With solar & wind cheaper than Coal , the development and construction of new reactors will not be fast enough to meet the 2050 target of zero carbon emissions. Even China is having difficulty accelerating the construction of 36 nuclear reactors. And many people are suing china government about The builders of a nuclear power plant near their home.
impossible now - they allowed 30,000,000 illegals into the US they OPENLY call for attacks on nuclear THE ONLY REASON THE LEFT ARE COMING AROUND ON NUCLEAR POWER IS THEY KNOW THEY'VE MADE IT IMPOSSIBLE BY ERODING THE SECURITY OF THE COUNTRY there is NO WAY to have nuclear today, AT ALL, because we have HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of well funded terrorists in the USA that want to bomb these reactors.
If you are smart about Power usage you can use a lot more of the sun and Wind Energy. I work in a dairy plant in Germany. The Most Energy is for cooling. But you have to cool 24/7 thats why during the day whenour solar Panels produce Power we cool the Warehouse a lot lower then we have to so we dont have to cool during the night. This means we usw more Power but 100% from solar
@pj8227 nuclear is pissing in the wind, as base load is small and we need many times more than total electricity. Battery technologies are evolving rapidly, faster than nuclear technologies and every customer will have a BV with OVERSIZED battery that is free storage every day. Nuclear electricity cashflow will be dead. Dead daily and all night long. Warming latitudes and rooftop PV and BVs oversized battery V2G parked 23hrs every day. Millions and millions and millions of customers and BVs and rooftop PV.
We have water and food, 24/7, yet, it doesn't rain or snow every day, and crops aren't harvested, every day, because humans have learned to store water and food, and source it from various regions. Same with electricity, we can easily produce it during daytime hours and windy days, store the excess, as we're doing now, and use the stored power, when needed. Some cities and towns are doing this now, and the whole world will soon.
The nuclear will get smaller idea has me thinking of all the Sci-Fi scenes where someone has a tiny nuclear generator in a flying car or a generator in their house. I don't necessarily think we'd get to that point given how regulated the material will be but it's interesting to think about.
did i miss the part where they discuss sourcing nuclear fuel or was it just not in there? i would have liked to hear about what kind of environmental impact there would be from digging uranium out of the ground and enriching it for fuel usage, how much uranium there's estimated to be, where it can be found, how long it would last given what amount of energy consumption
China has less of the bureaucracy around nuclear and uses far more industrial energy including direct use of high temperatures and the ones that need to decarbonize most so if it's going to make a comeback it'll be the Chinese who make it happen.
You're forgetting another common feature of China: poorly-built structures that crumble within like 10 years. And they're building nuclear reactors.....that is just tragedy waiting to happen. A country that somehow produces rebar of such poor quality steel it can be snapped with bare hands should not be building that.
The Chinese alone are building more solar and wind power plants, every year, than the entire Americas and EU, combined. Yes, China is developing a few nuclear power plants but admit, they cost is far too high and won't pursue them much longer.
@@BarrGC Most of that coal they have shipped (probably using bunker fuel, for the Chinese-crewed ships to cut costs) from Australia, unless that has changed.
Nuclear is a hugely undervalued resource. As brilliant as 100% renewables are like solar, wind, hydropower, geothermal, etc we just don't have the capacity for our growing demand. Nuclear has virtually no downside, spent fuel rods can be recycled upwards of 80-90% efficiently, and with current advancements in technology, we can get radioactive waste down to a minimum and most likely eliminate it completely within the next 200-500 years. It's a vital stop gap between mass renewable adoption until Fusion reactors become a viable commercial reality.
What about the financial downsides? A complete state-of-the-art reactor with recycling facilities, etc costs billions (as of today) The most expensive kWh in the world are produced by modern nuclear reactors
@@julianzurn1428 Everyone has been saying the same thing about photovoltaic solar panel production. The price has dropped dramatically in recent years. Prices fall 2-5% year over uear, that’s 40-40% cheaper than 5 years ago, 70-80% cheaper than a decade ago, over 90% cheaper than 2 decades ago, and over 99% reduction than 50 years ago. Things won’t get cheaper unless economies of scale are put into effect. The longer we wait the more expensive it will seem.
