Unfortunately this is an unpopular opinion and the other comments in the thread prove the average person thinks a nuclear power plant produces deadly products. It is literally thousands of times better for the environment than coal and gas plants. Replacing all coal and gas plants with nuclear energy would have an immediate positive impact on the environment. We also don't need to keep them forever. Eventually they'd be replaced with renewables.
A nuclear power plant does produce deadly products. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-waste-is-piling-up-does-the-u-s-have-a-plan/
A nuclear fusion power plant (up and coming) would produce zero net, but the energy needed is not yet sustainable. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-repeat-nuclear-fusion-breakthrough-in-a-step-toward-more-clean-energy-180982683/
However, I am not a professional, just a mere student. I think I'd agree that nuclear power overall, would be better now than coal or gas, but would be worse in the long run due to the residual pollution.
A nuclear power plant does produce deadly products.
Those potentially deadly products can be stored in a safe way. Your link doesn't even claim that it's actively killing people. They claim that it's costly to build geologic repositories, and once they're built you don't need more for a long time. Meanwhile coal power plants are directly putting deadly waste into people's lungs.
Take a look at this bar chart: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh
Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17876910/
I'm not sure if that's an unpopular opinion so much as a completely incorrect one.
The simple truth is that nuclear is fucking expensive and takes a long time to build.
Renewables and storage are much cheaper and take way less time to start producing energy.
Given this, why would you be in favor of nuclear? Please don't try and tell me about base load (not needed), SMRs (even more expensive) or fusion (not going to happen in our lifetimes)
Given this, why would you be in favor of nuclear? Please don't try and tell me about base load (not needed), SMRs (even more expensive) or fusion (not going to happen in our lifetimes)
Peak-load scaling. The major advantage that fossil fuel generators have is that you can spin them up faster to react to higher demand. You can't do that with solar or wind, but you can with nuclear.
If we had grid-scale storage solutions, dealing with peak load would be easier but it's still more cost effective to build pumped hydro storage than large battery arrays. Most electric grids have to produce electricity on-demand which means they have to be highly responsive.
We don't have good grid-scale storage yet. We need demand-responsive energy production. Fission is better than burning coal.
You can’t do that with solar or wind, but you can with nuclear.
That's why I said renewables and storage. There are lots of storage technologies such as pumped hydro and various kinds of battery that can react very quickly to increased demand. You categorically cannot do that with nuclear, where did you learn this?
Firstly, nuclear needs to run 24/7 as it's not economically feasible to do anything else given how much these things cost. Secondly, you're still heating water to create steam to drive turbines to generate electricity. All of that takes time to ramp up and means that nuclear is not used to generate in response to increased demand.
[...] react very quickly to increased demand. You categorically cannot do that with nuclear, where did you learn this?
This is not correct.
A Brief Survey of Load-Following Capabilities in Modern Nuclear Power Plants
Load-following NPPs in France claim power output ramps as much as 5%/min if necessary, though typical ramps are kept below 1.5%/min.
Certain French NPPs routinely decrease power output 50% at night.
It's true that load-following is mostly not done with nuclear in the US, but this is policy/common practice/habit, not a technical limitation of nuclear power plants.
Also, I mentioned pumped hydro storage to point out specifically that battery technology really isn't effective enough yet. It still doesn't scale well, it's too expensive for large grids.
Yes, but your assertion that renewable is cheaper completely ignored the cost of grid scale energy storage suitable to remove fossil fuel generation.
nuclear is fucking expensive and takes a long time to build
So what? Cost is relative to supply, demand, and political willpower. Also, I suspect it's much cheaper than carbon recapture.
Given this, why would you be in favor of nuclear?
I think you've lost the point entirely. The question is "what do we need to effectively generate electricity without fossil fuels?" Nuclear is one such answer. Heaven forbid we encourage the development of more than one thing at a time.
Cost is relative to supply, demand, and political willpower.
Cost is cost and with new nuclear you can add on a fair chunk to whatever amount is quoted because they often go way over budget.
