As long we don’t have a way to deal with the nuclear waste, nuclear is not safe.
And even if we had a way to deal with this, Mining, preprocessing, building the reactor, running the reactor and treating the waste has to be cheaper than renewabls, which I doubt.
Last, but not least, building such powerplants takes years, if not decades, to build, which we do have. At the current rate of emission, we have less than 6 years left before we miss the 1.5°C target[1], which is way to short for any nuclear facility.
Vash63@lemmy.world 3 months ago
The problem isn’t function or safety, it’s cost. It isn’t cost effective to build or renovate a nuclear plant compared to wind or solar. If you have one in good condition, it makes sense to let it run its lifetime, but it makes little sense to build new.
Miaou@jlai.lu 3 months ago
Well it’s probably cheaper to keep coal plants running, if money is the metric we care about.
stoy@lemmy.zip 3 months ago
Standardization and modularity.
Yes, the first plant would be expensive, but the cost would drasticly go down once production gets under way.
Make the plant design modular as well, so if the plant it built next to water, it can use the water to discharge heat, and not need cooling towers.
This isn’t a huge problem.
poVoq@slrpnk.net 3 months ago
The problem is cost and time. Its all fine and dandy to say we just need to make it modular, but the required R&D for that will take many years and the you need to build up production capacity and actually install them.
If this were the 1990ties, I would agree, but it isn’t, so let’s please be realistic and focus on what can be done now, which isn’t modular nuclear reactors.
All you achieve by focussing on nuclear is letting the coal plants run at least a decade longer, while we do have better and cheaper alternatives right now that just need to be installed.
stoy@lemmy.zip 3 months ago
I am not blind to the issues with developing nuclear power, but nothing good will come from just standing still.
Start small scale development of nuclear power today, we will never get rid of baseload, and solar/wind can’t deal with it well enough, sure we could deply batteries and have solar/wind charge them up ahead of a still night, but batteries degrade, so you’ll soon need to rebuild them.
The environmental movement psycosis around nuclear power has caused immesurable harm to the planet, and I am quite distrustful of their evaluations of nuclear energy.
Here is a very interesting documentary from BBC Horizon from 2006, it concerns our fear of radiation: www.dailymotion.com/video/x7pqwo8
I don’t think it will be easy to restart nuclear energy construction, no, I know it will be dificult, but I don’t think it will be as dificult as the environmental movement claims.
bobtimus_prime@feddit.org 3 months ago
This study says otherwise: www.sciencedirect.com/…/S0360544223015980