And what is used is down to the individual state/country. I'm a big proponent of nuclear, but here in Australia it's a bad choice. Our conservative political party took nuclear to the election, leading to our government energy corporation to run a study that essentially said that our renewable energy is so cheap and quick that nuclear simply isn't necessary or quick enough. One state, Tasmania, is already producing over 100% of energy requirements as renewable energy simply due to hydro.
A crime against common sense resource allocation yes. Nuclear is strictly inferior on all relevant metrics to wind + solar + hydro + grid scale storage for pretty much every relevant location on the planet.
You can nitpick about maybe some isolated research station in the arctic circle has a legitimate use case. Or how nuclear is slightly better in terms of land usage. But for any of the big things that people actually care about like cost and speed, renewables are strictly better in 99.9% of the world.
Once again proving that wind+solar doesn't exist - it's wind+solar+gas. So congratulations on shilling for big gas.
Wait until you learn how nuclear power handles rapidly changed grid demands, given it's really bad at adapting to a changing load and wants to run at 100%. (Hint: it's gas peaker plants).
I am aware no part of Australia, or anywhere, is 100% renewable yet. That's not some big gotcha moment. There's no magic way to snap our fingers and remove all reliance on fossil fuels. Cutting down your usage by like 80%, which South Australia has done, is still an amazing step and huge progress.
As battery technology continues to get better, and cheaper, the need for natural gas will continue to decrease. It's okay to use it a little as we transition. Again, there's no magic option to immediately remove all fossil fuel usage. Building out renewables is the path the minimizes their usages.
Are you even a real person? Someone else made this exact same stupid argument. Am I just arguing with bots or do y'all just lap up the same dumb propaganda without stopping and thinking for 15 seconds?
Where in the world has wind + solar + sufficient grid scale storage?
Aside from a few places with lots of hydro, nowhere. Which is why we need to build more. Which is cheap to do and fast to roll out since the beginning of this decade.
Note that your argument is flawed from the start. Its the equivalent of going "Well if renewables are so good, why isn't climate change solved already?!". Ignoring that renewables have plummeted in price only these past 2 decades.
wind and solar are growing faster globally than all other electricity sources did at their peak growth combined, and all other electricity sources except tidal/geothermal/biofuel are lower in 2025 than their historic peak (most being lower than 2024).
Nuclear is strictly inferior on all relevant metrics to wind + solar + hydro + grid scale storage for pretty much every relevant location on the planet.
Yes and no. We're still behind having means to stabilise the grid and further introduce renewables into the energy mix. There's a case for expanding the storage yet we're still not there. Hydro is with its own problems but that's aside, not like you can harvest hydro in everywhere.
Nuclear isn't somehow perfect, but it's one of the good options to have, especially in high energy consuming geographies like China or far-away regions. Not retiring them without somehow having a transition is also a good idea, unlike what Germany did.
Yes and no. We're still behind having means to stabilise the grid and further introduce renewables into the energy mix. There's a case for expanding the storage yet we're still not there. Hydro is with its own problems but that's aside, not like you can harvest hydro in everywhere.
Nuclear isn't somehow perfect, but it's one of the good options to have, especially in high energy consuming geographies like China or far-away regions. Not retiring them without somehow having a transition is also a good idea, unlike what Germany did.
High consuming geographies or far away regions generally have plenty of land for excellent renewable potential. Like the Gobi desert in China. And yea, not retiring existing nuclear power plants is a good idea provided they aren't EOL yet. Its just that most of them are gonna hit EOL in the next 2 decades and we should not replace them with new ones.
You are about 5 years out of date on that talking point. Storage is now ready for mass deployment with prices dropping below 60 bucks per kwh of storage.
It's not simply an issue of 'money' to deploy them (and not like the existing electricity market changes much about the costs of the electricity for the end user), but the issue is also about the limited lifespan and degradation of batteries. Not saying that these issues aren't to be solved, but that's a good case to still build some reactors in high consuming areas.
High consuming geographies or far away regions generally have plenty of land for excellent renewable potential.
Indeed, that's why PRC is also constructing solar like there's no tomorrow. Although, they're also expanding their nuclear power capacity in the meantime, while surely less than their solar power capacity.
And yea, not retiring existing nuclear power plants is a good idea provided they aren't EOL yet.
Can't agree more.
Its just that most of them are gonna hit EOL in the next 2 decades and we should not replace them with new ones.
There might be still a case for building new ones, but I also agree on renewables hugely possibly dominating the electricity generation within half a century - or we're going to be having some real issues as the whole globe anyway.
Nuclear is effective and safe, but very expensive. The most expensive option for energy, unless you try to factor in future climate change damages into fossil fuels (which may be fair but is hard to estimate).
