I’m pro nuclear-power technology, but anti nuclear power as a capitalist or state-owned tool. And unfortunately, it’s only ever going to be the tool of states in the current world, so functionally I’m against it.
But if small groups could be setting up SMRs for their communities, that would be awesome.
Context: I’m currently doing a PhD in nuclear engineering
Hard-line advocates of nuclear power usually point to its role as a ‘baseload’ generation, but this term is often misused. A lot of people use it as if it means “reliable power on demand” as opposed to wind and solar which is not (without batteries). But baseload generation generally refers to plants with unvarying output that provide the minimum energy consumption of the grid, so that other (varying output) energy sources can be turned up or down to make up the deficit.
The “unvarying” part is very important for nuclear power. Conventional nuclear plants (PWRs/LWRs) really hate when you vary their power output. This is because varying heat and radiation flux through the fuel rod cladding causes a “racheting” effect which accelerates the swelling of fuel pellets against them leading to formation of cracks in the surface oxide, which can propagate into the bulk metal if power goes up and down too often, leading to rupture of the fuel rod cladding (which is bad). Anything below 85% power output for longer than 2 weeks is classed as extended reduced power operation (ERPO) and should be minimised - typically it is done for maintenance purposes.
This is important because it influences how much of your energy production can actually come from nuclear. France for example generates something like 75% of its electrical power from nuclear, but this is only possible because they are surrounded by countries which import a lot of energy (i.e. Germany and the UK), so they can offload excess power there and avoid putting their plants into ERPO. If Germany and the UK had similarly high amounts of nuclear, the system would not work and a lot of plants would experience reliability issues.
All this is to say, nuclear is an excellent energy source for making up a large, unvarying chunk of energy production (say, ~30%) but anything much more than that can cause more problems than it solves. One power source which can provide reliable on-demand time-varying energy is… batteries! Which is one of the reasons that recent advances in battery + solar are so exciting to me. A power grid made up of solely nuclear and renewables working together to meet time-varying demand is now completely plausible. So we dont have to choose between nuclear or renewables per se, we just have to deploy each in a way that suits its own merits.
Might I just add that nuclear isn’t exactly dealing with climate change and water shortages that well.
It’s something I never really thought about, but plenty of nuclear plants have faced climate related issues in recent years, and been forced to shutdown or reduce output.
Also, in an age of drone warfare, decentralised power production is potentially also a huge plus.
This is true. We hear about it happening a lot in mainland europe because there are a lot of inland reactors relying on rivers/reservoirs, however coastal reactors aren’t vulnerable in the same way. Climate change certainly isn’t making nuclear obsolete, but it definitely changes the way we need to think about cooling systems
Of course, coastal reactors are vulnerable in other ways. Climate change can exacerbate extreme weather events. It’s the annoying thing about lots of stuff, you only really find out what goes wrong, when it goes wrong.
Unknown unknowns, as some arsehole once put it.
Also, coal contains small amounts of uranium and thorium which gets concentrated in the fly ash. Fly ash which then gets spread across the area surrounding the power plants. So I’m certainly not saying nuclear is obsolete or particularly dangerous compared to alternatives like coal.
What about nuclear + storage (pumped hydro, batteries) then? That should let you up the baseload a bit right.
Absolutely! Though in practice battery storage tends to be more economical with renewables as the excess is higher (so electricity is cheaper) and storage time is shorter (as upping nuclear baseload would require you to account for differing long-term demand between seasons)
Pro. If you consider how absolutely minuscule the risks are (keep your regulatory bodies free of corruption, guys), all political criticism looks uninformed and performative, answers in this thread included.
Imagine an anti-vaxx hippie: presents as progressive, gushes of pointless contrarianism, easily exploitable by the estabilishment*. That’s how I see the nuclear power-“critics”, both here and elsewhere.
* E.g.: I consider the Green Party of Switzerland the epitome of counter-productive performative idiocy ever since they’ve been campaigning for replacing our NPPs with gas turbine plants. Fuckin’ 🤡s the lot of them.
I am pro nuclear energy. It’s the most efficient way to generate sustainable electricity in abundance in the smallest amount of space.
We’re not running out of space. That’s a strange thing to use as a decider.
Same opinion here. It’s basically a gas well boiler plant without the CO2. The reason we don’t have more of it is due to politics surrounding transporting nuclear waste.
Pro, I think a lot of the anti-nuclear sentiments are leftovers from when nuclear power was not as heavily regulated as it is now.
Now it’s basically impossible for a meltdown except for if a literal natural disaster happens, and sometimes even then
And it’s a very clean energy source, with the one problem of what to do with the radioactive waste, but there is far less waste than fossil fuels, and it’s easier to get rid of.
I’m nominally pro, or maybe passively anti while cheaper, more scalable, and cleaner sources are at hand. If you’re already going full wind, solar, and geo and there’s still a rationale for a nuclear plant, I’m open to it. But that’s a big fat if.
