What's Wrong WIth The Nuclear Power?

[Something Funny]

I've watched the below video on Oil from Leo's blog:

When talking about greener alternatives to Oil, the guy completely dismisses the nuclear power simply because "it will need a PR boost", according to his own words.

How is that a valid argument? The narrator paints this dystopian "post order" future with oil shortages and climate change but says that nuclear energy won't be an option because...?

To me, it looks like a great alternative to oil, gas, and coal. A nuclear power plan produces a shit tonn of energy, doesn't polute the environment or produce CO2, and isn't dependent on weather conditions (unlike solar or wind). It also doesn't require a super complicated supply chain, unlike oil or gas. Ability to produce energy locally, independent of the external political situation is a huge advantage, right?

And, I think that its dangers are really overblown.

There is also an issue of nuclear waste it generates, but it doesn't seem like that big of a deal to me.

Is there something that I am missing which makes nuclear energy not a viable option?

[Alexop]

Traditional nuclear plants are very expensive to build and mentain, they produce lots of radioactive waste, it can create Cernobil situations in cases of earthquake, war etc. and it is just scary for the average people, especially stage green paranoia folk

Solar power will be the future I think, because it will be dirt cheap. We just need cheaper batteries to store all that energy during the night/lack of sun.

The small modular fission reactors would be something if you can't make renewables do the job.

Fusion reactors or some alien technology will eventually replace all this crap, even solar panels would look like a joke.

Edited December 20, 2023 by Alexop

[Devin]

Smaller nuclear plants placed in more desolate locations like Bill Gates is working on look promising to me. It seems clear to me that nuclear is the future, the moon and mars are going to be perfect locations for more radical systems testing which will foster great advancements.

[Danioover9000]

@Alexop

2 hours ago, Alexop said:

Traditional nuclear plants are very expensive to build and mentain, they produce lots of radioactive waste, it can create Cernobil situations in cases of earthquake, war etc. and it is just scary for the average people, especially stage green paranoia folk

Solar power will be the future I think, because it will be dirt cheap. We just need cheaper batteries to store all that energy during the night/lack of sun.

The small modular fission reactors would be something if you can't make renewables do the job.

Fusion reactors or some alien technology will eventually replace all this crap, even solar panels would look like a joke.

   *Chernobyl. Also, if the world is forced to, it'll want nuclear power plants as the future because when they figure out nuclear fission and nuclear fusion, that'll be a lot of energy produced. I think they're researching better technology to create better nuclear fission.

[Danioover9000]

@Devin

1 minute ago, Devin said:

Smaller nuclear plants placed in more desolate locations like Bill Gates is working on look promising to me. It seems clear to me that nuclear is the future, the moon and mars are going to be perfect locations for more radical systems testing which will foster great advancements.

   Yes I was also going to say in the future mankind will place bigger nuclear power plants on moons or other planets instead of earth, which solves any potential environmental impact on earth. Of course that's just shifting the problem elsewhere, but until they find ways to correct this problem this'll do. Probably why the UFO in Roswell and UFOs then tended to hang around nuclear bomb sites or power plants.

[Alexop]

20 minutes ago, Danioover9000 said:

@Alexop

   *Chernobyl.  wrote it as we say it in romanian: Cernobîl

 

Edited December 20, 2023 by Alexop

[Danioover9000]

2 minutes ago, Alexop said:

@Alexop

   *Chernobyl.  wrote it as we say it in romanian: Cernobîl

   Fair enough. I was used to it spelled the other way.

[Devin]

@Danioover9000 For space to earth energy I foresee solar satellites with laser transmission. You have a ring of satellites around the globe that reflect the sun to each other and down to collection sights on dark sides of the earth.

[Danioover9000]

@Devin

Just now, Devin said:

@Danioover9000 For space to earth energy I foresee solar satellites with laser transmission. You have a ring of satellites around the globe that reflect the sun to each other and down to collection sights on dark sides of the earth.

   That's also another possibility, as China's working on that quantum laser thing. next stage of economic warfare will be which country occupies earth's space orbit with it's satellites? 

[Bobby_2021]

Fear mongering against nuclear energy is total bullshit. It is our only hope to net zero by 2050, if we have any chance at all. 

All these renewable energies is going to cost us a shit ton of money and a ton of waste to manage. People are shit scared by nuclear disasters that happened years ago with ancient technology. Nuclear plants are super safe so as disposal of nuclear waste given that it is a relatively unpopulated area.

