Comming from a country where nucler power is nowhere near the radar, what is the case against nuclear power? it seems such a nobrainer for me to use
- Cost. Literally billions of dollars, all upfront. This one was budgeted at $3B and ended up costing $10B+.
- Inflexibility. Almost all of the cost is in building one, so if you aren't running it basically 100% of the time at 100% capacity you are losing money.
When it comes to $/MWh, nuclear simply can't compete with fossil or renewable when demand is low. And you can't run it to pick up high demand because it gets even more expensive. The private market is simply not interested in them, unless they get a government guarantee that forces their production to be bought at a fixed price.
And there's of course the whole safety and waste argument, but I consider that to be secondary. All in all, nuclear is a could-have-been and mostly a side-effect of nuclear arms development. Neat technology, but there are way better options.
https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html
https://whatisnuclear.com/fukushima.html
...etc.
We have to build lots of bigger, standardised reactors which will then reduce the cost due to experience and economies of scale. But then of course someone has to subsidise the tens/hundreds of billions in upfront investment to get to that point.
Where as with renewables this was all done decades ago. And we are now at the point where it is orders of magnitude cheaper than nuclear. And getting cheaper by the day.
You mean an "Impressum"? That's just some weird thing that AFAIK (almost?) only German Web sites have, because they're required to by German law. The vast majority of sites on the World Wide Web get by just fine without it; it's not like that's some kind of minimum requirement for a reputable site.
So saying "a Web site without an imprint" as if that in itself somehow showed the site were somehow bad is, if it's about a non-German site, just stupid. HTH.
1) If markets valued the low-CO2 nature of nuclear, they’d be doing better
2) Multiple hypothetical approaches to reduce nuclear costs are ongoing. No one knows for sure if any of them will work, or which one will work best
3) Factory-produced large reactors on floating platforms is a surprisingly intriguing idea to make reactors cheap
or: 1) make everything else more expensive so we look better
2) let me consult the magic orb because I have nothing in my hands
3) I have a nice idea
Meanwhile we have HERE just another example of hilariously expensive reactor. Actual facts. Waved away with theories like "we don't have the people with experience anymore" which leaves you with the thought: should inexperienced people build nuclear reactors at all?
Difficulties in managing waste
20 years ago I was all for nuclear, then I looked at terrible projects in Europe, like in the Finland and the UK, and realised that it's too little too late. Europe can't build nuclear, so rather than trying to fight a losing battle for another 20 years, Europe should be massively investing in what it can do (offshore wind, tidal, solar, pumped hydro)
That is unless we sanction all nations that have nuclear weapons and blockade them from international trade until they get rid of them and subject themselves to being open to inspections for couple centuries.
That's the happy path.
The failure path with an unhinged dictator causing global destruction also gets much more likely.
* Lots of public opposition due to the public being scared of nuclear waste, nuclear accidents, etc. The public far prefers taking on invisible risk (like the lung cancer risk from coal/oil/gas emissions) than the huge event risk of a nuclear meltdown, even if the overall harm to human lives is higher.
Chernobyl! Fukushima! Radiation! Waste! Death! Death!! DEATH TO ALL HUMANITY!!!
And they're right about it not being the cheapest option, so what can you say? They win the argument.
Next time you meet the person is at a protest where they don't want a solar farm where there is now a nice forest or pasture, no 24/7 moving shadows from huge wind turbine blades and that's after they pushed for a law to require more space between the edge of town and the nearest turbine, protesting for fish rights when hydro is being proposed (if that's possible in their area in the first place)...
People also love to gloss over that electricity is 10% of the problem. Whenever you see a headline about Germany having run on 90% renewable power last month or whatever, mentally replace that with 9% because energy used in transportation, building heating, etc. don't count towards this. And then we haven't even touched upon the problem of cement/steel/plastic yet, we're going to need breakthrough materials or negative emissions with capturing plants that, you guessed it, also require electricity.
It's apparently very hard to understand that we need to work on all fronts, not pick a partial solution and wait until that's exhaustively implemented (all reasonably available space occupied) 15 years down the road, then wonder why emissions are at record highs (see 2021).
Agriculture and industry are tough nuts to crack. With electricity, transport and heating, it's a problem of scaling out. With agriculture and industry - we don't even have a blueprint yet
Getting consistent funding for new projects is hard when every other project in history has over run both costs and time widely.
But yeah if we argue for another five years before getting started on at least the legislation/planning stages (after which we could still declare it a sunk cost, based on how the situation looks in 2027), we might as well forget about it.
Firstly, the plant above has costed more than 3x projected time or money, so doubling is not going to solve anything.
Secondly, forget civic planning, could you or I go to our companies and say just double by budget because we don't know how to plan well ? What is the guarantee our plan is at least 50% accurate ? i.e. only 2x is enough ?
