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this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2025
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Waiting for the nuclear gang to drop in and tell us that all windmills and solar panels should be dismantled in favor of clean nuclear power plants and that Germany should never have abandoned the atom.
What if they advocate for nuclear power and say leave the solar panels up?
Then they can tell us where the budget comes from then fail to explain why it's worth five times the price of other renewables with grid storage.
Germany shut down it's reactors as they reached end of life. It isn't economical to build new reactors.
Nuclear has always been a military and strategic concern. Better than importing fossil fuels from potential bad actors during the cold war and you get some MAD weapons along with it.
If you support the weapons proliferation, you support nuclear. You believe in the cold war stand off and think it's valuable. If you don't, want nuclear war, you have to count that as another negative.
Arguing it's an efficient way to produce electricity, even if it's replacing fossil fuels, is disingenuous.
Pick two out of powerful, efficient, safe. That's nuclear power.
Nuclear reactors do not need to use weapons-grade materials or byproducts.
They don't use it but they can produce it.
Only one type of reactor, the old uranium design, produces anything weapons grade (Which then requires an additional step to purify). Don't use that reactor design.
Agreed.
Also, don't waste money on experimenting with the others. Just build renewables and grid storage.
Low-weaponization nuclear reactors already exist, industrial-scale grid storage doesn't, but yes the answer to this dispute would be much more clear if it did!
There are new reactors that have nothing to do with weapons manufactoring.
And they are all uneconomical.
The nuclear industry only works economically when either we need weapons grade material as a byproduct or we happen to produce electricity as a byproduct when making weapons grade material.
They aren't an efficient use of resources.
I honestly don't enough about this topic to understand if your telling the truth or not. My instinct says that it's not that simple.
It isn't that simple. Solar power wasn't economical until China made a push to manufacture at scale.
Wind power received that push in Europe. Then China and India have joined in.
Not buying the massive nuclear reactors and buying smaller units could be possible. They exist. Alternative technologies also exist.
But nuclear generates heat, which we use to heat water into steam. Which drives a turbine to produce AC electricity.
Massive steam turbines are massive because they are efficient. Multistage turbines range from near 70% efficient for massive ones to 25% efficient for the smallest ones in serious use.
NTAC-TE is a technology that converts the radiation into electric current. Like solar panels converting the sun's radiation into electric current.
NASA uses it in space craft.
If we can get that working at an efficient rate smaller radioactive units will produce power without the efficiency loss of small steam generators. Then we can talk about small modular nuclear energy.
Unfortunately every pro nuclear person parrots the same gumf about nuclear being good, therefore we need to build the massive nuclear reactors.
They only consider talking about any other technology to try and defend nuclear when you point out why they shouldn't be built anymore.
So in 20 years, if we stop building massive nuclear reactors with the money, we might be able to complete some research and start building the correct nuclear technology at scale.
But that 20 years is vital and we need to spend that on carbon reduction now. That's reducing usage through insulation. That's renewables being added to the supply directly now. That's grid level storage to allow us to stop relying on massive steam turbines to hold a steady grid load.
In 20 years we can talk about nuclear again. Add an additional time for every wasted effort on a reactor like Hinckley C or Olkiluoto 3. Starting out as a thin justification and just economically viable.
But then spending 400% of their budget meaning carbon reduction would have been much higher investing elsewhere.