- cross-posted to:
- Memes@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- cross-posted to:
- Memes@lemmy.dbzer0.com
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/68257855
Nuclear is the best btw.
“Indestructible”?
HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!
Thanks for the laugh, pal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY446h4pZdc
Pretty much, yeah
Indestructible like the Runit dome?
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-15/cracks-appear-in-runit-dome-amid-sea-level-rise/106423684
Forcing nuclear down our throats while renewables are a thing is so wild. And people actually defend nuclear.
You want mining of sparse minerals by workers in inhuman conditions? Check
You want a contamination which will exist for longer than the oldest human build structure? Check (because the barrels you made made indestructible, just dont test this pls)
You want centralized energy way more expansive than solar or wind? Check
There are literally no upsides of nuclear against renewables and a battery.
There’s a lot of fossil fuel money pushing the nuclear cart. Nuclear plants take enough time to build that they are a good enough delay against renewables for the current crop of fossil fuel executives
It’s nice that the pro-nuke comments replying to you are gathering down votes
Bruh.
Nuclear is capable of generating a ton of energy right besides where is used, renewables have to be transmitted absurdly long distances in most cases.
And mining is every day more automated, sending robots to dig down the materials, and even then, is not like renewables don’t need mining also lol.
And yes, they test it, here they’re smashing a train full speed to one of the canisters to test it’s safety
Renewables for my house are on my roof. That’s not far. My nearest solar farm is ten kilometres away, which is also close.
It’s a ploy to keep power in the hands of corporations and the bourgeois state. And in some cases the vision is to give the ultra rich nuclear (weapons) capabilities.
That’s beside the point. Nuclear isn’t sustainable on the long run, period.And solar can potentially generate all the electricity needed and more by itself.
it isn’t, transmission is a complex thing to do lol, my country had a full blackout last year because a cascading failure caused by a transmission line.
Nuclear fuel will last long enough for us to both have nuclear fission and the capacity to space mine materials.
solar doesn’t work in places that don’t have land available to be turned into solar farms, here in chile they do a lot of solar, and cool melted salt solar too, but is far north in the Atacama and they have to bring it in, wich is a huge bottle neck, A nuclear power plant in Santiago would relieve a lot the strain in the grid.
Yes, transmission is a complex thing to do, and that’s why more funds should used to improve research in that direction, rather than wasting hundreds of billions on ticking time bombs, so that mining company owners can get richer while making us sicker.
1 hour of sunlight that hits the sunlit hemisphere, contains enough energy to satisfy the needs of the whole planet for 1 year. That’s how much solar is better than nuclear.
I really can’t believe that in 2026, the idea of generating energy by boiling water, is still considered “advanced tech” just because they wanna use a different fuel. Lol
And no, solar doesn’t need land.
Solar still uses boiling water, thermosolar at least, that has a lot of benefits over the photovoltaic cell, as it can generate energy steadily and even trough the night, here in chile they built cerro dominador, quite impressive thing.
it depends on the geography of the place, in my country it would be reasonably a huge challenge to build farms over the sea because of the geography of here (it’s like a underwater cliff)
and still, I’m heavily pro renewables, but that doesn’t I won’t be pro nuclear also, both are crucial tech to de-carbonize the world.
Photovoltaic is the future, it’sprettyy much unarguably the only technology that can create energy without moving parts or without any sort of burning.
You don’t get any more futuristic than this. The only problem with photovoltaic and wind is that they’ve been actively boycotted.
Here in the UK energy providers habitually stop their own wind turbines just because otherwise the price of energy will get too low. That’s how fucked up the system is. And nuclear is nothing more than an astute way for these capitalist pigs in control of the energy sector to keep making money from something that should be free already.
I fully agree that solar will be the majority of electricity produced in the near future, but photovoltaic has the disadvantage of following the sun, and honestly, chermical batteries aren’t really the solution (and I’m saying this when my country is one of the biggest lithium producers in the world) Gravity batteries are, but surprise surprise, they are water turbines and water pumps lol, they will last way longer than a chermical battery anyways.
Thermosolar has the molten salt as a buffer between the sun and the electricity, you can use it to produce energy steadily, even in the night, wich solves the problem of having to build gravity damns and the associated risk of them.
