I think a lot of Anti Nuclear Power is based off old designs that weren't as safe and had radioactive byproduct I think newer reactor designs take a lot of bite out of that process. Additionally when you look at what is proposed to happen with Fusion reactors in Virginia in the next couple years it becomes a less popular position to be in opposition.
I was curious and did the reading. The technology still doesn't exist as far as I can tell. Even according to the Commonwealth Fusion Systems who says they will build in Virginia.
The International Atomic Energy Association says:
> there are still some technological issues to address before a commercial power plant can operate. A prototype of a fusion reactor (DEMO) is expected to be built by 2040. [1]
I wish Commonwealth Fusion Systems to sucessed in the plan for commercial fusion electricity production, but they still have many technical problems to solve. They will probably demostrate fusion containment with fusion energy gain factor greater then 1 (more like 10), the primary goal.
But fusion power plants needs to breed and separare tritium, prevent excessive tritium losses in the first wall. The plasma-facing materials in tokamak are subject to very harsh conditions, mutch harder conditions then reactor walls in a fission power plant.
My Anti Nuclear Power is not based on the technology, which is awesome, but on the external factors.
Nuclear power plants will be run by private companies that will weasel out on maintenance to save a penny. Yes, they will weasel out, this time will not be different to other industries.
Nuclear power plant cost overruns by more than 3x.
Nuclear energy being already more expensive than solar.
No private insurer wants to insure a nuclear power plant because the potential payout is gargantuan. So it is the country the one that has to insure it.
Nuclear waste maybe will get reprocessed one of these decades if we really get very lucky, but it is expensive and gets in the way of the profits. So we create a shell company to deal with it, and if it happens something, we bankrupt the shell company and the country has to pay it, again. We get to keep the profits, of course.
What if an accident happens? Well, the country is insuring it, so they have to pay for it. We don't have to be that careful anymore, we don't have to pay for it!
But there are 32 layers of protection, nothing bad will ever happen! We are going to a world with more active wars. Your 32 layers of protection will be blown apart by a well placed hypersonic missile. I hope this never ever happens, but my gut feeling tells me otherwise.
Nuclear would be great if it, and the world, would be run by responsible adults, not by profit-maximizing locusts and warmongering oligarchs.
The point of the hypersonic missile catastrophe was something I had not considered and is an excellent point. I think that is true with all critical infrastructure to some extent but a nuclear reactor would certainly have more fallout. I wonder if any designs have thought about that situation.
I could see this maybe working using a standardized sensor reporting system that goes into some third party/government/public analysis. Full sensor array stream, and whatever is used internally to make decisions, up for scrutiny.
Repeat after me:
Technology solutions don't fix human problems.
Your sensor reporting system will be forced to report whatever is needed - regardless of the reality of the situation - as soon as the right manager demands more uptime to an engineer, or otherwise they get fired because leadership demands more profit.
Yeah, I used to have a lot more faith in companies being responsible, but no longer. Instead what we've been seeing is that companies cannot be trusted with vital infrastructure. Every single time they manage to integrate, they all turn into worse versions of Mr. Burns. Our economic system is setup to reward corner cutting and a race to the bottom. If an nuclear plant ends up melting down, our publicly funded nuclear insurance steps in to clean up the mess and the LLC goes bankrupt. Meanwhile, everyone that invested walks away with all the wealth they've siphoned, which they siphoned more of by cutting corners.
And what's nuts is they can walk away with those profits, buy another nuclear company, and repeat the same process until the same inevitable outcome happens.
We need reform. At a minimum we need make it impossible to have things like LLCs in charge of companies where failure result in huge negative externalities. The owners need to be at risk at going bankrupt. Without that risk, they'll just keep destroying everything so long as it makes an extra buck.
> Nuclear power plants will be run by private companies that will weasel out on maintenance to save a penny. Yes, they will weasel out, this time will not be different to other industries.
Of course like in the well known capitalist regime of the USSR that precipitated the big nuclear problem. If only we had the government instead of the evil capitalists to run things then we could be safe from those profit maximizing parasites.
Yeah, this might well not be any individual human being changing their mind, but rather new human beings less inclined to be anti-nuclear-power now forming a critical mass within the UK Green Party.
Third-parties are generally full of eccentrics (remember that the UK is still FPTP, even if they're a multi-party system). Eccentrics typically aren't the "very serious" types looking at tradeoffs.
The large portion of the environmentalist left are degrowthers who literally want people to just live with less, which means "less energy" is actually good. It will never be a politically viable position, but again, we're talking about a party that until recently has never come close to wielding power.
Degrowthers just believed climate scientists that there is a problem and then believed climate deniers when they said none of the solutions work.
If you accept both of these then like Vaclav Smil, you'll conclude that you need to use less fossil fuels and nothing else will replace them. And if you care about fairness globally then 1st world nations need to really use less.
It all makes perfect sense if you believe all the lies told about renewables.
Most of the people mocking it helped spread those lies, which makes attacking the people who believe them a bit rude.
The solution was, and still is, urbanism and electrification… not living with less.
Literally the leftist dense cities have been the ones pushing back hardest against high rises, sustainable transportation alternatives, and in large part, electrification through overly restrictive environmental laws designed in the 70s.
That’s over now. Climate change is here, and you still can’t convert a house to a duplex in LA without jumping through a thousand hoops.
Yes this is an extremely bad thing. Degrowthers who literally want people to just live with less are enemies of human progress and flourishing. I do not want people like that to have any political power.
It doesn't matter if it's "good" or "bad" if it's not a politically viable position.
That I think it's an idiotic position is beside the point. Things and prosperity generally are not the problem, and can grow pretty much indefinitely for the foreseeable future if it's done in a reasonable and sustainable way.
> if it's done in a reasonable and sustainable way.
There are a lot of things that would work fine if done in a reasonable and safe way but we have plenty of examples of people making unreasonable and unsafe decisions.
> I've never understood the opposition to nuclear power.
Part of it was a Soviet psyop to get Western citizens to oppose West's nuclear weapons. Encourage people to oppose nuclear in general, both nuclear power and nuclear weapons.
Oposition to nuclear is much older, it started is oposition to nuclear weapons, nuclear weapon tests and in generation was part of the global peace movements and anti-cold war and anti-Vietnam war movements.
For example Greenpeace had it roots in the oposition to nuclear weapon testing at the end of 1960s.
It's perfectly understandable, if you allow that most peoples' understanding of nuclear safety is not perfect. Chernobyl and 3 mile island, but also Hiroshima and Nagasaki- atomic power's dangers get a lot more press than when it works quietly and reliably.
Sure, you and I can talk about newer plant designs that fail safely, or about how coal plants emit more radiation by far. But if we had the ability to rapidly convince large swathes of the populace of provable scientific facts, then clean power is only one of the many many problems we would be able to solve.
It was part emotional response to Chernobyl, part is was full on Russian propaganda infiltrating parliaments in Europe.
The leader of Germany that phased out nuclear and made Germany fully reliant on Russia then took a job... at Gazprom. The VP from the Greens responsible took a very high paying job lobbying for foreign Gas firms, too.
It has to be one of the most successful foreign influencing campaigns in history.
Yep, it did. And (brown)coal kills much more people and the dependence on Russian gas made the geopolitics much worse than any nuclear reactor ever would.
The chances of a Soviet leadership-induced meltdown like at a German nuclear reactor that is properly designed and maintained is laughable.
It is, however, extremely hard to film the slow killing of people by browncoal. It's easy to film a nuclear reactor incident.
I think we can agree that people are not in general making purely statistical decisions when it comes to what risks are acceptable and which ones are not.
German TV had local experts who could tell the audience in real time that the authorities in Fukishsima were lying about the unfolding disaster.
A slightly racist belief in the Japanese as superior at following the rules meant a big shock when the Germans realised that even the Japanese could not be trusted with nuclear power.
And who cares about the 150 000 displaced people and the still existing exclusion zone?
