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88-2: Only Markey, Sanders Oppose 'Expensive, Risky' Nuclear Power Expansion
(www.commondreams.org)
this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2024
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This is the one side of the aisle I think Bernie is always on the wrong side of. Nuclear power of some form will be required for a full transition away from fossil sources, and it should be telling how fast other nations like China are dumping money into it. It is cleaner and causes fewer accidents per GWh than any fossil source ever has- it's just been demonized for decades by those who stand to benefit from it being restricted and painted as a "non-green" energy source.
The problem is that humans cut corners for power and profit, and the nuclear industry is no exception.
i’m not sure what you’re talking about… The nuclear energy industry has a track record of safety and extensively regulated engineering that surpasses virtually any other industry
Those are two within the last 15 years. I'm glad when things are happy happy joy joy nuke plants are safe, but don't think for a second that it's a steady state. Ready to see what happens when a spent fuel pool gets hit with a bunker buster?
That’s ONE in 15 years. In fact 18 years, because the previous one was in 2006.
But look at this list of oil spills https://response.restoration.noaa.gov/oil-and-chemical-spills/oil-spills/largest-oil-spills-affecting-us-waters-1969.html and list of most contaminated coal ash disposal sites https://earthjustice.org/feature/coal-ash-contaminated-sites-map#top10
We have seen what happens to oil infrastructure in a war: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/04/08/sunday-review/exposures-kuwait-salgado.html
Cool, now do solar and wind.
Solar power, as great as it is, is only available during the day and wind is also not a constant source of electricity either. Solar panels are also made through slave labor in China. The cobalt needed for a lot of our batteries to store renewables also comes from slave labor, though we’re working on that part. And almost all of the renewable sources don’t have parts recycled and instead put their heavy metals into landfills.
They’re still a lot better than fossil fuels but they’re by no means perfect. That’s why we need at least some nuclear to help with those issues
Nuclear disasters vs not producing consistently due to nighttime.
I do find it interesting the method of resource extraction matters for solar components, but rarely any other minerals mined inhumanely for energy.
Like human rights policies are inherent to a solar panel.
producing enough energy consistently is the key figure of merit for electric generation infrastructure. Not a hand wavy optional nice to have fru fru thing.
Nuclear disasters are becoming incredibly rare and plus a nation like the US for instance has plenty of wide open and otherwise unused land. Ask the military. So even if there were a disaster, they could be pushed far away from cities.
The only disaster in recent memory required a tsunami to cause it and its effects are very minimal. Mostly it just cost a lot to clean up which again, is miles better than the radiation from coal and spills of oil and release of natural gas. The standard for which nuclear must meet is way higher than any other energy source when it comes to contamination.
I also didn’t say that mining of other types didn’t matter. Coal has always abused its workers. Oil is bought from nations with large human rights abuses procuring it. Meanwhile Uranium is often easily accessible to nations and doesn’t even need to be traded for.
Using nuclear energy is such a brain dead easy decision. Only barriers are upfront costs and public perception.
While I am inclined to agree: those upfront costs translate directly into time. Time that we don't necessarily have. Solar and wind are deployable and much less complex of a facility to run overall. For me it isn't about the best energy producer as it is whichever method gets us of fossil fuels the fastest.
Nuclear has long term capabilities and should be used, don't get me wrong, but solar and wind are bridges, if you will, to when it can have all the time and money it needs.
Yes but that doesn’t have much to do with what I was speaking on. In the short term, we should be heavily investing in solar and wind but we shouldn’t have an anti-nuclear stance.
So when people come along with an educated view of nuclear energy and talk about disasters and what not, I’m just making sure they know that’s not the sticking point. Nuclear isn’t dangerous, it’s just expensive and takes time to build.
Nuclear needs to be invested in for the long term, that’s the clarification. Until then, it’s wind and solar all the way. However, I’m concerned that we could end up in a future where wind and solar rely on these massive batteries which aren’t much better for everyone involved unless we recycle.
I’m not a nuclear absolutist, it’s just uneducated to say that nuclear is bad and shouldn’t be supported. It has applications, just later in our future
Well no one in this chain of comments was saying nuclear is bad and shouldn't be supported.
There is commentary on the kind of profit motives that result in things like: failed nuclear energy facilities and cobalt slave mining, though.
So, Fukushima was a story of incompetence and bribery, not under-engineering. It was perfectly safe when built. In the 30 years after that, the owners bribed investigators again and again to cover up deficiencies that were known.
