Yeah no shit. We already knew nuclear was not profitable, but it’s clean & makes tons of power, so it’s a good deal for everyone that isn’t a business & wants cheap & clean energy.
I’d love for you to see the Uranium and Thorium mines in Canada and tell me how clean that looks to you.
Uranium and thorium mines are just as clean as the rare earth metal mines needed for PV cells. This is kind of a moot point. We need carbon free energy now and solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear are all part of the mix of solutions needed. There are many considerations currently being made to determine which technologies should be used in what locations.
Make sure to compare with a West Virginia mountaintop-removal coal mine.
The point of this research is that renewable are cheaper. So why would we invest our money in the more extensive option?
Government isn’t business. It should not be chasing a profit margin. The decisions should be around sustainability, ecological friendliness, and robustness against failure
Unfortunately, government is a business. They are beholden to the same profits and losses that any other business is subjected to based on market conditions. The government has to answer to shareholders (citizens) and it’s creditors (BoC and other countries).
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Least we forget the US is like the only country who won’t recycle their nuclear waste. We have enough sitting to generate power for like 140 years. Waste isn’t useless it can still be reprocessed…
In more general sense profitability is robustness against failure.
If only there were organizations of people who were known for building really high quality technology without a profit motive… Like some kind of space program 🤔🤔
They had a profit motive, like space race, cold war and all that. You know, USA and USSR were really preparing for The Global Thermonuclear War back then.
And, of course, all the people participating in that were being paid.
Nah, due to Negative Externalities and things like Tragedy Of The Commons it’s quite common for companies to be making massive profits whilst destroying the very environment they need to thrive.
I mean, look at Polution, look at Global Warming, look at Overfishing, look at the 2008 Crash - without an external entity (i.e. the State) to force them to change their ways or rescue them, most economic entities in the pursuit of profitability will act in ways that systemically will eventually destroy the very things they need to be profitable.
Stuff like Negative Externalities is pretty basic Economics.
That naive idea of your of how economics works probably came from stuff you heard from politicians, not from reading books…
While without a profit motive of any kind they won’t exist.
I really don’t get how those things you mentioned existing negate what I said. These are orthogonal. Well, except for that weird logic that it’s about choosing between two teams, but nobody can be that stupid, right?
Don’t confuse profit with capital
Define “clean”
Nuclear should be the only non renewable power we use at scale. Oil makes sense for emergency situations (it’s portable and is stable forever) and where energy density is most important (like aircraft, for now). Coal can fuck right off.
oil is ironically not stable forever
Though most people’s idea of “old bad gas” is defined not by pure gasoline, but ethanol-containing gasoline. Ethanol gasoline is hydrophilic – leave a can sitting over winter, and you’re going to get some rough running and billowing water vapor coming out the exhaust. Pure petroleum products are way more stable.
In my opinion clean is anything that doesn’t emit out of smokestacks.
Also in this case it doesn’t emit out of smoke stacks while the sun’s down and the wind’s not blowing.
Dams are terrible for the environment so hydro is out. Nuclear is cleaner than hydro.
Um… dams and nuclear tend to go hand in hand. They need shit tons of water in reserve for cooling. Alternatively, they can draw river water in, but any power plant that dumps hot water into the river is damaging the aquatic ecosystem.
What? Damns have nothing to do with nuclear. You’re thinking of in Ukraine and that’s unique situation. Also that dam was blown up and the nuclear power plant didn’t explode.
Take the nuclear titties near me, not a dam in sight.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generating_Station
Yes, because it is right next to the ocean. I wasn’t saying all nuke plants have dams. All nuke plants have water, and sometimes to have a sufficient quantity of water, dams need to be built. North Carolina has zero natural lakes, every lake in NC is made by a dam. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGuire_Nuclear_Station
cleaner* than fossil
people say “clean” when they mean “doesn’t produce greenhouse gasses”. Nuclear power is absolutely not “clean”. Waste sites will need to be monitored for like a thousand years to prevent everything from natural disaster leakage to terrorist aquisition of nuclear materials. The reality is a new powerplant is just the 5% down payment on a nuclear waste mortgage.