Your comment has nothing to do with reality. Nobody is recycling spent fuel rods and yes, there’s a massive downside to nuclear: nuclear waste! Nobody’s figured out how to eliminate nuke waste radiation in 200-500 years, that’s a pipe dream, and nuclear power costs 6-12 times to generate than solar and wind + batteries.
If it can be done safely for humanity and the environment I am all for it but I guarantee making it for profit will make it very unsafe as history shows.
There are nuclear power plants in the world's oceans currently. The same amount of authority and policies should be placed on land as well. Advancements in technologies require increased power production. Other options: unoptimal
The U.S. has had an aversion to advancing research it started in so many different fields. Rejecting basic research in biology, chemistry, energy, transportation, climate. It is a nation in decline. Largely due to an anti science / education mentality leading to divestment in centralized knowledge centers in favor of capitalism as a solution.
Fukushima cost over $187 billion dollars in damages and impacted us all the way over on the Pacific coast of the US. I'm not hearing how safety has improved. Yes airplanes only crash once a year. But that crash doesn't cause billions of damage and tens of hundreds of thousands of victims
Nuke is too expensive( it costs billions of dollars), it takes too long (well over 10 years), the power plant only lasts 60 years and then you have to store the high level spent fuel for 10,000 years. Solar, and wind with battery backup is a viable low cost alternative. Nuclear Energy also produces U235 and Pu239 which are used to make nuclear bombs. Not a viable alternative but an apocalyptic one.
The only argument I've ever heard against fission energy is that the uranium supply is outside the United States and in dwindling supply. How true that is, I do not know... What I do know, however, is that the push for "green energy" is motivated by profit. Low efficiency energy production is high expense energy for the consumer.
We need to build more nuclear energy for sure to meet our net zero goals. The modern research and reactor tech along with waste material recycling is incredibly promising. High cost of building new nuclear seems like a solvable problem.
With solar & wind cheaper than Coal , the development and construction of new reactors will not be fast enough to meet the 2050 target of zero carbon emissions. Even China is having difficulty accelerating the construction of 36 nuclear reactors. And many people are suing china government about The builders of a nuclear power plant near their home.
This video does nothing constructive advancing the possible adoption of nuclear power plants in the US because it chooses only to praise American nuclear technology but completely avoids the downsides of nuclear Nuclear requires a very large upfront investment, more than practically all other options . If a nuclear power plant has an accident, it won't likely cause a blast like a nuclear bomb unless something under pressure like overheated coolant is suddenly released but like Chernobyl, Fukishima and Three Mile Island will more likely devolve into a long running catastrophe. I found it amusing that this spokeslady characterized the long time to decommission a plant as part of building a positive relationship with that country. A major danger not mentioned in this video is that although accidents can hopefully be minimized, intentional acts like terrorism, revolution and war can turn nuclear fuel or waste into dirty bombs with hardly any expertise. But most of all, even with more efficient technologies like Thorium reactors, there is always the problem of nuclear waste which is extremely hazardous and usually fatal to all forms of life with half lives exceeding 300 and even 600 years... In other words at least as long as the USA has existed These issues become important to consider when the simple fact is that nuclear is competing with power sources that don't have those issues like legacy fossil fuels and the wide array of Green. I'm not advocating for a complete rejection of nuclear power but mainly to reject for large community power plants. There😢 many uses where nuclear is probably the best solution, like for propulsion, to power medical implants, space and deep sea exploration and more. But committing to nuclear power plants just to generate electricity is not something I would back whenever there are better options
Nuclear fission could be the answer, but only if they can move past the PWR (pressurised water reactors). The USA 🇺🇸 invented the Thorium Molten Salt Reactor half a century ago and then put that technology on the shelf until the Chinese 🇨🇳 came along and asked for copies of the research documents for the Thorium molten salt reactor, they now have a functioning prototype and plans for mass production of this reactor. The current reactor type that uses water has a tendency to blow up when things go wrong because the water separates into hydrogen and oxygen therefore making radioactive ghost towns. This thorium reactor can’t make radioactive ghost towns, it’s more efficient with his fuel, and thorium is practically everywhere. People in the western countries are blocked by bureaucratic red tape and unable to compete with China in regards to the thorium molten salt reactor. If your country wants a safe efficient reactor they will most likely have to buy from china 🇨🇳
As an accountant who always looks at the numbers..... you are welcome to invest your private money in "new new supernew nuclear" and I will invest mine in renewables. At the end of the day you will have to create a nuclear plant which is cheaper than renewables + storage, which can be built quickly and with low regulation. Will never happen, which is why investment in the idea is so poor.
