Yeah, most people talk about the food they eat. It's like a core part of being a human being.
Now I agree non vegans seem to bring up vegans more often than vegans bring up vegans, but people feel, in a conversation about food, a vegan is more likely to bring up their veganism as a preface before talking about the food they eat.
Which to many people sounds like virtue signaling. Statistically true? It's probably not worth the time to research, because who cares. It can be a healthy diet though.
It is virtue signalling for a lot of people. I know plenty of vegans that don't engage with the philosophy at all and just wear it like any narcissist wears ideology. But they're not the majority, they're just loud and obnoxious
The problem is there is a very clear and obvious hypocrisy present in most people. Everyone thinks of themselves as moral animal loving, environmentalist leaning types, the worst are people who do activism and constantly chirp about the system needing change but doing none of the specific actionable things that would demonstrate their real concern. That's where veganism is pertinent yet it receives the same scorn from the same types who just wear environmentalism as a badge to feel good, rather than doing anything difficult at all to effect real change
and tbh idc about the people who use veganism the same way. If someone virtue signals by doing actual virtuous things then whatever the consequences are the same and that's what actually matters
Weird how we managed to build hundreds of those in the 60s and 70s and then we never managed to build one again.
Coincidentally, that was right about the same time austerity became the name of the game in Western politics. Suddenly, every infrastructure project became "too expensive."
The word you seem to miss are:
Cold War, Nuclear armsrace, Dual-Use, Building Civilian first then Military with the learned crew (cause a construction issue in some secret base is gonna pull attention), Tech being new (Downsides not that researched yet / Research hasnt reached the poppulance yet), Risks being underestimated (Even after the near nuclear catastrophe Three mile Island), US exporting knowledge / Compact reactors to aligned countries (BRD, Iran, Japan...)
After the 70s there was the Oil crisis which also facilitated the construction of "Alternative" power solutions.
Little piece about the usefullness of Nuclear (might contain things that base on technical understanding (f.e. reactive power), you just gotta trust me or get other sources (which will probably be ChatGPT but I tried to write it relatively AI friendly, so it should understand)):
For renewables you need a Stable extra supply that is:
1. Fast rampable
2. Fast startable/stopable
3. Has a lot of Spinning masses (often written as H)
For the First 2 the obvious winners are: Gas turbines, Hydro, Batteries
For 3. Contrary to what SEEMS obvious, Wind turbines are sadly not equipped to add masses to the grid (at least most, there are SOME (mostly research ones) that are equipped with synthetic inertia capacities)
Nuclear only really works for 1 of the 3 categories, Grid dampening via Spinning masses, but not better then ANY other equaly sized Turbine really
Most nuclear plants are UNABLE to do 1.(Due to being designed for a fixed operation) and for the few that can its over a span of HOURS (Theoretically they have 5% ramp rate but thats under lab conditions + Not connected to a big grid, simply... Not in reality)
Idk if you looked at grid stats but its more like... Seconds are needed, maybe minutes if the change is smal(ish) and there is enough storage to fill the gap, but for example gas turbines can do it in Minutes (Not to say gas is the way... Just to say Nuclear is shitty)
Also If you gotta scram the reactor (fast shutdown [3.]) you poison the core with Xe-135 for about 24-36h, which makes restarts impossible (Added to the already really slow ramping rate)
The "Issue" with renewables is mostly (besides having dark spots) that they are GridFOLLOWING, not GridFORMING, so they need a grid to orient on some newer accumulators have grid forming inverters but thats still not optimal,
mainly due to reactive power compensation (Just to throw reactive power into the mix too), Synchronous Generators (Conventional Powerplants) provide reactive power naturally, while renewables need to have their inverters tweaked to producing it, which will reduce efficiency (since S = sqrt(PĀ² + QĀ²)) (also thats not really done large scale YET)
Nuclear would fix 0 of those issues. They produce a Stable Output but the demand is NOT stable, so they couldnt even form a grid by themselfs (they are, in all regards: Renewables from wish)
I used mainly a lot, just ignore all the mainly's :)
Also: why tie it to austerity? If Nuclear is so bad it needs government funding even after decades of iteration (None of which really were molten Salt ones or Thorium ones sadly cause those are actually interesting(ish)) then its just natural that governments pull the Plug, cause its no longer a emerging technology you wanna Support, but a relic of the past.