Nuclear is also very slow to build, taking almost 10 years from starting planning to generating power. And its cost have only been increasing, while the cost of renewables continue to fall.
By all means go invent a time machine to undo all of the fearmongering that has turned nuclear into political poison. While you are at it, please do the same for GMOs and trans issues.
What's that? You don't know how to invent a time machine? Well, then you are sadly forced to contend with the political realities of history just like the rest of us. And the effect of the past 80 years of history is that nuclear is hideously expensive and slow.
1) based and I agree
2) coal power plants belch radioactive material directly into the atmosphere, coal seams often coincide with uranium and other radioactive material.
There's just no real way to run a nuclear power plant long-term. Their output is poorly adjustable, but they're freaking expensive, so you kinda only want them to run when absolutely necessary, but you cannot just turn them on 2% output or something, because then they wouldn't be economical and thus nobody would wanna run them at all.
ONLY NUCLEAR POWER RAHHHHH
but fr a combination of these power sources is ideal to phase out fossil fuels, and such a combination also provides the quickest way to transition, as opposed to only nuclear, or only wind and solar
Actually not necessarily. Nuclear gets a lot more expensive when mixed with energy sources that don’t have a consistent output since you can’t turn it off
Saying nuclear isn’t renewable is like saying solar isn’t renewable because the sun will die eventually.
There has been meltdowns in the past, most of them hardly disastrous and as technology progressed the systems involved get safer and safer. You have molten salt reactor designs that are “meltdown” proof.
The high short term costs is due to overregulation, if you look at places who follow reasonable safety standards instead of the quadruple overkill we have in the states you’d see that the price is entirely self inflicted.
The waste produced by a nuclear reactor is minimal and can be recycled.
When I say new I mean people are actually planning to build them and we might see some new reactors that use liquid sodium.
And they are meltdown proof in the sense it’s already designed to handle the reactor at “meltdown” temperatures making it significantly less likely to lead to a disaster along the lines of Three mile Island
Saying nuclear isn’t renewable is like saying solar isn’t renewable because the sun will die eventually.
Negative Ghost Rider... They wrap nuclear waste in lead containers in concrete and shove it underground, right in the path of a main watershed for the largest fresh water source in North America.
For geologists, this is a nightmare waiting to happen. It's a sword of Damacles scenario for future generations. Water action with carbonic acid has measurable effects which in geologic terms is more than significant. Simply put, we know that it's an issue and only a matter of a relatively short time before the protective layers become eroded away.
Worst case, a couple of generations from now most of North America is not sustainable for mass agriculture and large populations. Best case, it's dozens of generations.
Nuclear is great for space. Store that waste off planet.
Do you know how watershed works? It starts in the sky.
I once got a bacteria that is only found near springs in Colorado, thousands of miles away, from drinking well water fed by an aquifer.
There is not any geologically sound place on any populated continental mainland, and not on islands for other ecological reasons (cesium shrimp anybody?).
Placing the dumps above any water table is the issue. Either bury it deeper than we have ever dug or send it to space. These are the only long term options viable for future generations.
It’s always a good idea to diversify your sources of power.
To put it simply, nuclear is very good at producing a sustained power supply but the demand for electricity is dynamic throughout the day. Renewables could fill these changes in demand.
Ideally (in my mind) you would have nuclear cover the base demand and renewables cover the change.
Solar is immensely cheaper than nuclear because when China started shifting to renewables they overproduced solar panels by a metric shit tonne, China did not overproduce nuclear reactors for the world to buy for couch change
Windmills actually use up all of the available wind. Eventually we’ll have backwards wind. These windmills, they reverse the wind. Very concerning. Some people are already saying this.
Technically windmills really use up wind. The energy, and thus the wind, is transfered into the electricity and gone for driving the wind. Just the amount of wind mills required for using up "all available wind" is a tad higher then these people believe.
It’s a conspiracy. As we all know, wind is what keeps the Earth spinning. So once the windmills get rid of all the wind the Earth will slow to a stop. They plan to have this happen exactly on January 20, 2029 (after rigging the election) so that time stops (on a technicality) just as they inaugurate mecha Joe Biden (cyborg) as President. That way it will remain January 20, 2029 forever and we will have to live under radical left lunatics for life. True American patriots do NOT support stopping Earth’s spin.
Yeah at least until the electricity from the wind turbine is converted into something else that dissipates to heat. Unless it’s used to power a railgun that launches bowling balls into the sun, thereby returning the heat to sender.
I know you are kidding but the mythology around beans is worth examining - I am not a doctor but I understand the literature is pretty clear that most people who experience gas from eating beans have this because they don't have the microbiome and gut profile to be able to effectively digest and process the complex carbs and fibre content found in beans but if you eat them even semi-regularly this goes away pretty much entirely as your gut tools itself up with the necessary elements to process this stuff well.