counter point: if i invest in new nuclear, i will not see a return on investment in the fist 20 years. But after 40 years the plant is still operating while after 40 years the wind and solar installation is either not operational any longer or degraded in output. New nuclear reactors are given a lifetime of 60 years. They will probably last in the order of 100, current operational ones are extended to 80 years in the US. conclusion: yeah solar and wind are good investments but nuclear is too if you're thinking in the long term
complete and utter bs. nuclear makes 0 economic sense. for a country with existing nuclear capabilities and knows how to design and construct a new nuclear plant on its own, a 1 gigawatt nuclear power station costs USD$6 billion minimum. usually it will be around 10 billion. by comparison, 1 GW solar farm costs half a billion to 1 billion and 1GW wind farm costs 2 billion max. sure, solar farms only operate 40% of the time over a 24 hour day and wind farms on average operate at 40% - 50% capacity. all you need to do is building energy storage to patch the gap. you can either use battery farms or pumped hydro. for nuclear, the average down time is 10%. a lot better than renewables on the surface. but you won't think so any more when you consider my next points. lets compare operational cost, shall we? solar farms, $10,000- $20,000 per MW per year. wind farms, $20,000 - $40,000 per MW per year. nuclear, get this, upwards of $300,000 per MW per year. factoring in all those costs, solar farms produce electricity at 2 - 4 cents per kWh. wind farms 3 - 5 cents per kWh. nuclear? well, upwards of 12 cents per kWh. and that's just for countries with existing know-how in nuclear. countries that don't have it can expect the cost to build and operate a nuclear plant to blow up 5 times or more for their first ones, with construction timeline touching 2040 if they start the tender process like right now this moment. that's NO help to the climate crisis. also, the average cost overrun for a solar farm is 1%. wind farm 13%. nuclear plant 120%. nuclear storage facility 238%. lmao. what a joke. source: Bent Flyvbjerg from Oxford Global Projects. (btw all the other numbers i wrote in this comment are all a few seconds of googling away). for recent relevancy, Flamanville 3 European Pressurized Reactor in fance has a cost blowout of 450%. the Vogtle nuclear plant in georgia, US has a cost blowout of 220% AND 7 years behind schedule AND raised georgian's power bill wildly. nuclear makes no economic sense. pull your head out of the 1960s. nuclear doesn't have a future.
@@djancak if your country has a flourishing manufaturing industry, solar farms in general don't need much storage at all. because your country's electricity load is going to be lopsided tilting towards day rather than night. in countries with less manufacturing, solar storage is only needed for 5% - 25% of the total solar capacity, because office building and all the business trading still happens during sunlight hours. pull your calculator out for how much is 5% - 25% of the solar generation capacity in storage cost. and tell me how does that compare to nuclear. offshore wind farms don't need storage. oceanic wind is constant and never stops. onshore wind farms works 50%ish of the time. but if you connect all the tens if not hundreds of win farms in a country to the same grid, you don't need storage either because wind is always blowing somewhere. none of the math supports your 1960s pipe dream grandma.
Not applicable everywhere. Many countries need to create regular jobs - geothermal, solar & wind (awa some other clean tech) can help with that. To work at a nuclear facility how much post grad university training is needed? And the nuclear industry is just dodgy - decades of lies, cover ups, & other shenanigans. In fact most countries wanting to go nuclear also want nuclear weapons too - that should tell you something... it's just sneaky! Costa Rica is almost 100 % clean energy, mostly via hydro but solar also a possibility. Portugal doing well on solar and Spain could also go solar, as with australia. NZ could probably do well with wind. Africa has enough wind energy potential to power the globe 3x. Kenya is doing very well using geothermal. Most countries around the equator have great solar potential and, if done correctly, can be less obtrusive. Since 75 - 80% people will live in cities by 2050, cities need to be providing solutions to many challenges, including energy. Think solar panels on every roof, shading highways, roads & streets awa carparks supported by community energy storage (perhaps using second life EV batteries). There are just too many risks with nuclear and no benefits for ordinary folk (in terms of jobs) offered by other clean tech. Clean energy must be deployed correctly - currently it's a "free for all" - with nature, once again, suffering serious impacts... Where has all the nature gone, long time passing... when will we ever learn?!