I’m confident studying mech, because it isn’t going away anytime soon.
and yeah, I full agree that we need to reform the power grid and enact at least partial statization.
but still, nuclear is a good tech that can produce clean energy right where is needed, we shouldn’t discard it just because renewables are quite O.P.
No one has done solar thermal for a decade. Your position is so out of date.
The sea here is too deep
There are floating wind generators
You seem ill informed
you would be wrong, cerro dominador on chile started operations recently.
I
Bruh
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Renawbles are capable of generating a ton of energy manageable distances from where they are used in most cases, even for the cases which they are not it is orders of magnitudes cheaper and better for environment if you make green hydrogen, ship it to where its needed and convert it back into current where you need it considered the absurd amounts of time and cost it takes to manage nuclear waste. Not even considering the cost to mine and ship nuclear fuel, build the reactor and safely dispose of it at the end of its lifespan as its miniscule compared to maintain any sort of storage building for a time longer than the time between humanitys first building and now.
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Mining is mostly done by people living under slave like conditions in poor countries. Even thinking having a energy source which needs to CONTINUOUSLY BURN MINED RECOURCES to keep outputting any energy at all is superior to a energy source which NEEDS MINED RESOURCES ONCE TO CONTINUOUSLY output energy until broken by external forces shows the absurdity of your argument
Solar panels need silicium (literally sand) and bor, apart from some plastics and structural metal and glass. Those are way easier and cleaner to mine then radioactive materials, and bor is needed in really small amounts, AND IT DOESNT GET BURNED, YOU CAN REUSE IT.
3.Thinking that smashing a train against something tells you anything about the properties of a material when exposed to time spans of degradation many orders of magnitude bigger than the time humans even started researching material properties…I dont even know where to start with this “argument” its bs on so many levels
About the point 2.
I live in a thinrd world country, and it angers me to no end when they try to take this moral stand when a lot of times they’re the ones who didn’t let us all develop in the first place lol.
My country depends on it’s mining industry, the biggest copper mining country in the world and i think the 2nd on lithium, they say it’s the wage of chile, most of the copper is extracted by the State owned CODELCO, wich money goes to schools and hospitals, and even the one who is mined privately is taxed and has to pay royalties that go to help the people.
Miners aren’t even poorly paid for Chilean standards, and they have benefits, they’re strongly unionized lol, and mines here have an extremely high tech level, making people don’t have to go to risky places, a lot of mines are totally automated, where robots extract the material and take it out, while their operators sit comfortably in a control room in the city.
So don’t come to lecture me on these “poor people in third world countries” because you know nothing, you are a firstworlder who had benefited from colonization and political meddling in our affairs, now that we’re finally advancing, and making a better country for ourselves, you come to say this thing? Bruh.
Im not a nuclear bro, but a vast majority of the planet’s Uranium is mined in Australia and Canada and both countries have pretty massive reserves. They have strict regulations and safety surrounding uranium operations. Naturally occurring uranium doesnt even pose much safety risk on its own, its the Radon that is generated by decay that causes problems for humans. Im not too familiar with how uranium mining is done but I imagine Radon risks can be mitigated pretty effectively with ventilation.
i agree with the anti-nuclear, but the mining conditions are really far less of a problem with uranium… canada and australia are #2 and #4 in the world respectively
uranium is relatively plentiful, and hugely energy-dense so most places have some that’s viable to extract, and it’s not worth cheaping out on costs to save a couple of $ buying from slave mines given the potential backlash
i actually wouldn’t be surprised if uranium mining is one of the best jobs in the developing world because if they actually want to sell their product they’d have to market their working conditions
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Not true. Nuclear works 24/7 without the need for battery storage and the cost and environmental damage associated with manufacturing batteries. Plus, it can be dialed up and down in response to demand.
We need to use all available tools to replace fossil fuels ASAP. Renewables and nuclear.
Where’s an example for an operating nuclear power-plant that can be dialed down to match demand?
Afaik they have lots of momentum (for days even), and even their propenents argue for them being critical for providing a base supply1. Never have I heard anyone claiming they’d be good for matching fluctuating demand. Can you back that up?