Oh, yeah, because the Fukushima nuclear accident is still ongoing. The plant is still too dangerous to access and dismantle. Cooling water is still pumped into the reactors to keep them from melting down. That water is still contaminated by a mixture of radioelements and being released to the ocean after partial treatment. And this will go on for several decades still.
There was no real need to actually evacuate anyone because of Fukushima, it was a overreaction caused by irrational fear of nuclear power. The evacuation itself caused much harm. It is pretty silly to hype an incident that caused ZERO deaths as some kind of horrible nuclear disaster.
It was absolutely not almost a second Chernobyl. Saying this proves you understand very little of what happened in the Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents.
Correct, because they managed to prevent it from becoming a second Chernobyl. At Chernobyl they failed to prevent it from becoming a first Chernobyl. But we don't want to keep rolling the dice just because the last time we got a 6.
No it was never possible for Fukushima to become a Chernobyl style disaster because it has a containment structure and the biggest difference is that Fukushima was basic overheating while Chernobyl was a complex power excursion of over 100GW. There was never a runaway nuclear explosion at Fukushima; it was a severe thermodynamic failure of cooling.
I oppose nuclear for a very simple reason: there is no way to deal with the long term waste. Not just the small amount of waste from the fuel, but the reactor components.
The waste will burden hundreds of generations for millenia and the reason? Our current consumption
Such greed and disregard for following generations
I don't think it accumulates enough solid waste to worry about. I'm Aussie, and I'm in favour of a proposal I heard a while ago to let other countries export their concentrated nuclear waste to the middle of Australia. Just bury it in one spot, on the oldest, most geologically stable landmass on the planet. It's far from bodies of water, it's far from population centres (excepting Alice Springs).
That said solar panels and batteries are so bloody good now, why even bother building nuclear reactors in much of the world? And geothermal looks promising too, with the new fracking tech they're using. But who knows.
Mt Isa Mines when done is a good spot, and as a bonus you largely get to avoid issues with indigenous opposition since the area is already suitably dug up.
I drove through Nevada recently and it made me angry how much flat, high sun, land there is for solar, with no real environmental impact whatsoever (probably improvement for local life from the bit of shade).
Nevada also has the geology and part of a repository built already for nuclear waste. But Las Vegas controls the state and so those empty holes sit unused.
This is also true of central Australia - dry, cloudless places that are good locations for solar panel arrays are also good places to store spent nuclear waste. There is the issue that solar panel efficiency drops somewhat in hot weather, but yeah there should be way more photovoltaic solar power in the American southwest, including Nevada.
>there is no way to deal with the long term waste.
Yes there is, bury it. Its what we do with lots of other waste. Of course, you have to be a bit more careful than you would be with a standard landfill. But the engineering is well understood. It is usually just the fact that nobody wants it buried near them that causes political issues.
>The waste will burden hundreds of generations for millenia
Pumping more carbon into the atmosphere is also a huge burden for future generations.
That's not true, we know enough about geology to deal with long term waste.
Nuclear waste is great for several reasons:
- the first one is quantity: very small in comparison with how much energy it produced (a nuclear reaction generates one million times more energy than a chemical reaction so less resource usage across the whole lifecycle);
- the second one is that most of it (over 90%) can be recycled and used with gen 4 reactors;
- the third one is that it stays local, i.e. unlike CO2 it doesn't go into the atmosphere (and then the ocean), and since CO2 is inert, from a human time scale how long CO2 can stay in the atmosphere is, I would argue, comparable to nuclear waste decay.
Coal waste will be a larger problem to deal with for future generations than nuclear waste will be. The burning coal of course has shortened the lives of millions and been a major contributor to green house gases. If you oppose both coal and nuclear, how should the world have generated electrical power from say 1950 to 2000?
>Climate change is a minor problem in comparison
No one knows what the best and worst case scenarios for deaths during to climate change as they effects might include AMOC shutdown, sea level rise, forced mass migrations of people, wars, shortages of food, etc. In all credible scenarios the deaths and suffering in even the best case scenarios will be much, much, higher than any deaths due to radiation exposure from nuclear waste.
Climate change is a consequence of fearmongering against cleaner solutions. We have methods for handling radioactive waste safely- whether it's vitrification and dropping it in subduction zones, or just putting it deep underground in wastelands, there are lots of solutions that are infinitely better than the status quo.
It wouldn't be any better, because if plants had been built decades ago, they wouldn't be able to be competitive anymore, would keep running a deficit, and would depress the economy and public finances like the white elephants they are, and take away means to transition to renewables.
There is a very very strong pro-nuclear contingent on HN and in tech in general, and most of the tech pro-nuclear support comes from viewing nuclear as environmentally positive compared to alternatives, so I'm not surprised at all to see this. It hits all the right "this is good" receptors, even if UK Greens are a tiny party. (I personally view nuclear as completely infeasible, economically, while also being environmentally friendly, so I've had few allies on any grounds when it comes to public debate on nuclear.)
The best time to build up nuclear power was 4 decades ago - when the supply of fossil fuel was obviously fraught, and things like solar and wind power were nonviable.
Whether it makes any sense to push for nuclear power now is unclear. Nuclear was quite expensive even back then - but decades of NIMBYism, "environmental" activism and overregulation have damaged the industrial capability and eroded supply chains to the point that getting a buildout going at scale, on a sane budget and a sensible timetable would be an uphill battle. At the same time, renewables aren't anywhere near as opposed, the economic outlook for solar, wind and grid storage is better than it ever was, and the situation is likely to improve even further.
I'm not so sure I agree. A big turning point in my thinking was reading a mid 1980s Forbes piece that investigated several other factors that stopped more US nuclear builds. Perhaps most of all was lack of need, there were too many starts resulting in a glut of nuclear power. Second, construction projects were frequently over budget, meaning the power wasn't as cheap as everybody anticipated. Third, yes, there were mid-construction design changes but that was only on a fraction of projects that were already way behind.
Look over at France, frequently touted as a "successful" buildout. But reactors got more expensive the more they built, not cheaper, and they never met their initial goals for number of builds.
And look at the one place with modern-day "successful" builds: China. They like to tout the reactors as great successes, and they are on time and on budget, or at least as on budget as we can tell in an economic system like that. But they missed their 2020 and 2025 five year plan goals for deployment, and will miss their 2030 goal too. Meanwhile, they deploy 20x-30x as much wind and solar each year, each tech. That's after adjusting for capacity factor! So the best nuclear builders in the world are only building enough of it to be low single digits of their energy mix.
Nuclear was always oversold as a technology, always underdelivered, and has not seen a positive learning curve that a normal technology would. It was doomed from the start, IMHO.
The background here is that people didn't really trust the individuals or institutions involved with nuclear power, and those same individuals and institutions weren't exactly enthusiastic about a new form of energy.
Pretty much, especially with their latest mess with “Zionism is racism” entryism, a leader who can’t lead, and a split between those interested in green subjects and rump Corbynites
We're familiar with the Green point of view, your niche parties are like NGOs in the US. I think the larger context might be the conversation about technology we've been having in the US since the atom bomb. Articles about nuclear power, GMO, AI, and other advances will trigger similar interest. The timeliness of this article isn't a factor, it's an interesting event and a chance to broach a few topics.
There are three Green Parties in the UK. The SGP members have had a supply agreement with the ruling SNP in the Scottish Parliament for years. There was even talk of them being in coalition for a while.
They were, but the current popularity of the 2 main parties (in recent times) has led to this or a couple of right wing ones as a popular protest vote.
Why is war never a factor in the nuclear power debate? Like nuclear is great, until you have missiles dropping on your territory. You can ask Ukraine about that. Zaporizhia has been held hostage since the early days of the war. Should the Russians have a manic moment they can make a Chernobyl volume 2 with conventional explosives.
Nuclear is a great peacetime technology, Europe is no longer in peacetime.
The destruction of the Kakhovka Dam flooded over 500 square kilometres and carried a significant death toll, caused major damage to the surrounding area and impacted over a million people.