Recycling nuclear waste and storing what can’t be recycled in deep underground impenetrable storage facilities that can last hundreds of thousands of years.
It is the only solution to our current predicament. Other sources are unoptimal and ill-advised. Should such an option be authorized, new research and efficiencies can be implemented and discovered for future generations to have a better understanding rather than fearing a necessary technology. Waste material can also be used as a power source. Lacks high yield, but should time come when we may need to rely on it, it is available. Reoccurring blackouts on even population dense cities, despite being economically productive, can disrupt the production, residents' frustration, and companies tempted to look for other sources (other locations for optimal income).
You better spend 10 times more on increasing the grid capacity if you are genuine about stopping CO2 emissions from fossil fuels. 10 times the cost of the nuclear generation to reach the millions and millions of customers. Its economics as the latitudes warm. Nuclear must run 247, to be economical but when the sunshines rooftop PV customers do not need to spend on grid electricity. It is not the size of the generator, it is the size of the grid to millions and millions and millions of customers. People who go offgrid in more isolated areas know how expensive the new poles and wires cost. Bigger grid capacity is stupendously expensive on the national scale. This is an info commercial youtube video. 80% of the world's population live in dictatorships. Do we export millions of tonnes uranium yellowcake to the nuclear industries in the dictatorships ??
impossible now - they allowed 30,000,000 illegals into the US they OPENLY call for attacks on nuclear THE ONLY REASON THE LEFT ARE COMING AROUND ON NUCLEAR POWER IS THEY KNOW THEY'VE MADE IT IMPOSSIBLE BY ERODING THE SECURITY OF THE COUNTRY there is NO WAY to have nuclear today, AT ALL, because we have HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of well funded terrorists in the USA that want to bomb these reactors.
I agree that the electrical grid needs to be upgraded. Regardless, if the energy source is nuclear or renewables, the price will be the same. What is not understood is the transition to a decentralized generation system. The future is a battery based system of independent nodes. The grid will become bidirectional. The only purpose of the grid will be inter-node battery charging. As to nuclear, a better bet will be enhanced geothermal.
Offcourse it's more expensive, they don't get build. Vogtle 3 & 4 where the first in 30 years in the US. EU has the same problem, almost no new builds in 30 years. Olkiluoto 3 was the first new reactor in the 21st century that got turned on in the EU. If you don't build things in the masses, it's really expensive.
@@1968Christiaan No kidding? When ignorant people that think that a plant is like what you see in the Simpsons, most places avoid the headache of having to deal with stupid.
A shortage of high-risk investors will kill it off even before. France had the problem you were talking about... and if EDF was a private firm they would be bust.
Except for special purposes like research or navel vessels, nuclear is not competitive. Renewable energy has already replaced coal. Distributed roof top generation is rabidly developing. Massive solar parks are coming online. Across the board battery installations are balancing the load. The only selling point for nuclear is as base load and that is being challenged by geothermal and load shifting. Investing in nuclear is investing in a stranded asset.
Can you give me a source where it says that renewables have fully replaced coal? I can't think of any country where it has done so. Coal is mostly replaced by natural gas or biomass. And just to be clear, i mean an industrial country not just a village without any industry. Thanks
My mistake, I should have said: "already replacing coal". Scientific American, August 3, 2024, article by Benjamin Storrow E&E: " U.S. Wind and Solar Are on Track to Overtake Coal This Year...Two renewable resources, wind and solar, together have produced more power than coal through July-a first for the U.S." Also:, The Guardian: "Coal in the US is now being economically outmatched by renewables to such an extent that it’s more expensive for 99% of the country’s coal-fired power plants to keep running than it is to build an entirely new solar or wind energy operation nearby, a new analysis has found".