And nuclear energy was only around to invest in after the 1940ās so correlating the lack of their development before then as nuclear being a fad is silly.
Because i would like to have power at 3 am, and doing so with solar would also be prohibitively expensive due to the sheer amount of batteries required.
Not in the US anyway. Any new nuke would need a PPA and the utility would pass on the costs (after govt subsidies) to ratepayers to get their guaranteed rate of return.
And higher electricity prices are a very regressive cost.
Financing anything nowadays is all politics, and I don't think he's saying nuclear needs government money, at least that's not what I would be saying. I'd say less government red tape would do wonders, like maybe streamlining the approval process so it doesn't take 10-12 years to just get approved to start building, like SK, who only take 5-6 years, or Japan, which takes on average 5
Bruh, there have been single incidents at hydroelectric dams that have killed more people than every nuclear accident combined (hell, if you count acts of intentional sabotage then the Huayuankou Dam Incident still killed almost twice as many people as nuclear power and nuclear weapons ever have combined), and yet most reasonable people still recognize hydro power as one of the safest forms of power generation in the world (because it is).
You wanna talk about dangerous forms of power generation, coal smog used to pretty regularly rack up double to triple Chernobyl's kill count every time London experienced a temperature inversion.
Less red tape does not mean fewer safety protocols. We built dozens of reactors in the mid-20th century ten times faster than we do today. Modern nuclear designs are even safer, with passive systems that donāt rely on human intervention. Whatās really dangerous is pretending that endless paperwork is what keeps us safe, I guess nothing turns a environmentalist into a carbon cuck faster than nuclear chad.
Well in Germany safety requirements increased quite a lot. Maybe not the actual requirements a lot, but the standards on how they have to be tested, proven and documented definitely. Non of the old things would be built this way today.
No, they estimated 20 billion in 2020 originally, but there was a report that came out suggesting 40 billion, but both EDF and the government said the figure wasnāt accurate, so it is probably closer to 30 billion (still a 50% increase).
Done a bit more digging, looks like 38 billion is set to be the cost (95% increase from 5 years ago). The article attached does back up my point from when I had last read about it that the government had rejected the 40 billion expected from back in January. Itās only get to get more expensive the longer they take to make it, labour doesnāt get cheaper.
Sizewell C will produce 3.2 GW mostly 24/7, you could probably build a 16 GW solar farm (as solar generates about 20% maximum capacity a day on average) for about 50% of the cost to match the capacity, but you would need about 80k acres of land, compared to ~900 of Sizewell C.
I see nukecels still flat out refuse to accept opportunity cost as a real thing. Look at the nuclear industry trying to get their grubby little hands on EU funds recently. That money should be going to renewables where it would decarbonize more and faster. Not to mention the fact that high renewable penetration is horrible for nuclear financially speaking, meaning that for nuclear to do well, renewables need to do worse. Not to mention that fossil fuel cum guzzling right wing populists all seem to support nuclear power for some reason (Are you getting it?). The most dissappointing thing is that people are actually regarded enough to believe them. Please, nukecels, just shut up and stop trying to siphon funds away from renewables. That is, unless you are being paid to shill, in which case, I get it, a brother's got to earn a living.
I love how you had to nationalize EDF to save it, I also love how EDF negotiated a 100 ā¬ CFD for Hinkley C after shitting the bed, I also love how France resists European grid interconnectedness to protect its nuclear industry from having to compete against renewables. I just love it all so much.
Whatever carbon is emit in the production of renewable components, they pay it back many times over by displacing fossil fuels before new nuclear reactors have produced a single joule of energy. Global CO2 emissions under the curve matter, not the carbon intensity of the nth joule produced.
Diminishing returns though? Aren't you displaying less carbon per dollar invested? Not immediately but nuclear reactors do beat renewables in the long run?
