sure nuclear WAS fine, french power plants are getting old, can’t handle oncoming increasing heatwaves and regularly have major accidents. source (german)
in the age of wind and solar and cheap batteries it is not necessary and much cheaper to build renewables.
also: french nuclear energy is only cheap because it gets heavily subsidized. a kwh of renewables is about 7ct, a kwh of nuclear is in reality about 49ct
Not this again… French nuclear plants has not being stopped because they can’t handle heatwaves, that’s plain bullshit, but because of ecological precaution, which on top of that, seems to be useless
That explains a lot of you take your sources from anti-nuclear organizations
in the age of wind and solar and cheap batteries it is not necessary and much cheaper to build renewables.
It’s not the age of wind and solar. We’re still in the age of coal (35% of electricity) and gas (22,5%). If we talk about energy at whole, it’s even worse : 30% is petrol, coal 26% and gas 23%. If you think that solar and wind will stay cheap when everybody will compete for the large amounts of metal and other sources needed to build them, and when we will run out of petrol to mine and produce them all, you’re lying to yourself. Nuclear in comparison require very little resource to build and to operate them.
And that’s without taking into account a basic fact: we don’t have enough room to build enough STEPs and we don’t have enough resources to build enough batteries to run entire countries on solar and wind. Looking at costs in 2026 is just meaningless when we’re actually talking about science fiction.
also: french nuclear energy is only cheap because it gets heavily subsidized. a kwh of renewables is about 7ct, a kwh of nuclear is in reality about 49ct
Another bullshit: EDF has been making billions of benefits out of nuclear every year for decades (except in 2022). They even made 10+ billions of euros of net benefits the last 3 years.
And EDF is subsidizing France, not the contrary: the State forced EDF to take a huge part of the cost of the Bouclier Tarifaire, and EDF paid billions of euros of dividends to the State as well
Why do you think the people who said that “we cant do it” are the same people who now say “now its too late”? The pro and contra points to nuclear energy are pretty obvious. Also obvoius is, that these pros and cons are predestinated for disagreement.
Also its obvious that opinions can change, on the one hand people maybe start priorize low carbon enegry production, on the other hand rivers for cooling are drying, a few accidents happened, and the price for nuclear energy is now pretty high while the price for renewables and batteries is dropping. We had a lot of change in circumstances in the last years and decades to discuss so saying “fuck off” is pretty pathetic in this case if you ask me
The pro and contra points to nuclear energy are pretty obvious.
No they’re not, nearly everyone I have ever spoken to (online or in real life) who has been against it had no logically cogent or sound arguments.
It may seem obvious after decades of propaganda (and three specific events where only one of them was an actual event, and everything worked out fine), but it’s not.
Dude you are being handed the obvious pro and contra points in this thread if you do not take them serious I doubt it makes sense continuing to argue on the internet about this topic.
Not them, but having read this entire thread, what contra points?
Other than that, I haven’t seen much in this thread.
I see a few points of how Frances configuration for cooling may not be good, but that’s not an unsolvable problem?
At least more solvable than the energy storage problem.
Physicist, not an engineer.
You need baseline and demand power.
Renewables like wind and solar are great for demand. As they provide power typically when usuage is peaking. But those power outputs drop when its needed most, so you still need baseline power.
Nuclear power is great at baseline, but because it takes a lot to ramp power up and down, isnt great to handle peak loads.
Notice the team up here?
Why is it always renewables or nuclear. Both have their places.
This solves the energy storage problems as well. Less of a need for batteries with rare earth metals that are… Finite.
Nuclear and renewables are not good together. You can’t adjust the output of Nuclear to the up and downs of renewables. Nuclear is a lot more expensive than Renewables. So Nuclear have always to be running, which makes the price go up. You can’t build more renewables to make the price go down if you have Nuclear running.
The cheapest way is to have renewables produce energy and store it in batteries.
I am just providing the contra points you did not notice earlier. I am not here to defend them.
We could talk about the new infrastructure size sodium ion batteries which use only the most available elements. But again, i am not here to discuss, just to show you that you missed the points in the original comment.
Hm i think when you have a for whatever reason much discussed topic you will always meet people with opinions that have not much research backgorund or on the other hand people with very strong opinions on both sides who are not open to the other sides arguments. For example: I talked about a few “accidents” and you wouldnt try to understand, why someone like me would think there were some accidents and talk about that there was just one major implying that Fukushima was peanuts and not an issue at all. Of course the truth is (regardless the risk of what maybe could have happened, i think many people who think about Fukushima are more afraid of what could have happend than what happened), that the impact of Fukushima lies somewere between “nothing” and “Tschernobyl”.