Natural Gas has replaced coal and was a driving factor in it's elimination. Solar is intermittent and there hasn't been nearly enough battery build out to make it work. Nuclear Power is only expensive because of excessive regulations. About 1/3rd of the cost is unnecessary regulations. I'm an all of the above guy on energy, but people basically keep asking nuclear to stop hitting it's self like a proper bully. It's based on emotional overreaction.
@@chrisconklin2981 Thank you for the information. Although the articles are overly optimistic. For example the last one from The Guardian. "On average, the marginal cost for the coal plants is $36 each megawatt hour, while new solar is about $24 each megawatt hour, or about a third cheaper." While this is factually true, it isn't quite on the same playing field. the $36/MWh is a continuous source while the other one is not. don't get me wrong, wind and solar are great additions to a grid, but that's it, they are additions not a full substitution at this point. the achiles heal of wind and solar has been and still is storage. There are projects that are significant in storage for wind and solar but they do not represent the same quality as a "base load" source. disclaimer: i am not advocating for coal or gas, these just are the facts of the current energy market.
Alternative title: This expert wants the US to have common sense
😂
With solar & wind cheaper than Coal , the development and construction of new reactors will not be fast enough to meet the 2050 target of zero carbon emissions.
Even China is having difficulty accelerating the construction of 36 nuclear reactors. And many people are suing china government about The builders of a nuclear power plant near their home.
Nuclear is the base load where everything stays on! The wind doesn't always blow and the sun sets every day!
impossible now - they allowed 30,000,000 illegals into the US
they OPENLY call for attacks on nuclear
THE ONLY REASON THE LEFT ARE COMING AROUND ON NUCLEAR POWER IS THEY KNOW THEY'VE MADE IT IMPOSSIBLE BY ERODING THE SECURITY OF THE COUNTRY
there is NO WAY to have nuclear today, AT ALL, because we have HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of well funded terrorists in the USA that want to bomb these reactors.
If you are smart about Power usage you can use a lot more of the sun and Wind Energy. I work in a dairy plant in Germany. The Most Energy is for cooling. But you have to cool 24/7 thats why during the day whenour solar Panels produce Power we cool the Warehouse a lot lower then we have to so we dont have to cool during the night. This means we usw more Power but 100% from solar
@@Ravachol71 good comment.
@pj8227 nuclear is pissing in the wind, as base load is small and we need many times more than total electricity.
Battery technologies are evolving rapidly, faster than nuclear technologies and every customer will have a BV with OVERSIZED battery that is free storage every day.
Nuclear electricity cashflow will be dead.
Dead daily and all night long.
Warming latitudes and rooftop PV and BVs oversized battery V2G parked 23hrs every day.
Millions and millions and millions of customers and BVs and rooftop PV.
We have water and food, 24/7, yet, it doesn't rain or snow every day, and crops aren't harvested, every day, because humans have learned to store water and food, and source it from various regions. Same with electricity, we can easily produce it during daytime hours and windy days, store the excess, as we're doing now, and use the stored power, when needed. Some cities and towns are doing this now, and the whole world will soon.
The nuclear will get smaller idea has me thinking of all the Sci-Fi scenes where someone has a tiny nuclear generator in a flying car or a generator in their house. I don't necessarily think we'd get to that point given how regulated the material will be but it's interesting to think about.
does protoman's arm canon run on nuclear power
New nuclear plants that have load-following and good fission products burn-up should have a place in our energy portfolio.
did i miss the part where they discuss sourcing nuclear fuel or was it just not in there? i would have liked to hear about what kind of environmental impact there would be from digging uranium out of the ground and enriching it for fuel usage, how much uranium there's estimated to be, where it can be found, how long it would last given what amount of energy consumption
China has less of the bureaucracy around nuclear and uses far more industrial energy including direct use of high temperatures and the ones that need to decarbonize most so if it's going to make a comeback it'll be the Chinese who make it happen.
You're forgetting another common feature of China: poorly-built structures that crumble within like 10 years. And they're building nuclear reactors.....that is just tragedy waiting to happen. A country that somehow produces rebar of such poor quality steel it can be snapped with bare hands should not be building that.
