Comment on First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled
Stoneykins@mander.xyz 6 months ago
I remember so many nuclear stans on lemmy a bit ago refusing to acknowledge that renewables are getting so good and cheap that they are more important to solving climate change than nuclear. I wonder how they feel seeing investors pull out in favor of renewables?
I’m in both camps. We need massive amount of renewable energy installed and we should keep going.
But there comes a point where the last 20% will be extremely expensive to do via renewables. We will do the last 20% much cheaper if we keep our nuclear expertise and plants going.
I’m not saying “build only nuclear”. I’m saying “keep it going”.
I agree with this. I like nuclear, I think it’s neat, but I think it will be a minor player in solving climate change and meeting energy demands (unless there is some miracle breakthrough in fusion). It is perfect for specific locations/contexts.
I’m just bothered by:
People who think nuclear everywhere is the only possible solution to getting off foasil fuels, and have unrealistic expectations about its ease of building and price
and
People who trash talk solar and wind while being wholly uninformed about how effective and cheap those things are, and how fast they are getting cheaper and more effective.
For some reason, these people are often the same people.
I wouldn’t say 20% is a minor player. But agree we can get 80% there with renewables, in some locations (like Scandinavia, blessed with abundant hydro and wind) probably to 90%.
There’s no doubt that integrating renewables is cheaper than nuclear right now, partly as a function of how little nuclear we’re building, but majoritively a function of how much steerable generation we have from fossil fuel (mainly gas) plants. But as steerable capacity disappears, we will need to build more and more very expensive storage to keep integrating renewables.
The fora I’m in where nuclear is discussed seems fairly even tempered to me. But it may be that you’re encountering some immaturity in renewable fora you’re in - I just haven’t come across very much.
Ah, the specifc numbers, 80%/20%, or 90%/10%, I’m not sure we exactly agree on, but hypothetical future specifics like that aren’t productive to argue about, I’m sure it will be solved by practicality at the time it becomes relevant.
But also important, and I should have said something about it before, battery and other power storage method technology is also getting cheaper and more effective, faster and faster. 2023 battery tech is better than 2022 battery tech and 2024 battery tech will be better yet, all by noticeable margins. It doesn’t really concern me, they get better faster than we can build them. And we are getting more efficient at recycling the rare materials too, we aren’t far from it being cheaper to recycle a battery than mine new rare materials.
Might be easier to get people’s opinions if you don’t insult them in the first sentence.
“stan” is a common word for excessive fanatic. It isn’t always purely an insult. I also was specifically referring to people that were pretty rude in their behavior before. Feel free to assume I’m not talking about you, I’m not saying there is anything wrong with people who like nuclear.
Think of me as a solar stan if it makes things simpler
Ah the classic “sorry if YOU were offended”.
I just needed a phrase to refer to the group of people that really, really liked nuclear power, and only wanted nuclear power to be the solution to fossil fuels, and were pretty rude to anyone who disagreed with them about this. “Nuclear Stan” seemed accurate to that, and I didn’t mean it as an insult, just a description of their position on the issue.
So why does it bother you? I’m not trying to be rude.
Nuclear stans? Us vs them thinking here.
Yes my political opponents are the people I disagree with. I don’t see your point here.
Fixing our energy demands so they stop fucking the planet doesn’t require us to hold hands and sing together, we just have to invest in the proper energy infrastructure. Arguing about what energy infrastructure is proper is a good way to make sure we are looking at all sides of this.
I’m not the one who downvoted you, but I understand where you’re coming from. I just think that both technologies are useful. Nuclear has clear advantages over all fossil fuels, so it would be a good thing to invest in. This would be in addition to solar, wind and battery farms.
Apparently most people from this assumed I was anti-nuclear, when actually I am just very pro-renewables. I don’t really have a problem with nuclear, not unless it is used improperly or inefficiently. I just recently had seen many arguments on lemmy where a lot of people seemed to be against using renewables in favor of nuclear.
It was such a unnecessary opinion that turned up so often on social media that I have to imagine it was seeded by mining companies.
Eh, classic problem. By the time we all realize something was actually a good solution and should be used, it’s time to move on. And some people don’t get that memo as quickly.
