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New research shows renewables are more profitable than nuclear power
(www.pv-magazine.com)
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this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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Yeah no shit. We already knew nuclear was not profitable, but it’s clean & makes tons of power, so it’s a good deal for everyone that isn’t a business & wants cheap & clean energy.
I'd love for you to see the Uranium and Thorium mines in Canada and tell me how clean that looks to you.
Uranium and thorium mines are just as clean as the rare earth metal mines needed for PV cells. This is kind of a moot point. We need carbon free energy now and solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear are all part of the mix of solutions needed. There are many considerations currently being made to determine which technologies should be used in what locations.
Make sure to compare with a West Virginia mountaintop-removal coal mine.
The point of this research is that renewable are cheaper. So why would we invest our money in the more extensive option?
Government isn’t business. It should not be chasing a profit margin. The decisions should be around sustainability, ecological friendliness, and robustness against failure
Least we forget the US is like the only country who won't recycle their nuclear waste. We have enough sitting to generate power for like 140 years. Waste isn't useless it can still be reprocessed...
Unfortunately, government is a business. They are beholden to the same profits and losses that any other business is subjected to based on market conditions. The government has to answer to shareholders (citizens) and it's creditors (BoC and other countries).
In more general sense profitability is robustness against failure.
If only there were organizations of people who were known for building really high quality technology without a profit motive... Like some kind of space program 🤔🤔
They had a profit motive, like space race, cold war and all that. You know, USA and USSR were really preparing for The Global Thermonuclear War back then.
And, of course, all the people participating in that were being paid.
Nah, due to Negative Externalities and things like Tragedy Of The Commons it's quite common for companies to be making massive profits whilst destroying the very environment they need to thrive.
I mean, look at Polution, look at Global Warming, look at Overfishing, look at the 2008 Crash - without an external entity (i.e. the State) to force them to change their ways or rescue them, most economic entities in the pursuit of profitability will act in ways that systemically will eventually destroy the very things they need to be profitable.
Stuff like Negative Externalities is pretty basic Economics.
That naive idea of your of how economics works probably came from stuff you heard from politicians, not from reading books...
While without a profit motive of any kind they won't exist.
I really don't get how those things you mentioned existing negate what I said. These are orthogonal. Well, except for that weird logic that it's about choosing between two teams, but nobody can be that stupid, right?
Don't confuse profit with capital
Define "clean"
Nuclear should be the only non renewable power we use at scale. Oil makes sense for emergency situations (it's portable and is stable forever) and where energy density is most important (like aircraft, for now). Coal can fuck right off.
oil is ironically not stable forever
Though most people's idea of "old bad gas" is defined not by pure gasoline, but ethanol-containing gasoline. Ethanol gasoline is hydrophilic -- leave a can sitting over winter, and you're going to get some rough running and billowing water vapor coming out the exhaust. Pure petroleum products are way more stable.
In my opinion clean is anything that doesn't emit out of smokestacks.
Also in this case it doesn't emit out of smoke stacks while the sun's down and the wind's not blowing.
Dams are terrible for the environment so hydro is out. Nuclear is cleaner than hydro.
Um.... dams and nuclear tend to go hand in hand. They need shit tons of water in reserve for cooling. Alternatively, they can draw river water in, but any power plant that dumps hot water into the river is damaging the aquatic ecosystem.
What? Damns have nothing to do with nuclear. You're thinking of in Ukraine and that's unique situation. Also that dam was blown up and the nuclear power plant didn't explode.
Take the nuclear titties near me, not a dam in sight.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generating_Station
Yes, because it is right next to the ocean. I wasn't saying all nuke plants have dams. All nuke plants have water, and sometimes to have a sufficient quantity of water, dams need to be built. North Carolina has zero natural lakes, every lake in NC is made by a dam. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGuire_Nuclear_Station
cleaner* than fossil
people say "clean" when they mean "doesn't produce greenhouse gasses". Nuclear power is absolutely not "clean". Waste sites will need to be monitored for like a thousand years to prevent everything from natural disaster leakage to terrorist aquisition of nuclear materials. The reality is a new powerplant is just the 5% down payment on a nuclear waste mortgage.
Or build breeder reactors to convert the waste back into fuel and eliminate it entirely. Building nuclear power would literally reduce the amount of nuclear waste we have versus doing nothing.
And yet, all these pseudoscience anti nuclear people who talk about nuclear waste all the time don't seem to be advocating for that. Curious, isn't it?
Look the psuedoscience anti nuclear people aren't going to be what kills nuclear power.
The problem is the option is to "replace pseudo science oil barons with pseudo science nuclear power barons." Society isn't largely run by scientists, its run by lawyers and business idiots.
If you operate under the assumption nuclear will be treated more carefully and delicately than oil, well I too would like to live in that star trek communism universe.
It will get dumped in water supplies. It will end up in food supplies. The reality is there is a difference between "looks good on paper" and "even some lawyer who doesn't believe in germ theory won't fuck it up".
That's a very valid point, but it isn't unique to nuclear. Solar panel manufacturing produces some nasty chemical waste. Some might be manufactured using hydrofluoric acid even, which scares the living shit out of me.
There are going to be safety and waste issues with everything, and they're going to be different types of hazards. I would rather drink water contaminated with some nuclear waste than have contact with hydrofluoric acid. Ideally I'd like neither.
I'm not entirely sure what the solution is. It's hardly worse than oil (which also uses HF!), but that's not adequate. What we need is regulations and regulators that make it cheaper to throw as much safety factors as possible on something vs pay fines for violations. I'm confident we have the technology needed, we just need to make sure it's actually used.
If the pro nuclear people managed to build something that actually eliminates nuclear waste, it would take away most arguments of the anti nuclear people.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/02/nuclear-waste-us-could-power-the-us-for-100-years.html
The technology exists, and has for decades. It wasn't economical so it wasn't considered for commercialization, although some companies are looking at it now.
If the anti nuclear people actually bothered to do proper research, perhaps we would've had enough support and outcry to build more of these reactors over the last several decades.
Depleted uranium can't be used in fission bombs.
The nuclear fuel is pointless from military perspective... It just get burred into the ground, and there isn't like 50 GTons if it every year
Not how it works lmao