The Chinese alone are building more solar and wind power plants, every year, than the entire Americas and EU, combined. Yes, China is developing a few nuclear power plants but admit, they cost is far too high and won't pursue them much longer.
@@MrArtist7777 Did you make sure to check that those panels were actually plugged in to anything this time?
@@MrArtist7777 They also mine and burn more coal than any other country...
@@BarrGC Most of that coal they have shipped (probably using bunker fuel, for the Chinese-crewed ships to cut costs) from Australia, unless that has changed.
Nuclear is a hugely undervalued resource. As brilliant as 100% renewables are like solar, wind, hydropower, geothermal, etc we just don't have the capacity for our growing demand. Nuclear has virtually no downside, spent fuel rods can be recycled upwards of 80-90% efficiently, and with current advancements in technology, we can get radioactive waste down to a minimum and most likely eliminate it completely within the next 200-500 years. It's a vital stop gap between mass renewable adoption until Fusion reactors become a viable commercial reality.
What about the financial downsides? A complete state-of-the-art reactor with recycling facilities, etc costs billions (as of today)
The most expensive kWh in the world are produced by modern nuclear reactors
Its too expensive.. it cant Change its Output fast (If there ist No Wind or sun)
And in Case of war ITS a huge target that can be attacked fairly easy Not Like solar or Wind that ist more decentralised
@@julianzurn1428 Everyone has been saying the same thing about photovoltaic solar panel production. The price has dropped dramatically in recent years.
Prices fall 2-5% year over uear, that’s 40-40% cheaper than 5 years ago, 70-80% cheaper than a decade ago, over 90% cheaper than 2 decades ago, and over 99% reduction than 50 years ago.
Things won’t get cheaper unless economies of scale are put into effect. The longer we wait the more expensive it will seem.
Your comment has nothing to do with reality. Nobody is recycling spent fuel rods and yes, there’s a massive downside to nuclear: nuclear waste! Nobody’s figured out how to eliminate nuke waste radiation in 200-500 years, that’s a pipe dream, and nuclear power costs 6-12 times to generate than solar and wind + batteries.
Where @KyleHill at?
If it can be done safely for humanity and the environment I am all for it but I guarantee making it for profit will make it very unsafe as history shows.
There are nuclear power plants in the world's oceans currently.
The same amount of authority and policies should be placed on land as well.
Advancements in technologies require increased power production.
Other options: unoptimal
The U.S. has had an aversion to advancing research it started in so many different fields. Rejecting basic research in biology, chemistry, energy, transportation, climate. It is a nation in decline. Largely due to an anti science / education mentality leading to divestment in centralized knowledge centers in favor of capitalism as a solution.
Fukushima cost over $187 billion dollars in damages and impacted us all the way over on the Pacific coast of the US. I'm not hearing how safety has improved. Yes airplanes only crash once a year. But that crash doesn't cause billions of damage and tens of hundreds of thousands of victims
Nuke is too expensive( it costs billions of dollars), it takes too long (well over 10 years), the power plant only lasts 60 years and then you have to store the high level spent fuel for 10,000 years. Solar, and wind with battery backup is a viable low cost alternative. Nuclear Energy also produces U235 and Pu239 which are used to make nuclear bombs. Not a viable alternative but an apocalyptic one.
Nuclear has been great but I'm disappointed they didn't bring up nuclear waste disposal and how to handle that or how she would change that handling.
All this stuff is way too expensive than any green designs.
I like the content and the possibilty of moving toward nuclear. I do have an issue with the speaker not answering the questions about cost of nuclear.
The only argument I've ever heard against fission energy is that the uranium supply is outside the United States and in dwindling supply.
How true that is, I do not know...
What I do know, however, is that the push for "green energy" is motivated by profit.
Low efficiency energy production is high expense energy for the consumer.
There is enough uranium to last hundreds of years. And that's just uranium, if we used throium reactors we would have energy for thousands of years.
いきましょう ｎｕｃｌｅａｒ ｉｓ ｇｏｏｄ！
We needed to start building new reactors back in 2008.
We need to build more nuclear energy for sure to meet our net zero goals. The modern research and reactor tech along with waste material recycling is incredibly promising. High cost of building new nuclear seems like a solvable problem.
Always been the answer.
