8 ms·

I see this take a lot, and it’s kind of misinformed. The primary drawbacks of nuclear are: 1) incredible slow to build. A typical plant takes ~20 years from dec

• bpodgursky 5y ago
  If it was actually code red, we would waive literally all safety regulations and environmental policy reviews, and break ground on new plants tomorrow. And cost would be no object.
  • varelse 5y ago
    I suspect you mean if the west believed it was actually code red... Good luck with that...
    • bpodgursky 5y ago
      Yes. I do actually think it is critical, but it's clear that most people are using "code red" as a semantic device, not out of belief that we should act with _true_ urgency.
  • lutorm 5y ago
    Cost being no object doesn't mean you should choose unnecessarily expensive solutions...
• mywittyname 5y ago
  Nuclear power can be fast to build. It would need to be constructed in volume, with immutable designs. Right now, America builds so few nuclear plants that they are essentially all one-off designs. Mass production is key here. Vis-à-vis costs, the government can poof into existence trillions of dollars with no ill effects. Cost is an easily overcome obstacle. If a mandate came down to produce 1000 new nuclear reactors by 2030, I think it could be achieved. The country just needs the political will to make it happen.
  • ErikVandeWater 5y ago
    > the government can poof into existence trillions of dollars with no ill effects This is because the federal reserve's printed money goes basically into treasuries and stocks. The rich save basically all of their money. If they decided to spend it on real-world goods, there would be huge inflation. But it's probably all nil. The cost of building enough nuclear power plants with economy of scale is probably near the same as building enough solar and wind farms.
    • dantheman 5y ago
      Except that you miss the part where solar and wind need normal power plants to provide power when they aren't running.
      • munk-a 5y ago
        Balancing systems do exist - I used to swim in Smith Mountain Lake[1] as a kid and that entire lake is a gigantic battery. During low demand periods they pump water into a reservoir to then run the turbines during peak demand hours. None of these systems are perfectly efficient - but we've got a lot of options in our tool belts for ways to balance peak demand that don't require more continuous production capacity. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_Mountain_Dam#Hydroelectric_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_Mountain_Dam#Hydroelectr...
        • MagnumOpus 5y ago
• korantu 5y ago
  The report talks about hypothetical setup with smart girds and customers reacting on price change. This configuration was never tried at 80% scale. It might or might not work. People did try decarbonise industrial economy to 70% - it worked with technology existing not now but in the eighties. And it did not put any limitations on consumers, while taking just 10 years to implement. Surely at code red we should be looking at things that were shown to work?
• biztos 5y ago
  > long-duration battery solutions This isn't practical everywhere, but on the island of El Hierro (Canary Islands) there is a wind-and-battery solution in the form of a wind-pumped hydro-electric station. In effect there is a big pool of water acting as a battery and the wind turbine "charges" it. When I ran across it on a trip to the island I was really impressed. Very original solution! https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-basic-configuration-of-the-Hydro-wind-power-plant_fig1_282575056 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-basic-configuration-...
  • mikelward 5y ago
    I first heard about pumped hydro back in 2007. https://www.google.com/amp/s/grist.org/article/monbiot-we-can-provide-all-or-most-of-our-electricity-from-renewable-source/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/grist.org/article/monbiot-we-ca... https://books.google.com/books?id=vsPYv7jm-34C https://books.google.com/books?id=vsPYv7jm-34C
  • matkoniecz 5y ago
    https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plik:Zar_zbiornik.jpg https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plik:Zar_zbiornik.jpg https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elektrownia_Por%C4%85bka-%C5%BBar https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elektrownia_Por%C4%85bka-%C5%B... - another one from Poland, likely one of the largest batteries in the world (build in 1979 - 2 000 000 tons of pumped water, 440m height difference, typical working duration is 4 hours and 5.5 hours for pumping water back) https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plik:Dlouhe_strane_horni_nadrz.jpg https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plik:Dlouhe_strane_horni_nadrz... and another one General concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit... If it would be actually climate emergency then we would be building in mountains all where reasonable. No matter the damage to some rare species, panorama and tourism.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• shookness 5y ago
  Small modular nuclear reactors could be an answer to your primary concern: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor https://www.nuscalepower.com/ https://www.nuscalepower.com/
  • bccdee 5y ago
    Yeah I hear this every time, but very few small modular reactors (SMRs) have actually been built on account of economic and safety barriers to building them [1]. Now, I'm sure these are soluble problems. I'm by no means anti-SMR. But most of the actual serious proposals I've heard discussed for decarbonization lean much more heavily on already-existing technologies such as solar panels, which are getting cheaper and more efficient every year and which we are putting in the grid right now. Most of the time, when I hear people talking about SMRs, it's as an excuse to do nothing. "This research tech will solve the climate problem, so all we need to do now is wait for it to pay off." Like the original poster in this thread, who claimed that a lack of investment in nuclear somehow proves that things aren't really that bad. Apparently, the IPCC does expect and hope for substantial increases in nuclear power as a portion of our energy supply [2][3], but "[a]chieving a rapid decarbonization of the electricity sector will require, at first, deploying proven technology," presumably because nuclear on its own is not enough, and because SMRs are too experimental to lean on in any substantial way. [1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544220312445 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422... [2]: https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/10/1048732 https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/10/1048732 [3]: https://www.world-nuclear.org/press/press-statements/the-ipcc-1-5c-special-report-nuclear-energy%E2%80%99s-impo.aspx https://www.world-nuclear.org/press/press-statements/the-ipc...
