this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2024
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I think op's yaaaaayyy was sarcastic.
But I'm with you, we should be reviving nuclear, maybe 3 mile Island would be a good starting point since I imagine there's a lot of stuff already there. Although if it's abandoned with no maintenance, there's probably a lot that's rusted out and needs to be replaced.
Unit 1 at three mile island only stopped producing power in 2019. The company that owned the unit (both units at TMI are owned by different companies) were in the process of decommissioning the unit but was expecting to finish until 2079. They apparently said in 2017 it was costing to much to generate power there. This all from wikipedia.
My main issue with nuclear power is that it's training one unsustainable method of electricity generation with another, except there's even less fissile material on Earth than there is fossil fuels. I'm not really concerned with the safety issues, especially with more modern facilities. But I feel like relying on any non-renewable resource to generate electricity is a bad idea.
Nuclear is so ridiculously energy dense that there's no near future where we're in danger of running out of it and nuclear hopefully soon won't even need to rely on fissile materials, since we keep getting g closer and closer to getting fusion working.
And solar and wind and hydroelectric and other renewable are also great but they're variable. Sun only shines locally for so many hours per day, wind doesn't always come from the same directions or speeds, hydro is quite climate dependent, relying enough water to refill reservoirs.
I'm not saying we shouldn't be also building up renewables but every powersource has its limitations and making a mix of all of these to cover each of the downsides is our best bet.
Fissile material is not everywhere. A lot of it comes from Kazakhstan. I'll let you check the map to see why that might be an issue. I also think you might be overestimating how much fissile material is economically feasible to extract.
Nuclear is a bad addition to that mix. It's too expensive, relies on rare materiald but most of all, it's deeply, fundamentally inflexible. The variability of the cheapest energy sources (solar/wind) makes nuclear a bad idea because you can't quickly turn a reactor on or off in an economically feasible way. These reactors are already so subsidized, they'd need to be running almost 24/7 to make it profitable. And with cheaper energy coming from solar and wind, we're just not going to need that. And once a nuclear reactor needs to be turned off repeatedly, it's profitability disappears into thin air.
Even a gas-powered power plant is a better idea at that point. It has some emissions unfortunately, but it is very quick to power and scale up when needed.
Shhh. Don’t say anything critical about nuclear energy on Lemmy unless you want to be downvoted into oblivion.