Besides maybe solar, there is always the potential for harm during war times. Heck, even with solar, cutting off electricity supply to a major urban area can tragically carry a death toll that goes beyond even the few severe power plant disasters we as a species have ever encountered.
Fission is not an outlier here and designing any power plant for resilience is a necessary step, whether in war or peacetimes, whether in a tectonically stable or seismically active area.
A nuclear strike on a larger fission reactor could create an awful result unlike any other power plant. There were some studies during the cold war (something about the effects in West Germanyin the early 1980s, IIRC).
As opposed to a nuclear strike directly on a populated civilian area with no nuclear power plant nearby which also creates an awful result?
The main difference in nuking a fission plant over any other area would be creating longer-term fallout.
If the attacker is at all rational, unlikely to be desired because it makes the area hard to inaccessible for troops on either side.
If the attacker is horrificaly irrational and just wants to cause pure, long term, irreparable harm, unfortunately salted nukes would be a feasible option, independent of having a fission plant anywhere near the drop zone...
Nuclear disarmament, international cooperation and reliable defence alliances can (hopefully) be used to protect against this, along with resilient fission designs within reason. Not having a fission plant by itself unfortunately and targically wouldn't prevent an utterly irrational attacker willing to cause as much long term damage as possible.
Very aware of that harsh fact, living in a country that has a section in our constitution making nuclear power illegal (yes, very stupid) and is not part of any defensive alliance (while expecting the countries around us to defend us anyways), if someone wanted to "salt the earth" around Salzburg, Vienna or Graz, they could do it, even if we have no plants.
Scale of fallout would be huge. People were kind of shocked by the analysis (trying to remember what came out then... Fetter, early 1980s, Scientific American?).
Nuclear ICBMs generally make this a moot point. An advanced enemy can explode a "nuclear reactor" anywhere in your country at any time.
Regarding drones, most reactors are built relatively hardened. For example, they're protected against a 747 flying into it at full speed. So even a drone attack would take an advanced enemy, and they might as well drop a bomb on you.
I'm happy they're doing this, and it's good and admirable to see people be able to change their minds on something they once believed so strongly, but this should have happened 30 years ago.
>People only "change their mind" when it becomes an existential crisis.
If only. There's people and parties (not in the UK) who would rather see the rest of the country suffer than admit they were wrong, so they feel compelled to die on that hill and take everyone with them, because defending their principle is more important.
Unlike fossil fuel power plants, NPPs don't depend on a steady supply of a high volume of costly consumables just to keep running. Reactor fuel loads last months to years, naturally buffering any price shocks or supply chain issues. And you can maintain an "energy security" stockpile of nuclear fuel that would add you even more years of runaway.
To have your nuclear power disrupted, you have to face an adversary that's both capable and willing to hit targets on your soil, and on top of that, is willing to target NPP infrastructure specifically.
A random rogue state lobbing mid-range drones over a strait wouldn't cut it. Neither would a war halfway around the world.
We're talking about Germany shuttering their nuclear power plants despite USA warning them repeatedly that Russia was going to weaponize the Nord Stream gas dependence against them. Which is ultimately exactly what happened.
Nuclear power replaced coal in Germany, not gas. A big dependence exists because people heat their homes with gas and lots of industry needs gas, nuclear doesn’t help with either.
That is not really the case. Germany certainly wanted cheap gas, but there was also the theory that integrating Russia economically will prevent conflicts. While ultimately a wrong decision, it was not entirely stupid.
But regarding gas, one has to understand that a tiny fraction (15%) of gas is used for electricity and most for heating. So nuclear power is completely irrelevant here.
I also would like people realize that many nuclear plants in Europe and elsewhere still depend on fuel from Russia. So energy dependence is a bit more complex.
It's a bit more complex, I think. When gas imports started from the USSR, nuclear power plants were still being built in Germany, for example. There were gas imports for a long time.
if the germans want to shoot themselves in the foot they are allowed to do this, yes. what is the point of your comment? it's not even remotely relevant.
I was trying to point out that societies make and are free to make decisions that others don't like or that aren't great for them by some metric - and that there is nothing wrong with that. Why is that not relevant when it comes to energy?
so your point is that it's fine that germany ceeded energy independence and gave power to russia, because they're a country and countries have the 'right' to make bad decisions?
we have the right to criticise countries too right?
If Germans don't want energy independence - you can criticize that but that's how nation states work or is there some UN Charter violation in there, for example?
im still so confused what your point is. it's like talking about the consequences of someone's alcoholism, and someone chiming in "well they have a right to die of the booze if they want" like...ok???
So any nation state needs to be energy independent? Is that your point? Or have cheap energy and energy independence? If people want low growth, expensive energy etc., why is that like alcoholism? What is intrinsically bad there? Not like life expectancy in Germany is low, for example.
Which means new nuclear is about the worst thing we can spend our limited resources on since it won't be coming online until the 2040s, and then at a ruinosuly expensive price.
Meanwhile renewables and storage are reshaping our global energy system due to being the cheapest globally scalable energy source in human history.
We also need to keep in mind nuclear supply chains. After 21 sanction packages the EU still haven't sanctioned Russia's nuclear industry.
We're simply too deeply entangled across the entire supply chain: nuclear fuel, enrichment, reprocessing, technological partnerships, reactor maintenance, new construction and more.
And by “the war against Russia,” you meant when Russia violated its treaty and invaded a sovereign country on the EU’s doorstep? That war “against Russia?” What an interesting phrasing you’ve chosen.
And why did this war start? And how many military bases does Russia have, say, around Caribbean? What was Ukraine going to do with Crimea? People burned alive in Odessa? "Russia violated its treaty and invaded a sovereign country" - double standards at their best? USA/Israel being the number 1 terrorist/pedo coalition - nothing? Not even a strongly-worded letter? Fuck off already, the byproduct of brainwashing.
The Russia/Ukraine war started because Russia invaded Ukraine.
Ukraine said that Russia invaded Ukraine. Russia said that Russia invaded Ukraine. And Russia has a long history of invading its neighbors - that's why it's already so big. We have no reason to doubt that Russia invaded Ukraine.
Or more probably, it's imputable to biology and the natural replacement of the "old guard" by adults who didn't grow up during nukes schizophrenia. Or in other words, I doubt that those folks reasoned themselves out of the irrational fear for nuclear energy that they did not reason themselves into.
I'm not sure it's irrational. It's perhaps oversensitive. There are dozens of nuclear power incidents rated at levels of 5+, affecting the wider region.
In the UK, Sellafield was a nightmare. Lots of less serious slip ups and malfunctions punctuated by a few critical incidents, between 1954 and 2003. You might understand why yesterday's Green Party might think it an issue worth pursuing.
As other people have mentioned, it's very likely not the same people; but rather more anti-nuclear people leaving the organization or dying, and more pro-nuclear people joining.
I believe more recently there was an expose about some other politicians at that time having links to Russia, although don’t have them to hand right now.
It loses on accounting if you assign zero cost to the million+ lives that carbon emitting power generation takes every year, and the long term, possibly irreversible damage it does to the planet. If you factor in those two things even 1%, nuclear wins hands down
Cost of recent nuclear power in the UK comes in at $130/mwh at best. Where wind and solar are coming in at $50-80/MWh.
So for the same rate of investment you can decarbonize 2-3 times faster. And that doesn't figure the long lead times for nuclear vs solar, wind and batteries.
Why is it that almost every top comment or top reply on HB loves to pretend they know what they're talking about while making almost no fucking sense.
You got one guy on here claiming a fusion reactor will be built in Virginia (lol). Yet another claiming that the reason that everyone hates nuclear power is because of the byproduct of nuclear waste and that it's worse than climate change (rofl). Like what kind of drugs are you people on?
Wow when nuclear power was the answer why we’re against it, but now nuclear power is too expensive compared with renewables plus solar they are for it.
