When it comes to generating electricity, nuclear is hugely more expensive than renewables. Every 1000Wh of nuclear power could be 2000-3000 Wh solar or wind.
If you’ve been told “it’s not possible to have all power from renewable sources”, you have been a victim of disinformation from the fossil fuel industry. The majority of studies show that a global transition to 100% renewable energy across all sectors – power, heat, transport and industry – is feasible and economically viable.
This is all with current, modern day technology, not with some far-off dream or potential future tech such as nuclear fusion, thorium reactors or breeder reactors.
Compared to nuclear, renewables are:
- Cheaper
- Lower emissions
- Faster to provision
- Less environmentally damaging
- Not reliant on continuous consumption of fuel
- Decentralised
- Much, much safer
- Much easier to maintain
- More reliable
- Much more capable of being scaled down on demand to meet changes in energy demands
Nuclear power has promise as a future technology. But at present, while I’m all in favour of keeping the ones we have until the end of their useful life, building new nuclear power stations is a massive waste of money, resources, effort and political capital.
Nuclear energy should be funded only to conduct new research into potential future improvements and to construct experimental power stations. Any money that would be spent on building nuclear power plants should be spent on renewables instead.
Frequently asked questions:
- But it’s not always sunny or windy, how can we deal with that?
While a given spot in your country is going to have periods where it’s not sunny or rainy, with a mixture of energy distribution (modern interconnectors can transmit 800kV or more over 800km or more with less than 3% loss) non-electrical storage such as pumped storage, and diversified renewable sources, this problem is completely mitigated - we can generate wind, solar or hydro power over 2,000km away from where it is consumed for cheaper than we could generate nuclear electricity 20km away.
- Don’t renewables take up too much space?
The United States has enough land paved over for parking spaces to have 8 spaces per car - 5% of the land. If just 10% of that space was used to generate solar electricity - a mere 0.5% - that would generate enough solar power to provide electricity to the entire country. By comparison, around 50% of the land is agricultural. The amount of land used by renewable sources is not a real problem, it’s an argument used by the very wealthy pro-nuclear lobby to justify the huge amounts of funding that they currently receive.
- Isn’t Nuclear power cleaner than renewables?
No, it’s dirtier. You can look up total lifetime emissions for nuclear vs. renewables - this is the aggregated and equalised environmental harm caused per kWh for each energy source. It takes into account the energy used to extract raw materials, build the power plant, operate the plant, maintenance, the fuels needed to sustain it, the transport needed to service it, and so on. These numbers always show nuclear as more environmentally harmful than renewables.
- We need a baseline load, though, and that can only be nuclear or fossil fuels.
Not according to industry experts - the majority of studies show that a 100% renewable source of energy across all industries for all needs - electricity, heating, transport, and industry - is completely possible with current technology and is economically viable. If you disagree, don’t argue with me, take it up with the IEC. Here’s a Wikipedia article that you can use as a baseline for more information: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy
Obligatory Kyle Hill videos because keyword “nuclear energy”:
Some things to note:
Going back to 1965, air pollution from fossil fuels has cost us around 81 million lives. 4,000 people in China die every day due to fossil fuel pollution. 1 in 5 premature deaths can be attributed to fossil fuels.
Radiation in pop culture is portrayed as difficult to contain, but that isn’t the case. We know how to do it well, and we already do it.
Pop culture depictions fail to illustrate the radiation that is released into the air, unable to be properly managed, as a result of fossil fuel production and consumption.
ITT: People regurgitate oil company propaganda verbatim.
Nobody wants to maintain anything.
When you fail to maintain coal, gas, wind, or solar, it just stops working for the time being.
When you fail to maintain nuclear systems (be that poor understanding, lack of training, negligence, whatever), things go very bad very quickly.
This is before you get into wider issue's like waste management and environmental concerns.
Correct me if I'm wrong but even though Nuclear sounds cool. In the vast majority of places isn't it less costly, to go with renewables, instead? And for a greater power output? And also renewables can be created in a fraction of the time without any r&d. That's not even mentioning the potential hazards and waste management issues with nuclear.
In Australia our conservatives run on the promise of nuclear power, but they've been in power for 20 of the last 26 years and haven't ever attempted to implement it, they just use the promise to stymie the development of renewables.
Imo the time to try to use nuclear to suppress oil and gas was 50 years ago.
Oh yes, let's focus on an extremely expensive energy source! Let's get rid of dependencies of dicatotors by making us dependent of other dictators to get uran! Why waste any more time on energy sources that pay off after a few years when we can have an energy source they'll still have to pay for in 100 generations? So genious!
Not in France!
Pollution? That's a problem for future Homer.
Very true.
I would support reactors which aren’t designed to produce enriched uranium, don’t blowup when neglected, and don’t produce as much waste.
There has been some work on molten salt reactors recently, which look promising.
Literally.
The main power utility in Idaho is looking into nuclear power generation. I'm pretty excited considering I'm in the utility industry.
nuke plant vibes are sublime
Permanently Deleted
Belongs in ich_iel.
Energiewende is an absolute catastrophe
Fun fact, all the pro-nuclear bullshit you hear is just regurgitated nuclear lobbying propaganda.
The only reason nuclear has such a following is because people (almost always men) think they think they're in the know. It's unironically very typical of how the alt-right pipeline starts. People think they're being given all this "truth" about nuclear and now they're knowledgeable about stuff that other people aren't aware of or that other people are believing the "mainstream" thought about. It also helps that nuclear followers see themselves as edgy. It's a perfect rabbit hole for these people who are easily influenced to fall down.