• tda 5y ago
  Don't forget the substantial costs to clean up. Just think about growing up in a world full of EOL nuclear plants left by generations before you that need to be cleaned up... In a political unstable world due to an ongoing climate crisis. Even today we as a whole struggle with decommissioning nuclear plants, and the costs are astronomical this is already a huge problem now, let alone in a post climate change world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_decommissioning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_decommissioning
  • MagnumOpus 5y ago
    Just think about a world full of EOL toxic waste ash ponds left by coal power plants, each of them vastly more toxic and teratogenic than any nuclear plant, let alone a decommissioned one. In fact, you don’t need to imagine it, you are living the dream.
• voldacar 5y ago
  >A typical plant takes ~20 years from decision to productionized If this were truly "code red" and people really believed that, we would find a way to push the bureaucrats out of the way and build nuclear capacity way sooner than 20 yrs. Humans can do amazing things under dire stress. This is not happening, so I will assume "code red" is hyperbole, something that the IPCC is not entirely known to shun.
  • dakna 5y ago
    > people really believed that > we would find a way to In this case "people" and "we" just doesn't refer to the same cohort.
  • GVIrish 5y ago
    Humans don't always react rationally in code red situations though. Right now the irrational fear of nuclear power is stronger than the fear the average person or politician has of climate change. Doesn't mean that the climate change situation isn't dire.
  • outworlder 5y ago
    > This is not happening, so I will assume "code red" is hyperbole If you take the current pandemic as an example of what we do when under dire stress, I don't think we should be that confident. Yes, some people can perform astonishing feats, and yet other people can deny there's even a problem even when it's obvious.
    • fallingknife 5y ago
      I wouldn't call a disease with a mortality rate < 1% and that is really only a threat to old people "dire stress"
      • bertil 5y ago
        I take it you haven't talked to any medical professional recently.
• 1-6 5y ago
  I think we're also forgetting that adoption of nuclear power is also dependent on a stable government. Geopolitical risks probably outweigh all the drawbacks mentioned.
• matkoniecz 5y ago
  If people believed that global warning is an extinction threat for humanity / code red / critically important... Then waiving almost all regulations on nuclear power and accepting some meltdowns would be reasonable. And also waiving nearly all regulations on solar power, wind power, massive construction of hydropower etc.
  • varelse 5y ago
    That I would guess is exactly the strategy China is adopting. And the west IMO will reel in horror at even a single meltdown there and back off any plans to adopt nuclear the day that happens, wasting precious time we really don't have.
  • elproxy 5y ago
    It isn't all about electricity generation: how areagriculture, land use, global logistics (to a good extent) affected by electricity generation ?
• krona 5y ago
  > A typical plant takes ~20 years from decision to productionized 500 days for a small modular reactor (450MW) https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactors.aspx#section-leading-the-consortium/deliverable https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactor... At least, that's what the brochure says.
• elproxy 5y ago
  Yes it's slow to build today, though it hasn't always been the case: France once built 56 reactors over 15 years [0]. Yes it's expensive, but once again, this isn't a feature of Nuclear power, but one of the capitalist (or at the very least neoliberal) system it is built into: 60% of the Hinkley point C costs are due to the mode of financing (not 100% public) [1]. The real question is not whether this or that type of electricity generation is better (although it's also an important question), but rather how we can completely redesign our socio-economic system to quickly wean ourselves off of fossil fuels (hint: global logistics are far from electrified), reduce emissions from the agricultural sector (we do need to eat), etc. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Messmer_Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Messme... [1] https://www.nao.org.uk/report/hinkley-point-c/ https://www.nao.org.uk/report/hinkley-point-c/