How about some useful policies like removing planning constraints for grid expansion and solar farms and compulsory wind farms on golf courses owned by foreign billionaires
Nuclear power is not too expensive, it's expense is artificial. Also - renewables can't provide base load energy to replace mos of carbon stuff. You need a powerful base load to support most renewables in the mix
The 1990s called. They want their energy economics back.
Even back then, those economic comparisons were idealized for nuclear. Build it run it count up to the dollars and there you go. Except you need to secure it, you need to handle waste, and roughly the same cost over runs are bedeviling decommissioning as they were construction.
On top of all that, why is nuclear still uninsurable in the private market?
The cost of Nuclear has raised in the same way every other civil industrial project has risen.
A pipeline in Canada was supposed to be $8B it cost $30, subways and tunnels go 3-5x over budget because the actors can extract that wealth.
Think of the builders like Nvidia - they are not incented to build something for 'cost plus' - they want to make sure they suck all of the surpluses out they can. Why build for $10B when you can build for $35B?
Contractors are incented to price all the way to the point where it's 'not viable'.
Thats why with oligarchic vendors, you will never, ever have cheap energy. Never. Because the supply chain will take all the surplus. That's why we have competition. Groceries are not like that.
Insurance - this is a debilitating issues stopping nuclear because there's no way to know what the outcome would be. We don't know how the courts would rule on damages if there was a problem.
This is something that has to be socialized, at least on some level.
Farmers and property owners have to 'live with' the fact there are 300f monstrous windmills obstructing their view for the public good. It's minor but very real. In a more extreme case, we have to contend with the fact there are certain cases in which people may have to 'vacate their properties' in some cases. How do we compensate? It's hard to say, but that has to be worked out and made clear otherwise nothing will get built.
Regulations around storage are another problem - governments have not pushed hard enough for material solutions, kicking the can down the road because just leaving the problem sit in pools beside reactors was 'good enough'. Were we to have invested this for decades we would be much further along.
US, Canada and France etc. have pretty good records, though the US situation is too 'open' it could be tightened, and there's no reason we couldn't have already 35%-50% base nuclear energy all over North America.
It would be less expensive if every 20 years some idiots wouldn't blow one of them up and render a sizable swath of land uninhabitable by doing something regarded. The cost is in making sure they don't and unfortunately it's probably here to stay.
It's actually 100% worth it even with 1 fukishima every 20 years.
There are literally 0 confirmed deaths to due exposure at Fukishima. Zero.
Literally installing solar panels is more dangerous. Most of the are will be recoverable in a few decades.
The wars in Russia, Iran and frankly the entire Iraqi conflicts, and Yemen as well - are all 'Oil Wars'. Without high Oil prices and global dependency - none of that would exist.
If we had followed through with buidling out nuclear from the 1980s - and did it safely, we might have 1 more Fukishima, and also learned from it (there are htings about Fukishima that should have never happened) - and most of the West would have 50-65% base load from Nuclear.
We may very well have had all electric cars 20 years sooner and Oil would be used for jet fuel and a few other things. Maybe not even that, as we can synthesize fuel with electricity already.
Nuclear costs $16B/GW. Solar $1B/GW nominal. Batteries $1B for 1GW/4GWh. Figure out how much solar overcapacity and batteries you can get, within a year or two, for the price of a nuclear reactor deployable 10-20 years from now.
Interesting claims. Where are you getting those numbers?
And do you actually believe they are comparable?
German nuclear plants were producing for less than 2 cents/ kWh. Firm, day + night, summer + winter, profitable.
Intermittent renewables cost multiples of that and require massive subsidies on top and are allowed to place the burden of their intermittency on the firm producers on top of that.
Yep, and renewables + batteries are only getting cheaper. Nuclear takes a long time to build. A new plant planned today will be obsolete before construction ends.
Nuclear fans on HN don’t get that nuclear was the answer in the 90s, but is not today.
The problems in the U.K. specifically are more about grid capacity (both long distance and local substation level) and nonsense regulations (why can’t I have pluggable battery to go with my pluggable solar) than in generation.
Citation needed. For example Flamanville 3 (France) was estimated to cost around €3.3 billion, costs ballooned to over €13-19 billion. There are other similar examples such as Hinkley Point C (UK). Also maintenance is much more expensive and don't forget the cost for storing nuclear waste + decomissioning. Compare that to renewables...
One of the useful policies mentioned in the article is:
> Last year, Adrian Ramsay, then a Green co-leader, criticised government support for Sizewell C. “The money being spent on this nuclear gamble would be far better spent on insulating and retrofitting millions of homes, bringing down energy bills and keeping people warmer and more comfortable,” he said.
Classic negawatt approach, to use Amory Lovins' term.
Seems, though, like most people would rather build impressive infrastructure than improve what's already there. Grid expansion and new energy production development have far more cachet than paying a bunch of people with white vans to go around fixing up houses.
Well actually given the free fall in prices of renewables and batteries, not really.
Nuclear costs $16B/GW. Solar $1B/GW nominal. Batteries $1B for 1GW/4GWh.
Figure out how much solar overcapacity and batteries you can get, within a year or two, for the price of a nuclear reactor deployable 10-20 years from now.
They were never were in control of the government, so it seems a conspiracy theory that the greens somehow did "a lot of damage". I think a conspiracy needed by people who can not deal with the fact that nuclear is simply not economical, and therefor fails on the market.
There are aspects of many political parties I agree with, but to me, being against Nuclear Power is the largest short sighted items this and a couple of other parties are/were against.
If many countries took the same road as France, the world would be in a much better place. Imagine the energy advances that could have happened if nuclear was supported for the past 50 years.
Or renewables. I remind you that nuclear power is completely economically unviable today because it is the single most expensive way to generate power. Even with Trump rolling back safety regulations, it's still too expensive when solar panels are 10 cents per watt, nuclear is 50, and the amount of backup storage to offset the unreliability does not bridge that gap.
Gas is dispatchable, nuclear is not. It’s enormously expensive, and that expense is locked in whether you need the power or not.
We’re already in a situation where we have more power than we need during certain hours of the day in some states/countries, and that’s not even counting the massive, accelerating buildout that will happen between now and the years before new nuclear is built… even it was started today.
Also France is around 7c (euro) per kwh from nuclear generation. If the whole west was all in on nuclear for last 50 years it would have resulted in lower per kwh costs.
What would solar's cost per kWh be? GP means the cost of the asset per peak generation power. 0.1/W seems about right, to an order of magnitude at least.
and i remind you that this framing is completely misleading outside the world of simulations and calculations.
Nuclear doesn't need to be the only source of electricity generation. In fact, it can be the base on top of which a serious country expands electricity generation with renewable energy.
I will also remind you that there is not a single industrialised economy anywhere on earth that has successfully supplied new electricity growth with only renewable energy. Not one.
> I will also remind you that there is not a single industrialised economy anywhere on earth that has successfully supplied new electricity growth with only renewable energy. Not one.
Nuclear fans across the internet seems to have adopted this talking point recently and none of them have noticed it doesn't make any sense.
You think.. I heard some antinuclear guys opposing fusion because the vessel for fusion reactor would get radioactive, and that is "nuclear waste" (of course, it's not the dangerous, long-term kind).
The neutron radiation around a fusion reactor is far more intense than in any fission reactor, because in fusion reactors most of the produced energy is carried by neutrons.
Any material exposed to neutron radiation will become radioactive. Of course the designers of fusion reactors will attempt to choose only materials that are converted into radioactive isotopes with a short halflife, but until someone demonstrates a working fusion reactor we will not know whether this is possible or the production of some amount of long-life radioactive waste must be accepted.
In my opinion, during the next few decades there are far less chances for fusion reactors to be used as a significant energy source on Earth than for some improved kinds of fission reactors.
In any case neither fission reactors nor fusion reactors are strictly necessary on Earth, but nuclear reactors are the only way to achieve interplanetary travel through the Solar System in decent times, so I believe that the future of nuclear reactors is for spaceships, not for terrestrial use.