Given renewables and storage is cheaper, why would you want to piss money away?
Heaven forbid we encourage the development of more than one thing at a time.
We're been developing nuclear for 70 years. In that time it's not got cheaper, in fact the opposite has happened. Time to let go.
To be fair, solar and wind are dependent on wind availability and solar availability year-round. Nuclear is buildable nearly anywhere. There are a lot of places other options aren't as possible or efficient.
mortality rate in deaths per thousand terawatt hour
if you disagree with OP, do some research and understand that you have been propogandized
I am 100% supportive of nuclear and still disagree with OP. Not supporting nuclear does NOT automatically mean you are not an environmentalist. That is just beyond stupid to me.
ok but i think there’s a big distinction between “not supporting” and being anti-nuclear energy, which is what OP actually said.
From your link:
How many lives were lost in these accidents?
So they are just looking at deaths from nuclear accidents, and not construction or mining? You would have to do the same for the others. What kind of wind and solar "accidents" are there (excluding construction and mining)? Was the sun or wind too powerful one day?
You're going to have to do better than that. Nuclear plants are guarded by barbed wire and guys with guns. Wind turbines are guarded by sheep. The solar panels on your roof are guarded by squirrels and crows. It's pretty obvious which one is more dangerous.
You’re going to have to do better than that.
No I’m not. You are moving the goalposts. The source of the article I linked specifically speaks to mortalities from accidents and air pollution. Asking that statistic to do overtime and somehow speak to mining fatalities is whataboutism and totally ignores that coal mining has exactly the same problem. Mining fatalities are significant and not to be ignored, but to cite them as a reason to prefer coal over uranium is foolish.
It’s pretty obvious which one is more dangerous.
Self-reporting that you didn’t even read the article lol. The cited graphic clearly indicates that more than 4x as many individuals have died from rooftop solar accidents, such as electricution and falls than have died from nuclear power, per unit of energy. Statistics like “look who is guarding the power source” are obscenely unfit to describe the situation in comparison to raw numbers of human deaths.
4x as many individuals have died from rooftop solar accidents, such as electricution and falls
Those are from installation and construction. Your statistic doesn't include construction deaths for nuclear plants. So the metric is biased. People fall doing any type of construction, including nuclear plants and solar panels.
Also, construction of solar panels has more deaths because of the workers involved. The "construction team" adding panels to your house may be just two guys on meth. If the same two guys worked on a nuclear plant, they would have equally high fatalities. If you used the construction workers from a nuclear plant to do a basic home solar panel installation, it would virtually eliminate fatalities due to better safety.
You can't prove your point with flawed metrics, no matter how many times you repeat yourself. Nuclear plants are expensive and require constant maintenance. Solar panels are literally mounted on top of elementary schools. They're cheap and easy to put up and take down. Wind turbines need a little more maintenance and construction but they are also simple compared to nuclear plants. These are facts.
Also, construction of solar panels has more deaths because of the workers involved. The "construction team" adding panels to your house may be just two guys on meth. If the same two guys worked on a nuclear plant, they would have equally high fatalities. If you used the construction workers from a nuclear plant to do a basic home solar panel installation, it would virtually eliminate fatalities due to better safety.
Even if every construction worker was hopped up on whatever you can imagine, it wouldn't even matter.
It takes 2 workers to install 10 kW in solar panels that (might) last 15 years. That's 75 kW-years of energy per construction worker.
It takes 1200 construction workers to build a 1000 MW reactor which will operate for (at least) 50 years. That's about 42 MW-years per construction worker, or 42000 kW-years per construction worker.
Nuclear construction could have over 500x the accident rate of rooftop solar installation and still be safer. Try again.
lol your meth comment made me lose all interest in this conversation. that was gross. im blocking you and standing by my words until someone who can actually cite a stat in good faith comes through, because i have based all my arguments off the best reasearch i can find and you have provided nothing but baseless assertions. take care ❤️
There are plenty of environmentalists with binary thought patterns. If they can’t have the perfect system now, they’d rather let it all burn.
