94
88-2: Only Markey, Sanders Oppose 'Expensive, Risky' Nuclear Power Expansion
(www.commondreams.org)
this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2024
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This is the one side of the aisle I think Bernie is always on the wrong side of. Nuclear power of some form will be required for a full transition away from fossil sources, and it should be telling how fast other nations like China are dumping money into it. It is cleaner and causes fewer accidents per GWh than any fossil source ever has- it's just been demonized for decades by those who stand to benefit from it being restricted and painted as a "non-green" energy source.
The problem is that humans cut corners for power and profit, and the nuclear industry is no exception.
sure, and you think this isn't also happening in every single other industry right now?
That's a regulatory problem and not a fundamental mechanics problem. the logic of "well it's good but humans will cut corners" means we should never do anything at all.
We have not in fact always done better
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Rock_uranium_mill_spill
We have not in fact always done better
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
57 major accidents-
It should be said that most of our accidents don’t result in Chernobyl like death tolls, but then, Chernobyl is in a class all its own.
As bad as TMI was, and it’s the first one that came to my mind, it didn’t have any direct deaths. It was ridiculously close to having a massive death toll, and it cost like 2 billion to clean up over… decades…?
There are industrial accidents, like fossil fuel plants catching fire and/or exploding, with more casualties than every nuclear 'disaster' combined.
Pretty sure people kill more people than any other cause combined.
Could be wrong. Depends if you count manufactured famine and healthcare crises as part of that.
We should get off fossil fuels, but I don’t see nuclear as a way of doing that. Solar, wind, and hydro (tidal is interesting. Micro hydro could have uses without destroying entire ecosystems.)
I'll be the one to point out that TMI is exactly what you want to happen in a "nuclear disaster". Nobody got seriously hurt that we know of, the problem was found and dealt with quickly once identified, and we've implemented TONS of extra safeties to make sure that can't happen again without massive alarms and Serious Lights. Could it have not happened at all? Absolutely. But in a disaster, it's the perfect "disaster" - nobody died, nobody got seriously injured directly, the plant got screwed up, and $2b to clean up ANY disaster site is honestly pretty damn cheap when we're talking radioactive heavy metal remediation.
Radioactive materials (particularly gases,) were released so, it’s not quite perfect, but yes. TMI was much, much to be preferred over other possible outcomes of the accident.
all reactors are built near water and susceptible to some sort of flooding though. i realized that after German Biblis was hit by a flood earlier this month
So is nearly every coal/gas thermal power plant ever built. Steam turbines need water and cooling, thr type of thermal generation used doesn't change that.
the point is: other types of power plants just spill less hazardous materials when destroyed by a flood and don't have the additional risk of a meltdown.
Nuclear is the most expensive energy technology used, so expansion is only useful if all renewable sources are already built out to the limit
This is not the case, so investing in renewable is the smarter choice environmentally and fiscally
Of course, the route we took in Germany reducing nuclear to upscale coal is even stupider, but it is far too late to reverse that
It is not the most expensive for any intrinsic reason. It's not necessarily that complex to operate. It's expensive because bureaucracy that has been strapped to it to make switching to it harder, which was designed to keep dirty energy in demand longer. It is the safest power source we have available (including renewables). There's no reason it's so expensive except to attempt to kill it.
I'm pretty sure that bureaucracy was also about controlling nuclear materials because they're dangerous and potential weapons.
Some of it, yeah. Obviously some is required. Not the amount that it has though.
It's the most expensive if you don't already have the infrastructure & experience needed to support it. Of course in places where nuclear is barely used or not used at all, it's going to be more expensive than others. But the US doesn't have such a problem – in large part due to lifetime extensions (which allow plants to operate for another 20-40 years, up to a maximum of 80 years), which bring nuclear's cost down to comparable to renewables. Without lifetime extensions though, nuclear indeed would be more expensive than renewable energy.
Renewable energy also gets subsidized significantly more than any other form of energy – in the US, solar and wind both get roughly about 16x the $/MWh of nuclear, and 2x the total amount of budget. The EU also puts like half of its total energy subsidies into renewables (and a third into fossil fuels) and almost none in to nuclear. That should probably be taken into account too.