this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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First U.S. nuclear reactor built from scratch in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia::ATLANTA — A new reactor at a nuclear power plant in Georgia has entered commercial operation, becoming the first new American reactor built from scratch in decades.

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[–] nomadjoanne@lemmy.world 100 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Ooh a lot of people here seem very pro-nuclear-power. That's cool!

[–] EuphoricPenguin22@normalcity.life 73 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Unfortunately, there's still that one guy in the comments trying to say that hypothetical, largely unproven solutions are better for baseload than something that's worked for decades.

[–] wren@sopuli.xyz 42 points 1 year ago (3 children)

That or the fear-mongering talking points. That's what caused our local power plant to be decommissioned, and now those same people are complaining about how much their electrics cost now.

[–] szczuroarturo@programming.dev 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The old soviet legacy. And a bit of actual disasters and from the 2 significant ones (hiroshima and chernobyl) half are beacuse of the soviets.

[–] RedneckFinn@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

*Fukushima

Hiroshima was the freedom bombing disaster

[–] joel_feila@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

on a side notw how people have dies from fukushima in the years since and how many have died from coal? Also you can compare the number of long term health problems

[–] cryball@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago

Doesn't matter. Bad news at the time was enough to scare people for the next 30 years.

Heck, even my college Sociology textbook from OpenStax basically has nuclear fear-mongering baked into one of the later sections.

[–] joel_feila@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

some people can't help but cut their nose to spit their face

[–] ephemeral_gibbon@aussie.zone 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If you mean renewables by that, it's hardly hypothetical or unproven. I'm in Australia and south Australia and Tasmania (two of our states) have fully renewable grids, Tasmania for the past 7 years. South Australia does still occasionally pull from an interconnect but most of the time they're exporting a bunch of power.

Renewables with storage are cheaper and faster to build than nuclear and that's from real world costs. Nuclear would be fine if it wasn't so stupidly expensive.

[–] tempest@lemmy.ca 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Tasmania

Generates nearly all its power using hydro electric, which is great but pretty dependent on geography.

South Australia

Wiki says a pretty big hunk of that is still gas

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_South_Australia#/media/File:Electricity_generation_SA_2015-2021.svg

In Ontario Canada where I am from it would take > 4000 wind turbines all working at once (not including the batteries) to supplant our nuclear capacity. Even the largest battery storage are in the hundreds of mega watts and only for a few hours at the cost of about half a billion dollars.

I think it is more productive to approach these technologies as complementary as any proper grid should have both for the near future if we want to reduce global warming.

[–] ephemeral_gibbon@aussie.zone 1 points 1 year ago

Ah sorry, my mistake on that one. Despite how many wind turbines working at once it may take, the power from the is cheaper by a long shot than nuclear.

The reason I don't think nuclear is the main solution is just cost + build time. It's horrendously expensive. Much more so than the cost of renewables with proper grid integration (transmission, storage etc.) that has been modelled.

Maybe in a while the small nuclear reactors may come close, but currently the full sized reactors are too expensive and smr's aren't really a thing yet because of cost.

If power prices can come down instead of go up it's going to be a lot easier to convince everyone to transition away from fossil fuels, and from modelling that's been done (e.g. by csiro) that can be the reality

[–] ZodiacSF1969@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

South Australia is 70% renewables, as per their own official energy site.

Batteries are the limiting factor for renewables. Building battery storage that can supply a large city is expensive. Even the battery South Australia had Elon Musk build can only supply a town for about an hour. I'm hoping battery tech improves soon, but it seems to have stagnated for a while.

[–] ephemeral_gibbon@aussie.zone 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ah sorry, my mistake. I messed up there.

The battery in SA is really just for grid stabilisation, not long term storage. Batteries are not really a good soln for longer duration storage. You need surprisingly little storage though when they've modelled fully renewable grids which is why the projected costs aren't stupidly expensive.

[–] ZodiacSF1969@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

That's interesting, I'm an EE but in industry atm. I'd like to look into that whole scenario one day and see how much storage we'd need to go fully renewable.

[–] DoomBot5@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

I think you mean hypothetical technology that hasn't been invented yet, but he expected will be in widespread use 50 years from now.