this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2023
403 points (98.6% liked)
Technology
60056 readers
4010 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I keep telling people that the economics of nuclear - especially new plants - just doesn’t work, but here and on Reddit it seems to be a very bitter pill that many are not ready to swallow.
The time of nuclear energy has come and gone. We missed it.
I’m not some anti-nuclear energy hippie. I took nuclear reactor design courses at uni. But you just can’t make money that way anymore.
Yup. The pro-nuclear lot have gotten stuck with talking points that were valid against Greenpeace in the 90s. I argued the same way for many years. However, I also saw how the numbers have changed over the decades. There's a reason nobody with money to invest in the energy sector wants to bother with nuclear at all; the US government has been willing to sign off on new nuclear plants, but nobody is trying. Nor is there any reason to subsidize it when those same subsidies could go towards storage for solar and wind.
The places we maybe want to subsidze it is in non-traditional places (ships) and reusing our old nuclear waste. Not the grid as a whole, though. The opportunity cost would be terrible.
Really?
Yes really.
Molten salt reactors are not significantly cheaper to build own or operate, on the contrary. I’m making an economic argument here.
If you put economics before the environment then sure, nuclear's not viable, never was.
And oil's only viable because of mass subsidies and tax exemptions.
Wait what? Surely nuclear gets less viable if you factor in the cost of cleaning up after yourself.
That, and massive externalization.
Those molten salt reactors can run on what the current reactors create as nuclear waste. They actually help with the cleanup process by breaking the radioactive waste down to a few very short lived ions that cease to be radioactive quite quickly. The other nice part about them is that you can't make weapons with them.
I'm in favor of subsidizing nuclear reactors that can reuse waste. That's a better idea than the current strategy of letting it sit around, or the potential future of burying it and hoping nobody digs it up again millennia from now.
There is little other reason to bother with nuclear anymore.
I’m familiar with the technology. It’s great.
It won’t get built because you can’t make money off it without running the risk of government changing its mind as soon as you’re done building the thing.
See also, theme park Kalkar.