Or are you getting your anti-reneweblaes lobbying talking points mixed up? That argument is usually used for natural gas plants.
1 which doesn’t make sense in a renewables dominated grid.
The closer the rods are to each other, the more collisions occur per unit time, and the more heat is generated.
That’s a super basic view on the science of nuclear power. As an engineer, I need a lot more than that, because it needs a lot more to put basic principles into working projects.
So, is there a nuclear powerplant, that exists outside of some powerpoint slides, that is actually used to match fluctuating generation from other energy sources and/or fluctuating demands?
All of the ones I know are/were used to provide a base supply by running more or less 24/7 at their designated output, not least because they need to do that to be even somehow economically feasible.
They do it in France. The term to google is “load following” nuclear power plants. All new ones have the capability.
Most are used for base load power generation, but this is for economic reasons (getting your money’s worth out of an expensive-to-build facility), not technical feasibility.
Natural gas is a cheaper load following alternative, but that isn’t an option when we’re talking about replacing fossil fuels.
Kudos for a measured response to my sometimes snarky tone.
I only had the time to read the executive summary of this thing, but I learned a bit more about nuclear power plants.
It’s still not enough for me to evaluate how well that can integrate with a grid dominated by renewables (can the load following be fast enough, to match wind and solar fluctuations) but still good to know more.
You got mislead my dude. Probably because there’s lot of propaganda for nuclear as it is needed to offload costs of building nuclear weapons, so especially USA, France and China are campaigning hard.
We dont need another finite fossil resource oligarchs can use to control us, we need to change societies habits so it complies with energy production. For the actually relevant parts its easy enough to store the energy. Batteries are not the only possibility, water elevation, hydrogen, pressure cells just to name a few. But even if batteries were the only ones, it’s still worth manufacturing them compared to the costs of managing nuclear waste for timescales longer than human build structures exists.
Did a medieval person know what wages today would be? No Do you know what the nuclear end storage would cost in 1000 years? No But even for the time we can for see, in the best case scenario its an economically bad decission, in the worst case we poison the whole planet to a degree where no human life can exist.
nuclear costs a shit load of money up front and has such massive NIMBY pushback… it’s great for the fossil fuel industry to argue for because it’s politically impossible to actually implement: we need more nuclear! stop with all the renewables! leads to only 1 thing… talk about nuclear and no more renewables
meanwhile, batteries really don’t produce much environmental damage… that’s just straight up misinformation… and the bonus with batteries is nice the materielsd are mined, you can recycle them back to brand new forever… you don’t have to keep mining all the lithium; just enough to keep up with new capacity
Get lost with your expensive nuclear energy. Renewables produce MUCH cheaper energy.
But for a stable network you need to account for times with no sun and no wind.
If we had a stable and international network, there would be not a time without sun or wind.
Building out capacity to transport a massive amount of energy over thousands of kilometers isn’t really that great either. Also, when it comes to night this is kinda not possible to avoid
You realise that the sun never goes away right? Half of the earth is illuminated 24/7
But half the earth is in darkness at once? You want to really transport solar energy across half the earth at mass?
I mean we do transport phone and internet signal all a roundthen world via big cables under the ocean already. That’s non an impossible challenge.
If we didn’t fight Nuclear energy for decades we wouldn’t have been in half as much trouble as we are in now. But the oil companies won with their smear campaigns.
Renewable energy is cheaper now, but that wasn’t always the case. Also nuclear can be part of solving some of the issues with renewable energy. We can build massive battery banks and double our number of solar farms so that we have power when the sun goes down or we can reduce the need and incorporate nuclear
Nuclear is the best btw.
What’s the LCoE of new nuclear? What’s the LCoE when you add the cost of the storage mentioned in your meme?
Nuclear has been artificially made way more expensive than it should be.
For one part, why is it the only energy source that has to take care of its waste? (LCOE includes this cost, and I’m not saying they shouldn’t, I’m saying other sources should too.) Coal can spew waste out (including radioactive waste) and they don’t have to handle it. Wind just throws out blades and doesn’t have to deal with them. Etc.
