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this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2024
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Yeah, nuclear power plants are expensive and slow to construct. 20 years ago, hell, 10 years ago, I would've said "Yes, building new plants or making major expansions is still a good idea." Now? Renewables are advancing so fast that it's probably economically unwise to make major investments in nuclear power.
Nuclear energy has insane energy density in terms of MJ/kg (something like 3.9 x 10^6 ) versus chemical fuels (4.5 x 10^1), but it's grossly inefficient because most of the output is waste heat and "hot" isotopes-- the last things we need. I don't have hard numbers on hand but I wouldn't say nuclear is more than a few tens of percent efficiency. Then there's the capital costs to build, maintain and operate plants PLUS costs to source, refine, transport, and store the fuel, and then transport and discard (contain) waste product. Not worth it at scale.
Versus Solar, Wind and Tidal which are far less energy dense per unit mass of working fluid¹, but enjoy up to 80% efficiency, and are relatively easy to scale.
Nuclear still makes sense, I think, in interior areas like the American Midwest where wind and solar are fickle, and transportation (transmission) costs for tidal would be unsustainable.
¹ Not a fair comparison because solar efficiency is quantized on intensity x area / time, while wind and tidal would quantized on flux density, or (mass / area) x velocity (over time?).
I think it would make the most sense at high latitudes. Where they don't get enough sun for solar and maintenance on iced-up turbine blades would be a pain in the ass.
There's another downside to depending on nuclear power that wasn't so much an issue in the past, but is now, and will be even more in the future: the required cooling capacity to operate a nuclear reactor.
The reason nuclear power plants are built next to large bodies of water is that the waste heat needs to be dispersed somewhere. The heat is transferred to the body of water (lake, river, sea or ocean). Except now with climate change the bodies of water are already warmer so they cannot take away as much heat. In other places drought is reducing the amount of water, meaning less waste heat can be carried away. If you can't get rid of waste heat from your reactor, you have to turn it off until you have sufficient heat dispersal available.
This isn't theoretical. Its been happening sporadically for almost a decade. Here's an article from 2018 detailing Finland having to turn off reactors because of ocean temperatures too high to operate.:
"Finland's Loviisa power plant, located about 65 miles outside Helsinki, first slightly reduced its output on Wednesday. "The situation does not endanger people, [the] environment or the power plant," its operator, the energy company Fortum, wrote in a statement. The seawater has not cooled since then, and the plant continued to reduce its output on both Thursday and Friday, confirmed the plant's chief of operations, Timo Eurasto. "The weather forecast [means] it can continue at least a week. But hopefully not that long," he said."
I don't know why more people aren't talking about this when they recommend nuclear power for a climate changing world. Its only going to get hotter from now on, which means we'll be able to effectively only use less nuclear power plant capacity.
exactly. it isn't that they're unsafe, its that there's more effective options that aren't oil.