I think a lot of Anti Nuclear Power is based off old designs that weren't as safe and had radioactive byproduct I think newer reactor designs take a lot of bite out of that process. Additionally when you look at what is proposed to happen with Fusion reactors in Virginia in the next couple years it becomes a less popular position to be in opposition.
> Fusion reactors in Virginia
I was curious and did the reading. The technology still doesn't exist as far as I can tell. Even according to the Commonwealth Fusion Systems who says they will build in Virginia.
The International Atomic Energy Association says:
> there are still some technological issues to address before a commercial power plant can operate. A prototype of a fusion reactor (DEMO) is expected to be built by 2040. [1]
[1]: https://www.iaea.org/topics/energy/fusion/faqs
The technology absolutely exist, and CFS are proving it.
Please note the date. This is the reactor being built. CFS has come a long way since inception. DEMO is a joke. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4
I wish Commonwealth Fusion Systems to sucessed in the plan for commercial fusion electricity production, but they still have many technical problems to solve. They will probably demostrate fusion containment with fusion energy gain factor greater then 1 (more like 10), the primary goal.
But fusion power plants needs to breed and separare tritium, prevent excessive tritium losses in the first wall. The plasma-facing materials in tokamak are subject to very harsh conditions, mutch harder conditions then reactor walls in a fission power plant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma-facing_material
They also need a way to extract power from 1,000,000C heat. Since we have absolutely no idea how to do that, fusion is still a non-starter...FOR ENERGY PRODUCTION. Fusion can be used for other things but power production won't be one of those things in any of our lifetimes if ever. That being said, we still should do the research and use fusion for what it is useful for. Its just that those uses don't include power production.
The high temperature of the plasma is not a problem for energy production (the plasma temperature is much higher then 1,000,000C, fusion reactions become self-sustaining at temperatures between 50 and 100 million Kelvin). Nothing physical can touch the plasma, because anything touching the plasma would melt and, much bigger issue: the plasma would rapidly loose temperature and nuclear fusion reactions would stop. Therefor energy is extracted from plasma in an indirect way.
This part is quite well known and follows the design of classic thermal power plants.
Radiation heat from the fusion heats-up the inner wall of the vacuum vessel. This heats up working fluid flowing behind the inner wall (in case of CFS then plain is to use a molten salt: FLiBe). Also there a second, more important effect: deuterium-tritium fueled tokamaks release 80% of produced energy in the form of high energy neutrons. Large part of energy of neutrons has to be captured by the working fluid for the power plant to be economically viable.
Heat from the working fluid is transferred using a heat-exchanger to heat water and produced steam, which drives a steam turbine and an electric generator.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLiBe
FLiBe as a working fluid is not a new concept and has been already demonstrated in molten salt fission reactors.
This is complete non-sense. Nothing about what you are saying is factually accurate in any way, scientifically or otherwise. What is happening is that enough people have finally learned that the environmental movement's policies weren't based upon actual science or data. This lost them support. They have finally lost enough support to verge on complete irrelevancy. Now that that has happened, they are trying to reverse that trend.
You are right, it's not the case that the criticism is based on old designs. The new designs have the same flaws and nobody has ever solved them: waste management is unsolved and either monumentally expensive or completely reckless, nuclear is overall way too expensive, insurance is too expensive unless it is shouldered by the entire population (profit goes only to shareholders though). It's not a good technology, that is all.
My Anti Nuclear Power is not based on the technology, which is awesome, but on the external factors.
Nuclear power plants will be run by private companies that will weasel out on maintenance to save a penny. Yes, they will weasel out, this time will not be different to other industries.
Nuclear power plant cost overruns by more than 3x.
Nuclear energy being already more expensive than solar.
No private insurer wants to insure a nuclear power plant because the potential payout is gargantuan. So it is the country the one that has to insure it.
Nuclear waste maybe will get reprocessed one of these decades if we really get very lucky, but it is expensive and gets in the way of the profits. So we create a shell company to deal with it, and if it happens something, we bankrupt the shell company and the country has to pay it, again. We get to keep the profits, of course.
