After years of wrangling, France has set out a new energy law that slashes its wind and solar power targets and drops a mandate for state-run energy provider EDF to shut down nuclear plants.
Why have we seen some countries try to revive nuclear? It is not better than alternatives. Old plants are already too old to operate and new ones are expensive and take time. Is it just an excuse to continue mining and keep dangerous materials?
Why have we seen some countries try to revive nuclear? It is not better than alternatives.
What alternatives? Gas? Coal?
Solar and wind are amazing for reducing the need for other power generation when they’re working, but there aren’t any realistic alternatives if you want power on a winter night. You need several Frances worth of solar panels to provide power in January, for example.
Yes, there are numerous days when solar can run a country, overproducing power that could be stored. But there are also plenty of days it doesn’t, and you need a solution for that too. Would you prefer it to have its waste in barrels, or pumped into the air?
Nuclear is expensive because it’s the only energy source that works 24/7 and takes care of all of its waste. Solar is great, but if you include all the batteries needed to run 24/7, that 20k investment for a house becomes a 500k investment. Fossil fuels are only cheap because they don’t include the absolutely insane cost of climate change. Wind is great but suffers from the same problem as solar, plus its much more location limited. Hydro and geothermal are amazing, but its orders of magnitude worse than wind for scale and placement.
Leaving us only with nuclear power, which is actually diet cheap once you include the externalities of the other alternatives.
Nuclear … takes care of all of its waste
That could not be further from the truth.
There are temporary solutions for the waste at most.Tell me you don’t understand waste handling without saying you don’t understand waste handling. There are “temporary” solutions for ALL waste ever.
Nuclear waste is such a tiny little problem, that stacking every spent fuel rod ever, inside it’s storage cask, in one pile wouldn’t even fill a decent soccer stadium. If you just looked at the fuel itself, the same waste wouldn’t even reach your knees. If you powered your entire life with nuclear power (and I mean transportation, manufacturing, heating, lighting, etc) with nuclear power, the resulting spent nuclear fuel for your entire family would be slightly less than a 1-inch cube.
I can’t stress enough how nuclear waste is a total non-issue that was invented by the fossil fuel industry and misguided idiots who understand neither basic physics or (much less basic) general waste handling.
Without sinking to your level I will limit myself to say:
I am not the idiot here.I wasn’t refering to you personally.
I was refering mostly to the anti-nuclear crusaders from the 70’s and 80’s who were so anti-war, they figured “Nuclear bomb bad, so nuclear bad”, and decided that civilian powerplants were building bombs without any evidence (or even basic understanding) and thus everything related to nuclear power was the devil and needed to stop.
Of course, if you do believe that or their propaganda, I actually was talking to you. The maths aren’t hard though, you can do them yourself. The nuclear industry is incredibly transparent and you can google almost anything. That, of course, makes it very prone to lies and deliberate misinterpretation, for example when people say there are huge amount of nuclear waste! (which is sort-of-true, but the overwhelmingly vast majority of it is low-level).