing construction track record) and no demand growth was provided to offset efficiency gains if electrification, you might squeeze a decade out of it.
Check my math? I must have missed something. I’ve got 5000 years if nuclear continues to make up 10% of global energy production with no overall growth in production, 500 years if we go full nuclear, no growth in production.
For ease of math, I’ve assumed production rates will not change. This is a bad guess, but it’ll put the real answer between 500 and 5000 years.
This is quite the mental gymnastics routine. I’m going to give you a benefit of the doubt and assume you fell for it and are suffering cognitive dissonance rather than assuming you are lying on purpose.
You are conflating electricity and primary energy several times in a way that boosts the answer by around an order of magnitude each time.
https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/WorldStatistics/WorldTrendinElectricalProduction.aspx
2680TWh is 9.6EJ, not 61EJ.
https://www.energyinst.org/statistical-review
2680TWh is 9% of 29165TWh of electricity, not 10% of energy (either primary or final). Primary energy being around 600EJ by the same source. Final energy being harder to calculate because fossil fuels make a lot of waste heat, but usually estimated between 150EJ and 300EJ.
You could have very simply observed that 6 million is about 90 times 65,000, not 5000. 90 * 0.09 = 8. There are 8 years of fuel for current electricity demand (11x the current nuclear prodiction consuming 65,000t of NatU being ~700,000t) with the known reserves you listed.
Additionally 10-100MW scale SMRs being developed are much less efficient than large LWRs because the neutrons are largely wasted rather than making and fissioning Pu239.
This where you either apologise and stop pushing climate denial propaganda, or alternatively start a gish gallop about EBR and Phenix confirming you made your mistakes in bad faith.
I dunno if I’m right but here’s what I did:
- I googled “total global yearly energy production” for the 617 EJ
- I googled “what percentage of energy comes from nuclear globally” for the 10%.
- The “67,500 tons/year” and “6 million tons recoverable” came from the article you provided.
The rest is arithmetic.
Your screenshot literally says electricity in the url, not energy.
You’re now actively pretending to not understand the distinction rather than reading your own sources. Why double down when it’s already very obvious what you’re doing?
Yes, that’s where I got the 10% from. Do you think I should use a different percentage?
Good call let’s just burn oil instead.
No just don’t vote stupid people into governments who don’t have a plan and are just saying “turn it off at that point I am not responsible anymore so I don’t care if there is not enough renewables”
Actually we are able to reuse spent fuel. I know it’s not the same comparison, but we have enough spent nuclear fuel to power the entire US for 100 years.
Thinking that a closed fuel cycle is probably possible in spite of spending 30 years and billions of dollars trying and failing isn’t the same thing as being able to do it.