What if an accident happens? Well, the country is insuring it, so they have to pay for it. We don't have to be that careful anymore, we don't have to pay for it!
But there are 32 layers of protection, nothing bad will ever happen! We are going to a world with more active wars. Your 32 layers of protection will be blown apart by a well placed hypersonic missile. I hope this never ever happens, but my gut feeling tells me otherwise.
Nuclear would be great if it, and the world, would be run by responsible adults, not by profit-maximizing locusts and warmongering oligarchs.
> Nuclear power plants will be run by private companies that will weasel out on maintenance to save a penny. Yes, they will weasel out, this time will not be different to other industries.
Just like commercial aviation companies then, right?
> Nuclear power plant cost overruns by more than 3x.
On average or what?
> Nuclear energy being already more expensive than solar.
What's "solar"? A solar panel? Sure. Solar+8h worth of batteries? Maybe. Solar+enough batteries to guarantee a stable grid? Hmm. Solar+batteries+the externalities of burning fossil fuels to compensate?
> Nuclear waste ...
Let me stop you right there. Head on over to https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/fifteen_minutes and look at how much coal&gas waste (no, not just CO2) we are dumping into the atmosphere at this very moment.
Now go ahead and tell me again that we need to badly find a solution to the huge problem of inert, solid, compact nuclear waste that's just sitting there.
> What if an accident happens?
Idk, what if an accident happens with anything else that's already 99.999% safe, like aviation? Odd question to ask about the objectively safest power source we have.
> Your 32 layers of protection will be blown apart by a well placed hypersonic missile. I hope this never ever happens, but my gut feeling tells me otherwise.
Right. You're getting attacked by hypersonic missiles and your priority is your nuclear power plant safety.
Empirically, somehow Ukraine is not a nuclear wasteland despite their nuclear power plants being very much under threat of attack by not so sane people.
> What's "solar"? A solar panel? Sure. Solar+8h worth of batteries? Maybe. Solar+enough batteries to guarantee a stable grid? Hmm. Solar+batteries+the externalities of burning fossil fuels to compensate?
Do you think the concrete to build an NPP doesn't require a crazy amount of fossil fuel? Do you think the storage will continue to be as expensive? Do you think the storage will continue to be as expensive by the time the NPP is actually completed?
I can have solar now, with batteries next year, and great batteries in 3 years. Or badass nuclear in 7 to 10 years with an average cost overrun of 102% (https://www.bu.edu/igs/2025/05/19/investment-risk-for-energy...), just in time for solar and batteries to be so good that nuclear will be irrelevant.
BTW, Ukraine is not a nuclear wasteland because Putin doesn't think it is worth making it a wasteland, because Russia actually attacked the Chernobyl sarcophagus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant_...), thus showing everyone that Putin is not scared by the nuclear fallout taboo. That genie is out of the bottle now, the madmen have shown that they are not mad enough right now.
The carbon payoff for the average NPP is 6 weeks. The idealized payoff for a solar panel is 5 years, in practice its 10 in the tropics trending to 20 on a line about where SF or Barcelona is. And a solar panel on average only lasts 20 years.
Show your sources.
My sources say: nuclear power 20-33 months, coal power 33 months, peat power 26-27 months, gas power 21-27 months, wind power 7 months and photovoltaic power 60-95 months.
https://inis.iaea.org/records/kgzhn-ark54
Which means, among other things, that solar is already net negative before nuclear is built and starts to produce.
And also, solar panels are rated to 25 years 80%, which means they retain 80% of initial production after 25 years, not "explode after 20 years and you have to replace them".
But even better: let's go wind and beat nuclear and solar by a crazy margin.
> let's go wind and beat nuclear and solar by a crazy margin
During the last decade Europe went for wind and solar, but wind is quite expensive to build. Solar was expensive but is now a lot cheaper, mostly because it's mass produced in China using cheap, still quite coal heavy, electricity.
