For anyone interested in the current practical state of nuclear energy, the Decouple podcast is a pretty good listen.
But… Doesn’t the graph show a phase out of nuclear while also reducing fossil fuels? Pretty great accomplishment.
It does. But, keeping nuclear while increasing renewables would have resulted in a near elimination of fossil fuels.
That doesn’t make any sense.
Fission and renewables are fundamentally incompatible technologies. Nuclear plants are comically expensive. The only hope you can possibly have of making them profitable is to build giant power plants that run at full capacity 24/7. It’s physically possible to throttle a nuclear reactor, but it is not economically possible to do so. (Small modular reactors have been tried and failed dozens of times.)
Renewables however have to partner with throttleable power sources. You need a power source that can run its output up and down to cover the swings in renewables. This is possible with fossil fuels, it’s not possible with fission.
The best example of this? The Bath County Pumped Storage Station.. It’s one if not the largest pumped storage facilities in the US. And yet, it was built…40 years ago?
We normally think of energy storage being built for solar and wind. But this energy storage was actually built to complement fission plants. The area has a lot of nuclear plants around it. The idea was that with this facility, they could keep the reactors running full power 24/7, and use the storage station to store the excess power at night.
This dramatically illustrates why fission and solar/wind pair so poorly. If you wanted to build a grid out of 100% solar/wind or 100% fission, either would require extensive energy storage solutions. Nuclear needs to be variable but it’s stuck in a fixed state. Solar/wind would like to be fixed but are stuck in variable. Either requires energy storage to build a grid off them.
This is why Germany keeping its fission plants wouldn’t have resulted in much decrease in fossil fuel use. Keeping the fission plants would have simply meant less renewables instead. They are not complementary technologies; they are competitive technologies.
I’ve never understood the anti-nuclear movement. Let’s give up one of the cleanest and most efficient ways to generate energy because reasons?
-
Nuclear costs too much. Much much more than anything else.
-
It isn’t clean. Since when is radioactive disposal considered a clean activity?
That’s two reasons. The first one is the real reason.
- What exactly do you mean by the use of the word efficient?
-
I’ve never understood the anti-nuclear movement. Let’s give up one of the cleanest and most efficient ways to generate energy because reasons?
I don’t support fission because I don’t like paying comically high amounts of electricity. I support power options because they’re the most practical, not because I get some weird retro-futuristic “our friend the atom” sexual kick out of it.
Nuclear was the best solution in the 70s. If we had built all the plants then, we wouldn’t be in our current mess.
Today, the economics don’t make any sense. Energy from a fission plant is much more expensive than from renewables+storage, and nuclear plants that are operating often have to be curtailed in summer (when energy need is high) due to a lack of cooling water. The timeline to build a new plant is decades - far too late to make a difference if we started now.
There would also have to be global trust for literally every country to be operating multiple nuclear reactors, which does not exist today and likely never will. The odds that the US simply allows most of Sub-Saharan Africa - currently ruled by a set of characters ranging from (in the State Department’s view) dictators to Jihadists - operational control over advanced nuclear technology do not look very strong.
I’m typically pro-nuclear, but there are legitimate problems with it:
- Waste disposal - We STILL haven’t made a good solution for storing nuclear waste in most places.
- Cost overruns - Nuclear projects almost always run over their budgets by 10-30% or more.
That said, I’m of the opinion that it should be a part of our energy mix, given it’s reliability in producing consistent power. I think we should prioritize wind and solar, but for our overnight and non-windy days, nuclear is a great way to fill the gap.
nuclear is a great way to fill the gap
Battery storage is inexpensive and getting less expensive every year now that non-American companies are doing R&D. America is stuck in fossil fuels and nuclear because corporate propaganda has indoctrinated too many people.
Waste disposal - We STILL haven’t made a good solution for storing nuclear waste in most places.
Waste disposal can be pretty much ignored for new projects. We already have waste to store for thousands of years and the actual volume of said waste is so small that doubling it wouldn’t matter much for long term storage. Our politicians just need to get their shit together and actually build something to store waste.
I think we should prioritize wind and solar, but for our overnight and non-windy days, nuclear is a great way to fill the gap.
Nuclear is really bad for that. Nuclear power plants need to run as close to 100% uptime as possible to be even remotely economically viable and would still be the most expensive energy source by far.