The insane strictness on designs and safety are also far higher than they should be. A lot of its based on a linear no threshold model of radiation safety, which has been disproven., which dramatically increases costs.
Even still, LCOE for nuclear is pretty competitive in the US, and the US is one of the worst places for nuclear, as our dirty energy companies have easily been able to purchase laws to increase the cost of nuclear, so they can’t compete as much. Sort this by LCOE and see how many cheap nuclear is for most nations.
Bruh i saw this trash of a bait post yesterday already.
Nobody with more than 3 brain cells is defending coal. But Nuclear is also shit (unless u have subs to run or nukes to build, and hence can use civil nuclear plants, refining, and mining to offload some of the military bill onto the backs of civilians).
THERE HAS NEVER BEEN A SINGLE NUCLEAR POWER PLANT THAT WAS PROFITABLE THUOUT ITS WHOLE LIFE CIRCLE.
Take your god damn bait meme and shove it up your reactor pressure vessel.
What’s profit got to do with it?
Because people call nuclear cheap, when it in reality isnt, they just cherry pick a smol time slot while ignoring states pumping money into it before and after main run time.
Idc about profits man, I want a liveable biosphere.
Renewables it is then
GIMME
FUELSOLAR, GIMMEFIREHYDRO, GIMME THATWHICHWIND I DESIRE
Nuclear is dirt cheap if you level the playing field and also make all other sources pay to store waste eternally. The damage caused by climate change is ranging into the trillions, but no other fossil fuel pays for it.
Only nuclear power is expected to nearly package their waste, everyone else gets to spread it around the entire planet, slowly killing every living species.
Renewables are cheaper and also faster to build. Advocating for nuclear now is a delay tactic benefitting fossile fuels.
Renewables don’t create a permanent waste problem.(Also CO₂ is not as long-term as nuclear waste. It’s not easy or doable near-term, but you can let nature pull it out of the air and store the results. This can be done with none of the risks of failed nuclear storage.)
It’s the other way around. Nuclear is not competing against renewables’ spot, it competes with fossil fuels. Advocating for nuclear doesn’t try to use it instead of renewables, it tries to use it instead of fossil fuels. The opposition to nuclear is what benefits fossil fuels.
The choice is what you want renewables combined with, nuclear or fossil. Those are the choices.
There is a set amount of budget for replacing power infrastructure, and a set amount of capacity to be filled.
Any time a nuclear plant is starting to be built now, they could have instead already finished a renewable plant.
There is no longer any exclusive niche nuclear plants can fill, renewables and batteries beat it on all metrics now, even where stable baseload is needed.
If you need a GW of plants, you won’t build both a nuclear and a renewable GW plant, you pick one. If that GW replaces a coal plant, then nuclear will see the coal being burned for 10 more years while under construction.
The grid produces as needed, prices don’t vary enough anyone will use less power because low-emission sources are not yet available. Any nuclear power capacity under construction that could have been renewables will cause their equivalent capacity in fossile sources to be used an additional 10 years compared to if renewables had been built.There is no longer any exclusive niche nuclear plants can fill, renewables and batteries beat it on all metrics now, even where stable baseload is needed.
I would love to see a source on that, and how much overdimensioning it would take to achieve.
Any time a nuclear plant is starting to be built now, they could have instead already finished a renewable plant.
And every time they build a train, they could have easily built 10.000 bicycles instead. Not saying bikes aren’t incredibly useful, because they are. Not saying you shouldn’t build bikes, but I am saying they are very different things. If you try to replace cars with bikes, you’ll fail every time someone wants to travel more than 20km. If you try to replace cars with trains, you’ll fail ever times someone wants to travel less than 20km and not spend a billion bucks.
What you need to do is replace cars with trains AND bikes. But if you oppose trains “in favour of bikes”, you’re actually promoting cars. And vice versa.
Who is GW? And why do you bring him in?
But solar and nuclear aren’t the same thing. You can’t compare a solar kWh with a nuclear one. If you want to guarantee the same constant output from solar as you get from nuclear, you need immense battery storage or hugely oversized solar.
