Worked in nuclear power for five years and wish people could divorce themselves of bias when considering power. When you plug things in it has a cost greater than the dollars you are paying. In raw deaths per megawatt nuclear wins above all else. I'm not saying we should avoid solar and wind. I'm saying we should dive headlong into every form of power that seems a reasonable risk to human life and the environment before 1000+ human death wildfires, starvation, and every other natural disaster becomes common place. Belching coal exhaust or gas turbine exhaust into the air seems a careless act when I have personally sat inside, on top of, under, and to the side of nuclear reactors and have yet to fall over dead. Spent fuel can be handled and most import you don't need to breath it and it doesn't warm the planet. Everything has a cost and I would gladly bare the cost of nuclear for a world worth living in.
I don't know about others, but I have had a lot of stuff about nuclear power make its way into my YouTube feed in the last few years. Once I learned more about it, it is clear that it is by far the cleanest energy we currently know how to capture.<p>Everything has a footprint: solar power has panels and other components that last 10-30 years, hydroelectric is often terrible for local biodiversity, windmills have huge blades that wear out, etc. Nuclear creates far less waste and spent nuclear fuel can be recycled even.<p>I wish the US had gone all in on nuclear like France.
If you don't take nuclear power seriously, you don't take climate change seriously. Period, dot, full stop. We should have gone all-in on nuclear in the 1970s and 1980s but for a few screeching NIMBY so-called "environmentalists."<p>Yes, if you screw up badly enough, you can have a disaster. If I drove drunk and ran my Jeep down a crowded city sidewalk, you would also have a disaster, but I would never be that negligent, callous, and stupid. The US Navy has run reactors for 65 years with a flawless safety record . . . it can be done.
I am not surprised.<p>Over the last few years, social media has been absolutely <i>flooded</i> with people claiming that nuclear is the "one weird trick THEY don't want you to know about" to solving climate change. It is supposed to solve every single problem, and probably even cure cancer in the process - often relying on theoretical or experimental concepts which have never been tried in practice.<p>Meanwhile, the reactors currently / recently constructed are massively over budget and years behind schedule. Nobody is willing to invest in them unless the government is willing to guarantee a massive subsidy on the electricity produced. Additional reactors will <i>at best</i> come online in a decade or two. And during all this solar and wind are rapidly increasing their market share while being weaned off the initial subsidies. Literally everyone wants to build it and in many areas we are now seeing problems because <i>too many</i> people are building it, leading to overcapacity.<p>Nuclear was a great idea in the 70s, but got a significant reputation hit due to high-profile nuclear incidents, cost overruns, and long construction delays. It was essentially killed by cheap coal becoming available with the rise of surface mining, just like coal is now being killed by cheap gas.<p>In 2023 the economic reality is that nuclear simply isn't a viable option anymore, and it would be quite foolish to rely on it to solve climate change in any way.
Rooftop solar power is roughly as popular as puppies and kittens.<p>But the USA has very little of it because it’s expensive in the US (due mostly to regulation and utilities being obstructionist).<p>By contrast, rooftop solar is very cheap in Australia, so it’s everywhere.<p>Nuclear is safe and clean, but until it’s cheaper nobody is going to go near building any more of it, and the nuclear industry has been incapable so far of making it cheaper.
I live in the spitting distance from the world's largest nuclear plant complex in the world. I do not live in a daily fear. In fact it's very easy to forget. The current government is very bullish on nuclear.<p>The government however is also betting on oil and gas and have recently annoucned, with funding from saudi arabia, the nation's largest oil refinary project. They are also redirecting funds from renewable energy like solar and wind to nuclear, citing fraud and immaturity of the technology. The plant operator has been under constant scrutiny from the locals for construction faults, waste fuel management, etc.<p>What people seem to forget here is that nuclear isn't a panacea. Just because a country builds nuclear doesn't mean it's succeeding at reducing carbon emmission. The world's 2nd largest, and also the fastest growing, nuclear energy producer by power is china, which still depends largely on coal for its electricity. Also consider nations too volatile to have nuclear power. If you argue that net zero is "impossible" without nuclear, you're basically arguing those countries don't deserve its existence.