Poor planning cannot be solved by increasing budget (time or money), even in non public projects, work has tendency to get expanded to meet the budget, basically if Norway had thought 2x the $3B and actually budgeted $6B, they would likely have spent $20B in the end.
All this is only for operational life of the plant, it does not even include long term costs of waste storage because no one can even model that well enough or budget for it today.
I am not saying we shouldn't do nuclear, we really should, but truly commercial plans are meaningless unless we can handle costs better, We should invest more on that, there is encouraging work in SMRs(Small Modular Reactors) that could potentially address these concerns, until then most plants are experimental high risk projects from a public plan perspective.
If Russia didn't have nukes, its imperialistic ambitious would be curtailed. The ability to shield conventional assaults behind a nuclear threat is destabilizing for the rules-based world order.
(People get upset at the implication that one country would take over another country, but the people of North Korea would probably not be worse off if that happened. Instead they suffer greatly because nobody can help them.)
Their first nuclear test was in 2006. Even their production of refined uranium and plutonium only began in the 80s, decades after the war came to a standstill.
If anyone is upset that the people of the German "Democratic" Republic got to join the rest of "We, the people" in a free Federal Republic, they're cordially invited to go fuck themselves.
The same would go ten times over for anyone feeling that way about the much more oppressed North Koreans.
In my particular country, a major chunk of the public budget goes towards paying fines to EU for use of coal, all while our government periodically passes bills allowing it to borrow more money from the central bank, increasing inflation. Negotiations with neighbouring autocratic countries can be pretty tough, when they can threaten us and rest of Europe, which is going to put pressure, with stopping energy transmission. Energy shortages in some parts of the country were a regular occurrence for decades, even before the current political problems.
Lack of nuclear plants does nothing to prevent a nuclear war, while it harms us on many very tangible levels.
I agree that dependence on geopolitically and environmentally problematic fossil fuel sources is a pressing concern.
But yet [your country] is not lost?
I'd sure like it if less inherently dangerous technologies were further along. But every year they are gaining.
Takes decades to build, will be too late for climate change.
Uranium is also a finite resource
By any objective metric, nuclear is by far the best choice for stable base power generation.
"But what if it explodes" - and there goes all rationality.
Humans will take constant death from coal power plants rather than a minuscule chance of a larger catastrophe in a nuclear plant.
The only way these are remotely economical is when they are funded by the tax payer before the are built, while they run, and after they close down.
Any examples that goes against that? I'd be very interested to learn about them. I think as a way to ensure energy independence and remove fossil fuels they are good, but we cannot pretend they don't come with massive costs, and don't yet pay their own way.
And we do not really have any storage available - the only systems that are 1) not experimental 2) usable for anything other than frequency stabilisation; are the pumped hydro - and those are geographically limited. At least when it's windy, you can use wind turbines as sinks for stability. Intermittent nature of solar and wind is too intermittent for most industrial sinks.
Meanwhile unpredictable nature of generation from wind and solar push the grid to buildout LNG/petroleum powered gas turbines, due to their very short delay on ramping up/down (IIRC, second only to hydro). So you end up in situation where market approach to electricity is going to prevent decarbonisation, unless you hugely upend what is being bought on the market.
Personally I've been thinking of electricity market paying only for predictable (aka "dispatchable") low-carbon power plants, or at least with huge priority. Solar and Wind could still compete on such market by being paired with storage systems into Virtual Power Plants (something that already exists), and the rest of the generation would be sold on spot market during peaks, or preferably to dedicated sinks like green hydrogen production.
So if you want to base an electrical grid solely on nuclear power without additional fossil fuel plants, you need either a lot of often unused (and thus very, very expensive) nuclear capacity or some kind of .. storage. It's similar to renewables in that regard, although much more predictable and reliable (with exceptions, such as france this winter).
Thus far, a renewable euro has been just overwhelmingly better used to build out generating capacity, even where intermittent. The only problems in storage are picking which will be cheapest or otherwise most valuable -- e.g. hydrogen, ammonia, and liquid air are entirely the latter -- and that by waiting, you get more for your euro. Storage cost is plummeting much faster even than solar, and solar is already so cheap that building 2x, 3x, 6x overcapacity is in easy reach.
The cheapest, most efficient present storage is pumped hydro, which can be used in very many places where native hydro generation cannot be, i.e. almost anyplace with hills. But iron-air battery factories are under construction, for very cheap and safe storage, and that will compete with many other alternatives. Each has strengths for certain places, all work, and operating cost is in all cases very small, so building "the wrong one" just means you spent more up front than you maybe had to.
Trotting out the "ooh, storage" argument only demonstrates you don't have one.