this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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Memes

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A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme.

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Laittakaa meemejä tänne.

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Can we please just have both? (startrek.website)
submitted 1 year ago by The_Picard_Maneuver@startrek.website to c/memes@sopuli.xyz
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[–] schnokobaer@feddit.de 100 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Loads of people love to pretend an NPP is just a hut with a magic gem inside delivering an endless amount of power for free. In reality they are huge, highly complex, high-security facilities that take decades and billions to build and need to be operated and maintained by loads of highly trained staff in 24/7 shift operations. This isn't to downplay their merit of providing CO2 emission free power, but for the love of god please appreciate the enormous effort and expense this is achieved with, especially when comparing it to renewables.

[–] ThatWeirdGuy1001@lemmy.world 39 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's almost like many things operate exactly like that but don't have people spreading disinformation or fearmongering to the point where people are so pants shittingly terrified of them they won't even consider it.

[–] TheBaldFox@lemmy.ml 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah, fossil fuel companies have spent the last 70 years propagandizing against nuclear because it's their largest threat.

[–] Knusper@feddit.de 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sure, but hopefully you have no trouble believing that simultaneously, nuclear power companies and governments wanting to use nuclear, despite the risks, have been propagandizing for nuclear.

Pro-nuclear folks are often completely unaccepting of there being risks and externalized costs, which feels to me like they're subject to propaganda (notwithstanding that I'm likely subject to different propaganda).

[–] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 year ago

Nuclear power companies are rare, and badly funded. Most civilian nuclear programs are/were state-sponsored. Throughout the cold war, the main financial driver was a need for enriched plutonium and uranium for obvious applications.

Now that we have been (mostly) in an era of nuclear deproliferation for over 30 years, there is little to no money behind nuclear lobbying (though nuclear-armed powers are much less likely to scale back civilian nuclear production, they also don't have a military need to increase it). Weapons programs aside, "Big Atom" does not exist (unlike Big Oil or Big Coal who have billions of dollars to spend on lobbying annually).
Countries like Belgium or Germany even shuttered perfectly serviceable and economically viable NPP on ideological grounds FFS.

Now green field nuclear might not be a sound investment anymore (arguable, and depending on unreliable predictions about our future ability to do grid-scale battery storage to overcome intermittency issues as well as our willingness to rely on fossil gas instead).
But as someone living in a country whose nuclear program got fucked by stupid panicky rhetoric, I can tell you from experience that until the energy crisis of last year, "nuclear good" was a fringe "right wing" opinion held almost exclusively by people for who economics matters more than ecology (because traditional ecologists truly believe that nuclear waste is always worse than GHG emissions).

Yoyoing gas prices and the threat of an infrastructure collapse recently brought nuclear back into a more mainstream appeal, but unfortunately far too late to seriously consider building new NPPs.

[–] ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 8 points 1 year ago

Not quite. They initially did, but these days they fund the pro-nuclear groups more because it causes discussion between the pro-nuclear groups and the pro-renewables groups. This means nothing of substance really gets done. Moreover, they prefer nuclear over renewables because nuclear takes a lot longer to build. They don't mind another 15-20 years of fossil fuels that a nuclear-heavy strategy gives them, whereas renewables can be deployed right now which hurts their bottom line more.

[–] Rolder@reddthat.com 23 points 1 year ago

From what I understand, the costs and time needed to build a reactor would be far less if the constructions crews actually had experience building them.

[–] ReeferPirate@lemmy.ca 14 points 1 year ago

Hell yeah they bring high quality jobs as well as clean power

[–] gummybootpiloot@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Things that don't exist yet aren't a solution for problems we have now.

It's not like we could now just build a thorium reactor that makes economic sense without decades of serious prototyping. And by that time we might have found that there are more pbolems with it than we thought.

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[–] andrewth09@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Don't forget about the environment cost of extracting unprocessed uranium ore.

[–] winterayars@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Unfortunately renewables have nasty costs like this of their own.

[–] andrewth09@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Solar panels require a specific grade of silicone as a rare(ish) raw material input that requires extraction and heavy processing. Wind turbines don't really use anything that is not readily available (steel, aluminum, fiber glass, etc.)

The technology to recycle solar panels still needs to be developed. The technology to recycle solar panel blades exists, but has not scaled up yet.

I'm not saying solar/wind have no material cost. I am saying the process for refining uranium requires extracting a lot of uranium ore.

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[–] silver13@feddit.de 40 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Sure, let's pay private corporation billions in subsidies by handling their waste and have more centralisied and expensive energy production. Oh and trade dependencies due to uranium

[–] Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social 27 points 1 year ago (3 children)

The most recent nuclear reactor built in the US bankrupted Westinghouse and is set to raise utility rates. Oh, and it’s $17 billion over budget and 7 years late.

[–] Habahnow@sh.itjust.works 17 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Yep. Yet, Climate scientists still believe that we need to rely on a combination of nuclear and renewable energy in order to combat climate change. This tells me we're bad at it, and we need to get better at building and maintaining nuclear plants.