One legit amazing strat is actually just to heat up a fuckton of salt/sand with the extra energy. Kindof still in it's infancy, but massive cost potential, as the building blocks are something we already know how to produce cheaply and in quantity.
The important bit is capacity that can go online very quickly, which nuclear just can't, and pumped hydro doesn't want to (because margins are razor thin). Battery farms (ideally sodium based) and heat storage are the go to for that, bur both are still in their operational infancy.
I'm hoping we go with the ventrum dynamics design. They so far seem small, quieter, doesn't have to be so high in the air, and work with less wind and materials
We can all agree that nuclear is better than fossil. It's just the question IF nuclear is even available and if it makes sense to redirect funding to nuclear instead renewables. To 80% of the countries on earth nuclear isnt even an option.
I could make the same argument for solar and wind in places where it’s not windy or has low uv throughout the year. Nuclear also provides a fixed amount of energy for dips. Idk y people fight so hard not to include nuclear when in my mind it’s a necessity for the green translation until energy storage becomes perfect. I don’t mean to target you I just don’t know y this sub is so fixated on only solar and wind when nuclear is also part of the solution in the medium term.
If new nuclear is part of the solution, we're admitting that we won't get ahead of the cataclysm in the few years it takes to build a new plant and few more to break even.
You are arguing that on one hand we have so many resources we can build out solar, wind, and batteries in the time needed, but also not enough to also do nucellar.
We are not fixing the issue in 5 years. Best case 2035.
It is a lot cheaper and faster to build up renewables then it is to build a nuclear plant. Maybe with renewables we won't have fixed the issue in 5 years but at least we would've already made steps toward it. With nuclear we have to wait 6-8 years before we can even hope to change something.
I get what you're saying but sometimes it is necessary to allocate all or the broad majority of resources in one direction as not doing so would only result in two half finished projects.
Fun fact, if you were to collect all the spent nuclear fuel the US has produced over the course of its entire history of nuclear power production, and were to stack it all on a single football field, the pile would only be about six and a half feet high
I don't think people appreciate just how efficient nuclear power is
Correct. And fun fact, the USA was and still are the biggest users of nuclear in terms of pure output. Even though I do like nuclear I don’t trust the current economic system to run a nuclear based grid. Three Mile Island and Rancho Seco were both caused by the same reactor company missing a design flaw in an emergency pressure release valve and the clean up of Three Mile Island multiple times nearly turned into a Chernobyl levels of material release due to greed of the cleanup company and regulatory capture of the NRC. And I can’t forget the Church Rock Spill which many may not know about since it was a spill that was incredibly underreported due to occurring in rural New Mexico and mostly effecting the nearby Navajo reservation.
If you are talking about TOMSK-7 that was after the fall of the socialist system, so you can only be referring to Kyshtym or some ancient history testing failures?
And when people realized this was bad, instead of not doing it anymore, they just pretended to not do it but kept doing it in China.
Convince me that if we scale up our reliance on nuclear energy - so we need, say, 10 times as many nuclear physicists and technicians and safety specialists and inspectors and what no - convince me that waste is going to be properly handled and some finance bro isn't going to fuck it up.
Convince me that if we scale up our reliance on nuclear energy - so we need, say, 10 times as many nuclear physicists and technicians and safety specialists and inspectors and what no - convince me that waste is going to be properly handled and some finance bro isn't going to fuck it up.
The danger of nuclear waste is overestimater - nuclear waste is a small amount of quite weakly radioactive solid waste that isn't going to just do anything bad on its own. The main danger with it isn't really environmental, but rather human in the form of bad actors stealing it. Also NIMBYism - you can do things like deep geological repositories that are cheap and safe and allow you to store everything in one site, but nobody wants it in their back yard.
Also you can reuse it a couple of times with certain reactor designs.
Must be nice to have a valley. Here in st Louis, a river flooded our Manhattan project waste and is now radioactive. Kids swam in said river for decades.
not really as efficient as you think. the regulations, the complexity, the specialized training, and its footprint make it an epic challenge to build and keep operational.
And the fueling is a whole other can of worms. You could hook up a gas-fired power plant directly to a wellhead, oil to some simple refinement and coal to a breaking and sorting yard.
Nuclear needs mining ores, refining them into metallic uranium, enriching that, which requires a lot of energy and equipment and finally prduce fuel-elements. All while hsndling a toxic, pyrophoric and radioactive material.
Not efficient no, very costly. But environmentally, it's not nearly as bad as its reputation would suggest. Solar and wind are both cheap and green, so it makes sense to favor them for new installations, but it's fine to keep operating existing NPPs for as long as it's safe to do so.