I didnt even try to discuss pro or con nuclear, i just tried to explain why i think what happened or changed in the last years could easily change someones opinion on that topic.
Most people i know that changed their opinion on nuclear say things like “given that climate change is now a bigger issue than i thought 20 years ago, we maybe should have used more nuclear instead of burning coal despite the nuclear waste, 20 years ago i thought different. Also given, that new nuclear plants are very expensive and existing plants are old and risky, i think we should focus on renewables and batteries, because they are clean, decentral, and very cheap now.” something like that, just as an illustration.
That aside, honest question without ruse: who do you think the profiting propandagist is, which you refer to? Oil industry? Wouldnt renewables then be part of the same story?
And France is blocking importing solar energy from Spain. Also France has to do some shenanigans in Africa to secure their uranium supply.
Sure nuclear is far better than fossil fuels in terms of global warming, but it has similar geopolitical problems to the oil industry. It makes sense to go to solar and wind, but there’s a nuclear industry that’s doing the same kinds of things the oil industry does to block it.
This is just a bad take. Your average nuclear power plant uses the least amount of construction materials per produced unit of electricity during its lifetime amongst the non-fossil options (nuclear fission, hydropower, solar and wind) - this wouldn’t be meaningfully impacted by accounting for fissile material used either.
Furthermore, most of it is concrete which actually contributes to much less emissions per weight when produced compared to metals (steel, aluminium, copper) which wind & particularly solar use a lot of.
Thing is despite a single nuclear plant being big, it is the equivalent of thousands of wind turbines or millions of solar panels.
In the context of emissions per unit of electricity however, these materials become a vanishingly small factor for all non-fossil electricity producers compared to fossil fuel plants.
not this again…
sure nuclear WAS fine, french power plants are getting old, can’t handle oncoming increasing heatwaves and regularly have major accidents. source (german)
in the age of wind and solar and cheap batteries it is not necessary and much cheaper to build renewables.
also: french nuclear energy is only cheap because it gets heavily subsidized. a kwh of renewables is about 7ct, a kwh of nuclear is in reality about 49ct
Most of them still have 30+ years of life in them
Not this again… French nuclear plants has not being stopped because they can’t handle heatwaves, that’s plain bullshit, but because of ecological precaution, which on top of that, seems to be useless
Also plain bullshit
That explains a lot of you take your sources from anti-nuclear organizations
It’s not the age of wind and solar. We’re still in the age of coal (35% of electricity) and gas (22,5%). If we talk about energy at whole, it’s even worse : 30% is petrol, coal 26% and gas 23%. If you think that solar and wind will stay cheap when everybody will compete for the large amounts of metal and other sources needed to build them, and when we will run out of petrol to mine and produce them all, you’re lying to yourself. Nuclear in comparison require very little resource to build and to operate them.
And that’s without taking into account a basic fact: we don’t have enough room to build enough STEPs and we don’t have enough resources to build enough batteries to run entire countries on solar and wind. Looking at costs in 2026 is just meaningless when we’re actually talking about science fiction.
Another bullshit: EDF has been making billions of benefits out of nuclear every year for decades (except in 2022). They even made 10+ billions of euros of net benefits the last 3 years.
And EDF is subsidizing France, not the contrary: the State forced EDF to take a huge part of the cost of the Bouclier Tarifaire, and EDF paid billions of euros of dividends to the State as well
Don’t forget they have been basically stealing the required Uranium from African Sahel countries like Niger for decades.
Kazakhstan: 30%
Niger: 25%
Canada: 20%
Australia: 15%
Russia: 10%
Is this the anti-nuclear talking point now?
After decades of, “we cannot do it,” it’s now, “we should have done it before, it’s not a good idea anymore”
Fuck right off
Why do you think the people who said that “we cant do it” are the same people who now say “now its too late”? The pro and contra points to nuclear energy are pretty obvious. Also obvoius is, that these pros and cons are predestinated for disagreement. Also its obvious that opinions can change, on the one hand people maybe start priorize low carbon enegry production, on the other hand rivers for cooling are drying, a few accidents happened, and the price for nuclear energy is now pretty high while the price for renewables and batteries is dropping. We had a lot of change in circumstances in the last years and decades to discuss so saying “fuck off” is pretty pathetic in this case if you ask me
No they’re not, nearly everyone I have ever spoken to (online or in real life) who has been against it had no logically cogent or sound arguments.
It may seem obvious after decades of propaganda (and three specific events where only one of them was an actual event, and everything worked out fine), but it’s not.
Dude you are being handed the obvious pro and contra points in this thread if you do not take them serious I doubt it makes sense continuing to argue on the internet about this topic.
Not them, but having read this entire thread, what contra points?