For a reasonably serious person, it is out only bet to combat climate change. 

Yes, it is expensive and take decades. But it works. And we do have a few decades in hand comfortably. It is lunacy to waste time on a cheap solution that does not work at all. Future generations will thank us for investing in nuclear energy right now. And who knows, maybe after we put a lot of money into R&D, we might get a breakthrough that brings down the cost significantly.

Expensive and works >>> Cheap and does not work.

[Devin]

47 minutes ago, Bobby_2021 said:

Fear mongering against nuclear energy is total bullshit. It is our only hope to net zero by 2050, if we have any chance at all. 

All these renewable energies is going to cost us a shit ton of money and a ton of waste to manage. People are shit scared by nuclear disasters that happened years ago with ancient technology. Nuclear plants are super safe so as disposal of nuclear waste given that it is a relatively unpopulated area.

For a reasonably serious person, it is out only bet to combat climate change. 

Yes, it is expensive and take decades. But it works. And we do have a few decades in hand comfortably. It is lunacy to waste time on a cheap solution that does not work at all. Future generations will thank us for investing in nuclear energy right now. And who knows, maybe after we put a lot of money into R&D, we might get a breakthrough that brings down the cost significantly.

Expensive and works >>> Cheap and does not work.

You start slapping reactors together everywhere I guarantee the future glowing radioactive generations will not thank you.

[DocWatts]

Modern nuclear reactors are very safe, especially when compared to fossil fuels (air pollution leads to several million deaths every year), and nuclear waste disposal is a solvable problem.

Instead, the main problem with nuclear energy is cost and logistics. A typical nuclear power plant costs tens of billions of dollars and more than a decade to construct.

That and the fact that at the end of the day it's still a non-renewable resource (I've seen estimates that at our current rate of consumption, we'd have perhaps a century or two of uranium left before extraction becomes too cost prohibitive for nuclear to continue to make sense as an energy source).

Which means that barring some major technological breakthrough, nuclear is at best a stopgap that can give us more time to transition to renewables.

Edited December 20, 2023 by DocWatts

[Danioover9000]

@DocWatts

1 minute ago, DocWatts said:

Modern nuclear reactors are very safe compared to fossil fuels (when we factor in the fact that air pollution leads to several million deaths every year), and nuclear waste disposal is a solvable problem.

Instead, the main problem with nuclear energy is cost and logistics, along with the fact that it's a non-renewable resource; which means that barring some major technological breakthrough, nuclear is at best a stopgap that can give us more time to transition to renewables.

   True, also it may be rumors but scientists are working on using super conductors as part of improving the efficiency of those nuclear power plants and how they fission, I think.

[Danioover9000]

@Bobby_2021

2 hours ago, Bobby_2021 said:

Fear mongering against nuclear energy is total bullshit. It is our only hope to net zero by 2050, if we have any chance at all. 

All these renewable energies is going to cost us a shit ton of money and a ton of waste to manage. People are shit scared by nuclear disasters that happened years ago with ancient technology. Nuclear plants are super safe so as disposal of nuclear waste given that it is a relatively unpopulated area.

For a reasonably serious person, it is out only bet to combat climate change. 

Yes, it is expensive and take decades. But it works. And we do have a few decades in hand comfortably. It is lunacy to waste time on a cheap solution that does not work at all. Future generations will thank us for investing in nuclear energy right now. And who knows, maybe after we put a lot of money into R&D, we might get a breakthrough that brings down the cost significantly.

Expensive and works >>> Cheap and does not work.

   I agree with this as well, just make the power plants somewhere just in case a fuck up happens it's nowhere near populated areas. Future seems to need more and more nuclear energy, and compared to oil and fossil fuel it's promising. I wish the stage green people would stop getting so offended and triggered about nuclear energy, just like the stop oil protestors are, just protest in front of those companies if you have to.

[Starlight321]

I'm not against nuclear power plants and see them as necessary intermediate solution but as mentioned before they are a huge investment and extremely expensive to dismantle and we in europe have no place to bury the waste savely for hundredthousands of years. That's why finding a viable solution for the storage is in all the european countries put far off into the future and that will problably cost too much if taken into account. 

There is a very good video about renewables from reallifelore on youtube.

