• empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    6 months ago

    This is the one side of the aisle I think Bernie is always on the wrong side of. Nuclear power of some form will be required for a full transition away from fossil sources, and it should be telling how fast other nations like China are dumping money into it. It is cleaner and causes fewer accidents per GWh than any fossil source ever has- it’s just been demonized for decades by those who stand to benefit from it being restricted and painted as a “non-green” energy source.

    • Nomecks@lemmy.ca
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      6 months ago

      The problem is that humans cut corners for power and profit, and the nuclear industry is no exception.

      • aubeynarf@lemmynsfw.com
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        6 months ago

        i’m not sure what you’re talking about… The nuclear energy industry has a track record of safety and extensively regulated engineering that surpasses virtually any other industry

        • Nomecks@lemmy.ca
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          6 months ago
          • Fukashima happened because they skimped on the wall height and generator placement.
          • Enerhodar is currently under siege in Ukraine, future unknown

          Those are two within the last 15 years. I’m glad when things are happy happy joy joy nuke plants are safe, but don’t think for a second that it’s a steady state. Ready to see what happens when a spent fuel pool gets hit with a bunker buster?

          • aubeynarf@lemmynsfw.com
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            6 months ago

            That’s ONE in 15 years. In fact 18 years, because the previous one was in 2006.

            But look at this list of oil spills https://response.restoration.noaa.gov/oil-and-chemical-spills/oil-spills/largest-oil-spills-affecting-us-waters-1969.html and list of most contaminated coal ash disposal sites https://earthjustice.org/feature/coal-ash-contaminated-sites-map#top10

            We have seen what happens to oil infrastructure in a war: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/04/08/sunday-review/exposures-kuwait-salgado.html

              • CleoTheWizard@lemmy.world
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                6 months ago

                Solar power, as great as it is, is only available during the day and wind is also not a constant source of electricity either. Solar panels are also made through slave labor in China. The cobalt needed for a lot of our batteries to store renewables also comes from slave labor, though we’re working on that part. And almost all of the renewable sources don’t have parts recycled and instead put their heavy metals into landfills.

                They’re still a lot better than fossil fuels but they’re by no means perfect. That’s why we need at least some nuclear to help with those issues

                • ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works
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                  6 months ago

                  Nuclear disasters vs not producing consistently due to nighttime.

                  I do find it interesting the method of resource extraction matters for solar components, but rarely any other minerals mined inhumanely for energy.

                  Like human rights policies are inherent to a solar panel.

          • Mirshe@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            So, Fukushima was a story of incompetence and bribery, not under-engineering. It was perfectly safe when built. In the 30 years after that, the owners bribed investigators again and again to cover up deficiencies that were known.

            I’m not sure what the nuclear plant being occupied by Russians who forced the entire safety team out at gunpoint has to do with the plant not being safe. The team was willing, by their own words, to keep working even with the Russians occupying the plant, even just keeping a minimum skeleton crew there to safely shut down the plant if necessary. That was shot down, almost literally - and Ukraine has been VERY careful about shelling that plant for political and infrastructure reasons even though enemy combatants are using it as a shelter to launch their own artillery strikes from.

      • empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        6 months ago

        sure, and you think this isn’t also happening in every single other industry right now?

        That’s a regulatory problem and not a fundamental mechanics problem. the logic of “well it’s good but humans will cut corners” means we should never do anything at all.

          • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            57 major accidents-

            It should be said that most of our accidents don’t result in Chernobyl like death tolls, but then, Chernobyl is in a class all its own.

            As bad as TMI was, and it’s the first one that came to my mind, it didn’t have any direct deaths. It was ridiculously close to having a massive death toll, and it cost like 2 billion to clean up over… decades…?

            • Rakonat@lemmy.world
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              6 months ago

              There are industrial accidents, like fossil fuel plants catching fire and/or exploding, with more casualties than every nuclear ‘disaster’ combined.

              • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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                6 months ago

                Pretty sure people kill more people than any other cause combined.

                Could be wrong. Depends if you count manufactured famine and healthcare crises as part of that.

                We should get off fossil fuels, but I don’t see nuclear as a way of doing that. Solar, wind, and hydro (tidal is interesting. Micro hydro could have uses without destroying entire ecosystems.)

                • aubeynarf@lemmynsfw.com
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                  6 months ago

                  .you just can’t get around needing consistent base load capacity. I wonder if the cost of a few GWh of batteries or complicated pumped dam/lake systems is reported in solar/wind figures to make an apples-to-apples comparison.

                  maybe once we have a huge fleet of plugged in EV‘s serving as battery storage, variable sources will make sense as primary generation

            • Mirshe@lemmy.world
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              6 months ago

              I’ll be the one to point out that TMI is exactly what you want to happen in a “nuclear disaster”. Nobody got seriously hurt that we know of, the problem was found and dealt with quickly once identified, and we’ve implemented TONS of extra safeties to make sure that can’t happen again without massive alarms and Serious Lights. Could it have not happened at all? Absolutely. But in a disaster, it’s the perfect “disaster” - nobody died, nobody got seriously injured directly, the plant got screwed up, and $2b to clean up ANY disaster site is honestly pretty damn cheap when we’re talking radioactive heavy metal remediation.