[–] franklin@lemmy.world 18 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Nuclear solves one of the biggest issues with renewables because the energy output can be adjusted.

This in turn means that you need less energy storage capacity in order to supplant existing technologies.

Honestly I'm just happy we're moving away from fossil fuels.

[–] BastingChemina@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 year ago

Nuclear is a great supplement to wind and solar PV.

Especially when the share of renewables get close to 100%.

Going from 85-90% to 100% imply to almost double the capacity of renewables energy available, even with batteries and thermal power stations as a backup.

On the other hand having 10-15% of nuclear really helps to stabilize the grid and lower the need to oversize the renewables power production.

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[–] zik@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They don't think that. Take South Australia for example - it's moving towards 100% renewables with the help of a mix of sources including battery storage. There's no need for non-renewable nuclear energy in the mix.

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[–] SkybreakerEngineer@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

If we were talking about naval reactors you'd have a point.

But this is what I was talking about in another post: Maybe big reactors are a bad idea? Maybe there are issues with getting them to utility-scale that, like blimps, makes them the less ideal solution for most applications?

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[–] dill@lemmy.one 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Huh, it's true. sauce

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[–] someguy3@lemmy.ca 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Canada and Australia are notoriously unreliable trade partners. (/s)

[–] marcos@lemmy.world 19 points 1 year ago (9 children)

Hum... Try sorting it by price.

[–] Krono@lemmy.today 26 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Is price the only concern? Seems like too narrow of a focus.

Maybe try sorting by "lifespan", as nuclear facilities last 3-4x longer.

You could try sorting by "crude oil usage", as each turbine needs 60 gallons of high synthetic oil to function, each needs an oil change every 6 months.

Would be interesting to sort by "birds killed" or "acres of habitat destroyed"

I'm not saying nuclear is necessarily better, that is a difficult calculation. But we got ourselves into this climate change disaster by short-sightedly "sorting by price". Perhaps spending more money for a long term investment would be more wise than always going with the cheapest option.

[–] Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago

You could try sorting by “crude oil usage”, as each turbine needs 60 gallons of high synthetic oil to function, each needs an oil change every 6 months.

Oil is usually recycled after it's changed.

[–] zero_spelled_with_an_ecks@programming.dev 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I was going to shred you because nuclear plants also have turbines that rotate and need lubricant, but then I did a quick search and found an interesting article that interviewed someone from a nuclear power plant that claimed one oil change in 34 years. https://www.lubesngreases.com/magazine/15_5/lubricants-at-the-atomic-frontier/

[–] TheBaldFox@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, since there is no combustion there is no carbon deposition and thus the oil basically lasts forever. We just filter it and add occasionally to make up for leaks.

[–] Zron@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

There’s no combustion in a wind turbine either, so why do they need changes more frequently?

[–] marcos@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

Because of higher efficiency requirements and because the wind turbines have a much larger number of smaller moving parts.

The oil requirements of nuclear are all on the first construction, mining, and refining of the fuel. Very little is required at the operation of the reactor.

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[–] dontcarebear@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago

And build time... Much faster to fill the landscape with turbines and solar panel fields.

Thorium salt reactors can still fill a couple of holes.

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[–] lightnsfw@reddthat.com 16 points 1 year ago

I vote we blow radioactive material around with giant fans. That should solve some of our energy problems.

[–] TheFerrango@lemmy.basedcount.com 15 points 1 year ago

Nuclear powered wind farms, to combat natural cyclones with counter spinning cyclones intensively farmed

[–] Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sure. And by the time we have one reactor finished in 20 years and 200% over budget we’ll be completely powered by renewables in that time.

[–] PugJesus@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This is the real problem. We shouldn't shut down existing nuclear plants, but adding more in a period when renewables are advancing at a tremendous pace is just... not sensible.

[–] Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago

Especially as the cost per megawatt of renewables is dropping precipitously and the cost of nuclear is actually going up

[–] marcos@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

We shouldn’t shut down existing nuclear plants

It's currently more expensive to get a MW from a fully paid for nuclear plant than to get one from a new solar plant.

What is still not a reason to shut the nuclear one down, but we are getting pretty close.

[–] deegeese@sopuli.xyz 5 points 1 year ago

I find it refreshing to see a bunch of realistic cost comparisons here whereas on Reddit, anti-nuclear voices get downvoted for being “outdated”.

[–] sxan@midwest.social 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I see you everywhere. I'm your secret friend. Ok, not so much a "secret" friend... stalker! That's the word!

Anyway, can you crosspost this to one (or more) of

I haint giffured out xposting on Lemmy, or if it's even a thing.

They'd probably appreciate it.

[–] wombatula@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

With the effort you put into this post, you could have just done that posting yourself.

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[–] balderdash9@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 year ago

clever girl

[–] platypode@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago

Nuclear power isn't renewable. Joule for joule, our reserves of nuclear fuel and petroleum are comparable. It's a decent bandaid, but between the finite fuel supply and the nuclear waste problem it's hardly the future and should be used as sparingly as needed to get us off of oil and onto renewables.

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