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Spicy Air ☢️
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/68257855
Nuclear is the best btw.
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this post was submitted on 05 May 2026
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Forcing nuclear down our throats while renewables are a thing is so wild. And people actually defend nuclear.
You want mining of sparse minerals by workers in inhuman conditions? Check
You want a contamination which will exist for longer than the oldest human build structure? Check (because the barrels you made made indestructible, just dont test this pls)
You want centralized energy way more expansive than solar or wind? Check
There are literally no upsides of nuclear against renewables and a battery.
There's a lot of fossil fuel money pushing the nuclear cart. Nuclear plants take enough time to build that they are a good enough delay against renewables for the current crop of fossil fuel executives
It's nice that the pro-nuke comments replying to you are gathering down votes
Bruh.
Nuclear is capable of generating a ton of energy right besides where is used, renewables have to be transmitted absurdly long distances in most cases.
And mining is every day more automated, sending robots to dig down the materials, and even then, is not like renewables don't need mining also lol.
And yes, they test it, here they're smashing a train full speed to one of the canisters to test it's safety
That's beside the point. Nuclear isn't sustainable on the long run, period.And solar can potentially generate all the electricity needed and more by itself.
it isn't, transmission is a complex thing to do lol, my country had a full blackout last year because a cascading failure caused by a transmission line.
Nuclear fuel will last long enough for us to both have nuclear fission and the capacity to space mine materials.
solar doesn't work in places that don't have land available to be turned into solar farms, here in chile they do a lot of solar, and cool melted salt solar too, but is far north in the Atacama and they have to bring it in, wich is a huge bottle neck, A nuclear power plant in Santiago would relieve a lot the strain in the grid.
Yes, transmission is a complex thing to do, and that's why more funds should used to improve research in that direction, rather than wasting hundreds of billions on ticking time bombs, so that mining company owners can get richer while making us sicker.
1 hour of sunlight that hits the sunlit hemisphere, contains enough energy to satisfy the needs of the whole planet for 1 year. That's how much solar is better than nuclear.
I really can't believe that in 2026, the idea of generating energy by boiling water, is still considered "advanced tech" just because they wanna use a different fuel. Lol
And no, solar doesn't need land.
Solar still uses boiling water, thermosolar at least, that has a lot of benefits over the photovoltaic cell, as it can generate energy steadily and even trough the night, here in chile they built cerro dominador, quite impressive thing.
it depends on the geography of the place, in my country it would be reasonably a huge challenge to build farms over the sea because of the geography of here (it's like a underwater cliff)
and still, I'm heavily pro renewables, but that doesn't I won't be pro nuclear also, both are crucial tech to de-carbonize the world.
Photovoltaic is the future, it'sprettyy much unarguably the only technology that can create energy without moving parts or without any sort of burning.
You don't get any more futuristic than this. The only problem with photovoltaic and wind is that they've been actively boycotted.
Here in the UK energy providers habitually stop their own wind turbines just because otherwise the price of energy will get too low. That's how fucked up the system is. And nuclear is nothing more than an astute way for these capitalist pigs in control of the energy sector to keep making money from something that should be free already.
I fully agree that solar will be the majority of electricity produced in the near future, but photovoltaic has the disadvantage of following the sun, and honestly, chermical batteries aren't really the solution (and I'm saying this when my country is one of the biggest lithium producers in the world) Gravity batteries are, but surprise surprise, they are water turbines and water pumps lol, they will last way longer than a chermical battery anyways.
Thermosolar has the molten salt as a buffer between the sun and the electricity, you can use it to produce energy steadily, even in the night, wich solves the problem of having to build gravity damns and the associated risk of them.
I'm confident studying mech, because it isn't going away anytime soon.
and yeah, I full agree that we need to reform the power grid and enact at least partial statization.
but still, nuclear is a good tech that can produce clean energy right where is needed, we shouldn't discard it just because renewables are quite O.P.