I've commented before on this, but I don't think it ever becomes financially viable.
Assuming all the physics are completely solved tomorrow;
Private capital can easily get better returns, not to mention sooner returns, doing pretty much anything else.
Public capital requires a very long-term govt spend spanning multiple governments. China could do it, but hard to see a western govt doing it. Plus it would add a decade to the schedule and costs would spiral upwards.
All of which is a huge bet against improvements in grid-level storage.
It was ultimately a conservative government that was responsible for exiting nuclear in Germany. But also nobody wants nuclear back, not even the industry - as it is too expensive.
> We need the Middle East out of our political system full stop. All of it.
And I'd like a pony.
Even if we never put a drop of oil in a fuel tank again, 40% of the world's plastics manufacture is dependent on Middle Eastern oil. It will never not be part of our system.
A Jewish drama student LARPing as the leader of an Islamist, pro-Palestinian party standing on a ticket of Israel not existing wasn’t on my 2026 political bingo card.
I concede it is somewhat unfair to compare anyone to Caroline Lucas, who really was one of the finest MPs of her time; a generational talent.
But he is not up to her standard, and they have MPs in office who show Polanski to be just a silly lightweight (and one who appears to be unable to take responsibility).
(It still blows my mind that his excuse for why he couldn't vote was that he had to campaign. In St Pancras. Which is literally only an hour and twenty minutes away from Brighton by a really nice easy direct train. And he could have voted online.)
Why is "Zionism is racism" insanity? Based on the definitions of those words it's a simple true statement, no? And our political system is insane if simple true statements send it over the edge.
The problem with this is that you're looking at actually existing Zionism and the history of Zionist leaders' actual statements and deeds. When approaching a nuanced topic like this, it's important to imagine a hypothetical ideal Zionism that hasn't spent the last 78 years engaging in ethnic cleansing.
> Because it is part of a pact that seeks to deny the existence of Israel
The veracity of the claim that Zionism is racist is independent of any implication you’ve arbitrarily attached to it. I both believe that Zionism is fundamentally racist - like many of the other ethno-nationalist 19th century movements - and that Israel has a right to exist. There’s no reason that both can’t be true.
Silly question: so what if it’s racist? Huge swathes of the planet are racist.
“Zionism is racism” is also some kind of tautology masquerading as an argument. A very diverse selection of races can count themselves as Jewish if they have a Jewish mother. So racism isn’t even the right term to use but “Judaism is tribalism” doesn’t have the same kind of undergraduate-brained ring to it.
If you think Zionism is racism and racism isn't bad, then just say that. Don't try to claim that Zionism isn't racism if you sincerely believe that it is and that's good.
"so what if it’s racist?" - I'm not sure what sort of answer are you looking for here?
A list of examples from history of things going pear-shaped when large numbers of people embraced a form of ethno-nationalism where lineage and genetics is the primary factor in determining a persons worth as a human?
That historical Palestine needs to be restored (and people like yourself are against that!) is proof that Zionism is racism. Not just of the structural type, but of the ethnic cleansing type. Hence the need for Palestine to be restored.
Fun fact: the descendants of the Judeans and Canaanites are today's Palestinians. Today's Israelis are descendants of an ethnically unrelated group of Germans who immigrated from Germany after WW2.
Roughly speaking, of course. Everything about ethnicity is always roughly speaking.
No, they definitely do not. Palestinians were actually living on the land, and they were ethnically cleansed off of it by the Zionists. They're not using mythology to justify invading someone else's land.
Netanyahu is actively sliming all of the Arab Israeli as "cheaters" and "stealer".
The opposition could ally with those parties and end Netanyahu corruption and start the Oct 7 investigation that Netanyahu blocks but they don't.
Explain to us, in light of these very evident and present facts, how Zionism isn't racism. Give us an idea what is going to happen if the Arab citizens part of the Israeli population grows more than the current 20% in regards to "self-determination and statehood for the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland".
Explain to me why a British political party needs to take an extreme, polarising position on Israeli politics it has absolutely no influence over, at a cost only of its domestic support.
The entire concept is tinged with antisemitism, it lacks a nuanced understanding in the religious belief in the restoration of Israel, and it encourages very simple, very straightforward reactions like "these people are all children who have no grasp of politics and shouldn't be near power". Which is my position.
Netanyahu is a horror (and a crook). The current Israeli government is engaged in a cycle of violence that is enabling illegal settlements etc.
It doesn't mean that a British political party should inject itself into a nearly 150 year old cultural/faith position that has its roots in the experience of antisemitism in Europe and the USA.
It's not that different to having a political platform position that Catholicism isn't true Christianity, or that only Sunni Islam is true Islam. Sensible multi-faith parties seeking electability and a broad power base don't do fucking stupid things like this.
The British government in power is already taking an extremist position on the issue, so I would expect all other parties to also make their positions clear. That's just how politics is supposed to work. You should know what parties stand for.
The UK police are literally today arresting peaceful pro-Palestinian protesters, so I'd say it has a lot to do with domestic policy. That's just a tiny tip of the iceberg, like you had a prince taken out by an Israeli spy!
You argument fails at the first sentence. The list of deep collaboration between Israel and the UK is too long for this post, and I won't list them, as you know it but are not arguing in good faith.
>The entire concept is tinged with antisemitism
But we can't say Zionism is tinged with racism? A blindingly obvious double standards.
The Zionists parties of Israel want to do ethnic cleansing in the Palestinians territories, and will purge the Arab Israeli the second they grow too big. Is there a gentle Zionism somewhere, that only wants Jews to emigrate to Israel to live their faith without all the war crimes? Maybe, but it is as relevant as the religious anti-Zionism that objects to it on religious grounds. Which is too say: not at all relevant.
> You argument fails at the first sentence. The list of deep collaboration between Israel and the UK is too long for this post, and I won't list them, as you know it but are not arguing in good faith.
I am fully arguing in good faith because we're talking about The Green Party here. It is the political party I am talking about with zero influence. They have zero influence on UK foreign policy in particular.
Please properly read what you're responding to before responding like this.
That... Doesn't make any sense. Parties should not have any opinions before they get any influence? They have to be a blank slate before they get elected to a majority or a sizable minority?
Between shameless scientific fraud from last century still affecting and harming nuclear policy to this day [0], and masses of idiots being easily influenced and swindled by foreign powers [1] (example specifically about the UK's case), I don't know why any such parties haven't been forcefully disbanded or put in the same category as terrorists, along with other organizations such as "Green"-"peace". They have at large done immeasurable damage to their countries and the world at large, and most of them started out explicitly as being anti-nuclear, that being their only mission for the longest time, only becoming relevant through the most disgusting fearmongering. Most importantly, they've achieved nothing but ensure the continued, worldwide permanent reliance on oil states and the terrorism that derived from it.
I find it fairly amusing that "green" parties were ever opposed to nuclear power. It was clearly lobbying by fossil fuel energy interests. If we're gonna generate electricity at night without burning coal, oil or gas, we need nuclear. Storing solar and wind overnight is an even more absurd proposition than nuclear power plants. Burning more fossil fuels is even more absurd than nuclear power plants.
This is a bit too cynical. It's impossible to understand the history green parties' opposition to nuclear energy without the context of their opposition to nuclear weapons. The argument went that "civilian" nuclear infrastructure was deeply interconnected with nuclear weapons. They share infrastructure. The existence of a civilian nuclear fuel cycle brings into existence a latent nuclear capability (you may recognize this theme from such films as the United States vs the Islamic Republic). Creating fissile material while avoiding diversion and proliferation requires the secrecy, security, and centralized technocratic control of what activists sometimes called the Atomic State, which they argued was incompatible with liberal democracy. I think these were quite serious arguments, though of course they'd persuade only if you're already bought in on unilateral nuclear disarmament.
Once upon a time, there was also the Soviet propaganda effort in the West. Many of the Cold War reactors could be used to produce not just electricity, but fission material for nuclear warheads. Meaning that if you could persuade big countries to give up nuclear energy for good, you'd also reduce your adversary's capability to build and maintain their nuclear arsenal, or preempt its future acquisition in the first place.