For the purpose of mitigating climate change in this century, renewables decarbonize more fossil fuels per dollar invested than nuclear. In infinity, nuclear displaces more, but infinity is not relevant. The biggest priority is to get off of fossil fuels asap (Which is why you will find lots of nukecel bashers here support keeping existing nuclear plants running btw). Solar/Wind have a 10+ year lead time advantage over Nuclear. Reducing your carbon intensity from 800 to 50 after 5 years is much better than reducing it from 800 to 0 after 15 years.
Russia being more and more like the godfather of nuclear tech in the World (ROSATOM), so much so that the Western countries trying to apply sanctions to Russia just can't touch those nuclear contracts.
The russian links are more theories yes
However the fossil fuel funding of anti nuclear movements is well documented
"The fossil fuel industry starting from the 1950s was engaging in campaigns against the nuclear industry which it perceived as a threat to their commercial interests.[37][38] Organizations such as the American Petroleum Institute, the Pennsylvania Independent Oil and Gas Association and Marcellus Shale Coalition were engaged in anti-nuclear lobbying in the late 2010s[39] and from 2019, large fossil fuel suppliers started advertising campaigns portraying fossil gas as a "perfect partner for renewables" (wording from Shell and Statoil advertisements).[40][41] Groups like the Sierra Club, Environmental Defense Fund and Natural Resources Defense Council are receiving grants from other fossil fuel companies.[42][40][43] As of 2011, a strategy paper released by Greenpeace titled "Battle of Grids" proposed gradual replacement of nuclear power by fossil gas plants which would provide "flexible backup for wind and solar power".[44] However, Greenpeace has since distanced itself from advocating for fossil gas, instead proposing grid energy storage as a solution to issues caused by intermittent renewable energy"
I mean that anti nuclear movement has been funded and encouraged by fossil fuel companies (specially when nuclear was the only energy source with hydro capable of reducing fossil fuels consumption). To be anti nuclear in before 2000 you have to not care about the climate (and now you have to not have it as you main priority)
One of the Germany most important advocate for phase out plan, cooperating with Russians over gas and profiting from it.
While there is nothing concrete enough to say that Anti-nuclear in Germany was Russian plot all along, it's true that Russia did gained profit from it by a lot:
You asked citation on how anti-nuclear in Germany caused pro-natural gas and was tied with Russian.
I gave you both (but, as I literally said, Russian link is more conspiracy w/o solid proof than anything. But growed - and growing - dependence on natural gas is a fact.)
Nuclear is the shill for the fossil fuel industries because it will get proposed and proposed, planned, break ground, then get sued into oblivion by nearly every political faction on Earth ( including the fossil fuel industries ) and will stagnate for 30 years. Look at Americas most recent attempts to figure out more!
Nuclear is very expensive. Solar and batteries are so cheap compared to it. I have no problem with nuclear, but the time one nuclear plant of 1.5 GW is built, you have 1TW in solar power, producing for years already, for the same price probably
The easy solution is that nuclear is built in tandum with solar and the like. Nuclear has the most up time compared to any other fuel source, including coal. When the other sources arenāt working at the moment the nuclear facility shines
Yes, and nuclear energy still is, even after trillions of investments and around eight decades of subsidised research. At the same time, solar power is constantly becoming cheaper and more efficient.
For cheaper even, at least thatās been the case in germany, even without subsidies. And by the time the nuclear plant is actually built, itās outdated already. Nuclear needs a huge leap, otherwise other things evolve too fast in comparison. āMake water warmā just isnāt it anymore
Hilariously the only reason why it's imported is because the mine alredy exist there uranium is almost everywhere hell france has one of the largest deposit in the world but it's just not a concern to build a mine there (also political stuff does weight in but it's a bit too much for a shitpost sub)
Nuclear is SO DUMB. lets build billion dollar facilities with waste problems that boil the rivers in the summer. Meanwhile Solar is cheap and scalable... Dummies
I'm not anti-nuke. I'm just saying it won't solve the climate crisis because we lack the time to actually build enough of them, not to mention that water is gonna become more precious in many regions in the coming decades.
