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Nuclear power was absolutely the answer, 50, 30, or even 20 years ago, but given the long construction times and cost relative to wind and solar backed by battery and hydro, the time for new construction has probably passed outside of niche regions. It’s still much more cost effective to keep existing plants online, but when the primary bottleneck is funding focusing on the more cost effective technologies just makes sense.
Of course, I imagine that’s the same reason why the oil and gas companies that have been fearmongering about nuclear power for the last half century have suddenly come around on it.
Aren’t there limits on keeping old ones running? And so many of them are old already. I agree that this is something that should have been planned and begun a while ago.
For the most part to my knowledge it’s the same as maintaining any large, complex piece of infrastructure. As it gets older spare parts get harder to find and have to be replaced with different similar parts requiring new engineering analysis, more and more big components like pipes and tanks get to the point where they need to be wholly replaced, etc…
Design lifespan is the point the designers expected a lot of annoying to replace things to wear out on paper for the cost of maintenance to rise, but now in the present we can inspect things to see how they actually did in practice.
This means that operations gets more expensive and you need to shut down for major work every now and then, but compared to the ever increasing cost of building an entire new plant just replacing the parts that have worn out in order to squeeze an extra fifteen or twenty years is probably going to be more cost effective to a point.
We just need them to hold in long enough for us to get enough renewables and storage capacity on the grid to replace all the fossil sources, at which point we can keep building renewables and replace the most most expensive to maintain nuclear and most fish limiting dams and the like.
These articles always ignore the expense involved with building, running, and maintaining a nuclear power plant.
Kyle Hill has done a fantastic job discussing nuclear energy, if anyone is interested in learning more about its viability. https://youtu.be/J3znG6_vla0
Also, I’ll leave this safety study here as well because nuclear safety is, and should be, a top concern.
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Right, but nuclear remains far more expensive than wind and solar, which is why almost no new nuclear gets built.
I’ll also note that a chunk of the data is from 2007 and 2008, and the price (and greenhouse gas emissions associated with) both wind and solar have declined markedly since then.
Great points! Wind and solar are far easier to scale. Their main issue is land use, but when applied properly (with appropriate environmental impact assessments) that’s not a major concern on its own, really it’s transiting that power to use centers. Dealing with the individual property rights for a transmission line that doesn’t benefit the person under it is and has been enough to kill energy projects.
In my opinion, nuclear’s strength lies in its energy density. You could replace a coal or gas plant with a nuclear plant. This is an option being explored by a couple companies because it enabled them to use land no one wants that already has the cooling and transmission connections.
I support nuclear and it was a recurring theme in my environmental policy degree, but I am by no means against wind and solar. I think they are fantastic sources. They each have their trade offs. But we will need to make use of everything in the face of climate change.
One small note, nuclear is expensive, however be cautious when researching cost per Wh produced and look for the time scale. Wind and solar projects are often forecasted to run for just 20 years, they can certainly go longer though. Nuclear runs for 50+ years. Cost comparisons always use the lowest time scale. Nuclear obviously has a very high upfront cost that makes it stupid expensive for a 20 year plan, but over 50 it can reach parody or undercut renewables. Renewables are also done a disservice by these same reports by locking them to the low timescales when their leases are easily extended. But leases are also a large expense so renewal does bump the cost. Things get difficult to forecast with those known-unknows, so it’s easier, and more accurate to take the lowest scale and say “this is the cost for 20 years” and let the reader decide if they want to math out the 2.5 multiplier. But then it wouldn’t be accurate to the 20 years since renewal costs and…well, you see why we use the lower scale.
Yeah, wind and solar seem to be able to go for 50+ years too. The main reason they’re not doing that so far is that newer installations can kick out more electricity (and money) in the same footprint.
And they’ll only get better with time. I think It’ll be a little rocky the next four years in the US. But still, they are great. My house is 100% wind powered and I regret not putting solar on 5 years ago
No it’s not.
It’s a rising star with climate change deniers who wave it around as a “viable” “new” energy source that competes with the, in their opinion unviable solar and wind energy alternative which are already running and generating power at a fraction of the cost associated with building nuclear power plants.
How many more Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Sellafied and Fukushima will it take for people to get it through their thick skulls that running a nuclear plant on Earth is not reasonable?
Sellafield happened in 1957 and they’re still cleaning up the site and aren’t expecting to finish this century, and that’s if they don’t run out of money.
Chernobyl is in the middle of the war between Russia and Ukraine and continues to be threatened by idiots with small dicks and big guns.
Nuclear power is not a viable option.
Oil is not a viable option and the list is orders of magnitude larger than what you listed for nuclear. Sooo many (100s?) millions dead, whole culture ruined, etc.
I always think of ‘antinuclear’ as pro-oil because that is exactly what has been the case for the last 50 years, its only in the last (less than) decade that we actually started using old tech (solar, wind) to deliberately limit oil.Outside of the land near fairly few nuclear accidents people won’t be & aren’t affected at all. The vast majority of nuclear plants lived and died as planned. But every fossil fuel operation is a massive carbon polluter.
(Even areas with higher radiation levels turned out to be way safer for mammals than expected, so human limits to radiation exposure are def way to strict and a bit of a result of Chernobyl propaganda in the west - so many villages, especially old people, returned and lived their lives out within the restricted zone, they died of old age and poverty, bcs they relied on Soviet pension plans which don’t exist in Ukraine, so they had to grow all food)I’m not under the impression you said anything good about oil, just that if we went the nuclear way like 50 years ago, we prob wouldn’t even have this convo this way right now. And if we don’t plan our economies, we can’t really predict our power needs in eg 30 years.
Is the Chernobyl-warzone threat bright now more than some localised radiation that would be ignored either way?
(This is a genuine question, in case it sounds sarcastic)When people hear of radiation they think of mutations, all sort of cancers (instead of just one), & birth defects, not of just the straightforward immediate tissue damage.
I just see so little reason not to continue to have nuclear energy as part of our repertoire of energy production, specifically a bit more regionally balanced (eg that almost every EU country would have some plants).