Waste sites will need to be monitored for like a thousand years to prevent everything from natural disaster leakage to terrorist aquisition of nuclear materials
Or build breeder reactors to convert the waste back into fuel and eliminate it entirely. Building nuclear power would literally reduce the amount of nuclear waste we have versus doing nothing.
And yet, all these pseudoscience anti nuclear people who talk about nuclear waste all the time don’t seem to be advocating for that. Curious, isn’t it?
Look the psuedoscience anti nuclear people aren’t going to be what kills nuclear power.
The problem is the option is to “replace pseudo science oil barons with pseudo science nuclear power barons.” Society isn’t largely run by scientists, its run by lawyers and business idiots.
If you operate under the assumption nuclear will be treated more carefully and delicately than oil, well I too would like to live in that star trek communism universe.
It will get dumped in water supplies. It will end up in food supplies. The reality is there is a difference between “looks good on paper” and “even some lawyer who doesn’t believe in germ theory won’t fuck it up”.
That’s a very valid point, but it isn’t unique to nuclear. Solar panel manufacturing produces some nasty chemical waste. Some might be manufactured using hydrofluoric acid even, which scares the living shit out of me.
There are going to be safety and waste issues with everything, and they’re going to be different types of hazards. I would rather drink water contaminated with some nuclear waste than have contact with hydrofluoric acid. Ideally I’d like neither.
I’m not entirely sure what the solution is. It’s hardly worse than oil (which also uses HF!), but that’s not adequate. What we need is regulations and regulators that make it cheaper to throw as much safety factors as possible on something vs pay fines for violations. I’m confident we have the technology needed, we just need to make sure it’s actually used.
If the pro nuclear people managed to build something that actually eliminates nuclear waste, it would take away most arguments of the anti nuclear people.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/02/nuclear-waste-us-could-power-the-us-for-100-years.html
The technology exists, and has for decades. It wasn’t economical so it wasn’t considered for commercialization, although some companies are looking at it now.
If the anti nuclear people actually bothered to do proper research, perhaps we would’ve had enough support and outcry to build more of these reactors over the last several decades.
Depleted uranium can’t be used in fission bombs.
The nuclear fuel is pointless from military perspective… It just get burred into the ground, and there isn’t like 50 GTons if it every year
Not how it works lmao
Chasing profit is how we got here. This shouldn’t be the basis of the decision. If it’s the only thing we can use to drag conservatives along though, I guess it’ll have to do.
It’s not about chasing profit though, it’s about getting to net zero as quickly as possible using finite resources. Any money that goes to nuclear could be going to renewables, which would get us there more quickly.
Any money that goes to nuclear could be going to renewables, which would get us there more quickly.
That’s a false dilemma. Nuclear and renewables provide different things, so they shouldn’t be compared directly in an “either or” comparison, and certainly not on cost. Nuclear power provides a stable baseline, so you don’t have to rely on coal/gas/diesel powered generators. Renewables cheaply but opportunistically provide power from natural sources that may not always be available but that can augment the baseline. The share of renewable energy in the mix is something engineers should figure out, not “the market”.
Also, monetary cost shouldn’t be the only concern. Some renewables have a societal cost too, for example in the amount of land that they occupy per kWh generated, or visual polution. I wouldn’t want to live within the shadow flicker of a windmill for example.
Two’s a crowd: Nuclear and renewables don’t mix
Only the latter can deliver truly low carbon energy, says new study
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/10/201005112141.htm
If countries want to lower emissions as substantially, rapidly and cost-effectively as possible, they should prioritize support for renewables, rather than nuclear power.
They don’t provide different things, they both provide electricity. Nuclear is only really suited to base load, whereas renewables can be spun up and down to match varying demand - however renewables are also more than capable of covering base load, because it’s all just electricity.
The only thing nuclear provides that renewables don’t is grid stability. Nuclear turbines have large rotating masses, when loads are switched on and off they keep spinning the same speed, helping to maintain voltage and frequency. Meanwhile renewables are almost all run via inverters, which use feedback loops to chase an ideal voltage and frequency, but that gives them an inherent latency when dealing with changes on the network. However, there are other ways of providing grid stability.
It’s not a windmill. It doesn’t mill anything. The technical term is Wind Turbine Generator (WTG), but usually they’re called wind turbines or just turbines. A group of turbines make up a wind farm.