Of course you can. Because nuclear energy is NOT a solution. Especially not in the long run.
This is accurate, however we can’t sacrifice good enough for the perfect we don’t have yet. I get there is no solution that lasts longer than a temporary one, but environmentally, nuclear absolutely should be implemented.
you make a weird assumption that a solution that can’t work forever won’t work as a transition strategy
This opinion is true, unpopular and truly unpolular.
Nicely done OP. This is the best post I've seen on this community on lemmy.
Also amusing how many ignorant and uneducated people are calling your take/nuclear energy "stupid" simply because they don't understand it.
"Nuclear = bad" is about as far as their level of thinking goes..
Nuclear waste = bad because we don't currently have a proper way to dispose of it. We bury it in a container with hopes that we'll find a way in the future.
IIRC we have 2 solutions 1 is what we currently use and the second is more or less the best but a tad expensive so we don't. (This is for the highly radioactive waste that has long decay and makes up about 1-3% of waste, the stuff we "worry" about)
The former is we mix the radioactive material with glass, ceramic, and concrete into large pieces and just leave em. Standing next to them you actually receive more radiation from the sun and they cannot be recovered into usable material because of how they are melted and mixed together.
The latter is more or less the same, but we dig, on site, an L shaped bore into the ground a long way into the earths crust where it can be stored indefinitely, is not recoverable, and can keep a site running for it's entire lifetime without filling the hole. You then fill in the hole at end of life and done. No harm to people, environment, or earth. Basically a DGR (Deep Geological Repository)
i don’t know if you checked in on what we do with excess matter from carbon fuels?
you are breathing it in right now 😌🤤😌
Logical fallacy: “you can’t claim to support $GENERAL_AREA and be anti-$MY_SPECIFIC_THING at the same time “? I’m sure there’s a name for that type of fallacy
No True Scotsman: defending an ingroup by excluding members that don't agree with a particular stance. A subset of the Appeal to Purity fallacy, which argues that someone doesn't do enough or have enough of some attribute to be included in a group. Other examples (deliberately inflammatory to cause a knee-jerk reaction to show how easy it is to fall into these things) would be "You can't be a good person and support Donald Trump for Persident" or "You can't support Palestine and still vote for Biden."
I don't agree with OPs statement, but I do agree with their sentiment. Nuclear energy is one of the best options available from an environmental standpoint to meet our baseline energy needs and supplement grids using non-persistant renewable loke wind and solar.
Bullshit, nuclear waste is incredibly toxic.
Yeah it’s a good thing we have clean burning gas and coal
There is this crazy new trend called renewables. Also, please quote the part where I supported fossil fuels.
It's not as toxic as coal. It is only that you are used to those effects. It's also a safer industry to work in. Technically safer even than wind and solar last I looked. I wouldn't treat it as a permanent solution. But it could keep the lights on while we pivot to renewables.
New Zealand says you can.
You can claim anything you want.
Also, nuclear power has a huge environmental impact, it just offsets that impact by generating a fuckton of electricity.
In an idea world, we would look to make existing devices more efficient, and use them more responsibly rather than just generate more power to offset those losses.
In the mind of the pro-nuclear advocate, they imagine oil and coal plants being decommissioned and beautiful, brand new super perfect never failing nuclear plants taking their place. In these dreams these nuclear plants are never made by the lowest bidder, are never under staffed or inadequately maintained, are never involved in war, are never targeted by terrorists, and are never struck by acts of God. These plants have perfect supply chains whose materials are exactly as durable as described and never less. They are run by people that will, quarter after quarter, year after year, never take shortcuts for profit or make decisions that will negatively affect the plant or the people working there. You see, even the capitalists are perfect little angels in this perfect plan that makes perfect sense.