[BlueOak]

As it's not a resource out of the ground, or tied to a locality. You can't tie it so easily to culture, they could with effort, but mostly they just get in experts from other countries. So there is less national interest, political capital, or care, besides the people directly earning money. Nobody is saying they are the nuclear power region and proud of it. A few countries are starting to realise it's beneficial to say this but that is harder because:

Then there is the drama. One disaster is remembered forever. I would say if you add up all the accidents in the oil or gas industry over time I would wager they would have caused much higher casualties, because these are physically demanding jobs with a larger workforce, and spillage or damage to the local ecosystems from extraction. Plus all the environmental damage from global warming, and fallout that causes on people's quality of life, wars, famine, migration, disease etc

The military-industrial complex cannot yet use nuclear reactors directly to power its vehicles. 
The car industry cannot use nuclear power to power its vehicles directly.
Same with shipping, or rail networks, farming etc.
I touched on that it's a smaller workforce at a nuclear plant compared to the entire complicated oil/gas industry, which is honestly incredibly inefficient by comparison of its size and related supporting network, but it does mean more people are given money to work in oil/gas, which they need to live or support their families.

So the related special industry groups that work together, and have in all likelihood started working as groups of companies when lobbying politicians or running advertising campaigns to affect public perception/opinion, are not directly allied with nuclear power.

If you want to understand why gas and oil are so directly intertwined with our lives, and the compounding influence and wealth that generates, you need to look at all the industries directly impacted. People just think its because they've got more money, well yes but that's a symptom, not a cause. Ditto environmentally friendly energy, which gets even more pushback.

The thing I hate the most about the fossil fuel industry, is they are directly responsible for us as a species warming up the planet for our future generations, drying it out, and leaving it in a worse state. All the wars and suffering it has and will cause. They have warped people's minds, and lied for so long, that people resist looking directly at what is going on in front of them, let alone reading a chart or looking at a temperature graph.

Thanks for the new video link i'll have a watch tomorrow, when its a better time of day.

Edited December 20, 2023 by BlueOak

[Devin]

I often have faith in humanity, I see the younger generations and see an anti- consumption movement.

We don't need to use all the energy we do, it would still be very practical to just reduce consumption down to safe levels, just not practical to get everyone on board.

Edited December 21, 2023 by Devin

[Bobby_2021]

Nuclear plants being too expensive is also pretty overrated. It's not that expensive. 

You basically need to invest $10 billion USD for nearly a lifetime of clean energy with minimal operating costs since the fuel itself is cheap as compared to coal or gas. The capital costs is huge. Which is opposed to conventional energy generation, where fuel is Costly with little capitals costs. 

To put it in context, Netflix in this year alone allocated $7B for making trash movies and series. And you think governments are too poor for setting up a power plant that cost around the same. 

The intend is lacking. Plain and simple.

Apart from the logistical challenges, and R&D almost everything that is used to counter the development of Nuclear energy is crap. Including disposing nuclear waste. All of those could be easily done with modern tech and infrastructure. 

Not to mention that we can hit a breakthrough in technology at any time that would significantly reduce the costs. But there is no interest and too much fear mongering that they force you to drink paper straws that dissolve in your juice rather than do something of substance.

That's the fundamental problem. They lack in substance. That's why it's wise to not take them seriously at all.

As long as they don't even talk about serious solutions, they will keep jerking each others off to feel good after convincing themselves that they are doing something. 

If you think long term, you will invest in infrastructure.

If you think short term, you will chase cheap energy and blame China.

[Basman]

Nuclear's bad PR is a serious obstacle to overcome if you want to build plants. It is a lot harder to build nuclear energy if general sentiment is against it, which exacerbates the lack of intent to put in the long-term investment it takes to build plants. If you are for nuclear you have to argue for it more than with other energy sectors.

[BlueOak]

I didn't mention my own optimism. 

When space travel, or rather space industry is more normalized, nuclear power could be everywhere by default.

People can't conceive the scale of the infinity in space, compared to the grain of sand that is earth. One mineral-rich asteroid, is worth more than our entire global economy many times over. Whatever is fueling that, and whoever has access to that first, utterly dominates everything on earth. It'll make the colonial period look like a footnote.

$10 Quintillion Asteroid:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/asteroid-16-psyche-may-be-worth-more-than-planet-earth-at-10-quintillion-in-fine-metals-180979303/

Global GDP: 100 trillion.
https://www.worldometers.info/gdp/
Breakdown by country https://www.visualcapitalist.com/100-trillion-global-economy/

I know its not as simple as that. The industry, and R&D required to access that is massive, but there are also many asteroids of differing values. The people designing the mining robots in the UK know exactly what they are doing.