The key is cost. Renewables and batteries are cheaper over any time period than thermal, much cheaper than any boiling water generator
the case for grid-scale batteries is getting stronger every month:
the more people driving EVs the more used EV batteries will become available… EVs require a pretty good energy density, but grid storage can buy up a bunch of dirt cheap EV batteries with 60% capacity and call it a day, and then onsell them for recycling in 10 years for exactly the same price (because the raw materials are the same: recyclers don’t care if the battery has 100% or 60% or 50% max capacity)
other battery tech is also getting much more interesting, like sodium batteries. they don’t have the energy density of lithium, but they’re more durable and have less fire risk. they’re pretty ideal for grid-scale storage, and when commodities of scale kick in with them they’re likely to become pretty common in grid storage and prices and usefulness just gets better from there
also, afaik gravity batteries aren’t really being used… the most common thing these days looks like it’s going to be flywheels, but using them more like capacitors: smoothing out load spikes and maintaining grid frequency (which with PV can go downhill fast)
I agree with most of the comment, but it really bothers me people still call nuclear "clean", it isn't, its the opposite. Yes no co2, but the effects of burnt nuclear fuel are way worse. Yes the crisis comes slower than the current climate crisis but it last for way longer and is way harder to manage.
Co2 I. The atmosphere in large amounts is bad for humanity, no question, we should stop that, but with co2 we at least have an advanced ecosystem which will bring the co2 levels down relatively quickly on human time scales if we stop emitting before the ecosystem is irreparable damaged, with nuclear we dont. There us exactly one way to get rid of radioactive waste, and that is to wait till it stops radiating by itself, magnitudes longer than it takes for co2 to get absorbed by plants.
No one has done solar thermal for a decade. Your position is so out of date.
There are floating wind generators
You seem ill informed
you would be wrong, cerro dominador on chile started operations recently.
I
Renewables for my house are on my roof. That's not far. My nearest solar farm is ten kilometres away, which is also close.
Bruh
Renawbles are capable of generating a ton of energy manageable distances from where they are used in most cases, even for the cases which they are not it is orders of magnitudes cheaper and better for environment if you make green hydrogen, ship it to where its needed and convert it back into current where you need it considered the absurd amounts of time and cost it takes to manage nuclear waste. Not even considering the cost to mine and ship nuclear fuel, build the reactor and safely dispose of it at the end of its lifespan as its miniscule compared to maintain any sort of storage building for a time longer than the time between humanitys first building and now.
Mining is mostly done by people living under slave like conditions in poor countries. Even thinking having a energy source which needs to CONTINUOUSLY BURN MINED RECOURCES to keep outputting any energy at all is superior to a energy source which NEEDS MINED RESOURCES ONCE TO CONTINUOUSLY output energy until broken by external forces shows the absurdity of your argument
Solar panels need silicium (literally sand) and bor, apart from some plastics and structural metal and glass. Those are way easier and cleaner to mine then radioactive materials, and bor is needed in really small amounts, AND IT DOESNT GET BURNED, YOU CAN REUSE IT.
3.Thinking that smashing a train against something tells you anything about the properties of a material when exposed to time spans of degradation many orders of magnitude bigger than the time humans even started researching material properties....I dont even know where to start with this "argument" its bs on so many levels
Im not a nuclear bro, but a vast majority of the planet's Uranium is mined in Australia and Canada and both countries have pretty massive reserves. They have strict regulations and safety surrounding uranium operations. Naturally occurring uranium doesnt even pose much safety risk on its own, its the Radon that is generated by decay that causes problems for humans. Im not too familiar with how uranium mining is done but I imagine Radon risks can be mitigated pretty effectively with ventilation.
About the point 2.
I live in a thinrd world country, and it angers me to no end when they try to take this moral stand when a lot of times they're the ones who didn't let us all develop in the first place lol.
My country depends on it's mining industry, the biggest copper mining country in the world and i think the 2nd on lithium, they say it's the wage of chile, most of the copper is extracted by the State owned CODELCO, wich money goes to schools and hospitals, and even the one who is mined privately is taxed and has to pay royalties that go to help the people.
