Comment on Bill Gates Says China Is Outspending the World on Nuclear Power
turdas@suppo.fi 4 weeks agoNuclear is statistically either the cheapest or the second-cheapest form of production in my home country of Finland, and yes that statistic does take into account the construction costs of our massive 1.6 GW reactor that was finished 13 years behind schedule and ran several billion euros over budget becoming the 8th largest construction project ever.
In terms of cleanness it is also incredibly clean. Even if you include Chernobyl and Fukushima (the latter of which leaked barely anything anyway), nuclear has emitted orders of magnitude less radiation than coal. Indeed even thinking that radiation has anything to do with nuclear’s emissions betrays your lack of understanding of the topic – the main emissions concern are the construction and fuel extraction emissions, not because they’re radiological hazards but because they’re not free in terms of carbon emissions. Accounting for those it’s still pretty much the cleanest energy we have though.
solo@slrpnk.net 4 weeks ago
I believe nowadays it would make more sense to compare nuclear to renewable energy, not coal. Apart from that I believe it’s important to keep in mind the nuclear waste problem.
turdas@suppo.fi 4 weeks ago
That’s what I was comparing it to. The lifecycle emissions of nuclear plants are similar to solar panels and geothermal energy, and higher than hydro and wind power (though not by so much that it would really matter): docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/80580.pdf
Nuclear waste is not and has never been a real problem. The amount of long-term waste produced is minuscule: the US powers about 70 million homes with nuclear energy, which generates about 2000 metric tons of high-level waste – 30 grams per household, about the volume of a marble (and keep in mind these are US households which consume 3 times the power of other western households). Storing it away permanently is… well, not easy, but relatively easy: just do what Finland does and put it underground. The main difficulty with it has always been scaremongering and NIMBYism.
solo@slrpnk.net 4 weeks ago
The link you provided talks about something more specific than what you just said. It’s about the Life Cycle Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Electricity Generation. This means that the decommissioning of a nuclear plant for example is not taken into account for these emissions, and it is well known that decommissioning a nuclear reactor can easily take several decades (example from world nuclear news)
The links I added above about France tell another story.
turdas@suppo.fi 4 weeks ago
No it doesn’t. And yes, it does account decommissioning of a nuclear plant. See table 1 on page 3.
The first link you posted says that a solution is already in the works, and would you look at that, they’re doing exactly what I said should be done: building an underground storage facility.
On the other hand, Greenpeace’s idiotic and anti-scientific stance on nuclear is nothing new, and their activism on that front is quite possibly funded by the fossil fuel industry (they do not disclose their donors) like that of many other anti-nuclear groups. Some of the other work Greenpeace does is OK, but you would do well to not trust anything they say on nuclear.