Land occupied is not much of a concern when most renewables (and nuclear, for that matter) tend to be installed away from population centres. It feels like you’re grasping for reasons now.
Suffice it to say, I work in the electrical industry, and this isn’t the first report that’s come out saying renewables are cheaper, better value and quicker to build and get us to net zero when compared to nuclear. That isn’t to say nuclear isn’t important and shouldn’t be built, just that nuclear shouldn’t be a priority in pursuit of phasing out fossil fuels. At the end of the day, demand will only go up, so building a lot of renewables before building nuclear won’t exactly be going to waste. We’ll need all of it.
Renewables cannot be spun up. You have to massively over build to do that. And even then, you’re still depending on availability of sun and wind.
If you need more power than is available, it’s done with natural gas peaker plants at 10x the normal cost of electricity.
On the flip side, a stable base load of nuclear, can be spun up and down over the day to meet expected load.
That’s exactly the suggestion, over-build renewables right now to get to net zero, then fill out the generation portfolio with nuclear. The demand will only go up, so that excess renewables will eventually be used to capacity anyway. The study is laying out what the priority should be right now, when climate change has already got its foot well in the door.
Renewables can effectively be spun up or down as long as they have batteries. That way, they can usually be generating as much energy as possible regardless of demand.
In that case it’s the batteries being loaded and unloaded, not the renewables.
Storage can be connected to the grid anywhere and charged whenever power is cheap - from whatever sources are generating at that time. It is effectively an independent investment - assuming your on-grid / grid scale.
As far as i know the only major renewable electricity generation that is intrinsically linked to storage is reservoir based hydro with reverse pumping capability though even that increases costs and is a quite situation dependent if you want a lot of peaking power…
Nuclear fanboys could equally argue to add batteries so as to convert baseload into shape, or peaking.
is our battery tech even up to this?
Yes. There’s numerous live examples which have been in place for years (Horndale South Australia for example)
Yes. It costs less and requires less mining to use the most expensive and wasteful storage option. The only reason there aren’t more is a lack of sufficient investment in VRE required to make them useful.
baseline
Base load. Here’s an argument that we don’t need it: https://cleantechnica.com/2022/06/28/we-dont-need-base-load-power/
There’s an interesting point buried at the end of that article: electricity quality. With batteries in the loop, supply can scale with demand almost instantly, versus the time it takes for various types of power plant to adjust output.
I wonder if this has any impact on another piece of the puzzle, high voltage direct current (HVDC) which we need to transport electricity over large distances with minimal loss.
Seriously. By this logic fossil fuels are cheaper, thus better!
This is how we get garbage like carbon credits, trying to capture the cost to the environment in dollar amounts is just more symptoms the fallacy of using economics in lieu of physics.
Profitability is so much not the point here and also, there’s no reason for different energy production sources (especially ones that are base power vs incidental power) to be in conflict. Do both of them.
We don’t have to like it but unfortunately profitability is by far the number one driver for…well everything. So little is accomplished by way of altruism. People are greedy. The best way to successfully incentivize climate action is for environmentally friendly actions to become the most profitable and be advertised as such.
So I agree with you that both options should be used. But I disagree that profitability is not the point. Money is always the point and always has been.
Price of energy is key to the success of every economy.
There is, actually, a conflict. Renewables are more dynamic in production. You can turn them on and off quickly, you can scale them quickly too. You can’t do that with nuclear plants. Baseload is not a goal, it’s a limit. That’s why the nuclear energy sector is friends with the coal sector.
Example of Nuclear-Coal friendship from Poland: https://twitter.com/stepien_przemek/status/1642908210913853442
Example of Nuclear-Coal friendship from the USA: https://www.energyandpolicy.org/generation-now-inc/
A deeper understanding here: “The duck in the room - the end of baseload” https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/p/the-duck-in-the-room-the-end-of-baseload
Baseload is not a goal, it’s a limit.
I would love to know what oil company you heard that from, since it’s absolutely not true. You can both turn them off quickly (faster, in fact, than LNG or Coal), start them up quickly (sub minutes) and change production quickly. These have all been features since 1960’s era reactors, and we’re around 10 generations past them.