Still solar and wind are weather dependent and need to by supplemented by fossil electricity production in Europe in the winter months, which is why we see these days market electricity prices around 300 Euro/MWh in Europe. (The plan, decade ago, was to use cheap Russian gas to supplemented solar and wind. Things didn't go according to the plan).
> Nuclear power plants will be run by private companies that will weasel out on maintenance to save a penny.
I am as pro nuclear (actually pro anything not fossil fuel), but this was actually the best counter argument I came across:
Yeah, I used to have a lot more faith in companies being responsible, but no longer. Instead what we've been seeing is that companies cannot be trusted with vital infrastructure. Every single time they manage to integrate, they all turn into worse versions of Mr. Burns. Our economic system is setup to reward corner cutting and a race to the bottom. If an nuclear plant ends up melting down, our publicly funded nuclear insurance steps in to clean up the mess and the LLC goes bankrupt. Meanwhile, everyone that invested walks away with all the wealth they've siphoned, which they siphoned more of by cutting corners.
And what's nuts is they can walk away with those profits, buy another nuclear company, and repeat the same process until the same inevitable outcome happens.
We need reform. At a minimum we need make it impossible to have things like LLCs in charge of companies where failure result in huge negative externalities. The owners need to be at risk at going bankrupt. Without that risk, they'll just keep destroying everything so long as it makes an extra buck.
> Yeah, I used to have a lot more faith in companies being responsible, but no longer. Instead what we've been seeing is that companies cannot be trusted with vital infrastructure.
I am in the same boat. Companies will optimize for profit and rent-seeking, all else be damned. A nuclear meltdown would be a negative externality, if line goes up it would have been worth.
> We need reform
Any reform needs to account for corporations being machines optimized to generate profit. Regulations should ensure "negative externality" is not really externalized.
Corporations only understand profits, and investors should be understood as entities willing to leech from society. The only way to heandle corporations is by having failures threatening the money that investors can leech through this pipeline.
If we look at mining companies, we kind of know that society will carry most of the risk and negative externalities, so regulations must exist to limit how and to what degree companies can operate.
If a mining company extract lead and silver from the ground, we kind of know that they won't be around to safeguard waste for all eternity, nor will they be able to restore the environment when the company eventually goes bankrupt. If society want to allow such commercial operations then it need to also strike a balance so that society don't have to bear too much of the negative externalities.
In Sweden, the goverment here owns the energy company that operate the nuclear power plants and the mining company.
> In Sweden, the goverment here owns the energy company that operate the nuclear power plants.
That is not correct. Vattenfall has nothing to do with Oskarshamn, and had nothing to do with Barsebäck.
Forsmark
- Vattenfall: 66.0 %
- Mellansvensk Kraftgrupp (essentially Fortum): 25.5 %
- Sydkraft Nuclear Power (Uniper): 8.5 %
Ringhals
- Vattenfall: 70.44 %
- Sydkraft Nuclear Power (Uniper): 29.56 %
Oskarshamn
- Uniper (through Sydkraft): 54.5 %
- Fortum: 45.5 %
Barsebäck
- Sydkraft Nuclear Power (Uniper): 100 %
Such anti-nuclear has some validity, but only if we can agree that burning fuel for energy and heat should not continue. Constructing new power plants and central heating systems that rely on burning fuel should be imminently stopped, and all existing plants should have their remaining life time determined and then sunset when they reach it. Any argument of external factors for nuclear are dwarfed by the external factors from burning fuel for energy and heat, double so for profit-maximizing locusts and warmongering oligarchs.
The biggest reason the world is seeing more active was is that we are dependent on a few unstable countries for our energy needs. Solar and wind power can produce very cheap energy when the weather is optimal, but suboptimal weather can equally produce extremely expensive prices to the point where social and economical stability start to break down. We are giving money to warmongering oligarchs because of the fear of what happens if prices goes up to high, which would not happen if energy and heating infrastructure was secure and geopolitical independent.