              • aubeynarf@lemmynsfw.com
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                6 months ago

                The BP Deepwater Horizon spill cost like $60B to clean up, so even with inflation $2B is comparatively small.

              • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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                6 months ago

                Radioactive materials (particularly gases,) were released so, it’s not quite perfect, but yes. TMI was much, much to be preferred over other possible outcomes of the accident.

      • lurch (he/him)@sh.itjust.works
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        6 months ago

        all reactors are built near water and susceptible to some sort of flooding though. i realized that after German Biblis was hit by a flood earlier this month

        • empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          6 months ago

          So is nearly every coal/gas thermal power plant ever built. Steam turbines need water and cooling, thr type of thermal generation used doesn’t change that.

    • No_Change_Just_Money@feddit.de
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      6 months ago

      Nuclear is the most expensive energy technology used, so expansion is only useful if all renewable sources are already built out to the limit

      This is not the case, so investing in renewable is the smarter choice environmentally and fiscally

      Of course, the route we took in Germany reducing nuclear to upscale coal is even stupider, but it is far too late to reverse that

      • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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        6 months ago

        It is not the most expensive for any intrinsic reason. It’s not necessarily that complex to operate. It’s expensive because bureaucracy that has been strapped to it to make switching to it harder, which was designed to keep dirty energy in demand longer. It is the safest power source we have available (including renewables). There’s no reason it’s so expensive except to attempt to kill it.

        • Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          I’m pretty sure that bureaucracy was also about controlling nuclear materials because they’re dangerous and potential weapons.

          • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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            6 months ago

            Some of it, yeah. Obviously some is required. Not the amount that it has though.

      • sparkle@lemm.ee
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        6 months ago

        It’s the most expensive if you don’t already have the infrastructure & experience needed to support it. Of course in places where nuclear is barely used or not used at all, it’s going to be more expensive than others. But the US doesn’t have such a problem – in large part due to lifetime extensions (which allow plants to operate for another 20-40 years, up to a maximum of 80 years), which bring nuclear’s cost down to comparable to renewables. Without lifetime extensions though, nuclear indeed would be more expensive than renewable energy.

        Renewable energy also gets subsidized significantly more than any other form of energy – in the US, solar and wind both get roughly about 16x the $/MWh of nuclear, and 2x the total amount of budget. The EU also puts like half of its total energy subsidies into renewables (and a third into fossil fuels) and almost none in to nuclear. That should probably be taken into account too.

  • makeasnek@lemmy.ml
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    6 months ago

    I’d love to see more nuclear power generation. Nuclear power is the densest form of power on earth, it’s safer than even renewables and doesn’t have the huge e-waste or energy storage problems that come with it. It’s very, very safe even compared to windmills depending on where you draw the box. I have never met anybody who actually understands nuclear power safety or waste disposal who is against it. At best, they say “renewables are currently cheaper so let’s focus there” but they’re not like “Nuclear is bad”.

  • njm1314@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    I’m usually against Sanders on this, but I very much respect the risky part of that sentence. Because I just don’t have a lot of faith in the future right now, and I don’t know if I trust any nuclear options going forward. I mean after Trump wins the election and implements his project f, or whatever it was called, who’s going to be the head of the nuclear regulatory agency? One of his shitty kids friends? Maybe Sanders is right and it’s a bad time.

    • RealFknNito@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Would you be surprised that we have dozens of nuclear plants all over the United States? Modern reactors that can withstand the mistakes of the past without the disaster? Media makes the public think the risk is higher than it is when in reality, more people have died per year installing renewables than all the nuclear disasters combined (per GW/H).

      Nuclear is simply too energy dense to ignore.

      • WhatYouNeed@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Where do you put the waste? For how long and at what cost?

        What about the cost of decommissioning nuclear sites at the end of their life?

        • aubeynarf@lemmynsfw.com
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          6 months ago

          Right now the volume of waste is low enough that they store it on-site. Coal ash disposal is far more of a problem, and has led to major contamination incidents.

          What figures do you have on decomissioning? How much does a coal or natural gas plant or oil refinery cost to decommission? Do plants need to be decommissioned or can they be incrementally upgraded?

          Have you done any background on this or are you sealioning?

        • makeasnek@lemmy.ml
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          6 months ago

          In the ground, very deep, forever, for not nearly as much money as you might think. It takes up very, very little space. It’s not green liquid that can spill, it’s pieces of glass.

          • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            We did that in Germany, and it’s now contaminating groundwater, as the very deep hole is flooding with water.

            • RealFknNito@lemmy.world
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              6 months ago

              You put things around the glass so that groundwater never touches the ‘glass’. Again, very different now from the days we started.

        • jeffw@lemmy.worldOP
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          6 months ago

          Got em, Sanders and Markey are in the pocket of big oil and everyone else in the Senate is standing up to those corrupt senators! /s

        • Fades@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          You CLEARLY don’t know what you’re talking about, and now you reveal your “logic” is simply a game of 50/50. Very cool.