Miners aren't even poorly paid for Chilean standards, and they have benefits, they're strongly unionized lol, and mines here have an extremely high tech level, making people don't have to go to risky places, a lot of mines are totally automated, where robots extract the material and take it out, while their operators sit comfortably in a control room in the city.
So don't come to lecture me on these "poor people in third world countries" because you know nothing, you are a firstworlder who had benefited from colonization and political meddling in our affairs, now that we're finally advancing, and making a better country for ourselves, you come to say this thing? Bruh.
i agree with the anti-nuclear, but the mining conditions are really far less of a problem with uranium… canada and australia are #2 and #4 in the world respectively
uranium is relatively plentiful, and hugely energy-dense so most places have some that’s viable to extract, and it’s not worth cheaping out on costs to save a couple of $ buying from slave mines given the potential backlash
i actually wouldn’t be surprised if uranium mining is one of the best jobs in the developing world because if they actually want to sell their product they’d have to market their working conditions
Not true. Nuclear works 24/7 without the need for battery storage and the cost and environmental damage associated with manufacturing batteries. Plus, it can be dialed up and down in response to demand.
We need to use all available tools to replace fossil fuels ASAP. Renewables and nuclear.
Where's an example for an operating nuclear power-plant that can be dialed down to match demand?
Afaik they have lots of momentum (for days even), and even their propenents argue for them being critical for providing a base supply^1^. Never have I heard anyone claiming they'd be good for matching fluctuating demand. Can you back that up?
Or are you getting your anti-reneweblaes lobbying talking points mixed up? That argument is usually used for natural gas plants.
^1^ which doesn't make sense in a renewables dominated grid.
The closer the rods are to each other, the more collisions occur per unit time, and the more heat is generated.
That's a super basic view on the science of nuclear power. As an engineer, I need a lot more than that, because it needs a lot more to put basic principles into working projects.
So, is there a nuclear powerplant, that exists outside of some powerpoint slides, that is actually used to match fluctuating generation from other energy sources and/or fluctuating demands?
All of the ones I know are/were used to provide a base supply by running more or less 24/7 at their designated output, not least because they need to do that to be even somehow economically feasible.
They do it in France. The term to google is “load following” nuclear power plants. All new ones have the capability.
Most are used for base load power generation, but this is for economic reasons (getting your money’s worth out of an expensive-to-build facility), not technical feasibility.
Natural gas is a cheaper load following alternative, but that isn’t an option when we’re talking about replacing fossil fuels.
Kudos for a measured response to my sometimes snarky tone.
https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2021/12/technical-and-economic-aspects-of-load-following-with-nuclear-power-plants_30eb3b02/29e7df00-en.pdf
I only had the time to read the executive summary of this thing, but I learned a bit more about nuclear power plants.
It's still not enough for me to evaluate how well that can integrate with a grid dominated by renewables (can the load following be fast enough, to match wind and solar fluctuations) but still good to know more.
You got mislead my dude. Probably because there's lot of propaganda for nuclear as it is needed to offload costs of building nuclear weapons, so especially USA, France and China are campaigning hard.
We dont need another finite fossil resource oligarchs can use to control us, we need to change societies habits so it complies with energy production. For the actually relevant parts its easy enough to store the energy. Batteries are not the only possibility, water elevation, hydrogen, pressure cells just to name a few. But even if batteries were the only ones, it's still worth manufacturing them compared to the costs of managing nuclear waste for timescales longer than human build structures exists.
Did a medieval person know what wages today would be? No Do you know what the nuclear end storage would cost in 1000 years? No But even for the time we can for see, in the best case scenario its an economically bad decission, in the worst case we poison the whole planet to a degree where no human life can exist.
nuclear costs a shit load of money up front and has such massive NIMBY pushback… it’s great for the fossil fuel industry to argue for because it’s politically impossible to actually implement: we need more nuclear! stop with all the renewables! leads to only 1 thing… talk about nuclear and no more renewables
meanwhile, batteries really don’t produce much environmental damage… that’s just straight up misinformation… and the bonus with batteries is nice the materielsd are mined, you can recycle them back to brand new forever… you don’t have to keep mining all the lithium; just enough to keep up with new capacity