U.S. Pledge To Triple Global Nuclear Energy By 2050 Is Joined By More Than 10 Nations So Far
www.huffpost.com
African countries feature prominently in the White House push to triple worldwide use of both nuclear and renewable energy.

When I first read the titile, I thought that the US is going to have to build A LOT to triple global production. Then it occured to me that the author means the US is pledging to make deals and agreements which enable other countries to build their own. Sometimes I think the US thinks too much of itself and that’s also very much part of American branding.

Where are my renewable bros at? Tell me this is bad.

  • xerazalEnglish
    31•2 years ago

    Nuclear power isn’t bad. I used to be anti-nuclear energy because of the specter of Chernobyl, 3 mile island, and Fukushima. But learning more about it, there haven’t been many actual problems with nuclear energy.

    Chernobyl happened because of mismanagement and arrogance. 3 mile happened because of a malfunction. Fukushima happened because of mismanagement and failure to keep up safety standards in case of natural events.

    These are all things that can be mitigated to one extent or another. it’s much cleaner than other forms of energy, outputs way more than solar or wind, and with modern technology can be extremely safe. I think we should be adopting nuclear, at least as a stopgap until renewable tech reaches higher output in efficiency.

    Kinda annoyed that these investments are going into foreign countries, when we are one of the major contributors to greenhouse gas. We should be building them here first to mitigate our own ghg contributions, then helping smaller countries build theirs.

    I do still have concerns about waste removal and storage tho, but I’m sure we could figure that out if we actually wanted to. But I doubt we do, because “dA cOsTs” or some shit.

    • @deo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      13•2 years ago

      Chernobyl had such a far-reaching environmental impact. Beyond even the radioactive pollution stuff, it scared everyone away from nuclear power and back to fossil fuels for energy production. I sometimes wonder where we’d be wrt CO2 levels if nuclear energy adoption had continued along the same trend as it was before Chernobyl. Would we have had substantially more time to mitigate climate change? Maybe we’d have been in the same boat (or an equally bad boat) due to other factors; maybe it would have stymied renewables even more due to already having a readily available and well-established alternative to fossile fuels in nuclear power. Idk. But if someone wrote one of those what-if alternative history novels about the subject, I’d read the heck out of it.

    • @GiM@feddit.de
      8•2 years ago

      Nuclear is too expensive. It doesn’t make sense to build new reactors.

      • @intensely_human@lemm.ee
        2•2 years ago

        It doesn’t make sense to build one new reactor. Tripling the world’s nuclear power generation makes a lot more sense. At that scale it’ll be cheaper.

          • @Vqhm@lemmy.world
            2•2 years ago

            Most things decrease in price as production scales up.

            Is called Economies of scale.

            There’s also a lot hype around process improvements such as Six Sigma. Some of this has come out of factories and into IT and software dev such as kanban boards and agile.

            Strangely most think that software development does not have economies of scale.

      • @averyminya@beehaw.org
        1•2 years ago

        Regarding waste; nuclear waste can be turned into diamond batteries.

        If they manage to release, the idea is that small cell batteries can self-recharge themselves practically forever (20,000ish years?). Battery dead? Remove it, swap it, wait. Battery dead? Insert the one you removed previously, the Uranium inside replenished the charge.

        Neat stuff given that it is made from waste byproduct.

    • @DrFuggles@feddit.de
      1•2 years ago

      It’s not “da costs”, it’s actually really, really really expensive to build new nuclear reactors. Most of that comes from increased labor costs, which in turn have ballooned largely due to increased regulation and oversight requirements, which I would argue is not something we should do away with.

      I wouldn’t necessarily mind having a reactor or two acting as base generators especially during the winter, but

      1. In Germany we’ve been searching for a secure waste site since the first reactor went online in 1957. If we haven’t found it yet, we never will.
      2. There’s not really a reason to hope for cost reduction of reactor construction once we do it at scale, because requirements and local acceptance are too heterogeneous to implement any sort of scaling construction. Every jurisdiction will have its own risk assessment and usually the locals are none too happy about a reactor close to them. I just don’t see something happening in that regard. Wind turbines and solar panels on the other hand can be churned out in factories at scale, which is why they’re so cheap, comparatively.
      3. Therefore, personally I’d rather invest in green H2 as an energy storage solution. We can easily generate an enormous electricity surplus during the summer months, but lack long-term storage of the electricity. So we shut off solar and wind farms when they’re over producing. Wouldn’t it be neat to instead let them keep generating and use that surplus energy to power power-to-gas plants E. G. with H2? It’s an enormously power-hungry process, but if you do it when power is basically free…

      Oh wait, we’re already doing that and it’s already cost-effective. Now, if we were to take that process and build it at scale… for example by not spending 12-20 Bn 💶 to build another Flamanville, Olkiluoto or Hinkley Point C… I think that might actually work.