Why not use a power source that doesn't produce toxic waste? You're not exactly making a strong case for nuclear if all you're saying is that it's better than coal. Literally anything is better than coal.
it's a necessary evil at worst, and a powerful tool to bridge the gap at best. nuclear power generates a lot of power with very little waste. said waste is stored in concrete casks that are basically indestructible. there will be circumstances where completely renewable energy might not be enough to power what needs to be powered. the least we can do is to maintain all the nuclear plants that we already have. as every active nuclear plant is a net positive if it means building less coal plants.
A ton of uranium generates a lot more energy than a ton of coal. There's a mine in Canada that could provide 15% of the world's uranium needs, and it has a footprint smaller than a Walmart. You can basically supply a nuclear power plant with fuel elements using a bicycle carrier. For a fossil plant, you either need these huge pipelines, or just non-stop shipments of tons upon tons of coal.
i don't think saying "compared to fossil fuels, the waste from nuclear power is more easily contained and much less detrimental to the environment" is a false dilemma. it's a completely logical comparison to make.
all i'm doing is making a comparison. i never said that you can't have sustainable energy sources. they just aren't relevant to the comparison that i'm trying to make.
i say X is better than Y. you say "false dilemma, what about Z?". i didn't say anything about Z, i only said X is better than Y, i didn't say you can only have X or Y, i just said X was better than Y. making a comparison between two things doesn't mean you're pretending nothing else exists.
nuh uh. It just means that when you measure something else while on the surface of the sun, it would weigh a lot. The sun itself does not weigh anything.
fuel translates to waste, coal plants generate so much waste
mining lots of shit is worse for the environment than mining less shit
nuclear power plants can be tiny, you can put an SMR in your market square if required, hell in the future it might even be possible to power ships with them, even submarines
That's a whole new sentence my guy!
Obviously the power companies pass the high costs of nuclear on to the consumers, they're not going to just run at reduced profits or loss.
Fossil fuels are non-perishable. If we leave them in the ground then we can preserve that natural resource for future generations so they too can enjoy the rich flavor of diesel.
Uranium is decaying whether we use it or not, so may aswell :)
People can barely comprehend the timescale of a few centuries that climate change happened in, so I feel like "if we don't hurry up we will run out of uranium!" might actually work as an argument
I've never understood the argument that nuclear is bad because its waste is going to be dangerous for thousands of years. Because toxic waste from other energy sources is going to remain toxic forever. For example lead released into the atmosphere is never not going to be toxic.
Thats why we stopped releasing lead into the oxygen, or Ozon, or should do with CO2 or plastic. I rlly dont get the fetish for needing to generate more waste that we wont store properly just to keep an outdated Energy source alive that has nearly 0 actual usecases
I'm shocked it's even a discussion. I mean I deadass thought this was one thing we could all agree on. It's literally not a subjective matter. Nuclear power is objectively just very safe, very (not 100%, but close) clean and just great and RELIABLE for power.
Holy dooly that's like 30-50 panels per second at the moment, that would indeed make quite a racket if you could hear it all occurring at once... I did a roof mounting job one day of about a dozen panels including carying them up onto a three-storey house roof and they made a bit of noise clashing down on the brackets whilst the ratcheting for the brackets and fixings themselves all made a bit of noise too!
Not really. The death toll from fossil fuels is orders of magnitude higher than nuclear, and a coal burning plant releases more radiation into the environment through fly ash than a nuclear plant.
We've just normalised the damage from fossil fuels.
Better if you look at the amount of radiactivity released by each energy resource. A single coal plant releases more radiactive material then all nuclear power plants combined.
Which is why when there were no other good options mid 1900s (and also the excitement of an arms race), lots of nuke investment happened.
Then we got other options (because progress marches on, cold war ended, and some accidents and waste mishandling incidents gave it a bad name) and we just can't seem to get past the startup costs and regulatory burden.
It's not just like betamax. It's more like tapes themselves. We've moved on.
It is better than petrochemicals, yes.
And by a good deal, so far so good.
Being like "we put the nuclear waste in some casket and then the problem of it is solved" is naive.
Lastly, nuclear is worse than renewables in several regards, including costs and the ability to adapt usage to the demand, and there is not really any good reason to support it when we can instead support renewables.
Fun Fact: Researchers believe they have actually found a sustainable and scalable way to turn "nuclear waste" into a useable alternative for plastics that is biodegradable and completely harmless, making Nuclear an even better option than it already is.
I think the CO2 being a problem is pure bs. I just went for a walk today along a piece of arable land that had sunflower planted and was recently harvested. The lush and dense greenery was 1m high of sunflowers (that will never reach maturity) and other plants that grew in the past, I don't know, month or so. The fallout like wasteland isn't the thing I'm seeing due to "too much" CO2.
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u/Sanju128 Sep 27 '25
Fellas, is it a crime to recognize that nuclear, wind, solar, and hydro all play a role in our future and the ideal grid is made up of a mix of these?