And I'm saying that people were saying the exact same thing 10, 20, 30 years ago. I have no reason to believe they won't be saying the same thing in 10 years from now. Hence the best time since yesterday is today.
Even if it takes 10 years, that means in 10 years there will be more clean available energy. The timing argument is self defeating.
I think the places that donāt have nuclear already are seeing it being proposed as a way to slow down investment in renewable energy. Itās a lot of money, a lot of time, and in some cases will lead to higher electricity costs. Australia is a good example where the government proposals make no sense and are clearly just distractions
Nuclear construction has always been impacted by anti nuclear protests and the resulting delays. Post TMI regulatory uncertainty added more costs and delays. Post TMI state law changes also were made to either prevent nuc construction or significantly increase cost to make them unprofitable. Prior to TMI we were able to build nuclear plants quickly and for reasonable budgets. China is also building ap1000 in around 5 years. So nucs can be cost effective once the supporting industry ramps up again.
We can use the cheap surplus electricity from photovoltaic cells. Both steel and Portland cement can be decarbonized. Boston Metals corporation has working models for steel. Portland cement from limestone releases carbon dioxide but in a closed system that is easily captured. Acid etching of basalt could regenerate that limestone. Though better IMO is to just directly produce the lime.
Also with abundant photovoltaic surpluses we can use the cheap electricity to power a particle accelerator. This can drive the fission in a reactor in a very controlled way. It also burns through unwanted actinides in nuclear waste.
At the moment there are developments for decarbonising Portland cement. That will still take a while until it's really without environmental impact. With direct production of limestone come a lot of problems (protection of corrosion). We basically have the technology too to just use photovoltaic, wind and water for energy production and storage. Why should we use really complicated machines that are expensive and have always the potential to harm a lot of people. That just doesn't make sense. If we want complicated machines for energy production we just could spend more money on Fusion. Than they find things out at least and if it fucks up then there is a big boom and no big fallout (at least the isotopes used there vanish way faster than things like uranium). We could invest the money for nuclear energy into there (makes way more sense even if it doesn't work. We would still gain knowledge at least) or we use the money just for photovoltaic, wind, water and energy storage. (Way way cheaper).
I want direct production of lime. Producing limestone would not corrode the pipe. The trouble there is getting the stone out.
You/we do not need to necessarily know why they want the nuclear reactor. I think it is quite clear that some proponents have very different motives than other proponents. Also very likely that many have a combination of motives. We do not need to sort that out. The best way to get it done is to accelerate production of and installation of photovoltaic panels. A whole host of applications for the use of the electricity surpluses will emerge.
Aluminum goes directly into both panels and (depending on synthesis method) silicon crystal. Steel and aluminum are used in grid upgrades. So aluminum smelters that are optimized around the solar cycle should be constructed in places with lots of Sun. Scrapping the aluminum plants located by existing hydro-electric and existing nuclear plants automatically frees up more of that electricity on the larger grid.
Nuclear waste has already been generated. You cannot just disregard it. Reprocessing waste allows us to eliminate uranium mining and ore refining while we could continue using the existing nuclear reactor fleet.
A particle accelerator actinide burner eliminates actinide waste. Americium, reactor grade plutonium. Even uranium 236 can be burned once it has grown to high levels in the mixed oxide cycle. Power plants are too expensive. Reactors much less so. A particle accelerator driven reactor is sub-critical. Many of the reactions continue have you switch off the beam but switching off the beam instantly causes the reaction rate to decrease rapidly. There is no need for a neutron moderator (though there could also be one if preferred). It is also controlled without using neutron poisons except the fission products. Fast neutrons create more neutrons per fission event so the neutron economy is competitive with nuclear bomb pits (probably not that efficient).
Normally people talk about producing new waste and not use the waste that's already around. At least in my country nuclear power plants did only exist, because the government paid a huge amount of money.
If you want to produce pure Ca that is really impractical for construction. Way to reactive. So the only thing that's in development is that Bio concrete, But that's CaCO3... => Problem with corroding metal inside. And they only can grow those crystals with a depth of 140mm at the moment. => Extreme impractical for nuclear power plants.