I think they might be referring to turning down the reactors, which I think is an actual difficulty with them. By no means however is it a reason to not use them, it just means you employ it wisely. Have it meet most of the demand, and use solar and wind and others to supplement to full demand.
That’s not difficult. Nuclear is extremely expensive.
With renewables you just sell it to the grid for whatever gas generated electricity is going for. Which is currently still a fucking lot. Thanks Russia.
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Thanks Russia.
Oh, it gets worse. Russia is big on nuclear, they have a whole agency that deals in nuclear in Europe, it’s called ROSATOM.
This is related to other post with the fossil-fuel sponsored ecomodernist girl whining about Greenpeace and nuclear:
Russia lobbied to have the EU include nuclear energy and fossil methane to be included in the “sustainable” taxonomy: https://www.greenpeace.de/publikationen/20220517-greenpeace-report-russland-taxonomie.pdf (PDF)
Russia has a good stranglehold on nuclear energy: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-14/russia-s-grip-on-nuclear-power-trade-is-only-getting-stronger and many European powers …compliant to that.
Russia’s nuclear trade with Europe flowing amid Ukraine war https://web.archive.org/web/20221011224411/https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/russias-nuclear-trade-europe-flowing-amid-ukraine-war-90691865
European Union nations are continuing to import and export nuclear fuel that is not under EU sanctions on Russia
Russia’s Grip on Nuclear-Power Trade Is Only Getting Stronger https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-nuclear-power-uranium-plants-europe-imports-germany-sanctions-ukraine-war/
New data show exports in the strategic industry jumped more than 20% last year, as long-term projects boost Russian influence.
Here’s an article in German: https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/uran-abhaengigkeit-russland-koennte-den-usa-noch-erhebliche-schmerzen-zufuegen-a-cad81a53-4704-4842-a641-1b6191e4add5
It’s even more complicated, but building nuclear now in Europe would mean more dependency on Russian nuclear fuel and nuclear tech.
This includes France, the nuclear postergirl:
French Nuclear Power Crisis Frustrates Europe’s Push to Quit Russian Energy https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/business/france-nuclear-power-russia.html
France typically exports electricity, but now it risks blackouts and a need for imported power because of problems at the state nuclear operator.
France accused of funding Putin’s war effort by buying his nuclear fuel https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/12/02/france-accused-aiding-putins-war-importing-russian-nuclear-fuel/
It’s not just complicated, with many limits, but the useless yammer of nuclear-fanboys is just using up air in discourse.
Building more nuclear will not help with with climate warming mitigation. And it has its own problems with climate, as France knows…
(most recent time this happened, again) France to reduce nuclear power generation due to heat wave https://www.laprensalatina.com/france-to-reduce-nuclear-power-generation-due-to-heat-wave/ from a few weeks ago.
Building More nuclear will help with climate warming. None of your links deal with that.
how will it help? the stuff comes online in decades in the future. We need to reduce emissions now.
I agree we need help now. There’s a reason it comes so far in the future and all of them are artificial.
If we really wanted to we could build safe nuclear tomorrow. Okay that’s a bit of an exaggeration but you know what I mean.
Nah, the power company likes the profits from nuclear way better.
The secret is that they can bill the ratepayers for all the cost overruns, while keeping the extra profits on the cost-plus construction contract for the shareholders.
(Source: I’m a Georgia Power ratepayer being absolutely reamed for Plant Vogtle 3 and 4, and the Georgia Public Service Commission isn’t doing a single goddamned thing to hold Georgia Power to account or to help people like me.)
Yeah, but think of the poor corporations.
Stop all the hate for nuclear. It’s just a way for the fossil fuel industry to cause infighting among those of us who care about the climate. If we can make energy free or close to it, we should. The closer everything comes to being free the better.
People pushing nuclear is a way for fossil fuels industry to keep us reliant on them for the next 20 years while we build power plants.
More than that as we will need to pay them to maintain storage which they won’t be keen to do without tons of government and tax payer assistance
Until we are able to sort out the cost/tech to make a green-sourced grid (such that the role of utilities is to capture surpluses from when the sun shines and the wind blows and sell it back when transient sources aren’t producing) nuclear is going to be an important part of a non-carbon-producing energy portfolio.