So you either have them running 24/7, always delivering the same lets say 50% of our required power and you switch off wind turbines / solar panels during the day. Or you only turn their output up when its needed, which then increases the price per kWh upwards of 1€.
I meant run nuclear at 100% all of the time and have it be a mix-in for power, rather than making up for solar and wind dropping off. My wording was poor. With energy storage and natural gas power as an absolute last resort, we could eliminate almost all of our non-renewable power unless there is unexpected demand.
I’m not sure what you mean by storage being solved, but then saying we need to pass laws to solve it. Not sure what you mean there. Most nuclear plants store waste on site at the same location as the plant because there isn’t another option.
I saw a skit from wkuk saying that if some emergency made it impossible for the reactors to be tended to (in the skit is was societal collapse) they would melt down.
Idk how true this is but if true it be a risky vulnerability
To my knowledge, modern nuclear plants are designed to fail safely if faults are detected, but prolonged periods without staff monitoring the facility could be more risky. This one automatically regulates itself, and shuts down if any parameters are out of range, waiting for operator intervention to bring it back up. Every nuclear plant designer since Chernobyl has been very keen on safety.
Really? I think its pretty simple.
It still requires mining. It requires a plan to dispose of waste (which only ONE country actually has). There are over 600 mines that are in need of remediation around the world that haven’t been accomplished, with at least a hundred waste sites that are still not remediated.
Which leads to the single best reason to avoid nuclear: Nobody is responsible enough yet. In most countries that can afford to do it, it will go to the lowest bidder to operate and run and we can see that governments and wars come and go. Humans are shit at being responsible, particularly when money or power is dangled in front of them.
Solar is the cheapest and cleanest form of energy with the most recyclable materials.
it was an astrotuf campaign made by fossil companies and environmentalists fell for it
Cool graph and all, but nuclear power is not the way to go. It’s slow to construct, not flexible at all and very expensive. Building new reactors just isn’t viable when there’s wind and solar.
It’s slow to construct,
This often has to do with expertise and demand. If we aren’t building them often, it becomes more difficult to build them.
not flexible at all
What does this mean? It boils water. How flexible does it have to be to boil water?
very expensive.
So is the environmental crisis.
France went all in on nuclear. Their nuclear company still went bankrupt.
Not flexible means you can’t just switch a nuclear power plant on or off when power is needed or not needed. It takes days.
It very much is the way to go for many countries. Nuclear is expensive, but it takes up significantly less space, and is significantly more stable than solar and wind. They all should be used, but saying nuclear is “not the way to go” is flat out wrong.
Unless you’re bloody Singapore, who the fuck cares about space efficiency of power generation?
I can only speak for Germany, which has more than enough space for renewables
They phased out nuclear after Fukushima because they were worried that all the tsunamis Germany has may also trigger hyper-specific vulnerabilities in their reactor designs.
It’s ironic, how quickly three mile island, Chernobyl and Fukushima are struck from collective memory. I’m pretty relaxed about nuclear energy though: I will probably be dead and buried by the time these reactors would go life. And young men now have the right to repeat their grandfathers’ mistakes, it’s their world, and their taxmoney. That doesn’t mean I won’t join the protests, should a reactor be planned within 300 miles from my home, but I would protest in a relaxed sort of way, can of beer, chitchat, veggie hotdogs, catching a bit of sun.
3 Mile Island was an overblown media sensation. Chernobyl was a poorly designed and poorly maintained facility doing a live stress controlled by complete morons that literally could not have happened in the next generation reactor design. Fukushima took a literal force of nature to cause an issue and even then it was originally designed to handle it but cost cutting during construction moved the backup power source too close to the water.
Meanwhile the current generation reactors, even discounting SMR, are designed to make those failure modes physically impossible. The ultra-modern SMR designs are already producing commercial power in China with North America following suit in the next 36 months or so.
but cost cutting during construction
Welcome to the best reason to avoid nuclear. People will always cut costs.
Yeah, this is the factor that has me more negative on nuclear power than positive, even though I believe it can be one of the safest ways to generate a lot of power, that depends on people not cutting corners.
They are also a pretty big liability during military conflicts, especially if it’s with a far away enemy that isn’t worried about the local fallout from a strike.
