Can somebody please explain why the world hasn't gone nuclear yet?

Submitted ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨naiki@slrpnk.net⁩ to ⁨energy@slrpnk.net⁩

https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/e47d7a0d-78bc-4971-b3ad-8dc99f8d4b8a.jpeg

I mean im guessing its because it may not be as profitable, or atleast at first, boycotts or directly just capitalism fucking everything up? i legit always imagine aliens seeing us still use coal while having DISCOVERED IN 1932

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Allero@lemmy.today ⁨24⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
Initially, world war very nuclear-positive

Then, Idaho, Chernobyl and much later Fukushima happened, slowly turning the world against nuclear as a dangerous energy production option. Association with nuclear weapons and Cold War didn’t help, either.

In the meanwhile, renewables like solar and wind, which were initially prohibitively expensive, got more traction and investment, and as a result of new developments and economies of scale, they eventually managed to become cheaper than nuclear in most areas of the world, rendering nuclear power financially inefficiny and thus generally obsolete.

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jagermo@feddit.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Its a type of energy that gets more expensive

Hard to get insurance, so all costs fall to the states while all profits go to companies

Trash is not solved

A minor error can have a huge environmental impact, especially in densly populated areas like Europe

Plants need cooling, most use rivers and that does not mix well with rising temperatures, and have to be shut down in summer

No public backing

High initial costs, high costs so run, high costs to dismantle

Nuclear plants are not flexible and can’t react to energy availability

Most fuel is produced by less reliable states. Renewable energy is produced in your home country.

No chance of decentralizing the grid, making it a target for single point of failures or attacks (State sponsored or terrorism)

Solar is cheaper, battery parks are cheaper, hydrogen is cheaper, wind is cheaper, hydro is cheaper.

All in all, there are cheaper ways to create and store more energy safely, more decentralized and with less ties to single big companies.

Money is no issue, because if we have billions to throw at one plant, we obviously have enough for a smarter grid with storage options.

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- keepthepace@slrpnk.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Its a type of energy that gets more expensive
  
  We choose to make it so. Constantly adding security features and not financing research. It could have gone done has well if we had pushed for small reactors, helped the EPR more, not shut down the research into plutonium as a fuel…
  
  Trash is not solved
  
  It is inert and a lot of it has the potential to be a future fuel. “Put it in a hole below the water table” is pretty close to a solution.
  
  A minor error can have a huge environmental impact, especially in densly populated areas like Europe
  
  It will be hard to be as impactful as coal or thermal engines, which are considered to be responsible for about 48 000 premature deaths yearly here in France. If nuclear energy allowed a country to decarbonate, it could “afford” a Chernobyl per year and still save lives.
  
  Plants need cooling, most use rivers and that does not mix well with rising temperatures, and have to be shut down in summer
  
  That’s simply not true. Every year journalists fall for it but here is a breakdown:
  
  Every year some plants undergo planned maintenance in summer, not because it is too hot but because there is less consumption (winter heating is when the peak is)
  
  Some plants do lower their outputs, the most they had to do it so far was by 0.2% of the total output of the country because of environmental regulations that basically forbid any heating of the water above certain temperatures.
  
  It only touches plants that don’t have the iconic cooling towers. Plants with cooling towers do not warm rivers, in some case they may even cool them down.
  
  As long as there are liquid rivers, plants will be able to cool down. We will have much more serious problems before this becomes an issue.
  
  Nuclear plants are not flexible and can’t react to energy availability
  
  It can. As I am writing that, it is 1pm here, we are at 33GW of nuclear production, mostly because there is a lot of solar power and Germany is flooding us with electricity with negative energy. At 4am, we were at 42GW of nuclear. Image
  
  Most fuel is produced by less reliable states.
  
  Minerals are fungible, therefore consumers go for the cheapest. It usually means countries where semi-slavery is the norm and environmental regulations are not a thing. They do tend to be shitty countries yes. Non-fossil mineral resources however are found pretty uniformly over the globe (having mountains helps). There are uranium mines in France that we shut down because of labor cost.
  
  No public backing
  
  That’s the main problem. The above lies have been repeated ad nauseam and local opposition means that opening new nuclear plants is basically impossible. This is a policy and opinion problem mostly.
  
  I am bitter about it. The sane plan was to go full nuclear in the 90s, double the electricity production, get rid of coal and thermal vehicles that way and slowly transition over 40 years into solar as we either get batteries costs down or develop space based solar power.
  
  Now we are getting the transition but it was oil-fueled instead of nuclear-fueled and this choice was made by people misled into believing they defended the environment by fighting nuclear power.
  
  Yes, wind/solar + batteries is the future (though I don’t think these are cost competitive with nuclear yet. Solar alone is, batteries not) but opting out of nuclear was a very costly option for the climate.
  