Soviet Union (and later Russia) enacted the propaganda effort against nuclear mainly to prevent the west from ditching their fossil energy. Less western nuclear warheads was secondary goal at best.
Correct, but it still was framing that would be useful to have. If nothing else, because civilian reactors mean there's also a civilian program, an educational program, and the military would like to have that around.
I was curious and did the reading. The technology still doesn't exist as far as I can tell. Even according to the Commonwealth Fusion Systems who says they will build in Virginia.
The International Atomic Energy Association says:
> there are still some technological issues to address before a commercial power plant can operate. A prototype of a fusion reactor (DEMO) is expected to be built by 2040. [1]
[1]: https://www.iaea.org/topics/energy/fusion/faqs
But fusion power plants needs to breed and separare tritium, prevent excessive tritium losses in the first wall. The plasma-facing materials in tokamak are subject to very harsh conditions, mutch harder conditions then reactor walls in a fission power plant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma-facing_material
Please note the date. This is the reactor being built. CFS has come a long way since inception. DEMO is a joke. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4
Nuclear power plants will be run by private companies that will weasel out on maintenance to save a penny. Yes, they will weasel out, this time will not be different to other industries.
Nuclear power plant cost overruns by more than 3x.
Nuclear energy being already more expensive than solar.
No private insurer wants to insure a nuclear power plant because the potential payout is gargantuan. So it is the country the one that has to insure it.
Nuclear waste maybe will get reprocessed one of these decades if we really get very lucky, but it is expensive and gets in the way of the profits. So we create a shell company to deal with it, and if it happens something, we bankrupt the shell company and the country has to pay it, again. We get to keep the profits, of course.
What if an accident happens? Well, the country is insuring it, so they have to pay for it. We don't have to be that careful anymore, we don't have to pay for it!
But there are 32 layers of protection, nothing bad will ever happen! We are going to a world with more active wars. Your 32 layers of protection will be blown apart by a well placed hypersonic missile. I hope this never ever happens, but my gut feeling tells me otherwise.
Nuclear would be great if it, and the world, would be run by responsible adults, not by profit-maximizing locusts and warmongering oligarchs.
Your sensor reporting system will be forced to report whatever is needed - regardless of the reality of the situation - as soon as the right manager demands more uptime to an engineer, or otherwise they get fired because leadership demands more profit.
I am as pro nuclear (actually pro anything not fossil fuel), but this was actually the best counter argument I came across:
And what's nuts is they can walk away with those profits, buy another nuclear company, and repeat the same process until the same inevitable outcome happens.
We need reform. At a minimum we need make it impossible to have things like LLCs in charge of companies where failure result in huge negative externalities. The owners need to be at risk at going bankrupt. Without that risk, they'll just keep destroying everything so long as it makes an extra buck.
Of course like in the well known capitalist regime of the USSR that precipitated the big nuclear problem. If only we had the government instead of the evil capitalists to run things then we could be safe from those profit maximizing parasites.
It's hard to convince people to change a stance they made a part of their political and personal identity.
The large portion of the environmentalist left are degrowthers who literally want people to just live with less, which means "less energy" is actually good. It will never be a politically viable position, but again, we're talking about a party that until recently has never come close to wielding power.
If you accept both of these then like Vaclav Smil, you'll conclude that you need to use less fossil fuels and nothing else will replace them. And if you care about fairness globally then 1st world nations need to really use less.
It all makes perfect sense if you believe all the lies told about renewables.
Most of the people mocking it helped spread those lies, which makes attacking the people who believe them a bit rude.
Literally the leftist dense cities have been the ones pushing back hardest against high rises, sustainable transportation alternatives, and in large part, electrification through overly restrictive environmental laws designed in the 70s.
That’s over now. Climate change is here, and you still can’t convert a house to a duplex in LA without jumping through a thousand hoops.
That I think it's an idiotic position is beside the point. Things and prosperity generally are not the problem, and can grow pretty much indefinitely for the foreseeable future if it's done in a reasonable and sustainable way.
There are a lot of things that would work fine if done in a reasonable and safe way but we have plenty of examples of people making unreasonable and unsafe decisions.
Part of it was a Soviet psyop to get Western citizens to oppose West's nuclear weapons. Encourage people to oppose nuclear in general, both nuclear power and nuclear weapons.
For example Greenpeace had it roots in the oposition to nuclear weapon testing at the end of 1960s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenpeace
Sure, you and I can talk about newer plant designs that fail safely, or about how coal plants emit more radiation by far. But if we had the ability to rapidly convince large swathes of the populace of provable scientific facts, then clean power is only one of the many many problems we would be able to solve.
The leader of Germany that phased out nuclear and made Germany fully reliant on Russia then took a job... at Gazprom. The VP from the Greens responsible took a very high paying job lobbying for foreign Gas firms, too.
It has to be one of the most successful foreign influencing campaigns in history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Schr%C3%B6der#Business... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joschka_Fischer#Business_activ...
The chances of a Soviet leadership-induced meltdown like at a German nuclear reactor that is properly designed and maintained is laughable.
It is, however, extremely hard to film the slow killing of people by browncoal. It's easy to film a nuclear reactor incident.
A slightly racist belief in the Japanese as superior at following the rules meant a big shock when the Germans realised that even the Japanese could not be trusted with nuclear power.
Thanks to the inherent safety of nuclear? Or that the wind was, by chance, blowing to the sea when the worst happened?
https://www.ianfairlie.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/fukush...
https://www.sciencemediacentre.co.nz/wp-content/upload/2011/...
And who cares about the 150 000 displaced people and the still existing exclusion zone?
Oh, yeah, because the Fukushima nuclear accident is still ongoing. The plant is still too dangerous to access and dismantle. Cooling water is still pumped into the reactors to keep them from melting down. That water is still contaminated by a mixture of radioelements and being released to the ocean after partial treatment. And this will go on for several decades still.
The waste will burden hundreds of generations for millenia and the reason? Our current consumption
Such greed and disregard for following generations
Climate change is a minor problem in comparison
That said solar panels and batteries are so bloody good now, why even bother building nuclear reactors in much of the world? And geothermal looks promising too, with the new fracking tech they're using. But who knows.
Yes there is, bury it. Its what we do with lots of other waste. Of course, you have to be a bit more careful than you would be with a standard landfill. But the engineering is well understood. It is usually just the fact that nobody wants it buried near them that causes political issues.
>The waste will burden hundreds of generations for millenia
Pumping more carbon into the atmosphere is also a huge burden for future generations.
>Climate change is a minor problem in comparison
What do you base that on?
We have no way to communicate the danger of the waste to people 55,000 years in the future
That greed, yours and mine, could create that dangerous pile of rubbish, that will be deadly to people who will never know of our existence
What astounding recklessness and hostility to the future
For current consumption
Unbelievable
Nuclear waste is great for several reasons:
- the first one is quantity: very small in comparison with how much energy it produced (a nuclear reaction generates one million times more energy than a chemical reaction so less resource usage across the whole lifecycle);
- the second one is that most of it (over 90%) can be recycled and used with gen 4 reactors;
- the third one is that it stays local, i.e. unlike CO2 it doesn't go into the atmosphere (and then the ocean), and since CO2 is inert, from a human time scale how long CO2 can stay in the atmosphere is, I would argue, comparable to nuclear waste decay.
You cannot predict t that any place on Earth will be stable, or stay local, over hundredsof millenia
Wishful thinking so you can make future generations pay for your consumption
>Climate change is a minor problem in comparison
No one knows what the best and worst case scenarios for deaths during to climate change as they effects might include AMOC shutdown, sea level rise, forced mass migrations of people, wars, shortages of food, etc. In all credible scenarios the deaths and suffering in even the best case scenarios will be much, much, higher than any deaths due to radiation exposure from nuclear waste.
