Amazing how you get downvoted with no reply even though your comment is the truth. People who claim to be environmentalists who are also against nuclear energy are seriously dumb.
Fuel isn’t easy to source and will put us into a new dependency like gas did with russia. That’s not desirable.
Building a reactor takes a lot of time that we don’t have right now. We need to build that capacity and we need to build it fast.
Look at France and their shit show of new and old nuclear projects. The company building new reactors went insolvent because it’s insanely expensive and last year they had to regularly power down the reactors because the rivers used for cooling got too hot
There is still no valid strategy for securely containing the waste produced for the needed amount of time
The reason people don’t answer to that bs anymore is because it has been discussed to death with no new arguments on either side.
And the solution to that will not be nuclear power. Not in the near future because it takes too long to build and we need to cut CO2 now. And I’m also not convinced it’s a good long-term strategy based on the other points I’ve mentioned.
If we could magically build reactors in time with the needed capacity to replace coal and gas (which it doesn’t really btw starting and stopping nuclear plants takes way longer than necessary to react to demand changes) this would be a different discussion. But as it stands now it’s just a distraction from what we need to do: build renewable energy sources.
As I already said I do have a lot of concerns around nuclear power as a long term strategy that I do not see or at least see as less of a problem with renewable energy sources.
I don’t know about Europe as a whole but in Germany we did not shut down functional reactors. We shut down reactors of which no one knows how functional they are because no one checked that because they were scheduled to be shut down anyways.
And I’ll repeat again: discussing if this was a mistake is such a moot point it literally doesn’t matter now. It’s done. Discussing this again and again just takes up everyone’s time and energy without any productive outcome.
I don’t know about Europe as a whole but in Germany we did not shut down functional reactors. We shut down reactors of which no one knows how functional they are because no one checked that because they were scheduled to be shut down anyways.
That’s functionally the same thing. And it does matter to discuss. Even if you believe the ship has sailed in Germany, it hasn’t elsewhere, and Germany’s experience can be useful to learn from.
It’s not. Not knowing if something works is far removed from knowing something does in fact still work. Discussing this again and again with the same arguments on both sides is not fruitful. And it doesn’t help making any of the current decisions around our enery supply for the forseeable future.
The german solution was to build more coal power and shutter nuclear power and then pretend that by using accounting sleight of hand you had a “net-zero” carbon solution. But that’s bullshit.
That is true but that isn’t a constructive way of arguing about what we should be doing now to benefit the future. You can have the right of saying “told you so” if you need it so badly. I don’t really care. We need to solve this problem though and arguing about the chances nuclear could have had in the past is just distracting.
Sure but if we succeed at mitigating cimate change effects to a reasonable degree, civilization will survive for centuries, during which a reactor that uses itmight become available. It’s a minor problem blown out of proportion, as opposed to CO₂ emissions, which are the opposite.
Even if this were true this doesn’t help with the very real issue that we can’t build the nuclear capacity fast enough whereas renewable energy can be built fast, is already being built, and doesn’t have that problem that needs wishful thinking for it’s solution.
Because batteries aren’t as dangerous as reactors, are still making massive improvements on energy density and seem feasible to me. Doing anything useful with nuclear waste has been discussed for decades and no-one has come forward with any really promising results. The waste has been around for long enough if anyone could have done something productive with it it likely would have happened already.
Yeah I’m not convinced that just burying the stuff deep in a hole will do what I think is responsible. That shit stays dangerous for multiple thousands of years. That’s such a long timeframe that we cannot predict what’s going to happen to our society. It is very realistic that we lose the knowledge of the location or even the dangerousness of that stuff. Imagine future people stumbling into this and actually getting something like a curse from an old pharao by weird invisible forces that make you sick.
Another thing about this is that locations that are “good” candidates for this kind of storage are extremely rare. Germany has been looking for a suitable place for the last few decades and didn’t find any yet afaik. And the few places we might have are booked to be filled with all the old waste still sitting in intermediary storage.
Unless we have a reliable way of finding suitable storage places before we start producing more waste it will put us in the same situation we are in now, just worse.
Amazing how you get downvoted with no reply even though your comment is the truth. People who claim to be environmentalists who are also against nuclear energy are seriously dumb.
Answering from a German perspective:
Fuel isn’t easy to source and will put us into a new dependency like gas did with russia. That’s not desirable.
Building a reactor takes a lot of time that we don’t have right now. We need to build that capacity and we need to build it fast.
