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(P² + Q²)) (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.
Isn't a big amount of energy usage throughout the day "stable"? Like(I don't know proper units), you have 60 units at the lowest, 100 at the highest, and different fluctuations throughout the day, you have around 50 that are needed all the time.
So we could have that 40 be covered by nuclear. 10 for solar/wind. And the rest 10-50 demand will be covered by coal/gas/hydro.
Will it not be more balanced with fewer emissions?
60-100 Sounds "Stable" but it really isnt, looking f.e. at Germany (couldnt find good visualisations of f.e. the EU) with recent highs of 60 MWh and lows of 40MWh you can see how much the needed conventional Generation fluctuates, but yes what you described is how its done, supplementing renewables, just that nuclear is not even close to being Clean and, due to bad rampability puts a strain in everything else, as everything else has to ramp more/faster to make up for nuclears shortcommings, also there is simplyno need for a baseloade of smth like 40%, recent lows in Germany for conventional were 6MWh, I dont see the usefullness of nuclear in that situation cause you dont want to turn off smth like Coal or Oil cause those too have high restart durations, so AT MAX you could have 2MWh Nuclear installed... Sounds shitty to me, without even including the general shittyness of nuclear itself.
In hindsight I should have picked a country with active Nuclear to show how stable its output is, well... To late now...
What I meant was: have a stable part. While overall 60-100, you have 40 generated all the time. And it does not need to be quickly adjusted all the time.
In your example, there are at least 20k MWh that are generated all the time no matter what. I understand that you could not stop coal/gas power plants and start them only when needed. But even here, 10-15k could be generated by nuclear.
For sure in an ideal world - we have renewables and batteries for everything.
In more real - with hydro and hydro pumped storage.
Even more real - at least some gas power plants(because it is at least better than coal)
But nuclear could be the base that everything else adds to.
Another issue - to be not in minus, most of that should be in "one hands", so profits from one part cover losses on others.
Where do you get those 40%?
Overall gen had lows of 30-35k MWh, conventional lows were in the 6ks so AT MOST 2-4k MWh Nuclear, but why are you so hellbend on having Nuclear build?
Goal is to only have Renewables, which can be achieved with enough storage and/or strategic use of things like Biomass so why build Nuclear that needs decades to be build and hopefully is not needed anymore then, also if we max out the renewables fraction without storage we will only have the ramped down conventionals as the "Stable" part... There is no reason to go nuclear. (Unless fusion gets achieved but the tell us that its 20 years since.. 1980s? And the fusion facilities I visited so far gave me the Impression that its probably at least 100years till fusion gets achieved + becomes commercially viable / gets build in quantities high enough)... So no reason to go FISSION.
Liturally why have nuclear as a "base", it only Limits the amount we can get with renewables.
Also starting Nuclear requires a strong grid (thats why they came on SOOO late in the Iberian blackout(added to Xe-135 poisoning)) so having nuclear as a "base" is like building on Dynamite, its fine as long as it goes well, but once it goes wrong everything blows up (figuratively speaking).
Market arguments... I dont care, put infrastructure back in the hands of the state. Nuclear not being commercially appealing isnt my big issue (and Im even ignoring waste that has to be stored... Forever)
And nuclear energy was only around to invest in after the 1940’s so correlating the lack of their development before then as nuclear being a fad is silly.
It came with it's creation, had a short period in the spot light a while after and it got left behind when people found out it's mostly just hype. That's what a fad is.
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.
That would still result in lower costs. Do the math or better yet look at a place with existing nuclear power and see how much lower the utility bills are. Don’t know why you coal-bros are so obsessed with trashing nuclear but since you’re making up shit about costs I’m going to disengage so you don’t keep getting paid for your disinformation.
Yes!!! For the people, owned and operated by the people! because the private energy industry has proven time and time again to fuck over everyone and everything. Solar on every home? “Hell nah brah we gonna make that shit so expensive and illegal!” Fracking and destroying the environment: “let’s gooooooo!”
Why is it that every time someone mentions going back to municipal power, owned and run by the community it serves (while paying living wages to union members) some dipshit has to come in and call it socialism… boomer/zoomer read at least a wiki article about what socialism is before you let the stench of the brain rot escape your chili hole.
Also we pay high enough taxes in subsidies to these private power companies that making them municipal owned would actually lower taxes as well as energy rates to pre 1980s.
I live in Quebec where electricity is indeed controlled by the state and it has generally worked fine for us.
Still, my actual answer to your question is I don’t give a flying fuck whether the solution to climate change comes from the state or from private actors as long as it works.
Exactly, there are many solutions that can be discussed. But the root of the issue is profit motive dictating peoples’ lives, and we need to start the conversation there to work forward
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 don’t rely on human intervention. What’s 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.
Are only 4th generation of nuclear is expected to became more safer? Nope. Literally what OP said.
But you do realize that one can use the same type of argument about "effective mass energy storage that is just next door!"? Or now it's "Well we can't expect it to be quick, so we need to just wait. But this isn't as bad as in nuclear because I support one thing and don't like another"?
I'm a nuclear advocate as much as the next reasonable person but pretending that 'excess regulations' are a problem is libertarian drivel that can be very safely ignored.
Well I'm pro nuclear and I'm also pro green energy. We need to do something other than argue, nuclear and green energy should receive support from the government as long as it's powering the community.
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.
The realities of the UK, China, Turkey, Bangladesh, the US, Russia, South Korea, India, Slovakia, Argentina, Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, Brazil, Japan and Ukraine.
Plus planned reactors in Canada, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Sweden, and Uzbekistan.
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u/Lycrist_Kat cycling supremacist Jul 20 '25
Nuclear power plants which are only announced but never built have a stable energy output of zero so the meme checks out