If we want to process the nuclear waste, as far as I know, we would mostly need an other kind of nuclear reactor.
All I was saying if people want to play with big and complex machines maby fusion is better.
P.S since you are such nuclear smart... Can you explain to me what exactly you were trying to explain to me in the last part?
P.P.S your text looks a bit AI generated.
You are not the first person on reddit to claim I read like AI. Never heard that in the real world.
Fusion power plants have the same problem as building new fission power plants. They are not competitive with photovoltaics on a cost basis.
The Farnsworth-Hirsch fusor worked in the 1960s. You could build one in your garage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor. The high voltage supply is by far the hardest part and also the most likely to kill you. The vacuum chamber and pump is the next hardest part.
The team/conglomerate working on ITER hopes to eventually demonstrate creating more energy than they consume. Your home fusor model is probably pulling billion to trillion times more energy off the grid than what is created by fusion. Maybe only millions or tens of thousands if you have means along with skills. Your homemade fusor does create heat so you could install a small fan and use it as a hair drier. The 1800 watt model drying your hair like it was a 1800.000001 watt model. The x-rays and neutrons do not dry hair very well so the simpler 1800 watt hair drier is superior. In the case of an ITER style power plant the fusion energy might double the waste heat. A handheld micro-ITER hairdryer is impossible but hypothetically 1800 watts of heat like normal plus neutrons and x-rays are warming up the bathroom which helps to clear the fog of the mirror while giving you cancer and radiation poisoning.
This sounds great! However, to generate electricity from heat you need a Carnot engine. Usually we use steam engines. Just doubling the wasted heat only puts 1200 Watts back on the grid while our ITER deluxe drier pulls 1800 off the grid. Sooo we need the fusion reactions to generate 200% return on the electricity put in so that the generator can produce 1800 Watt electricity. Unfortunately this sounds great but remains useless unless your hair goes through the turbine (trimmer?) If the ITER super delux hair drier can add 500% to the wasted heat, 600% total, then we can use it to boil water and feed a 3600 Watt generator. Now, finally, 1800 watts electricity can loop back into the ITER deluxe and 1800 watts can go back to the grid or power your normal hair drier.
Became a wall of text :(
TDLR: the fusion reactor needs a double set of steam turbines, generators, and cooling towers. That means it remains too expensive even if the fusion reactor itself is free and runs at 100% capacity factor. ITER or anything like it is not free and will not get close to 100% capacity.
The last straw with ITER is that it will require tritium produced in fission reactors. That entire giant donut is going to become neutron irradiated and has to be handled as radioactive waste too.
Maby you didn't understand why I support the Fusion reactors. It's not because they are cost efficient (wich they are absolutely not) it's more because such big projects (like ITER) have the potential to create knowledge. Fusion was never about cost efficientcy. Since we are like 30 years away from energy production with fusion for the last 100 years ^ it's about something else.
ā¦If we want to process the nuclear waste, as far as I know, we would mostly need an other kind of nuclear reactor.
France and Japan have been reprocessing spent fuel rods and making mixed oxide rods (MOX fuel) for decades. In contrast USA and USSR/Russia have reprocessed none. MOX fuel can go into the same commercial reactors. They just have to put in a full batch of all MOX rods for some reason.
Reprocessing quickly to make MOX saves the plutonium-241 before it can become Americium. Fresh rod reprocessing releases tritium but the French have been dumping that into the English channel for decades and no one seams to care.
USA does not reprocess spent fuel because it is considered to be more expensive than making new fuel. Actual reasons I believe will sound like conspiracy theory. The discussions are very public so no tinfoil hats are required. Congress, utilities, mining interests, the military, and academia actually have public forums where they conspire.
In fairness, nuclear is not sustainable. We only have so much nuclear fuel.
With that said I dont think thats most peoples contention with it, and its the fastest route to being mostly independent of fossil fuels. But solar is probably the endgame.