Because what they're selling is a perfect version of a perfect nuclear plant. All inputs and outputs are perfect with the very small exception of the nuclear waste of course, which they have a perfect answer for as well. You see, we will perfectly store and perfectly wait for a perfect answer to our perfectly nightmarish waste product from our perfect energy source.
hey bro its cleaner than oil hey bro we could get rid of coal hey bro it's super safe that's why my plan calls for it to be built in South Dakota
No thanks. We don't need to jump out of the frying pan and into the fire to prove our environmentalism. Renewables are here. Let's make the great leap forward of this generation be the deployment of renewables on an unimaginable scale.
Even the baseline assumption that oil producing countries and corporations would just sit there and let it happen is so patently absurd that it's hard to take the conversation seriously at all. Sure buddy, Exxon and Saudi Arabia aren't going to deploy their armies of lobbyists and use their cartel to undermine the wholesale transition away from their product.
Sure buddy. Environmentalists against nuclear are binary thinkers but our idea of using nuclear isn't just naive magical thinking. Sure.
the strawman is burning and somehow you are shocked
Environmental and Health Consequences of Uranium Mining
Tailing deposits can cause landslides, air contamination, and wildlife exposure. Uranium tailings contain small particles that are picked up and transported by the wind. The radioactive particulates in the air can be concentrated enough to cause health issues including lung cancer and kidney disease. [6] These particles also contaminate soil and water. Furthermore, growing piles of mining debris become unstable and can result in fatal landslides, such as the 1966 landslide of Aberfan, which resulted in the death of 144 people. [7] Tailing ponds pose serious hazards to the environment as well through leaks, in which underground water becomes contaminated with heavy metals. [5] This can lead to the pollution of lakes and rivers. Local ecosystems, too, are harmed and destroyed by waste piles and ponds. Rain can interact with tailings and introduce sulfuric acid in aquatic ecosystems, similar to in-situ leaching. Wildlife exposure can also occur directly through interaction with tailing ponds. In particular, waterfowl often land and use tailing ponds, resulting in dire consequences. In 2008, 1600 ducks flew into a tailing pond and died in Alberta, Canada. [8] Evidently, the repercussions of uranium mining are far-reaching. Certain groups of people, however, are at greater risk of exposure to associated hazards.
The United States has a history of environmental inequity in which people of color and low-income communities are disproportionately subjected to environmental risks and consequent health hazards. Uranium mining is no different. Navajo Nation land, for example, is littered with tailing piles, and the United States Environmental Protection Agency has mapped 521 abandoned uranium mines on the reservation. [5,9] In this regard, uranium mining serves as an avenue for continued environmental racism, and the issue demands close examination and public awareness.
Source: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2021/ph241/radzyminski2/
It's not that this is an unpopular opinion, but rather that it's a dumb opinion. You're defining things one way and someone else can define them a different way. You can both define what an environmentalist is differently and that will affect the result of your question. If you're insisting that you own the definition of an "environmentalist" then you're being dumb.
In fact, I agree with the unstated premise of your statement. I think the risks of nuclear waste and a nuclear meltdown are much less than the risks of global warming and therefore nuclear power is good for the environment. However it is also a perfectly valid opinion that we should just reduce our energy usage and reduce global warming in that manner. I think it's unrealistic, but it's possible if we had the desire to do that as a collective. It is a valid opinion to be on that side of the fence. I think it's the less pragmatic approach, but I've known many people who are hippy environmentalists and it's still a valid position.
Well, I'd say that this argument is just as simplistic and binary. I'm in no way an expert, but from what I've gathered, nuclear power is nowhere near the clean power with long term storage as the only issue that many people seem to think. Mining is extremely dirty and nobody wants an uranium mine in their backyard. Yeah, next gen nuclear reactors that run on depleted uranium sound great in theory. Too bad they are just one corner closer from cold fusion. I am too for nuclear power because of pragmatic reasons so we can shelve fossil fuels until we have better, but pretending it is unproblematic is ridiculous and plain stupid.
Edit: It seems I have the unpopular opinion around here for saying that nuclear power is not entirely unproblematic. Gasp, my pearls!
Well, we're certainly not getting away from mining with solar and wind.
In fact, the amount of uranium used is so low that the amount mined per megawatt-hour is probably way less than for building solar and wind.
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