Yes we can do it better now because of the tech is here to improve safety standards and beyond
Best option. Will always be until fusion.
They need nuclear for the base load and renewable energy resources for everything else.
With solar & wind cheaper than Coal , the development and construction of new reactors will not be fast enough to meet the 2050 target of zero carbon emissions.
Even China is having difficulty accelerating the construction of 36 nuclear reactors. And many people are suing china government about The builders of a nuclear power plant near their home.
This video does nothing constructive advancing the possible adoption of nuclear power plants in the US because it chooses only to praise American nuclear technology but completely avoids the downsides of nuclear
Nuclear requires a very large upfront investment, more than practically all other options .
If a nuclear power plant has an accident, it won't likely cause a blast like a nuclear bomb unless something under pressure like overheated coolant is suddenly released but like Chernobyl, Fukishima and Three Mile Island will more likely devolve into a long running catastrophe.
I found it amusing that this spokeslady characterized the long time to decommission a plant as part of building a positive relationship with that country.
A major danger not mentioned in this video is that although accidents can hopefully be minimized, intentional acts like terrorism, revolution and war can turn nuclear fuel or waste into dirty bombs with hardly any expertise.
But most of all, even with more efficient technologies like Thorium reactors, there is always the problem of nuclear waste which is extremely hazardous and usually fatal to all forms of life with half lives exceeding 300 and even 600 years... In other words at least as long as the USA has existed
These issues become important to consider when the simple fact is that nuclear is competing with power sources that don't have those issues like legacy fossil fuels and the wide array of Green.
I'm not advocating for a complete rejection of nuclear power but mainly to reject for large community power plants. There😢 many uses where nuclear is probably the best solution, like for propulsion, to power medical implants, space and deep sea exploration and more.
But committing to nuclear power plants just to generate electricity is not something I would back whenever there are better options
Power is not free.
Nuclear fission could be the answer, but only if they can move past the PWR (pressurised water reactors). The USA 🇺🇸 invented the Thorium Molten Salt Reactor half a century ago and then put that technology on the shelf until the Chinese 🇨🇳 came along and asked for copies of the research documents for the Thorium molten salt reactor, they now have a functioning prototype and plans for mass production of this reactor. The current reactor type that uses water has a tendency to blow up when things go wrong because the water separates into hydrogen and oxygen therefore making radioactive ghost towns. This thorium reactor can’t make radioactive ghost towns, it’s more efficient with his fuel, and thorium is practically everywhere. People in the western countries are blocked by bureaucratic red tape and unable to compete with China in regards to the thorium molten salt reactor. If your country wants a safe efficient reactor they will most likely have to buy from china 🇨🇳
As an accountant who always looks at the numbers..... you are welcome to invest your private money in "new new supernew nuclear" and I will invest mine in renewables. At the end of the day you will have to create a nuclear plant which is cheaper than renewables + storage, which can be built quickly and with low regulation. Will never happen, which is why investment in the idea is so poor.
counter point: if i invest in new nuclear, i will not see a return on investment in the fist 20 years. But after 40 years the plant is still operating while after 40 years the wind and solar installation is either not operational any longer or degraded in output. New nuclear reactors are given a lifetime of 60 years. They will probably last in the order of 100, current operational ones are extended to 80 years in the US.
conclusion: yeah solar and wind are good investments but nuclear is too if you're thinking in the long term
complete and utter bs. nuclear makes 0 economic sense.
for a country with existing nuclear capabilities and knows how to design and construct a new nuclear plant on its own, a 1 gigawatt nuclear power station costs USD$6 billion minimum. usually it will be around 10 billion. by comparison, 1 GW solar farm costs half a billion to 1 billion and 1GW wind farm costs 2 billion max.
sure, solar farms only operate 40% of the time over a 24 hour day and wind farms on average operate at 40% - 50% capacity. all you need to do is building energy storage to patch the gap. you can either use battery farms or pumped hydro. for nuclear, the average down time is 10%. a lot better than renewables on the surface. but you won't think so any more when you consider my next points.
lets compare operational cost, shall we? solar farms, $10,000- $20,000 per MW per year. wind farms, $20,000 - $40,000 per MW per year. nuclear, get this, upwards of $300,000 per MW per year.