I feel indifferent. Nuclear is good way to do shitload of energy. Not sure about the small reactors
Not only a lot but STABLE energy.
and one of the most clean to boot, all the residue is accounted for and stored solid in big concrete barrels to decay until harmlessness
Well you still can’t meet normal demand with how unreliable renewables are.
We still need the good and cheap batteries that doesn’t exist yet for it to be viable as a baseline power source.
Hi! Your information is outdated and we very much have the technology necessary to meet energy demand with renewables.
It’s already a baseline source in many areas.
Tattorack@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Like crap? Renewables are good in places where they work. Nuclear works everywhere and is more reliable.
Investors pulling out of a nuclear project like this just looks like a, really dumb kneejerk reaction. “Oh! New shiny thing!”
Reptorian@lemmy.zip 6 months ago
This. Green energy works best when complimented with nuclear energy. Then, we can ween away from big oil.
IchNichtenLichten@lemmy.world 6 months ago
It’s the opposite. Nuclear outputs as close to 24/7 as possible, you can’t ramp it up and down to accommodate variable output from renewables for practical and economic reasons.
Uranium_Green@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
I mean you can vary it pretty significantly depending on the reactor type, but even if you couldn’t you can still put the energy to work in alternative ways, such as pumping water up into reservoirs/damns to generate energy at other points, or using the excess energy to split water. There are many ways to use excess energy.
Pipoca@lemmy.world 6 months ago
The problem with solar is that the sun doesn’t shine overnight. The good thing with that is that we use much less power overnight than we do during the day.
If you’re relying a lot on solar, you need to build a big-ass battery that you charge during the day and use at night.
Alternatively, you build a nuclear or gas plant sized to overnight usage and run them 24/7. Then, you build way smaller batteries to handle dispatchability and smoothing demand over the course of a day.
frezik@midwest.social 6 months ago
Nope, the writing was on the wall for almost a year on this one. The whole nuclear industry in general is a long history of cost and schedule overruns. This is more of the same. Investors are not dumb.
You can invest in a solar or wind deployment and have it running and producing revenue in six to twelve months. You can invest in nuclear with a stated schedule of five years, have it blow past that mark, needing more money to keep it going (or write the whole thing off), and then start actually getting revenue at the ten year mark. This isn’t mere speculation, it’s exactly what happens. Oh, and it’s producing at least half the MWh per invested dollar as that solar or wind farm.
It’s amazing anyone is putting any money into nuclear at this point. For the most part, they aren’t. The federal government has shown willingness to sign new licenses for plants. Nobody is buying.
SMRs do not appear to change any of this.
Now, something I think we should do is subsidize reactors that process old waste. Lots better than the current plan of letting it sit around, and probably better than storing it in a cave for millenia, too.
joel_feila@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Well the costs and schedule is a regulatory thing.
frezik@midwest.social 6 months ago
Even if that’s true, what are you going to do about it?
Say you do a whole lot of research, and conclude that loosening regulations x, y, and z will not impact safety in any measurable way, and will substantially reduce costs. Even detractors with scientific credentials agree this research is solid. Best case scenario, here.
NIMBYs will still kill it. What you just did is hand them a way to say “they are cutting corners using unproven methods to let their investors line their pockets at the expense of the lives of their workers and everyone who lives around it”.
They may be wrong, but their arguments in front of a government body can still be persuasive. They don’t have to be right, just vaguely plausible to people who aren’t experts. That will be enough to kill it.
You can’t beat NIMBYs by having the best argument. You need to plan around them. Don’t hand them a weapon before the fight begins.
PeterPoopshit@lemmy.world 6 months ago
3 people got killed by one of these like 60 years ago due to blatant design flaws that could’ve been solve. This means they can never exist again.
rambaroo@lemmy.world 6 months ago
That is massively understating the damage Chernobyl did as well as the number of people who died from cancer and radiation poisoning, to the point of sheer dishonesty.
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Also remember that time that they wanted to test a safety system so they disabled the other safety systems and the protocols said they should have shut down the reactor instead of doing the test due to other factors but they did the test anyways and it exploded? Oh and their “emergency off” button was actually an “emergency increase power then off” button. Clearly there’s no way to do these things safely.
PeterPoopshit@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I was talking about the one that exploded in Idaho. It was a “small” reactor. Thr control rods were moved by hand.
Clearly there was nothing they could have done to avoid human error /s