Mining and concentration are a big problem too. In situ mining with acid threatens ground water, and everywhere material is mined and stored they are under the threat of either bad actors, or foreign government/corporate intervention.
deleted by creator
The plan of the anti-nuclear crowd was to replace it with renewables, but then people kept voting rightwing parties after the nuclear phaseout was made into law. Nowadays rightwingers keep floating the idea of getting back into nuclear, but the electricity companies want nothing to do with it and no one actually wants to pay for it.
And despite all that, fossil fuels are still in the process of being phased out.
But renewables have replaced it? It looks like renewables are over 50% of power generation. Not sure where bioenergy falls though.
The issue is that renewables could have already (mostly) replaced fossil fuels in electricity production, which would have been better in the short to mid term. What OP is wrong about is blaming the anti-nuclear movement instead of the pro-fossil fuels “movement” (fossil fuel company lobbyists).
No they couldn’t have. Both fission and renewables require either fossil fuels or energy storage to build a grid off of them. They really do not complement each other well. They compete with each other; they do not complement each other.
Yes, that’d have been ideal. But what you said was still wrong, right? Nuclear went down and renewables went up. Therefore renewables replaced nuclear.
Hell, coal is even at like a third of its peak.
Fair, it would have been more accurate to say that the plan was to replace both nuclear and fossil fuels with renewables in a reasonably short timeframe.
But given the current political trajectory, coal use is going to increase again - AFAIK it already did in the US.
If the demand is faster than the curve to replace fossil fuels, and then nuclear starts to go down thanks to not replacing old reactors, we’re going to go back to the fossil fuels. Because apparently we can’t touch demand, that has to go up.
The chart in the post indicates that demand went down … some of that might have been replaced by electricity imports depending on what the chart actually shows, but AFAIK those weren’t that substantial.
I hope all those anti-nuclear people enjoy all the coal they’re burning.
Meh. Why are you trying so hard to blame it on the overwhelmingly leftist anti-nuclear movement, instead of the overwhelmingly rightwing fossil fuel lobby goons?
I blame the fossil fuel lobby goons too.
Because there’s more to blame, and being right or wrong, than what fucking team someone is on. Because of anti-nuclear sentiment in Germany, Germany is right now burning millions of tons of coal more than they would be if they’d kept up nuclear. And these are plants that already existed, that were switched off early. So the biggest modern objection to nuclear power - that it’s expensive compared to renewables - did not apply, because those costs are almost all incurred in construction and decommissioning.
It was a massive own-goal.
We’re constantly making stupid decisions concerning energy. I mean we know about the planet, climate change, sustainability for a long time. Even the predictions in old geography books I found from the 80s are pretty much the right direction… First decision to eventually maybe cut down on nuclear was in 2002… We could probably have settled it by now. If it weren’t for stupid politics, big oil and gas lobbying and our politicians (to this day) trying to get hooked on energy from some wannabe dictators who (surprise) are going to blackmail us at some point.
I think the only sane option is to -at some point- get over it, look ahead and try to come up with a solution. And that’s a big investment into renewables, storage and the energy grid. So by now the first people we need to blame is everyone who isn’t en route towards a better future. I mean we can also blame Merkel. But that in itself isn’t going to get us anywhere.
Sure we are. But I reserve a special place for people who understand that we need to get off fossil fuels but can’t see that that is the most important energy choice of all, by several orders of magnitude, so that if you have the choice to do something else that might be a good idea in its own right, but it would make achieving that harder, you absolutely should not take that choice.
Hmmh. I mean there’s basically 2 options in the mid- and long-term. Renewables, and fusion energy (but we haven figured out that one, yet). Everything else is in limited supply. Oil and gas is predicted to last us for another 50 years, we got plenty coal, that’s a few 100(?) years and uranium is about 40 years until it gets proceedingly more expensive to dig it up. So we shouldn’t be investing in either of those more than we absolutely have to. Though I read maybe we can invent technology to pull uranium out of the ocean at a somewhat reasonable price.
Nuclear reactors are built with a lifespan measured in decades, not centuries, so investing in them when there are decades of economically viable fuel left is reasonable. I couldn’t find your 40 year number (I saw 230) but either way, it shouldn’t be a problem.
It will be a problem at some point, but not so that we should avoid it now.
Your own graph shows coal power has halved largely due to wind and solar and no thanks to nuclear.
That graph looks a lot like coal mine s the source with the biggest decrease
you missed the green part of the graph…
to anyone interested, i suggest taking some time browsing through live data, it is quite cool…
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/
I’m surprised that electricity use is still at 1990 levels.