The choice isn’t “Solar/Wind OR Nuclear”, the choice is “Solar/Wind AND fossil fuels” or “Solar/Wind AND nuclear”. Every time someone opposes nuclear power in favour of something else, that something else is fossil fuels, even if you personally think you’re promoting renewables.
Nobody is saying we should build coal plant instead of nuclear, that’s the strawman. Every godamm nuclear defender always uses.
“but there are worse energy sources”
Yes we fckin know, doesn’t make your energy good.
Keep you strawman false arguments to yourself until nuclear has less cost and less contamination then renewables (forever).
1 - stop being so angry.
2 - Nuclear and renewables are the way to go. Renewables are the bicycles of energy, cheap, clean, easily to make and you can put em anywhere. But sometimes a bike won’t work. Nuclear are the trains, expensive to build and requiring lots of effort… but without trains, people will drive cars every time a bike won’t work.
If you oppose Nuclear, you’re promoting coal. If you oppose solar, you’re promoting coal.
I used to live near a city that got nuclear power. When the plant closed our costs rose 200-300%.
I don’t care if it’s profitable, it’s cheap as fuck for residents.
Because I don’t waste my time (well, much) on trolls, I had AI provide a response in the tone I would have used. I’m sure you’ll AI is BS yada yada but meh. I thought it was good.
Your post is peak “I read a Vox article from 2015 and now I’m an expert” energy. • Nuclear is not “shit.” It’s the only proven, scalable, carbon-free baseload power we have. • The problem isn’t nuclear—it’s Western governments treating it like a political football instead of an industrial project. • If you think coal is bad but nuclear is worse, you’re objectively wrong. Coal kills 8 million people/year from air pollution. Nuclear has killed ~5,000 in 70 years (Chernobyl + Fukushima, mostly from Soviet incompetence and a tsunami). • Your “no profitable plants” claim is like saying “no Tesla has ever been profitable”—ignoring that the Model 3/Y now print money, and existing reactors are cash machines. Final Verdict: Your Take is Hot Garbage • Accuracy Rating: 2/10 (generous). • Spice Level: 8/10 (points for passion, but you’re swinging at shadows). • Reality Check: Nuclear is the most cost-effective low-carbon power source if you build it right. The West doesn’t, but that’s our failure, not the tech’s. Now go shove that up your reactor pressure vessel. 🔥
Edit: AI is the new nuclear power lololol
“I had AI provide a response”
i stopped reading right there, dont waste my time.
The fuck you didn’t 🤣
Nuclear is the best btw
Naw. I was once enrolled in an Energy/Climate-focussed Masters degree, and scientific consensus for the goal generally seemed to range from “mostly renewables + a tiny bit of nuclear” to “all renewables”. Nuclear feels like this amazing hack but it’s expensive, and the storage problem, while sometimes overstated, is also often understated or falsely misrepresented as solved.
In Australia solar works so well and nuclear is so inappropriate* that now batteries are so cheap you don’t hear informed opinions other than renewables and batteries.
*because the Aussie grid on the east coast is a line north/south, and the population is too small, we can’t use the power of two reactors because too few people, we don’t want a solution where one generator is powering both Melbourne and Brisbane, with nuclear you need enough generators to be able to take one down completely for maintenance
Enrolled in an energy/“climate-focused” masters degree funded by British Petrol. The only downside in nuclear is plants being a sensitive target in warfare.
And earthquakes, and tsunamis, and hurricanes, and floods, and any other unforeseen circumstance which will result in rising level of cancer and lowering life expectancy for generations in the centuries to come. But yes who cares?! Glowy thing go brrrrrrr!
The goal of this technology is to reduce the volume of radioactive waste that requires deep geological disposal. Rosatom indicated that eliminating minor actinides could allow nuclear waste to reach radiation equivalence with the original uranium feedstock hundreds of times faster than natural decay.
TBF, historically most nations allow “temporary” storage of spent nuclear fuel cells in perpetually filled pools or running water, which have the potential to run out and cause a nuclear apocalypse via irradiating everything on the surface of the earth. Currently millions of spent rods are stored “temporarily” in such pools which all together contain as much Cesium-137 as 30 Chernobyls in the USA alone.
It gets talked about a lot in “what if” scenarios about human extinction, because if Humanity died out then those pools will dry up and everything else will die alongside us.
some sources on this?
