I'm pro nuclear power thanks to some videos made by Kyle Hill which I will link
this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
45 points (92.5% liked)
Ask Lemmygrad
670 readers
31 users here now
A place to ask questions of Lemmygrad's best and brightest
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I'm "against" it in current reality in the sense that I see it as the techie way to greenwash energy production. It relies on a lot of mining, typically in third world countries, to supply the energy consumption of the imperial core.
That wrecks the local environment and the society getting wrecked is never gonna benefit from that energy. I'm pretty sure Europe which relies a lot on nuclear barely has any mines themselves. Building the infrastructure is also very expensive (specially since a shoddy job would be so dangerous to first worlders), to the point where it makes other large scale projects like dams sound plausible.
They just aren't made instead beause they'd be changing and possibly harming the core environment rather than the peripheral one.
Nuclear proponents always have this (possibly very real) strawman in their heads about how "nuclear is unsafe" or "nuclear weapons" with good counterarguments for both, but I've yet to see one explicitly countering the position that nuclear power is just externalising the damage to overexploited countries. The current Niger situation comes to mind.
And nuclear waste disposal as it exists is also very unsustainable.
Now, if the same countries that extract the uranium/plutonium had the right to decide if that's acceptable to them democratically, and got help from "green" countries to set up their own end-to-end nuclear infrastructure with no strings attached for the good of the human race, then I'd be very interested.
But hydro, wind and solar are all right there with way less drawbacks.
load more comments
(9 replies)
Yes. Fusion can run at max capacity no matter the weather, can't melt down, and the fuel is basically free.
The benefit of nuclear and fusion is that they don’t need to run at max capacity, they can change their production outputs essentially on a dime to meet electricity needs.
Unlike solar and wind that need massive battery complexes, and fossil fuels that can’t stop burning once they’ve begun burning. Both of which lead to a lot of wasted energy.
~~This is kinda wrong. Nuclear energy is extremely hard to ramp up and down. Instead, it provides very stable base load power, reducing the amount of ramping energy sources required.~~
On the other hand, solar and wind provide irregular, momentary power, which needs to be stored in batteries to be able to be used over any other period of time where it is not sunny or windy. These batteries can supply electricity on demand.
By building nuclear, we can decrease the amount of solar, wind, and batteries we have to build and ramp daily. ~~However, because nuclear cannot adjust to meet the ebs and flows of energy consumption every day, we will still need renewables and batteries to make up the shortfall.~~
This is a TLDR:
This is the extremely massive manuals if you have any interest in reading them.
That is blatantly false. Nuclear reactors have extremely malleable “Operational Flexibility”, and operators have the ability to change the amount of energy generation in as little as under an hour in order to meet the eb and flow of daily and seasonal energy requirements. This is how reactors have operated for decades at this point, as it is extremely valuable to be able to change energy generation, as why would you burn needless energy when no one is using it?
All that it requires is that a reactor can accurately forecast and plan for when such energy requirements will occur, but with any sort of central planning this can be done easily.
That is the entire point of the anti-neutrino control rods. When a reactor operator wants produce less energy, you simply lower more rods into the reactor to stifle the reaction and slow the “burn” of the nuclear fuel, and when you want more energy you remove additional rods. Further, steam can be vented back through the system and away from turbines which also reduces wear on the system when less energy is required.
Additionally, newly developments in light water reactor are extremely responsive to load capacity changes, to a degree that makes any changes in the short run essentially moot.
On the other hand, battery systems are extremely inefficient, and degrade quickly, along with requiring an absurd amount of space and material to store just a little energy, further that energy quickly dissipates if not used relatively quickly. Further, the sheer amount of rare materials that batteries requires make them not very economical for any sort of large scale usage.
We still need renewables, but their energy should be for short term consumption, not for storage.
That's super cool info, thanks! I guess my info is kinda out of date then. I know that older nuclear power plants were considered less flexible than natural gas, but newer designs should solve that problem completely. The faster we can stop burning fossil fuels, the better!
it's better but outdated and silly compared to renewables.
Advocating for wide spread nuclear is like unironically advocating for muskets as weapons. They had a place as a stopgap when the current tech wasn't there but it's outdated beyond niche purposes. Technology has caught up now so there's no real need for nuclear beyond making generation more stable. Keeping a few plants as backup, maybe even expand it a little, but 95% of your climate plan should be renewables.
load more comments
(2 replies)