Already it’s cheaper to bring new solar and wind online than any other sort of electrical production; the fact that those are transient supply sources is the last major obstacle to phasing carbon fuels entirely out of the grid. If nuclear can be brought safely online it could mean pushing the use of fossil energy entirely into use cases where energy density is critical (like military aviation)
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Helium is the only element in the periodic table that is non renewable.
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Different isotypes the one you buy for baloons is not the same type thags used in nuclear reactors
There was a strategic helium reserve that the US government operated, but it was defunded and drawn down to depletion because of capitalism (gov’t doing it means corpos can’t make $$$ doing the same thing for twelve times the price).
The National Helium Reserve was started in the 1920s to store helium for military airships and barrage balloons; but airplane technology got a lot better and so we don’t use airships or even many balloons for military purposes anymore. So the original purpose of the reserve never turned out to be all that useful.
Helium is found alongside natural gas, and there is still plenty of helium production in the US. Until we get a real room-temperature superconductor, every MRI machine consumes liquid helium for cooling. This and other industrial uses make it profitable for natural gas producers to keep extracting helium.
America had huge reserves but released majority of it decades ago
The last helium from the National Helium Reserve is being auctioned off this November along with helium enrichment equipment, pipelines, and some office buildings too. Get your bid in!
Sir I would like one helium please
That sounds like “pie in the sky”:
The problem with fusion reactors is exactly the containment of the plasma and avoiding that it dissipates its heat through light emission.
If that was solved we would be better off doing fusion with plasma rather than fission, since even deuterium (a heavier form of hydrogen atoms because it has 1 neutron in the nucleous) can simply be extracted from the water and the H+H fusion reaction releases more energy than any fission reactions (and, funilly enough, would produce the much rarer helium, that’s needed for those reactors of yours).
The problem with fusion reactors is exactly the containment of the plasma and avoiding that it dissipates its heat through light emission.
That’s one problem. Neutron embrittlement is another.
Yeah, I was just addressing the previous post.
In all fairness I only checked what’s going on with fusion once in a while as my background is Physics (as in, I started a degree in it and then ended up going to EE because in my home country there really only are jobs for theoretical physicists, not the more hands-on kind) and hence only know it at a superficial level (of somebody with the background to understand Particle Physics but not a domain expert).
Yeah, I do know about the embrittlement of the container walls due to neutron emission from the fusion reaction (no idea how bad or not that is compared to the rest), but last I checked plasma containment was still a bit of a problem as was the plasma cooling through photon emission (mind you, that might not be as much of a problem for the kind of temperature of the plasma the previous poster was mentioning, which - I assume - are less that what’s need to induce fusion).
That said, all in all it just sounds strange to use fission to generate a plasma - I mean, bloody fire generates a plasma (the flame is a plasma) - so I don’t quite see the point of generating plasma with the whole overhead of a nuclear reaction rather than, say, high powered lasers, high-voltage currents (yeah, lighting is plasma) or just plain old chemical reactions.
That whole thing sounded a bit too much like “fancy sciency words thrown around to deceive the ignorant” so common in scams.
Who fucking cares about profit, our planet is dying.
anyone with a basic understanding of economics?
Like either we spend fuck tons of money subsidising nuclear to make it profitable or we can focus on wind and companies will build it themselves because its profitable.
What do you think is more likely: that I don’t understand the basics of how capitalism works? Or maybe that the comment was a criticism of the worship of the “free market,” and considering profit-motive to be the be-all, end-all?
Well considering you’re conflating a market economy with capitalism…
I care. I care that we don’t make a rash decision for a potential short term solution. Why not ramp up solar / wind and other alternatives?
Storage, we have less Lithium than you seem to think, and pumped hydro is not a solution – not that it’s not a universal solution, it’s simply not a solution. Implementation costs more than a nuclear reactor and maintenance and security costs are way, way higher than a nuclear reactor. We, unless you want to adopt a powerless overnight lifestyle, need on-demand power generation. Nuclear is the best, safest, cleanest, most feasible option for that until we remove all precious metals from energy storage technology.
I disagree. Nuclear is too slow costly and a huge security risk for an already unsafe grid. We need energy decentralization in addition to decarbonization. Renewables like solar and wind are 100% the best step.