Nuclear: hundreds
Don't let perfection be the enemy of improvement.
https://storelectric.com/dunkelflaute-energy-storage/
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/677bc80399c93...
The best time to build up nuclear power was 4 decades ago - when the supply of fossil fuel was obviously fraught, and things like solar and wind power were nonviable.
Whether it makes any sense to push for nuclear power now is unclear. Nuclear was quite expensive even back then - but decades of NIMBYism, "environmental" activism and overregulation have damaged the industrial capability and eroded supply chains to the point that getting a buildout going at scale, on a sane budget and a sensible timetable would be an uphill battle. At the same time, renewables aren't anywhere near as opposed, the economic outlook for solar, wind and grid storage is better than it ever was, and the situation is likely to improve even further.
Look over at France, frequently touted as a "successful" buildout. But reactors got more expensive the more they built, not cheaper, and they never met their initial goals for number of builds.
And look at the one place with modern-day "successful" builds: China. They like to tout the reactors as great successes, and they are on time and on budget, or at least as on budget as we can tell in an economic system like that. But they missed their 2020 and 2025 five year plan goals for deployment, and will miss their 2030 goal too. Meanwhile, they deploy 20x-30x as much wind and solar each year, each tech. That's after adjusting for capacity factor! So the best nuclear builders in the world are only building enough of it to be low single digits of their energy mix.
Nuclear was always oversold as a technology, always underdelivered, and has not seen a positive learning curve that a normal technology would. It was doomed from the start, IMHO.
Are they really?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_U...
Nuclear is a great peacetime technology, Europe is no longer in peacetime.
Besides maybe solar, there is always the potential for harm during war times. Heck, even with solar, cutting off electricity supply to a major urban area can tragically carry a death toll that goes beyond even the few severe power plant disasters we as a species have ever encountered.
Fission is not an outlier here and designing any power plant for resilience is a necessary step, whether in war or peacetimes, whether in a tectonically stable or seismically active area.
The main difference in nuking a fission plant over any other area would be creating longer-term fallout.
If the attacker is at all rational, unlikely to be desired because it makes the area hard to inaccessible for troops on either side.
If the attacker is horrificaly irrational and just wants to cause pure, long term, irreparable harm, unfortunately salted nukes would be a feasible option, independent of having a fission plant anywhere near the drop zone...
Nuclear disarmament, international cooperation and reliable defence alliances can (hopefully) be used to protect against this, along with resilient fission designs within reason. Not having a fission plant by itself unfortunately and targically wouldn't prevent an utterly irrational attacker willing to cause as much long term damage as possible.
Very aware of that harsh fact, living in a country that has a section in our constitution making nuclear power illegal (yes, very stupid) and is not part of any defensive alliance (while expecting the countries around us to defend us anyways), if someone wanted to "salt the earth" around Salzburg, Vienna or Graz, they could do it, even if we have no plants.
Regarding drones, most reactors are built relatively hardened. For example, they're protected against a 747 flying into it at full speed. So even a drone attack would take an advanced enemy, and they might as well drop a bomb on you.
Both Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own Green Parties. There is no single UK Green Party.
If only. There's people and parties (not in the UK) who would rather see the rest of the country suffer than admit they were wrong, so they feel compelled to die on that hill and take everyone with them, because defending their principle is more important.
“People act reasonably when left no other choice”
It stuck with me.
Unlike fossil fuel power plants, NPPs don't depend on a steady supply of a high volume of costly consumables just to keep running. Reactor fuel loads last months to years, naturally buffering any price shocks or supply chain issues. And you can maintain an "energy security" stockpile of nuclear fuel that would add you even more years of runaway.
To have your nuclear power disrupted, you have to face an adversary that's both capable and willing to hit targets on your soil, and on top of that, is willing to target NPP infrastructure specifically.
A random rogue state lobbing mid-range drones over a strait wouldn't cut it. Neither would a war halfway around the world.
But Germany wanted the cheap gas, so they ignored the risks and Russia ultimately invaded Ukraine.
But regarding gas, one has to understand that a tiny fraction (15%) of gas is used for electricity and most for heating. So nuclear power is completely irrelevant here.
I also would like people realize that many nuclear plants in Europe and elsewhere still depend on fuel from Russia. So energy dependence is a bit more complex.
we have the right to criticise countries too right?
Edit: what is your point? Being able to criticize? Sure, but so what?
Meanwhile renewables and storage are reshaping our global energy system due to being the cheapest globally scalable energy source in human history.
We also need to keep in mind nuclear supply chains. After 21 sanction packages the EU still haven't sanctioned Russia's nuclear industry.
We're simply too deeply entangled across the entire supply chain: nuclear fuel, enrichment, reprocessing, technological partnerships, reactor maintenance, new construction and more.
Ukraine said that Russia invaded Ukraine. Russia said that Russia invaded Ukraine. And Russia has a long history of invading its neighbors - that's why it's already so big. We have no reason to doubt that Russia invaded Ukraine.
In the UK, Sellafield was a nightmare. Lots of less serious slip ups and malfunctions punctuated by a few critical incidents, between 1954 and 2003. You might understand why yesterday's Green Party might think it an issue worth pursuing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle
Definitely risks in the supply chain there, but probably less than Russia?
Or the panic when the next drones appear near a power plant
What do you mean?
E.g the ex chancellor is now paid handsomely https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/23/world/europe/schroder-ger...
I believe more recently there was an expose about some other politicians at that time having links to Russia, although don’t have them to hand right now.
Nuclear loses on pure accounting and time to build.
So for the same rate of investment you can decarbonize 2-3 times faster. And that doesn't figure the long lead times for nuclear vs solar, wind and batteries.
You got one guy on here claiming a fusion reactor will be built in Virginia (lol). Yet another claiming that the reason that everyone hates nuclear power is because of the byproduct of nuclear waste and that it's worse than climate change (rofl). Like what kind of drugs are you people on?
How about some useful policies like removing planning constraints for grid expansion and solar farms and compulsory wind farms on golf courses owned by foreign billionaires
Even back then, those economic comparisons were idealized for nuclear. Build it run it count up to the dollars and there you go. Except you need to secure it, you need to handle waste, and roughly the same cost over runs are bedeviling decommissioning as they were construction.
On top of all that, why is nuclear still uninsurable in the private market?
The cost of Nuclear has raised in the same way every other civil industrial project has risen.
A pipeline in Canada was supposed to be $8B it cost $30, subways and tunnels go 3-5x over budget because the actors can extract that wealth.
Think of the builders like Nvidia - they are not incented to build something for 'cost plus' - they want to make sure they suck all of the surpluses out they can. Why build for $10B when you can build for $35B?
Contractors are incented to price all the way to the point where it's 'not viable'.
Thats why with oligarchic vendors, you will never, ever have cheap energy. Never. Because the supply chain will take all the surplus. That's why we have competition. Groceries are not like that.
Insurance - this is a debilitating issues stopping nuclear because there's no way to know what the outcome would be. We don't know how the courts would rule on damages if there was a problem.
This is something that has to be socialized, at least on some level.
Farmers and property owners have to 'live with' the fact there are 300f monstrous windmills obstructing their view for the public good. It's minor but very real. In a more extreme case, we have to contend with the fact there are certain cases in which people may have to 'vacate their properties' in some cases. How do we compensate? It's hard to say, but that has to be worked out and made clear otherwise nothing will get built.
Regulations around storage are another problem - governments have not pushed hard enough for material solutions, kicking the can down the road because just leaving the problem sit in pools beside reactors was 'good enough'. Were we to have invested this for decades we would be much further along.
US, Canada and France etc. have pretty good records, though the US situation is too 'open' it could be tightened, and there's no reason we couldn't have already 35%-50% base nuclear energy all over North America.
Ontario does is quite well.
This should have happened decades ago.
Renewables are a long way off from covering the base load.
They are only now crossing the threshold into 'key supply factors'.
There are literally 0 confirmed deaths to due exposure at Fukishima. Zero.