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  - Lemmchen@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
    
    That’s simply not true. Every year journalists fall for it
    
    Direct quote from Axpo:
    
    Eine übermäßige Erwärmung des bereits warmen Gewässers soll in heißen Sommerperioden verhindert werden, um Flora und Fauna nicht zusätzlich zu belasten
    
    Translation: Excessive warming of the already warm water should be prevented during hot summer periods so as not to put additional strain on flora and fauna
    
    Source: tagesschau.de/…/atomkraftwerke-hitze-kuehlung-abg…
    
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- Angelusz@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  To summarize: it’s being suppressed to keep the fossil industry alive.
  
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- naiki@slrpnk.net ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  hmmmmmmmmmm u do have a point, but i mean lithium is running out and we need a constant influx of power (power grid, no batteries) like with nuclear, we could never afford to use batteries for all the energy in the planet. also i THINK that hydro disturbs the ecosystem (fish n stuff cant get through) but im not sure how true that is considering that they can always just open a gate for fish to pass, like with that online dorbell.
  
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  - Lemmchen@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
    In Germany we already often have more energy than we can use and wind turbines have to be shut down so the power grid doesn’t get overwhelmed. What we need most right now (here in Germany) is more grid expansion and not necessarily more energy production. Also, not every store of energy has to be lithium batteries.
    
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FartMaster69@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Both the association with nuclear weapons and several high profile nuclear accidents worked to shape public perception negatively towards nuclear power.

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- Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  And the tiny tiny matter of it never having been economically viable. Both the R&D and construction were massively subsidised by the state. Then the corporations were allowed to skim off the profits while the nukes were running. After that the state gets stuck with the bill for decommissioning. It’s always been a racket. The only reason “civilian” nuclear power exists is as a fig leaf for nuclear armament.
  
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  - anton@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    
    The only reason “civilian” nuclear power exists is as a fig leaf for nuclear armament.
    
    I don’t think post war Germany had the delusion of their own nukes. Here the nuclear industry just exists to shuffle public money into private pockets.
    
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- WolfLink@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Also propaganda and lobbying by fossil fuel industries.
  
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  - FartMaster69@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Of course.
    
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- vivalapivo@lemmy.today ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  As if the public decides anything
  
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  - FartMaster69@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    If that was the case propaganda wouldn’t be necessary.
    
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schmorpel@slrpnk.net ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I guess I have to keep asking every time this shit idea of nuclear as green energy pops up: where to put the waste? Have we figured that out yet? Or will we continue hiding that stuff somewhere and hoping it stays there? 20 years ago I joined the protests in this location, where they were going to store nuclear waste in an abandoned salt mine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorleben_salt_dome

Despite thousands of people blocking roads the train full of nuclear waste arrived anyways. Guess what, briefly after that (or who knows, they probably knew anyways) they found the salt mine wasn’t such a great idea. And now that shit sits there in some storage building waiting for an accident to happen. Maybe Russia wants to drop a drone onto it when they feel like it, or in time the whole thing just gets abandoned because nobody has money to care anymore.

Only way to make energy green is degrowth, so spending less of it. Every single way of producing energy is damaging to the environment, and inventing new stuff or rebranding old stuff as “green” isn’t going to change it. They tear up the country I live in for lithium and the people can’t grow their gardens anymore, common lands are now filled with wind power and the people cannot send their herds onto the mountain anymore, they produce fuel out of maize and large areas of monoculture now grow fuel instead of food, huge areas of agricultural land are being filled with solar panels. It all causes damage, just stop spending so much energy. Don’t produce shit nobody needs, switch the fucking AI off, stay at home and just relax.

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- halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  If you were to take all of that nuclear waste ever produced in the US, processed and stored inside dry cases, it would fit within an American football field less than 100 ft high. That’s an insanely tiny amount of space for all the waste ever created for an entire type of energy production. For some comparison the amount of coal removed from the ground each year would form a cube over a mile wide.
  
  However, most nuclear waste is low level waste and decays within a decade or less. Some of the medium level waste lasts a few decades. The longer stuff is a small fraction of overall waste. But some of it can be reprocessed and used as fuel again. It is also perfect for the starter fuel for some Thorium-based nuclear breeder reactor designs. Some are useful for various nuclear medicines. Very little of it actually has no use whatsoever.
  
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- astropenguin5@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  As others kinda said, it take isn’t that much waste, especially compared to like coal ash. And it’s actually much safer too in dry casks. There are also bigger problems with nuclear than the waste, but thats not your question. The way to solve waste is a combination of:
  
  big ol fuckin hole in the ground (e.g. salt mine or similar, where it will get sealed in)
  
  molten salt reactors and other modern designs, which more completely use up the fuel. Old rod designs are actually like kinda really inefficient.
  
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- naiki@slrpnk.net ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  what are you suggesting tho, fossil is clearly and factually worse for the enviroment compared to nuclear, i mean do you know how big the earth is? sure radiactive waste may seem big and scary to you, but as halcyoncmdr mentioned earlier, it is really not that much of an issue, the earth is really big and we can just hide it really deep below, much better than putting shit in the atmosphere for us to suck into our lungs.
  
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Cornpop@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
People are scared and stupid.

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Lemmchen@feddit.org ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
US nuclear propaganda is strong with you guys.

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- halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Scientific education rather than emotional reactions to the unknown does that.
  
