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Comment on Nuclear and Fossil Fuels Join Forces to Undermine Renewables

Look, I hate fossil fuels as much as the next guy, but am missing why this article is pitching nuclear as a bad idea.

As I understand it, the coal and natural gas plants that have been decommissions still have millions of dollars per site of mostly workable infrastructure (in the form of steam pipes, valves, turbines, etc) and Small Modular Reactors really seem a promising tech to make use of that infrastructure. They might be “unproven” (as the article claims), but its my understanding is that its mostly regulations and finding investors that have kept them from being built (since they need to be sully certified as a full nuclear reactor would be, which takes the better part of a decade to do, thus investment has been slow rolling).

The prospect of a small nuclear plant replacing Indian River as a base load provider seems a lot more promising than wind without properly built mass grid storage. I’m sad to see fossil fuels reemerging, but this lumping of nuclear with fossil fuels feels disingenuous.

Am I really missing something in all this?

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silence7@slrpnk.net ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
The thing about nuclear which drove us to large plants in the first place is that bigger reactors have significant economies of scale. Even with big reactors, nuclear has been very expensive to build, and hasn’t really come down in cost in a long time, and takes a very long time to actually build.

By contrast, wind, solar, and storage are cheap and can be deployed rapidly in small increments with much more site flexibility.

So what’s going on is a false promise of future nuclear being used to prevent the deployment of renewables now.

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- DahGangalang@infosec.pub ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Ugh, yeah that is a frustrating part of any discussion I have with a lot of people I know IRL: they seem to think of it in an “exclusive or” (one or the other but not both) mindset.
  
  In my most humble of opinions, we need to be doing classic nuclear, renewables, and SMRs (and as pipe-dream-ish as it might be, research into nuclear fusion) all at once. Oh, and let’s not forget the mass-scale grid storage.
  
  Would that be a hella expensive investments? Yes, but worth it in the long run.
  
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hanrahan@piefed.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/nov/28/after-a-career-as-an-environment-writer-heres-what-i-have-learned

And there has been another – in my view, very sinister – development, which has put back the cause of action on climate change into very dangerous territory: the latest “nuclear renaissance”.

The government subsidies are simply huge: a nuclear tax is being levied on hard pressed consumers. What is the government thinking of? The fossil fuel industry, which has thrown its weight behind nuclear power, is of course delighted; all these decades of new construction without any electricity to show for it gives at least another decade or two of unabated burning gas

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budget_biochemist@slrpnk.net ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
If it was the only alternative nuclear power would be a solution to reducing coal and gas, but there’s no point building nuclear reactors if the renewables are better. Solar + Wind + Batteries are faster and cheaper to build, require less specialized skills and materials, easier to get approvals for, cheaper to run (doesn’t use any kind of fuel), lower emissions, better safety, more distributed (with the advantages that come along with that like being more fault-tolerant, etc).

Looking at generators all over Australia, Solar, Wind and Batteries are just popping up everywhere partly because they’re cheap and easy to build and run.

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poVoq@slrpnk.net ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
There arn’t really a lot of fossile fuel plants that are decomissioned before the end of their lifespan, so this is more more of an hypothetical solution for maybe sometimes in the future, all the while we continue burning fossile fuels. So basically it is an distraction from doing what is needed now.

And once a fossile fuel plant reaches the end of its lifespan the only usable things that are still there and can be reused is the electricity network connection. So those sites are good locations for cheap grid level battery storage (and maybe novel geothermal), but not small nuclear reactors that still need turbines and cooling towers etc.

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