The thing with nuclear power is that it’s FAR easier to convert a fossil fuel generator to nuclear than it is to convert it to green or to build a new one.
And yes, I agree, we need more green, but we first need to kill off all the fossil fuel options.
Although you are right in the sense that nuclear produces steam, I am not aware of any instance of this having been done. The steam turbine is such a small part of a nuclear plant.
In my view nuclear is best as a baseline production and heat production method. The baseline part may reduce as grid batteries smooth out the volatile production of the renewables.
Coal-to-Nuclear is actually pretty common, LINK
As a society, it’s easier to do everything at once rather than one thing at a time. Edit: The difference with nuclear is that it’s so much more expensive than other green options that spending on it now takes significant potential kwh out of the grid if it is given equal funding priority.
I’m against nuclear because it’s too expensive and there is no proper place to store the depleted material.
There’s plenty of places?
And do remember, it’s taking what was already a dangerous material, processing it to be less dangerous, and then putting it somewhere safe
Look, I’m pro nuclear power, but the “already dangerous material” is not naturally more dangerous than spent fuel. We concentrate and enrich natural radioactive materials to turn them into nuclear fuel, and in that process make them incredibly dangerous. So yes, nuclear byproducts are less dangerous than e.g. freshly-enriched Uranium, but not than raw ore sitting in the ground, and not mining those ores and enriching them is always a choice that’s available. Also, there are byproducts which are not less dangerous, that are created as part of nuclear fission, like iodine-131, which does not occur naturally at all.
Didn’t say it was.
Unlike where we store all the CO2, plenty of room for that in our atmosphere.
Pro, but renewables do deploy way faster so we do want those renewables to be running while we wait for the nuclear plants to be constructed.
Turning off fossil fuel burning plants is the priority
As someone who has done quite a bit of work on power systems (in the New Zealand context) recently.
You have to consider any energy generation technology in the environment it is going to be deployed in.
Whilst I am generally pro-nuclear; as a technology. It doesn’t really work as a deployable energy system in comparison to other forms of generation; especially here in NZ. There are three main reasons for this:
- Cost in both time and money to construct nuclear is far too high.
- Industry to support nuclear doesn’t exist in NZ. Expert techs, operators, fabricators etc are not here; we would need to build an industry alongside building the first plant.
- Regulatory framework to enable nuclear generation is almost nonexistent. We have medical isotope framework; as a basic way to work with radiological material.
- Bonus challenge; we would have to import all the fuel.
Countries with existing nuclear industries and power plant have a much easier time; but when comparing the cost in time and money to get the first GWh out of a nuclear generator; it is a hard sell.
One major advantage nuclear has over other forms of generation is physical footprint; effective power density is absolutely massive. To get similar power density in renewable generation, the only thing close would be the in development supercritical geothermal power; though nuclear would still have higher power density and is not geographically constrained.
Maybe things will change in the future. Maybe small modular reactors will eventuate in an easy to deploy way; or the developments in Chinese thorium reactors will pan out to a viable generation tech. But technology is not the only stumbling block that nuclear energy faces; especially in a small country that doesn’t have an existing nuclear industry.
I know there is a lot of money being thrown at fusion; and that may change the game entirely, it is an interesting time to be looking at energy systems.
NZ is earthquake and volcano prone, not ideal for nuclear.
I’m amazed at how level headed and straight forward the arguments are presented across a rather large variety of instances!
Also, against. Renewable + Battery + grid is the way to go. Connect every power source and distribute the energy. Include redundancy because energy is important.
Im pro nuclear power as long as it is cost effective.
Renewable solar and wind with backup batteries is by far the least expensive power supply at the moment.
Anything contradicting the previous sentence is a complete lie that was spread by liars with money to gain.
I used to be anti-nuclear in the past but I realized a lot of the talking points were either wrong or directly favoring the fossil fuel companies. 100% for Nuclear and renewable energy.
Anti, pro arguments only work in comparison to coal which is a low bar. We frankly simply have not solved the waste issue. I study chemistry and yes, the amounts are tiny, but some isotopes in waste have half lives longer than any structure we can build would last and scaling up nuclear would scale up this problem before it’s solved (just like we did with greenhouse gases). Also it’s objectively more expensive than any renewable source, as multiple independent studies have found.
Pro unless you want to build one in a 15 mile proximity of my house then I get cold feet
The security problem ruins the amazing tech. In an age of terrorism and drones, the risk isn’t acceptable. The same goes for hydro unfortunately, which is my fav energy form (I like watermills).
Nation states will choose uranium / plutonium reactors so that they can abuse nuclear power for weapons grade material generation. But we already have nuclear proliferation. Cat’s out of the bag. Given that nuclear is a huge win in almost every other way, I’m pro-nuclear even in the context of nation states.
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