The graph doesn’t show electricity use, it shows electricity generation. Electricity generated elsewhere doesn’t show up in the graph.
Edit: BUT apparently Germany does indeed use less electricity than in the 90s. source. Not exactly the sign of a thriving nation.
I mean, basically every electrical device is more efficient now. Heat pumps use less energy to heat than electric coils, modern LED light bulbs use less than 20% of their incandescent counterparts, and fridges, dishwashers, and clothes washers are significantly more efficient. New homes are also better insulated, leading to less energy use.
There are more reasons for declining energy use than jumping to your conclusion of a failure to thrive.
Heatpumps don’t replace electric coils, they replace oil and gas heaters. Likewise electric cars and trains.
No doubt everything got more efficient. But stagnating or declining energy use, while cheap regenerative energy generation increased slowly but steadily, means there’s missed potential.
Off the top of my head I cannot come up with any energy hungry industry which increased production in Germany in recent years, while I could name a couple which moved abroad.
Just learning about Javon’s paradox?
Everything is significantly more efficient these days. You can run 10-100 modern led lights on the electricity used by 1 conventional bulb, and heat pumps can be upwards of 400% efficient. All of those efficiencies really ad up.
but heat pumps aren’t replacingresistive heating. The vast majority of german houses are heated by oil or gas furnaces. I have lived here for 30+ years and have only ever been in 2 Houses heated by resistive heat. I just looked it up and the percentage was just 5.9% in 1998 and fell to 2.5% in 2025, while the percentage for heat pumps grew from 0.2% to 4.5% in that time. Last year 67.9% of new flats were equipped eith heat pumps. That combined with the imcrease in electric vehicle use should cause an increase in electricity used, and it’s weird that it doesn’t.
I wonder how much of that is due to moving manufacturing abroad… though there were also serious efforts to make electricity use more efficient. Plus Germany started to seriously get into EVs in the 2020s.
I think it’s that, we have less heavy industry, less manufacturing, but also population is fairly constant, we’ve been about 80mio people in 1990 and we’re still about the same (83.5mio). We use more electronics. But electronics also made everything 50x more efficient…
Plus Germany started to seriously get into EVs in the 2020s.
that isn’t really a plus in the context of a question: “how is it possible that the electricity consumption does not grow significantly?”
It’s a plus for the question of whether Germany’s electricity use has become more efficient. Electrification has been a major trend for decades, yet German energy production (which in Germany generally mirrors domestic demand) has been falling since 2016. If it was just because of manufacturing moving abroad, it should have been falling all the way from 1990.
At least they got use out of their reactors for a while. Austria went and built one and then decided to just never turn it on.
I know a lot of people nowadays talk about nuclear as this abundant energy source which is much cleaner than fossil fuels but this is exactly what was being said around the 70s, then we had two huge nuclear disasters. There’s two generations here that have starkly different views of nuclear energy.
We’ve already accepted the downsides: we’re all held at gunpoint by thousands of nuclear missiles on a daily basis for the past 5 decades and yet there seems to be more people worried about nuclear power than that. We could just as well take advantage of the upside as well.
The two huge nuclear disasters in question: Unreasonable demands of management and a lack of safety protocol.
Fine. I’ll support building a nuclear plant if you can promise to build it without hiring any managers, executives, or accountants.
Human error is inevitable.
Which is why you design it so human error cannot cause a nuclear incident. Which is what we’ve done with modern reactors. Many newer designs are objectively impossible to melt down, not just from the change in physics, but the safety features which cannot reasonably disabled and the oversight for regular inspections.
Which is why you design it so human error cannot cause a nuclear incident.
BWAHAHAHA
Human error is always present. You can’t engineer around it. You can have the best, most safest design possible on paper, but it won’t do any good at all if it isn’t built and maintained the way you designed it.
which cannot reasonably disabled
Now just need to make safety features that cannot be disabled by unreasonable management either.
Well, everything breaks down after a while. Can’t make an everlasting reactor.
So you can’t completely release it from human error.
Of course, nuclear is definitely better than coal. But it takes so long to build, we’re better off focusing on renewables now. In 30 years we’d have switched almost completely to solar anyway.
Why do you think it takes 30 years? It takes 68 months from bare ground to fully functional.