The planet is fine, and will be fine after we’ve gone, much like it was fine after the other mass extinctions. What’s dying is the environment that supports human life. Less snappy, granted, but I feel like emphasising that this is our problem and not something we should do for others might be worthwhile.
Do you never get tired of being pointlessly pedantic? Yes, the planet, as in the big rock floating in space, will continue to exist. Thanks.
There’s a point to my pedantry here. Did you read my whole post or just the first few words?
Gotta love anti nuclear activists getting more and more desperate. You’re being decarbonised. Please do not resist.
I would love to be decarbonised, but unfortunately i dont have the patience to wait 2 decades for it to happen.
How long do you think it takes to build renewables? It’s been about 20 years since most countries have started implementation and no country is 100% reliant on renewable energy or could store even a night’s energy needs without generation.
You can build a 50MW wind farm in 6 months
It’s been about 20 years since most countries have started implementation and no country is 100% reliant on renewable energy or could store even a night’s energy needs without generation.
Lot to unpack here.
There are actually a few countries that have 100% renewable capacity such as Iceland or Scotland and a lot more that are very close.
Yes we could be 100% renewable by now but the ff industry has done a lot of lobbying and conservative politicians have dragged their feet.
It has been a lot longer than 20 years since countries started building nuclear, yet were not 100% nuclear, is that a fault of the technology? or the politicians and NIMBYs?
Wind works at night, so you dont really need to store a nights worth of energy, especially as energy consumption is much lower at night.
Decarbonised by a stagnant and expensive industry that’s friends with coal? Unlikely.
https://i.imgur.com/4z837gc.png
nuclear energy is stagnant and decaying.
nuclear energy is stagnant and decaying.
Do you think you may be confusing the cause with the effect?
Alright, tell me how many more nuclear reactors are needed globally. Let’s just start with decarbonizing electricity production.
And, next, tell me how long do you think that will take, judging based on the average reactor construction time since, say, 1990.
Or look it up, maybe someone wrote an article with such a response.
The best time to build them was decades ago, so clearly the second best time is to… Never? Your argument is taken straight from the oil and coal industries – it would take too long to build up renewables infrastructure, so let’s just not do it? We shouldn’t build windmills, because you can’t tell me how many we need globally?
You’re grasping at straws. If you care about climate change, and you trust in science, there’s only one valid viewpoint on nuclear energy. I welcome dissenting opinions however and would be more than happy to hear why you disagree. Just know that I took courses in college on nuclear reactors and their design as part of my degree, as well as environment engineering, and I currently work in the green energy field – by no means am I automatically correct, but I want to see an argument that’s based in science and recent scientific studies and analysis, let’s say anything past 2015.
The best time to build them was decades ago, so clearly the second best time is to… Never? Your argument is taken straight from the oil and coal industries – it would take too long to build up renewables infrastructure, so let’s just not do it? We shouldn’t build windmills, because you can’t tell me how many we need globally?
You seem to be unaware of the plans and needs to reduce GHGs. We do not have decades to waste.
You’re right, and that’s why it would be foolish to build exclusively nuclear. It’s also foolish however to not build any nuclear. The long lead time means we need to start ASAP so it’s ready ASAP. With proper government action targeting bottlenecks in the process (I believe there’s only one manufacturer in the world for a certain type of reactor shielding) we can speed that up.
Diversification is the way to go. At the very least, we should build enough reactors and breeder reactors to consume existing nuclear waste and drive that to effectively 0.
On top of all that, the bottleneck for deploying solar and wind en masse isn’t actually solar and wind facilities (although we certainly need those) but our electric grid. It needs an upgrade in order to integrate alternative energies, and I believe estimates on doing that are ~10 years. We might end up in a situation where a nuclear reactor is actually faster to build, depending on the type.
I could not disagree more. Renewables are cheaper safer easier to deploy and secure the grid. Nuclear is dead.
Nuclear is the safest energy. It has the fewest deaths per kWh produced. Some modern reactors are able to consume nuclear waste to generate fuel as well. If you want to minimize nuclear waste, we need to build at least some reactors to shove existing waste into.
Nuclear keeps our already unsafe grid more unsafe. It’s too expensive and accidents, while rare, are disastrous. Nuclear is dead.
