Good news. Anything but fossil fuels at this point.
this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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Ooh a lot of people here seem very pro-nuclear-power. That's cool!
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.
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.
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About damn time! As a Georgia Power ratepayer, I've only already been paying extra for it for what, around a decade now?
That's the downside of nuclear. Cost and build time. Upside is it's reliable and carbon-clean.
The best time to build a nuclear power plant was thirty years ago. The second best time is now.
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Whoa. Finally a state in the US that isn’t doing something completely ass backwards. We need more of this.
It's Georgia, though. This is a positive development but it barely begins to make up for how much other ass-backwards stuff there is.
This is the state that elected Marjorie Taylor Greene, keep in mind.
A single congressional district within that state elected Marjorie Taylor Greene lol
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I highly, highly recommend the Oliver Stone documentary Nuclear Now from earlier this year. Completely changed my perspective. I had no idea that the oil industry was behind so much of the fear mongering around nuclear.
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Oh, neat. My state did something not completely stupid. I've got some reservations about nuke power as opposed to renewable, but this is definitely better than continuing fossil fuels.
Fission and fusion reactors are really more like in-between renewable and non-renewable. Sure, it relies on materials that are finite, but there is way, way more of that material available in comparison to how much we need.
Making this distinction is necessary to un-spook people who have gone along with the panic induced by bad media and lazy engineering of the past.
Fusion and fission are quite different. A practical fusion reactor does not exist. It's outside our technological capability right now. Current fusion reactors are only experimental and can not maintain a reaction more than a small fraction of a second. The problem is plasma containment. If that can be solved, it would be possible to build a practical fusion reactor.
The fuel for a working fusion reactor would likely be deuterium/tritium which is in effect unlimited since it can be extracted from seawater. Also the amount of fuel required is small because of the enormous amounts of energy produced in converting mass to energy. Fusion converts about 1% of mass to energy. Output would be that converted mass times the speed of light squared which is a very, very large number, in the neighborhood of consumed fuel mass times 10^15^.
Fusion is far less toxic to to the environment. With deuterium/tritium fusion the waste product is helium. All of the particle radiation comes from neutrons which only require shielding. Once the kinetic energy of the particles is absorbed, it's gone. There's no fissile waste that lingers for some half life.
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Oh wow really? Hope it kicks off some good news for other plants in the future.
The good news - it's online, generating clean power, and hopefully demonstrating the safety and benefits of modern nuclear plants.
The bad news - it's $17B over budget (+120%) and 7 years behind schedule (+100%). Those kind of overages aren't super promising for investors, but perhaps there are enough lessons learned on this one that will help the next one sail a little smoother.
Either way, good to see it can still be done in the US.
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Yeah, after literally bankrupting Westinghouse and costing us Georgians billions of dollars. I'm all for more nuclear power but this project was a colossal shitshow.
Georgia also has some shiny new solar factories so I'm interested to see how deep into renewables we can get in the next decade.
14 years and 35 billion (combined with #4 which has not been finished) and didn't generate a single kWh in anger until now. Put the same investment into renewables and it would generate similar or greater energy and would start doing so within a year.
The argument against nuclear now is not about safety. It is about money. Nuclear simply cannot compete without massive subsidies.
Renewables and nuclear are in the same team. It's true that nuclear requires a greater investment of money and time but the returns are greater than renewables. I recommend checking this video about the economics of nuclear energy.
That video completely ignores decommissioning costs for nuclear power plants and long-term nuclear waste storage costs in its calculation. Only in the levelized cost of electricity comparison does it show that nuclear is by far the most expensive way of generating electricity, and that it simply can't compete with renewables on cost.
People love to look at nuclear power plants that are up and running and calculate electricity generation costs based just on operating costs - while ignoring construction costs, decommissioning costs, and waste disposal costs.
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France was able to output 2 reactors per year at 1,5 billion of euros per 1000MW for more than 2 decades during the 70's to 90's. The whole French nuclear industry has cost around 130-150 billions between 1960 and 2010, including researches, build and maintenance of France's whole nuclear fleet.
A 1000MW reactor, at current French electricity price and for a 80% capacity factor, generates 1,4 billion of euros worth of electricity per year, for a minimum of 60 years.
Nuclear is not costly, and can absolutely compete by itself, if you don't sabotage it and plan it right.
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Base load my friend. We also need steady, reliable, clean power when it's dark and calm. Until we can accomplish seasonal grid storage of renewables, this is the less expensive option.
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“If you wish to make a nuclear reactor from scratch, you must first invent the universe”
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Just in time for openheimer in IMAX!
Very good news. Nuclear power simply has way more benefits over fossil fuels. Not to mention it's statistically safer, despite what decades of anti-nuclear sentiment has taught the public.
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what does built "from scratch" mean? Just a more emphatic way of saying "built?" Or that it wasn't repurposed out of some already built building?
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I'm all for investing in other forms of energy beyond fossil fuels, this is good news to me.
Hey wow, it's great to see we are still persuing this avenue for energy, I hate how stigmatized nuclear became (with some good reasons). Like any technology, we just rushed to using it without understanding the full consequences when shit goes wrong. Hopefully we're better prepared now.
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