Literally installing solar panels is more dangerous. Most of the are will be recoverable in a few decades.
The wars in Russia, Iran and frankly the entire Iraqi conflicts, and Yemen as well - are all 'Oil Wars'. Without high Oil prices and global dependency - none of that would exist.
If we had followed through with buidling out nuclear from the 1980s - and did it safely, we might have 1 more Fukishima, and also learned from it (there are htings about Fukishima that should have never happened) - and most of the West would have 50-65% base load from Nuclear.
We may very well have had all electric cars 20 years sooner and Oil would be used for jet fuel and a few other things. Maybe not even that, as we can synthesize fuel with electricity already.
For existing nuclear, stealing it from the other grid users is cheaper than building clean power today.
Or.... the full-system economics of renewables may not actually be as good as advocates claim.
Brit here: we need renewables and storage and nuclear.
> compulsory wind farms on golf courses owned by foreign billionaires
We need this x100.
It's not.
And do you actually believe they are comparable?
German nuclear plants were producing for less than 2 cents/ kWh. Firm, day + night, summer + winter, profitable.
Intermittent renewables cost multiples of that and require massive subsidies on top and are allowed to place the burden of their intermittency on the firm producers on top of that.
The problems in the U.K. specifically are more about grid capacity (both long distance and local substation level) and nonsense regulations (why can’t I have pluggable battery to go with my pluggable solar) than in generation.
That said, it seems neither pragmatism nor ideological coherence is really necessary to hold power these days.
> Last year, Adrian Ramsay, then a Green co-leader, criticised government support for Sizewell C. “The money being spent on this nuclear gamble would be far better spent on insulating and retrofitting millions of homes, bringing down energy bills and keeping people warmer and more comfortable,” he said.
Classic negawatt approach, to use Amory Lovins' term.
Seems, though, like most people would rather build impressive infrastructure than improve what's already there. Grid expansion and new energy production development have far more cachet than paying a bunch of people with white vans to go around fixing up houses.
Figure out how much solar overcapacity and batteries you can get, within a year or two, for the price of a nuclear reactor deployable 10-20 years from now.
There are aspects of many political parties I agree with, but to me, being against Nuclear Power is the largest short sighted items this and a couple of other parties are/were against.
If many countries took the same road as France, the world would be in a much better place. Imagine the energy advances that could have happened if nuclear was supported for the past 50 years.
We’re already in a situation where we have more power than we need during certain hours of the day in some states/countries, and that’s not even counting the massive, accelerating buildout that will happen between now and the years before new nuclear is built… even it was started today.
Also France is around 7c (euro) per kwh from nuclear generation. If the whole west was all in on nuclear for last 50 years it would have resulted in lower per kwh costs.
Nuclear doesn't need to be the only source of electricity generation. In fact, it can be the base on top of which a serious country expands electricity generation with renewable energy.
I will also remind you that there is not a single industrialised economy anywhere on earth that has successfully supplied new electricity growth with only renewable energy. Not one.
And that you can’t scale nuclear to provide all the power as the peaks are only needed rarely.
Which means that when other sources are cheaper (renewables), those must be banned to ensure nuclear gets paid more?
Nuclear fans across the internet seems to have adopted this talking point recently and none of them have noticed it doesn't make any sense.
What are you even claiming here?
For now this is only a desire, not a fact.
The neutron radiation around a fusion reactor is far more intense than in any fission reactor, because in fusion reactors most of the produced energy is carried by neutrons.
Any material exposed to neutron radiation will become radioactive. Of course the designers of fusion reactors will attempt to choose only materials that are converted into radioactive isotopes with a short halflife, but until someone demonstrates a working fusion reactor we will not know whether this is possible or the production of some amount of long-life radioactive waste must be accepted.
In my opinion, during the next few decades there are far less chances for fusion reactors to be used as a significant energy source on Earth than for some improved kinds of fission reactors.
In any case neither fission reactors nor fusion reactors are strictly necessary on Earth, but nuclear reactors are the only way to achieve interplanetary travel through the Solar System in decent times, so I believe that the future of nuclear reactors is for spaceships, not for terrestrial use.
Assuming all the physics are completely solved tomorrow;
Private capital can easily get better returns, not to mention sooner returns, doing pretty much anything else.
Public capital requires a very long-term govt spend spanning multiple governments. China could do it, but hard to see a western govt doing it. Plus it would add a decade to the schedule and costs would spiral upwards.
All of which is a huge bet against improvements in grid-level storage.
https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/news/ehrc-writes-green-p...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2026/10/30/thousands-qu...
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/green-party-zio...
We need the Middle East out of our political system full stop. All of it.
And I'd like a pony.
Even if we never put a drop of oil in a fuel tank again, 40% of the world's plastics manufacture is dependent on Middle Eastern oil. It will never not be part of our system.
But he is not up to her standard, and they have MPs in office who show Polanski to be just a silly lightweight (and one who appears to be unable to take responsibility).
(It still blows my mind that his excuse for why he couldn't vote was that he had to campaign. In St Pancras. Which is literally only an hour and twenty minutes away from Brighton by a really nice easy direct train. And he could have voted online.)
The veracity of the claim that Zionism is racist is independent of any implication you’ve arbitrarily attached to it. I both believe that Zionism is fundamentally racist - like many of the other ethno-nationalist 19th century movements - and that Israel has a right to exist. There’s no reason that both can’t be true.
“Zionism is racism” is also some kind of tautology masquerading as an argument. A very diverse selection of races can count themselves as Jewish if they have a Jewish mother. So racism isn’t even the right term to use but “Judaism is tribalism” doesn’t have the same kind of undergraduate-brained ring to it.
A list of examples from history of things going pear-shaped when large numbers of people embraced a form of ethno-nationalism where lineage and genetics is the primary factor in determining a persons worth as a human?
Nothing I said indicated I was pro or anti the proposition.
Roughly speaking, of course. Everything about ethnicity is always roughly speaking.
The opposition could ally with those parties and end Netanyahu corruption and start the Oct 7 investigation that Netanyahu blocks but they don't.
Explain to us, in light of these very evident and present facts, how Zionism isn't racism. Give us an idea what is going to happen if the Arab citizens part of the Israeli population grows more than the current 20% in regards to "self-determination and statehood for the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland".
The entire concept is tinged with antisemitism, it lacks a nuanced understanding in the religious belief in the restoration of Israel, and it encourages very simple, very straightforward reactions like "these people are all children who have no grasp of politics and shouldn't be near power". Which is my position.
Netanyahu is a horror (and a crook). The current Israeli government is engaged in a cycle of violence that is enabling illegal settlements etc.
It doesn't mean that a British political party should inject itself into a nearly 150 year old cultural/faith position that has its roots in the experience of antisemitism in Europe and the USA.
It's not that different to having a political platform position that Catholicism isn't true Christianity, or that only Sunni Islam is true Islam. Sensible multi-faith parties seeking electability and a broad power base don't do fucking stupid things like this.
You argument fails at the first sentence. The list of deep collaboration between Israel and the UK is too long for this post, and I won't list them, as you know it but are not arguing in good faith.
>The entire concept is tinged with antisemitism
But we can't say Zionism is tinged with racism? A blindingly obvious double standards.
The Zionists parties of Israel want to do ethnic cleansing in the Palestinians territories, and will purge the Arab Israeli the second they grow too big. Is there a gentle Zionism somewhere, that only wants Jews to emigrate to Israel to live their faith without all the war crimes? Maybe, but it is as relevant as the religious anti-Zionism that objects to it on religious grounds. Which is too say: not at all relevant.
I am fully arguing in good faith because we're talking about The Green Party here. It is the political party I am talking about with zero influence. They have zero influence on UK foreign policy in particular.
Please properly read what you're responding to before responding like this.
Complete bad faith, or lack of basic logic.
0. https://atomicinsights.com/wp-content/uploads/LNT-and-NAS-En...
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_for_Nuclear_Disarmame...