Other than that, I haven’t seen much in this thread.
I see a few points of how Frances configuration for cooling may not be good, but that’s not an unsolvable problem?
At least more solvable than the energy storage problem.
Physicist, not an engineer.
You need baseline and demand power.
Renewables like wind and solar are great for demand. As they provide power typically when usuage is peaking. But those power outputs drop when its needed most, so you still need baseline power.
Nuclear power is great at baseline, but because it takes a lot to ramp power up and down, isnt great to handle peak loads.
Notice the team up here?
Why is it always renewables or nuclear. Both have their places.
This solves the energy storage problems as well. Less of a need for batteries with rare earth metals that are… Finite.
Nuclear and renewables are not good together. You can’t adjust the output of Nuclear to the up and downs of renewables. Nuclear is a lot more expensive than Renewables. So Nuclear have always to be running, which makes the price go up. You can’t build more renewables to make the price go down if you have Nuclear running.
The cheapest way is to have renewables produce energy and store it in batteries.
Out of what, large scale, battery is available?
I haven’t seen one yet. Tons of prospects, none deployable on the size of say, the north american grid.
For example the biggest Battery Storage in germany is happening this year https://www.diesachsen.de/en/economy/germanys-largest-battery-storage-facility-launches-near-leuna-3169138
And we will see more and more of projects like these in the next years.
Like even Texas is investing into Renewables + Battery Storage. Even they get it
https://www.cleanview.co/power-projects/operating/battery-storage-projects/texas
https://www.cleanview.co/power-projects/planned/battery-storage-projects/texas
From OG comment, contra points, formatted in a bulleted list:
Gonna need a source on the age of cheap batteries.
All large scale batteries are chack full of rare earth metals, which are not named for their famous availability.
I am just providing the contra points you did not notice earlier. I am not here to defend them.
We could talk about the new infrastructure size sodium ion batteries which use only the most available elements. But again, i am not here to discuss, just to show you that you missed the points in the original comment.
Hm i think when you have a for whatever reason much discussed topic you will always meet people with opinions that have not much research backgorund or on the other hand people with very strong opinions on both sides who are not open to the other sides arguments. For example: I talked about a few “accidents” and you wouldnt try to understand, why someone like me would think there were some accidents and talk about that there was just one major implying that Fukushima was peanuts and not an issue at all. Of course the truth is (regardless the risk of what maybe could have happened, i think many people who think about Fukushima are more afraid of what could have happend than what happened), that the impact of Fukushima lies somewere between “nothing” and “Tschernobyl”. I didnt even try to discuss pro or con nuclear, i just tried to explain why i think what happened or changed in the last years could easily change someones opinion on that topic. Most people i know that changed their opinion on nuclear say things like “given that climate change is now a bigger issue than i thought 20 years ago, we maybe should have used more nuclear instead of burning coal despite the nuclear waste, 20 years ago i thought different. Also given, that new nuclear plants are very expensive and existing plants are old and risky, i think we should focus on renewables and batteries, because they are clean, decentral, and very cheap now.” something like that, just as an illustration.
That aside, honest question without ruse: who do you think the profiting propandagist is, which you refer to? Oil industry? Wouldnt renewables then be part of the same story?
What is extra frustrating is I have been hearing "we should have done it before, it’s not a good idea anymore” for literal decades now.
Best time to build is 10 years ago. Second best time is today.
This user (Twongo) has been posting on Lemmy for decares?
And France is blocking importing solar energy from Spain. Also France has to do some shenanigans in Africa to secure their uranium supply.
Sure nuclear is far better than fossil fuels in terms of global warming, but it has similar geopolitical problems to the oil industry. It makes sense to go to solar and wind, but there’s a nuclear industry that’s doing the same kinds of things the oil industry does to block it.
deleted by creator
Plus: Building nuclear power plants requires huge amounts of concrete. And making huge amounts of concrete requires extremely huge carbon emissions.
This is just a bad take. Your average nuclear power plant uses the least amount of construction materials per produced unit of electricity during its lifetime amongst the non-fossil options (nuclear fission, hydropower, solar and wind) - this wouldn’t be meaningfully impacted by accounting for fissile material used either.
Furthermore, most of it is concrete which actually contributes to much less emissions per weight when produced compared to metals (steel, aluminium, copper) which wind & particularly solar use a lot of.
Thing is despite a single nuclear plant being big, it is the equivalent of thousands of wind turbines or millions of solar panels.
In the context of emissions per unit of electricity however, these materials become a vanishingly small factor for all non-fossil electricity producers compared to fossil fuel plants.
Source on the environmental impacts of electricity generation
E: Added source
did you calculate how much gram of CO2 that is per kWh actually?