Look at France and their shit show of new and old nuclear projects. The company building new reactors went insolvent because it’s insanely expensive and last year they had to regularly power down the reactors because the rivers used for cooling got too hot
There is still no valid strategy for securely containing the waste produced for the needed amount of time
The reason people don’t answer to that bs anymore is because it has been discussed to death with no new arguments on either side.
And alas, we continue to put more CO2 into the air and the planet keeps warming.
And the solution to that will not be nuclear power. Not in the near future because it takes too long to build and we need to cut CO2 now. And I’m also not convinced it’s a good long-term strategy based on the other points I’ve mentioned.
If we could magically build reactors in time with the needed capacity to replace coal and gas (which it doesn’t really btw starting and stopping nuclear plants takes way longer than necessary to react to demand changes) this would be a different discussion. But as it stands now it’s just a distraction from what we need to do: build renewable energy sources.
watch us be repeating the same excuse in another 50 years. yes, nuclear takes a long time to build but that doesn’t mean we should just not do it.
also at the bare minimum we should not be shutting down functional reactors which is happening in europe.
As I already said I do have a lot of concerns around nuclear power as a long term strategy that I do not see or at least see as less of a problem with renewable energy sources.
I don’t know about Europe as a whole but in Germany we did not shut down functional reactors. We shut down reactors of which no one knows how functional they are because no one checked that because they were scheduled to be shut down anyways.
And I’ll repeat again: discussing if this was a mistake is such a moot point it literally doesn’t matter now. It’s done. Discussing this again and again just takes up everyone’s time and energy without any productive outcome.
That’s functionally the same thing. And it does matter to discuss. Even if you believe the ship has sailed in Germany, it hasn’t elsewhere, and Germany’s experience can be useful to learn from.
It’s not. Not knowing if something works is far removed from knowing something does in fact still work. Discussing this again and again with the same arguments on both sides is not fruitful. And it doesn’t help making any of the current decisions around our enery supply for the forseeable future.
You said:
If they weren’t scheduled to be shut down in the first place people would have known they worked.
The german solution was to build more coal power and shutter nuclear power and then pretend that by using accounting sleight of hand you had a “net-zero” carbon solution. But that’s bullshit.
No, that wasn’t the solution and it’s not what happened, coal is in decline in Germany since the 90s with a rather steep decline since 2018.
https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&interval=year&year=-1&legendItems=ly5y7&source=public
That is true but that isn’t a constructive way of arguing about what we should be doing now to benefit the future. You can have the right of saying “told you so” if you need it so badly. I don’t really care. We need to solve this problem though and arguing about the chances nuclear could have had in the past is just distracting.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository
Sure but if we succeed at mitigating cimate change effects to a reasonable degree, civilization will survive for centuries, during which a reactor that uses itmight become available. It’s a minor problem blown out of proportion, as opposed to CO₂ emissions, which are the opposite.
Even if this were true this doesn’t help with the very real issue that we can’t build the nuclear capacity fast enough whereas renewable energy can be built fast, is already being built, and doesn’t have that problem that needs wishful thinking for it’s solution.
Why do you not include city-scale energy storage as wishful thinking? Unlike nuclear reactors, that amount of storage doesn’t exist.
Because batteries aren’t as dangerous as reactors, are still making massive improvements on energy density and seem feasible to me. Doing anything useful with nuclear waste has been discussed for decades and no-one has come forward with any really promising results. The waste has been around for long enough if anyone could have done something productive with it it likely would have happened already.
How big would a battery need to be to power a single city of 1000000 for 1day?
Why would you want to do that? Do you fear that there might be absolutely pitch black days with absolutely zero wind?
Yeah I’m not convinced that just burying the stuff deep in a hole will do what I think is responsible. That shit stays dangerous for multiple thousands of years. That’s such a long timeframe that we cannot predict what’s going to happen to our society. It is very realistic that we lose the knowledge of the location or even the dangerousness of that stuff. Imagine future people stumbling into this and actually getting something like a curse from an old pharao by weird invisible forces that make you sick.
Another thing about this is that locations that are “good” candidates for this kind of storage are extremely rare. Germany has been looking for a suitable place for the last few decades and didn’t find any yet afaik. And the few places we might have are booked to be filled with all the old waste still sitting in intermediary storage.
Unless we have a reliable way of finding suitable storage places before we start producing more waste it will put us in the same situation we are in now, just worse.