> only if we can agree that burning fuel for energy and heat should not continue.
Unless you accidentally left out "fossil", as in "burning fossil fuel", then we at least are unlikely to agree.
I certainly intend to continue to gather tree waste and burn it - and I cannot see a problem if forest weight is maintained through replenishment and replacement.
Burning wood waste is primarily a green washing method. True tree waste is very minimal today in quantity, and most wood "waste" is actually used for a lot of products like paper and ply wood, and what is left to burn when everything is used are not enough to power a nation for any duration. In term of pollution it reduces air quality, and in term of sustainability there aren't enough forests around to use wood as the main fuel for all the power needs we have when renewables can't deliver.
Burning wood has at best similar environmental impact as beef. In theory it can be produced using just "waste", but we have to extend the word "waste" beyond recognition when production is scaled up and the profit-maximizing locusts become part of the picture. The world is suffering from deforestation.
We are not talking about using garden waste to burn a log in a open fire place, but rather grid sized power plants and central heating plants. I should however mention that there are air quality reports that points to issues with individual homes burning wood inside cities. Open air fireplaces do not scale well with dense population areas.
> Cutting down massive amount of forests just for the purpose of burning it up is harmful to the environment
Err, lets perhaps stick with
* Cutting down massive amount of old growth forest is harmful to the environment ( whether it's for burning or bauxite )
and
* Cutting down forest faster than regrowth rate is harmful to the environment (as that's net loss wrt surface sequestration)
and perhaps examine "harmful to bio diversity" (is it? checker-boarded plantation forest has about the same biodiversity as it ever has - it's not old-growth but it's not devoid of life or diversity), "dangerous to humans" (really? with modern logging machines on plantation forest? - the deaths in logging largely come from non plantation clearing on steep slopes and happen to humans aware of the risks)
> True tree waste is very minimal today
Is it? Many people hereabout heat their homes from limb lopping, dead fall, and tree deaths.
> not enough to power a nation for any duration
I don't recall suggesting powering a nation - just pointing out that there's an acceptable attrition rate for forests.
The harm from deforestation comes from multiple sources. It increase the harmful effect of storms, flooding, and perhaps counter intuitively also forest fires.
Modern plantation forest involve draining of water, and that causes green house gases to be released. After logging, the area also release more green house gases during the first 20 years then they pick up. Logging also changes the level of ground water, and how much of the ground water get filtered, which in turn reduces quality of the water downstream. Logging also increase erosion, which has it own set of risk to humans.
> I don't recall suggesting powering a nation - just pointing out that there's an acceptable attrition rate for forests.
The article is about nuclear power plants, in the context of the UK green party. In order for wood to be an alternative it would need to be able to provide energy in a green, sustainable, and national independent way. Power plants that burn wood pellets do exist, but how green and how sustainable they are is debatable. It also questionable if they will just use wood, or if they mix it in with other even less green and less sustainable fuels, but sells the energy as green energy produced on waste products.
> I cannot see a problem if forest weight is maintained through replenishment and replacement
It does not scale. That’s how they are cutting down ancient pristine forest in Central Europe. It’s useful as a supplement to use wood waste; it cannot be a major source of energy.
There was no claim that it scaled, merely that it should not continue.
My point is that AGW is sensitive to the source of burnt fuel and not to the act of burning fuel alone (although it is a balancing act between carbon released and carbon captured - thrown out of balance during the anthropocene by the act of dragging up "old" carbon from the depths).
It is good to recycle tree waste and it's already done on industrial scale. But there are not enough forests in the word to replace our consumption of fossil fuels.
For example Denmark is importing lot of wood from Baltics, UK lot of wood from Canada.
https://www.eubioenergy.com/2025/03/13/no-smoke-without-fire...
> not enough forests in the word to replace our consumption of fossil fuels.
I certainly didn't claim that there was, but thank you for rebutting a point not made.
The point of the hypersonic missile catastrophe was something I had not considered and is an excellent point. I think that is true with all critical infrastructure to some extent but a nuclear reactor would certainly have more fallout. I wonder if any designs have thought about that situation.