Yes, but those new designs are more expensive, and since each reactor costs a loooot of money, governments take shortcuts, save money and then accidents happen.
So really, the problem is people all the way down
So since we’re people and not angels, maybe we should stick with solar, wind, and batteries. There’s just less of a chance of us colossally breaking something with these.
“people are the problem” is foundation of any social and lot of hard sciences 😂
They’re actually not that expensive, overall. The problem is inefficient bureaucracy around it. As a fun fact you can cut the cost in half by repurposing old coal, oil, and natural gas power plants.
They’re insanely expensive up front, it’s just that they’re relatively cheap to run and last a long time so the costs have a low average over time.
Modern nuclear reactors are ~$2k per kWh which is roughly the same as solar.
No, we need that money to build out wind and solar now (there’s a climate collapse happening today), we can’t wait 20+ years for a nuclear reactor to go online.
If only we could do multiple things.
Fun fact, you still need base load reactors, and fun fact, it takes 5 years to build a nuclear power plant, to be specific, 68 months. From bare ground to fully online and synced with a grid.
But beyond that, solar is nice and can be useful, wind has some uses in some locations, but you have to be okay with being dependent on China since practically zero other countries make solar panels. There are a few, but 80% of all solar panels sold globally are made in China, and if we include local manufacturing, over 99% of all solar panels made are made in China.
I mean I’m okay with that, but EU people specifically get super weirded out by that. Most developed countries have all things necessary for a nuclear power grid and can ensure they can always repair, fuel, and maintain their power plants.
And building one on a fault line by the tsunami-prone sea
Different but wrong. I am always interested to know what people’s guesses are for the total number of deaths caused by Chernobyl, because it’s remarkably low in my opinion. It’s by far the safest form of energy generation. Yes, even safer than wind power… why? Simply because wind is a very energy un-dense source of energy so you need to do a lot of construction to obtain it, and construction is a somewhat dangerous job - there’ll be some small number of people who fall off wind turbines (or off rooves while installing solar panels, or whatever) and the huge number of turbines works out as swamping the small number of nuclear plants and tiny number of deadly nuclear disasters.
Different but wrong. I am always interested to know what people’s guesses are for the total number of deaths caused by Chernobyl, because it’s remarkably low in my opinion.
There were roughly 350,000 innocent human beings who had to abandon their homes due to Chernobyl. The death total was only so low because hundreds of thousands of people had to literally flee for their lives.
If anti-nuclear people knew anything about nuclear power, they wouldn’t be anti-nuclear. The Chernobyl powerplant was an RMBK reactor, completely different in structure than other nuclear powerplants. The fossil fuel industry loves misguided opposition against nuclear energy. Read about the RMBK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK
You support nuclear for psychological reasons, not for technological reasons. It gives you a sense of superiority over your fellow human beings. The real reason nuclear is a dead technology is that it’s simply not cost competitive with renewables and batteries, but you’re here pretending that it’s a bunch of scared superstitious ignorant environmentalists that are dragging it down. THOSE common fools just don’t know the science. THOSE morons just aren’t rational actors like you are. THEY are just to lazy to read about nuclear plant designs.
You’re engaged in a comforting form of self-delusion. The actual barriers to nuclear have nothing to do with people just being irrationally afraid of fission. But you ignore this because it gives you a sense of intellectual superiority.
You support nuclear for psychological rather than technological reasons. Fission is just your sports team.
And the nuclear lobby likes people like you.
Where would Germany get uranium from, by the way?
I hope the nuclear lobby likes me.
By sanctioning Russia and confiscating the uranium they buy, obviously (/s)
Ask them how many people died at Fukushima
That’s not what that article says
jdr is right.
The article says “1” and you said “One”.Damn you got me there.
The text of the article is what I looked at, where they’re a lot less definite.
The 2202 deaths claim is from this article.
If you don’t trust that news site, directly in the article to the left of the info box:
As of 27 February 2017, the Fukushima prefecture government counted 2,129 “disaster-related deaths” in the prefecture.
That claim is supported by one government report, two scientific papers and one news site.
Well, USA, uk, China, France etc also do 😝 both graph AND title are clickbait.
What? How is it clickbait? The title explains exactly what the graph displays. How did this offend you?
Obviously, the problem is with the word “now”.
“And now still relies…” it does, in this moment, still rely on fossil fuels.