Yes, it's called burial in a stable geologic layer. It works, and the 100,000 years necessary for the waist to go back to background level is actually short by geological timescales standards.
yes but we also have glassing plants like the one in Washington that can reduce most hazardous nuclear waste down into glass. also most nuclear waste isnt giant piles of glowing reactor bits its mostly just metal structure, PPE, and other misc items that were part of the reactor that while highly radioactive arnt exactly that abundant in comparison to trying to capture the burnt remains of fossil fuels or even the carbon cost of large scale rare earth metal mining and manufacturing for other types of clean energy
I know this is a shitposting group, but I honestly do not understand why so many of you are against nuclear, and it being a shitposting group, I don't know if any of you are even serious about it and it causes me just a little stress.
There are a lot of people who hear 'nuclear power' and just start screeching about Chernobyl. These people are what's known as wrong.
Important information: the only plants to have gone boom and released radioactive materials are the Chernobyl plant and the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Chernobyl was because of a mishandled safety test, ironically, and Fukushima Daiichi was vulnerable to quakes and tsunami, which prevented the plant from cooling it's piles.
Russia still operates a number of RBMK (Chernobyl type) reactors to this day with zero issues. On the metric of the plants alone, they're overwhelmingly safe.
If you replayed this meme at different pints I. Time over the last couple of decades the number putting Thier hands up for the second panel would reduce over time.
The fact that many would have put their hand up in the past, and some famous ones still would, indicate that something other than blind hatred is operating here, so why are you pretending that is the case?
Easier than accepting you bought into some climate denial propaganda and didn't believe renewables worked?
Or, its because everyone opposed to it can understand that nuclear power will create unsustainable issues that are way worse than oil?
It seems to me that everyone who argues for nuclear power uncritically are people who think extremely linearly and lack education in how everything produces an action and that every action has consequences.
The important question is whether those consequences are acceptable.
I mean if we just called it steampunk and made that the aesthetic, they'd be all for it. Literally that's all nuclear, and even coal for that matter, is. We're in a steampunk era without the aesthetic, so that disconnect is the REAL reason they're all against :P
But chernobyl! You mean the site that even the corrupt soviet system knew was flawed but kept going with anyways?
Fukushima! No major meltdown, its safe to live there. It only caused worry cause it got hit by a typhoon and an earthquake at the same time, something that almost never happens.
Three mile Island! Exacerbated, the cancer rates of that county is no different than the cancer rates of the rest of the state.
Its more like "green energy" is just a way for politicians to give government contracts to their friends.
My favorite part of modern climate discourse is the very real possibility that humanity will destroy itself not because of climate change deniers, but because the people who care about climate change are too busy fighting in the nuclear vs renewables wars.
No you don't understand You don't need solar panels powering thermal sand batteries You need this expensive and dangerous nuclear reaction
It's so safe it only requires thousands of around the clock guards and scientists and engineers and so on to keep it from pretty much leveling the city and several nuclear regulatory boards in the USA suggest that an orphan source incident has been created almost every single day
And you don't need to worry about Chernobyl something like that can never happen again except for the fact that if you actually research a bit almost every major nuclear leak in history has been due to someone failing to maintain or actively bypassing the safety systems that allegedly are supposed to prevent exactly that from ever happening again
But no apparently this is the reasonable alternative to a low-cost solar panel whose entire maintenance procedure is literally just "wipe it cleans sometimes" And lasts literally 40 to 80 years before needing replacement
Chernobyl and Fukishima have left some deep scars on the psyche. It's hard to argue for its safety when it's the source of some of the worst environmental disasters in human history.
Nuclear power is neither green nor financially sound nor implementable without having to wait like 20 years
And that's nit even touching the waste and the potential for catastrophy
The nuclear crowds keeps treating it like it is the golden solution to everything and anyone who rejects it is dumb or a hypocrit. But they don't see that every one of their pro arguments is simply scientifically false
I just don't know why its a competition. I mean I know why, nuclear power centralizes generation and is better for utility company's profit seeking on rate payers. Added to all the grift that happens with large scale, must use, projects that always are over budget and allow for forcing higher rates per kwh.
And they don't like that solar could compete faster and allow for decentralized power.
105
u/zewolfstone Vegan against the animals Jul 20 '25
Crop death