Thank you
Nonsense, fision energy is expensive and dangerous.
Only in Germany there are over 12.000 tons of radioactive waste and nobody knows where to stored it secure for the next 100.000 years. It’s depending on third countries to import the needed Uranium Indestructibles containers in a geological stable vault is a bad joke, it don’t exist, at least not enough for all the waste, not even for the already existing. A nuclear reactor has a life span of ~50 years max, after this it need to be eliminated, a process of over 10 years for descontamination and elimination of more radioactive waste with a cost of billions of $, paid by the country, as said, by you, not by the company. Means 50 years energy and >50.000 years problems. Nuclear is the best, but only if we have an working fusion reactor, means, maybe in 10-20 years. Meanwhile the fision energy is sponsored by certain lobbies and the weapon industry, they are the real reason.
In Spain the energy costs for the user are ~14 cts/kWh at some hours even free (the lowest costs in the EU), thanks to the intensive use of renevable energy, blocked often by fossil and nuclear lobbies in other countries.
Two things can be true.
Nuclear energy can be prohibitively expensive and impractical and have a massive storage problem. And fossil energy can still be even worse with externalities.
My 2 cents:
For the case of Germany, yeah it would be batshit crazy to build new nuclear reactors right now. Completely irrational. But turning off the existing ones prematurely was a grandiose idiot move and here we are still mining brown coal. People hold up the “but the nuclear plants that got shut down were replaced with renewables, not coal”. Yeah, well those renewables were supposed to replace the coal.
It’s undestandable to use existing Reaktors some years more, because closing them, as explained, is an even bigger mess with inacceptable costs. The consquences of an Hype promoted by Lobbies, without any thoughts and planning about, like selling expensive cars without brakes.
FFS, no one ever argues that we should replace nuclear energy with fossils, even the genuine fossil fuel lobbyist politicians don’t argue it like that. Why even bring it up?
I would love to ask everyone who opposes nuclear power one question. It’s a really simple question, you can Google it. I’ve never had an opponent of nuclear power answer the question, because it brings everything into perspective.
How much spent nuclear fuel is there in the entire world? What is the total amount of long term waste that the entire history of nuclear power generation has created? If you piled it up, how big of a pile would it form?
As you said: easy to answer, so not worth it to engage with seriously.
So let me counter ask you a very similar question: how much radioactive material (weight or volume, your choice) do you think was spread in Chernobyl, that made it still a closed off region today and resulted in ongoing increased radioactive levels in mushrooms and wild boar meat in multiple regions over central Europe, that it is still not considered safe for human consumption?
Is your point supposed to be “it would be a relatively small pile of radioactive waste”? There aren’t all that many nuclear power plants in the world because it never has been economically viable.
Why people here argue about cost or energy potential or resource mine of nuclear? Meme only about fossil waste extremely normalized?
I think it’s a pro-nuclear energy meme, joking on people’s misplaced worry and minimising the danger of stored nuclear waste
I feel that pro nuclear stuff is trying to make people less interested in renewable energy despite a city being able to add more energy to its grid in weeks with solar and wind backed by batteries compared to two decades for nuclear, but also you need enough because every few decades it needs to shut down for months to be refuelled at enormous expense.
Wind power waste is inert, solar power waste is highly recyclable
They say “keep using coal and oil, because nuclear is the only good electric power supply and will surely come real soon”
Ohh, not understand that way. Thank you.
In germany argument most about replace fossil with nuclear and a lot renewable. Not build nuclear instead renewable.
Can’t be funny everything must be serious.:-P
This would have been a great meme 50 years ago[1]. We already knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that climate change was caused by human fossil fuel consumption. At the time, a hard pivot to nuclear power would have been a great way to kick the can down the road for a few decades until we figured out a better idea.
Well, it’s a few decades later now. We came up with a lot of better ideas since then. Solar, wind, and geothermal are ascendant. And they don’t have nearly as many downsides as nuclear and hydro.
Side-note: a Spongebob meme would have really fucked people up in 1976. ↩︎
Why can’t both be accurate?
Facepalm