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  - naiki@slrpnk.net ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    where can i read more about this i dont know shit ngl
    
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Eyekaytee@aussie.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Well you can simply look at the rollout of renewables vs Nuclear in the UK

Image

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycNqII5HYMI

tldr: Nuclear power plants are expensive to build (complicated to build), expensive to run (need well trained staff to handle the complexities), the stuff that they run on (Uranium) isn’t easy to acquire, and on top of all this the waste product is difficult to dispose of, I believe in Germany for example when the power company shut down its Nuclear power plants it told the Germany government they can deal with the nuclear waste… so basically even though the german people get 0% of their power from nuclear power plants they pay every day to store the nuclear waste from previous ones that are no longer operational…

… and when things go wrong they REALLY go wrong

Coal on the other hand is relatively cheap, the technology is fairly simple, running them is fairly cheap, there’s no waste to get rid of etc

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- halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  
  Coal on the other hand is relatively cheap, the technology is fairly simple, running them is fairly cheap, there’s no waste to get rid of etc
  
  Well, the waste gets thrown into the atmosphere. And that coal ash contains radioactive waste. Radioactive particulates up to 10x more concentrated than the raw coal fuel are injected directly into the atmosphere and spread by the winds. You know, the actual dangerous part of those nuclear accidents everyone is always thinking about.
  
  scientificamerican.com/…/coal-ash-is-more-radioac…
  
  If a nuclear plant leaked even a fraction of that amount of radiation it would be shut down immediately. But all of that gets to be ignored, because it’s not a nuclear power plant.
  
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- apotheotic@beehaw.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  
  There’s no waste to get rid of
  
  It just flies up into the atmosphere for free, indeed
  
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iii@mander.xyz ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
In Europe I think it’s mostly because of fear and fearmongering by consrrvative groups such as greenpeace.

They argue from an emotive point of view: nuclear energy feels unnatural, scary, industrial. Gas power generation on the other hand is the same old familiar technology, the enemy we know, with externalities we all seem to accept already.

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- anton@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  It is also massively uneconomical. Even with existing subsidies, like free insurance and long term storage, plant operators don’t want to keep going.
  
  Modern day nuclear advocates are like the Japanese soldiers in the 70s refusing to admit the war was lost decades ago.
  
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  - astropenguin5@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Tbh I’d still rather have something economically unviable funded by my taxes than pumping CO2 into the air. And it’s not really that much of an either or thing with renewables, both can/should be done but the important thing is to stop subsidizing fossil fuels (which are to this day highly subsidised which makes the comparison even worse)
    
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rizzothesmall@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Propaganda in favour of the wildly profitable fossil fuel industry

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- BroBot9000@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  This! Even the Simpsons is guilty of it.
  
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rimu@piefed.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents

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- Thorry84@feddit.nl ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  There has to be more to the story than that, as medical tools using radiation have had terrible accidents, but are still used a lot all over the world. And for example every day there are terrible accidents with motorcycles and in some countries that’s basically the primary mode of transportation for most people.
  
  The true story has to be a bit more complex and nuanced?
  
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  - Lemmchen@feddit.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    There’s no alternative for medical instruments and riding a bike is a voluntary choice. Sitting in a radiation cloud because Chernobyl had a meltdown isn’t one.
    
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- naiki@slrpnk.net ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  higher ups 100% look past the fearmongering of chernobyl and other accidents, nuclear is the safest compared to the many accidents that occur in solar, wind etc (if you look past the accidents which just dont happen nowadays, also considering that china has literally made a reactor that is physically impossible to meltdown)
  
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solo@slrpnk.net ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
This is a video about Europe (mostly Germany and France), not the world as you asked, but I think it includes some answers to your question.

Why Germany Hates Nuclear Power - Real Engineering (19:37)

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- naiki@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  thanks, i mean i dont really think we should just have nuclear yk, but i wish it was the main power source, although the only issue i really have is that if i personally would love a more decentralized power grid, how could that ever be acomplished with nuclear energy? its not like we can just have mini reactors, right?
  
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vivalapivo@lemmy.today ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Full disclosure: I am not from the industry

Yes, fear mongering is a factor. If you are a political power that opposes the nuclear, you can win a couple of points.

Dependency on a major player. You can’t just build a nuclear plant as a country. It’s a multinational project and even countries like Turkey rely on countries like Russia for building a plant. The choice is not that wide also: France, China, Russia, or the US.

Then, you need to buy fuel from these players. There are a couple of examples where the plants were partially rebuilt to work on fuel from another country, but the drive was always political AFAIK: Ukraine and Finland made themselves independent of Russia’s nuclear supply.

It’s a long project with sky-high investment at the start and zero to no profit. It should be politically motivated. Like even in Russia I know of 2.5 newly built nuclear plants since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Others were upgrades of existing plants which require less money. But Russia builds nuclear in Turkey, Egypt, and Bangladesh.
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- claimsou@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  To point 2. South Korea can be added tot the list.
  
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  - vivalapivo@lemmy.today ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    TIL.
    
    Man, they have a broad nuclear program. Such a tiny country covered with rice fields
    
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