This is such a weird thing to research because a government (or governments) can directly or almost directly control what is profitable in a society based upon what is needed.
not really, while the government can do stuff like incentivize this only shifts the cost somewhere else
Check out the farm bill, or ethanol in gasoline, or various other things. They also can disincentivize things, outright ban things, and add untold cost to competing stuff in order to make yours more profitable than theirs.
The research done here had to be within the existing regulatory environment, which is not a fixed constraint at all but rather a product of government and industry actors.
And all of that is just talking about more indirect controls commonly applied in neoliberal leaning countries, some countries directly control how much things cost and how much overhead there is.
Government can just take over and control whatever it wants. With no business allowed to operate the cost and therefore profit don’t matter
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If we had an energy system owned by the people and not ran for profits, nuclear would be a viable, and probably even the preferred, option. We do not. We’re probably going to have to fix that to get a practical and reliable clean energy grid.
No, it would just bankrupt the state. Just because something is state owned, doesn’t mean the cost vanishes.
Infrastructure in this country is already so heavily subsidized by the federal government (and state, if you live somewhere that actually cares about your well-being) that we’re already pretty much paying for it all.
Profits are what is earned after expenses. It wouldn’t bankrupt a state to run energy infrastructure at cost.
You are, of course, correct.
But even so, costs are costs. It doesn’t matter if you’ve achieved communism, and are in a moneyless, stateless existance, you need labor and materials to build nuclear, and labor and materials to maintain it (along with other infrastructure).
And, I’m not anti-nuclear; it does make sense to use sometimes, in some amounts. Its just very very costly for what it provides.
But frankly, even only accounting for current tech, wide spread nuclear just doesn’t make that much sense compared to renewables + storage and large grids interconnects.
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What do you do with the waste in that scenario? Who pays for that? Or for insurance?
100% renewable energy is not possible on our current electrical grids. We usually use more energy at night where renewable does not cover our peak energy requirements, therefore, as a carbon neutral energy source nuclear covers that peak perfectly.
Downvoted cause you are technically correct. Technical problems are not solved by downvotes and good will.
alternatively, address the shortcomings of the power grid
Instead of “alternatively” let’s say “in addition”. We’re not going to solve anything with a single solution we need nuclear, we need solar and other renewables, and we need to upgrade the grid. All at the same time.
Precisely this, you can’t fix it, if you do not make an effort.
Solar isn’t the only renewable energy, and not even the only one you can install per household. Geothermal never stops, can be installed in your lawn, and has almost zero maintenance. Wave generation and offshore wind farms also provide round the clock energy.
Geothermal power is a lot easier in (say) Iceland than in places with less volcanism.
Geothermal never stops, can be installed in your lawn, and has almost zero maintenance
If you’re talking residential geothermal, that won’t generate electricity for your home. It can be used for HVAC and water heating though. It isn’t zero maintenance, and for most people it is pretty expensive (because they don’t have enough land to use the cheaper method for laying the pipes in the ground. Also, call it what it is - Ground-sourced heat pump. Average install price is $30k-$70k.
In many latitudes Air-sourced heat pumps are much much less expensive and perform nearly as well.
I’m hopeful to see cheap to purchase, install, and maintain Ground-sourced heat pump (residential Geothermal) but its not hear yet.
Yeah I’ve heard rivers stop flowing at night, it’s never windy at night, the ocean is still at night etc
Nuclear isn’t carbon neutral. How do you think Uranium gets mined/processed/shipped/utilized? The reaction may use/generate no carbon, but the entirety of the logistics of producing nuclear power absolutely does. Saying it’s carbon neutral is a bold faced lie.
If we want to start discussing the material processing effort then it’s going to be pretty hard to call any energy source carbon neutral. The concrete for dams and the steel for windmills don’t appear out of thin air.
More profitable AND safer. Humans are too stupid, lazy and bureaucratic to use nuclear.
To be fair though per terrawatt hour nuclear is safer than wind power and only beat in safety by solar.
Not actually safer, per kilowatt hour though.
What about when the grid is almost entirely renewables? Is nuclear cheaper than just storage? What about storage one it’s already been implemented to the point of resource scarcity?