The partisan split is interesting.<p>>> The 17-point partisan difference on nuclear power is smaller than those for other energy sources, including fossil fuel sources such as offshore oil and gas drilling (48 points) and coal mining (47 points).<p>I hope this means we can get the US government to continue to invest in nuclear. While it may not be the final step for human energy generation, it can be an effective stepping stone away from fossil fuels. My fear is the decreased reliance on coal and natural gas will cause unwanted political strife.<p>Although solar and wind are not at the capacity as nuclear is, it makes sense to continue to head in that direction. Consider this list, and how much coal is still in use.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_power_stations_in_the_United_States" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_power_stations...</a>
In favor of more nuclear power plants in 2023 (2020 numbers in parentheses):<p>Average US adults: 57% (43%)<p>Republican/Republican-leaning: 67% (53%)<p>Democrats/Democratic-leaning: 50% (37%)
The thing we really need is to just keep building plants. The problem nuclear power has faced is that since no industry which commonly exercises itself exists, the engineering experience and knowledge about how to run power plant construction projects hasn't matured - hence the cost overruns and delays.<p>Like the thing to do after the expense of the Vogtle project is to take the learned lessons there, and start working work on the next reactor (there were some really stupid things on that project too - i.e. commencing construction without finishing design work on the major components, which led to a lot of unnecessary rework).
Berkshire Hathaway Energy said they would, from a financial point of view, never build a nuclear plant and keep increasing renewables. And they're not known to be bad capital allocators.
US trade policy is also doing its part to make alternatives to wind more attractive:
<a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/08/19/business/waters-off-massachusetts-hunt-foreign-ships-building-wind-farms/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/08/19/business/waters-off-m...</a>
Nuclear costs too much, but if small modular reactors can be built quickly and cheaply like what South Africa was trying with the Pebble bed modular reactor¹, (now those people are at X-energy² and Stratek Global), then it would be beneficial in the long run to have consistent output without the need for batteries and energy storage.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_modular_reactor" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_modular_reactor</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-energy" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-energy</a>
I've done a complete 180 on nuclear power. I used to oppose it because of the problem of the waste.<p>However, the climate crisis overrides everything. If we're going to have even a chance of man being able to live relatively decently in the future, then we need to make some radical changes, and nuclear is an obvious source of energy that contributes far less to climate change.<p>So I've come to think that whatever the potential environmental hazards of nuclear waster, they are miniscule compared to the environmental disaster that we're currently in. Every tool we have to help mitigate that is essential.
If someone rang me and asked a question like 'am I in favour of throwing vast sums of money towards research and build of nuclear power plants?', it'd be a resounding yes with a strict qualification of 'fusion, not fission'. (Neither word appears in TFA.)<p>I realise the distinction probably isn't well understood in the general population, but I'm confident a huge part of that is due to every news story conflating the two.
Observation: It seems like americans don't really care that much about electricity/energy production. If this post had been been up 12 hours earlier there would have been hundreds of comments by now.<p>/A yuropean staying up late.
Probably too late to make much of a difference for climate change. We're just clawing our way back to our senses after decades of backwards movement caused by mostly well-intentioned protesters. Unfortunately, global warming did not wait for us to catch up. Whoops!
That's fine. I don't see why nuclear power should be viewed from a profit seeking lense. In the same way we pay 1T for Defense, 3T for medicare/medicaid/SS, i don't mind paying XT for Nuclear Power.<p>conspirary hat on: I think big city governments/urbanists/feds don't want nuclear since it would enable a large swathe of the country to continue suburban/rural lifestyles (SFH and electric cars powered by nuclear). I bet they were hoping high gas prices/high electric prices would force them back into dense urban areas (kind of a reverse white flight) where they can be "goverened", taxed and have their surplus "redistributed".<p>conspirary hat off.