cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/51898350
Their fusion and fission work is very impressive,” the Microsoft Corp. co-founder said of China’s nuclear innovation efforts. The country is investing more in fusion “than the rest of the world put together, times two
It’s the most expensive form of power we know. It’s far from clean (still shouldn’t pick too many mushrooms in parts of Europe), and it’s really funny you should bring up “limitlessness” when competing against the Sun and Wind.
Nuclear is statistically either the cheapest or the second-cheapest form of production in my home country of Finland, and yes that statistic does take into account the construction costs of our massive 1.6 GW reactor that was finished 13 years behind schedule and ran several billion euros over budget becoming the 8th most expensive construction project ever.
In terms of cleanness it is also incredibly clean. Even if you include Chernobyl and Fukushima (the latter of which leaked barely anything anyway), nuclear has emitted orders of magnitude less radiation than coal. Indeed even thinking that radiation has anything to do with nuclear’s emissions betrays your lack of understanding of the topic – the main emissions concern are the construction and fuel extraction emissions, not because they’re radiological hazards but because they’re not free in terms of carbon emissions. Accounting for those it’s still pretty much the cleanest energy we have though.
I believe nowadays it would make more sense to compare nuclear to renewable energy, not coal. Apart from that it’s important to keep in mind the nuclear waste problem.
That’s what I was comparing it to. The lifecycle emissions of nuclear plants are similar to solar panels and geothermal energy, and higher than hydro and wind power (though not by so much that it would really matter): https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/80580.pdf
Nuclear waste is not and has never been a real problem. The amount of long-term waste produced is minuscule: the US powers about 70 million homes with nuclear energy, which generates about 2000 metric tons of high-level waste annually – 30 grams per household, about the volume of a marble (and keep in mind these are US households which consume 3 times the power of other western households). Storing it away permanently is… well, not easy, but relatively easy: just do what Finland does and put it underground. The main difficulty with it has always been scaremongering and NIMBYism.
The link you provided talks about something more specific than what you just said. It’s about the Life Cycle Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Electricity Generation. This means that the decommissioning of a nuclear plant for example is not taken into account for these emissions, and it is well known that decommissioning a nuclear power station can easily take several decades (example from world nuclear news)
The links I added above about France tell another story.
Edit: I looked a bit more into decommissioning and found the following from the International Atomic Energy Agency, and thought of sharing for easier visualisation
No it doesn’t. And yes, it does account for the decommissioning costs of everything on the chart. See table 1 on page 3, column “One-Time Downstream”.
The first link you posted says that a solution is already in the works, and would you look at that, they’re doing exactly what I said should be done: building an underground storage facility.
On the other hand, Greenpeace’s idiotic and anti-scientific stance on nuclear is nothing new, and their activism on that front is quite possibly funded by the fossil fuel industry (they do not disclose their donors) like that of many other anti-nuclear groups. Some of the other work Greenpeace does is OK, but you would do well to not trust anything they say on nuclear.
If I got this right, from in table 1, p3 one could get to the conclusion that to decommission photovoltaics creates 7 times more CO2 (more precisely g CO2e/kWh), than decommissionning a nuclear plant for decades, as shown above. It made me wonder how they arrived to these measurements. But the link to the study for the nuclear is dead (see Heath, Garvin A., and Margaret K. Mann. 2012). So this cannot be verified.
Having a solution in the works, is very different from what you said, which was: Nuclear waste is not and has never been a real problem.
Bye-bye now
Nuclear is incredibly energy dense and reactors have a very long lifespan, so it makes sense that decommissioning it would be cheaper than solar panels. For example the 1.6 GW reactor in Finland has an operational lifespan of at least 60 years, whereas solar panels currently last 20-30 years. Given that they last half the time and that a 1.6 GW solar installation would be absolutely massive (something like 40 km²), it stands to reason that solar would create more CO2e/kWh to decommission.