Nuclear conrainment buildings are the strongest non-military structures build, you need a specialized bunker buster munition to penetrate them.
Under the current aircraft protection rules, the containment building has to survive impact of a fully loaded large civilian airplane moving at speed of sound.
For example testing of samples of containment building was done using acceleration of F-4 Phantom mounted on rocket sledge towards the wall. The wall survived the impact without problems.
> you need a specialized bunker buster munition to penetrate them
Which already exists. For example, India (so that you cannot say "this is something only available to USA) has the Agni-V (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agni-V) that supports a 7.5 ton bunker buster with Mach 24 terminal velocity. It costs $5 million each (like a battle tank).
Your squishy 747 moving at Mach 1 is nothing in comparison.
What other countries do already have something similar, or will have something similar, let's say, in the next 5 years?
If your concern are military bunker busters attacking civilian nuclear power plants, I would like to remind you that attacks on large hydro-dams can bring as much death and destruction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnieper_Hydroelectric_Station#...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Derna_dam_collapse
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
Yup. We don't need even more juicy targets. The fewer, the better.
I could see this maybe working using a standardized sensor reporting system that goes into some third party/government/public analysis. Full sensor array stream, and whatever is used internally to make decisions, up for scrutiny.
Repeat after me: Technology solutions don't fix human problems.
Your sensor reporting system will be forced to report whatever is needed - regardless of the reality of the situation - as soon as the right manager demands more uptime to an engineer, or otherwise they get fired because leadership demands more profit.
No technology is without drawbacks, but technology is the reason we don't live like in Middle ages.
If you want to try live without technology, try living in Somalia for few months. Average Somalian would change for you at any moment.
Thank you for confirming my point that technology fixes technological problems and not human problems.
The Middle ages had effectively more technology than the Romans (all the stuff that was invented til the Romans, plus the stuff that was invented later), yet they fared worse, mostly because of religion and feudal lords sabotaging what the Romans managed to achieve.
Lot of important Roman technology, that affect quality of human life, was lost in dark times of Middle ages. For example sanitation systems:
" There is little record of other sanitation systems (apart from sanitation in ancient Rome) in most of Europe until the High Middle Ages. Unsanitary conditions and overcrowding were widespread throughout Europe and Asia during the Middle Ages. This resulted in pandemics such as the Plague of Justinian (541–542) and the Black Death (1347–1351), which killed tens of millions of people. Very high infant and child mortality prevailed in Europe throughout medieval times, due partly to deficiencies in sanitation. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_water_supply_and_sa...
Even today countries without technology for clean and safe drinking water and sanitation have big problems.
" Without better infrastructure and management, millions of people will continue to die each year from preventable, water-related diseases like malaria and diarrhea. "
https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/water-and-sanitati...
> Nuclear power plants will be run by private companies that will weasel out on maintenance to save a penny. Yes, they will weasel out, this time will not be different to other industries.
Of course like in the well known capitalist regime of the USSR that precipitated the big nuclear problem. If only we had the government instead of the evil capitalists to run things then we could be safe from those profit maximizing parasites.
After reading GPs comment, I almost started thinking about systemic issues of our current economic structures. Good thing you are here to remind us that any problems under capitalism must be accepted without a critical thought, because COMMUNISM!
The only real (ie large) nuclear accident happened under communism. And the reason why we don't have even safer nuclear designs is because of regulation. This entire discussion is entirely backwards and isn't looking at the data. Look where and why incidents happened. When you do, you will find various causes, none of which are fixed by political ideology. They are fixed by engineering and insurance costs.
Chernobyl happened because the son of a central committee member needed data from a dangerous experiment that was conducted at the powerplant. They literally disabled safety systems with wrenches. Both the design itself would have never allowed in the west nor would the experiment that caused the accident. Also, the HBO movie was very inaccurate so please don't bring up something you saw there, many of the things in the movie aren't even scientifically possible.