I'm not sure what the nuclear plant being occupied by Russians who forced the entire safety team out at gunpoint has to do with the plant not being safe. The team was willing, by their own words, to keep working even with the Russians occupying the plant, even just keeping a minimum skeleton crew there to safely shut down the plant if necessary. That was shot down, almost literally - and Ukraine has been VERY careful about shelling that plant for political and infrastructure reasons even though enemy combatants are using it as a shelter to launch their own artillery strikes from.
sure, and you think this isn't also happening in every single other industry right now?
That's a regulatory problem and not a fundamental mechanics problem. the logic of "well it's good but humans will cut corners" means we should never do anything at all.
We have not in fact always done better
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Rock_uranium_mill_spill
We have not in fact always done better
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
57 major accidents-
It should be said that most of our accidents don’t result in Chernobyl like death tolls, but then, Chernobyl is in a class all its own.
As bad as TMI was, and it’s the first one that came to my mind, it didn’t have any direct deaths. It was ridiculously close to having a massive death toll, and it cost like 2 billion to clean up over… decades…?
There are industrial accidents, like fossil fuel plants catching fire and/or exploding, with more casualties than every nuclear 'disaster' combined.
Pretty sure people kill more people than any other cause combined.
Could be wrong. Depends if you count manufactured famine and healthcare crises as part of that.
We should get off fossil fuels, but I don’t see nuclear as a way of doing that. Solar, wind, and hydro (tidal is interesting. Micro hydro could have uses without destroying entire ecosystems.)
.you just can’t get around needing consistent base load capacity. I wonder if the cost of a few GWh of batteries or complicated pumped dam/lake systems is reported in solar/wind figures to make an apples-to-apples comparison.
maybe once we have a huge fleet of plugged in EV‘s serving as battery storage, variable sources will make sense as primary generation
I'll be the one to point out that TMI is exactly what you want to happen in a "nuclear disaster". Nobody got seriously hurt that we know of, the problem was found and dealt with quickly once identified, and we've implemented TONS of extra safeties to make sure that can't happen again without massive alarms and Serious Lights. Could it have not happened at all? Absolutely. But in a disaster, it's the perfect "disaster" - nobody died, nobody got seriously injured directly, the plant got screwed up, and $2b to clean up ANY disaster site is honestly pretty damn cheap when we're talking radioactive heavy metal remediation.
The BP Deepwater Horizon spill cost like $60B to clean up, so even with inflation $2B is comparatively small.
Radioactive materials (particularly gases,) were released so, it’s not quite perfect, but yes. TMI was much, much to be preferred over other possible outcomes of the accident.
all reactors are built near water and susceptible to some sort of flooding though. i realized that after German Biblis was hit by a flood earlier this month
So is nearly every coal/gas thermal power plant ever built. Steam turbines need water and cooling, thr type of thermal generation used doesn't change that.
the point is: other types of power plants just spill less hazardous materials when destroyed by a flood and don't have the additional risk of a meltdown.
Coal ash is arguably a bigger contamination risk.
Nuclear is the most expensive energy technology used, so expansion is only useful if all renewable sources are already built out to the limit
This is not the case, so investing in renewable is the smarter choice environmentally and fiscally
Of course, the route we took in Germany reducing nuclear to upscale coal is even stupider, but it is far too late to reverse that
don’t y’all buy excess power from France’s nuclear base capacity? Like 1.6TWh a year?
It is not the most expensive for any intrinsic reason. It's not necessarily that complex to operate. It's expensive because bureaucracy that has been strapped to it to make switching to it harder, which was designed to keep dirty energy in demand longer. It is the safest power source we have available (including renewables). There's no reason it's so expensive except to attempt to kill it.
I'm pretty sure that bureaucracy was also about controlling nuclear materials because they're dangerous and potential weapons.
Some of it, yeah. Obviously some is required. Not the amount that it has though.
It's the most expensive if you don't already have the infrastructure & experience needed to support it. Of course in places where nuclear is barely used or not used at all, it's going to be more expensive than others. But the US doesn't have such a problem – in large part due to lifetime extensions (which allow plants to operate for another 20-40 years, up to a maximum of 80 years), which bring nuclear's cost down to comparable to renewables. Without lifetime extensions though, nuclear indeed would be more expensive than renewable energy.
Renewable energy also gets subsidized significantly more than any other form of energy – in the US, solar and wind both get roughly about 16x the $/MWh of nuclear, and 2x the total amount of budget. The EU also puts like half of its total energy subsidies into renewables (and a third into fossil fuels) and almost none in to nuclear. That should probably be taken into account too.