factoring in all those costs, solar farms produce electricity at 2 - 4 cents per kWh. wind farms 3 - 5 cents per kWh. nuclear? well, upwards of 12 cents per kWh.
and that's just for countries with existing know-how in nuclear. countries that don't have it can expect the cost to build and operate a nuclear plant to blow up 5 times or more for their first ones, with construction timeline touching 2040 if they start the tender process like right now this moment. that's NO help to the climate crisis.
also, the average cost overrun for a solar farm is 1%. wind farm 13%. nuclear plant 120%. nuclear storage facility 238%. lmao. what a joke. source: Bent Flyvbjerg from Oxford Global Projects. (btw all the other numbers i wrote in this comment are all a few seconds of googling away).
for recent relevancy, Flamanville 3 European Pressurized Reactor in fance has a cost blowout of 450%. the Vogtle nuclear plant in georgia, US has a cost blowout of 220% AND 7 years behind schedule AND raised georgian's power bill wildly.
nuclear makes no economic sense. pull your head out of the 1960s. nuclear doesn't have a future.
what are the costs for the energy story for solar/wind though
@@djancak if your country has a flourishing manufaturing industry, solar farms in general don't need much storage at all. because your country's electricity load is going to be lopsided tilting towards day rather than night. in countries with less manufacturing, solar storage is only needed for 5% - 25% of the total solar capacity, because office building and all the business trading still happens during sunlight hours. pull your calculator out for how much is 5% - 25% of the solar generation capacity in storage cost. and tell me how does that compare to nuclear.
offshore wind farms don't need storage. oceanic wind is constant and never stops. onshore wind farms works 50%ish of the time. but if you connect all the tens if not hundreds of win farms in a country to the same grid, you don't need storage either because wind is always blowing somewhere.
none of the math supports your 1960s pipe dream grandma.
Not applicable everywhere. Many countries need to create regular jobs - geothermal, solar & wind (awa some other clean tech) can help with that. To work at a nuclear facility how much post grad university training is needed? And the nuclear industry is just dodgy - decades of lies, cover ups, & other shenanigans. In fact most countries wanting to go nuclear also want nuclear weapons too - that should tell you something... it's just sneaky!
Costa Rica is almost 100 % clean energy, mostly via hydro but solar also a possibility. Portugal doing well on solar and Spain could also go solar, as with australia. NZ could probably do well with wind. Africa has enough wind energy potential to power the globe 3x. Kenya is doing very well using geothermal. Most countries around the equator have great solar potential and, if done correctly, can be less obtrusive.
Since 75 - 80% people will live in cities by 2050, cities need to be providing solutions to many challenges, including energy. Think solar panels on every roof, shading highways, roads & streets awa carparks supported by community energy storage (perhaps using second life EV batteries).
There are just too many risks with nuclear and no benefits for ordinary folk (in terms of jobs) offered by other clean tech. Clean energy must be deployed correctly - currently it's a "free for all" - with nature, once again, suffering serious impacts...
Where has all the nature gone, long time passing... when will we ever learn?!
BS. So it‘s a commercial
How to make refining uranium safe to the environment is also a challenge, also the nuclear waste deposit is another.
There's already a company working to make recycling nuclear waste safe and economically viable.
Recycling nuclear waste and storing what can’t be recycled in deep underground impenetrable storage facilities that can last hundreds of thousands of years.
It is the only solution to our current predicament. Other sources are unoptimal and ill-advised.
Should such an option be authorized, new research and efficiencies can be implemented and discovered for future generations to have a better understanding rather than fearing a necessary technology.
Waste material can also be used as a power source. Lacks high yield, but should time come when we may need to rely on it, it is available.
Reoccurring blackouts on even population dense cities, despite being economically productive, can disrupt the production, residents' frustration, and companies tempted to look for other sources (other locations for optimal income).
You better spend 10 times more on increasing the grid capacity if you are genuine about stopping CO2 emissions from fossil fuels.
10 times the cost of the nuclear generation to reach the millions and millions of customers.
Its economics as the latitudes warm.
Nuclear must run 247, to be economical but when the sunshines rooftop PV customers do not need to spend on grid electricity.
It is not the size of the generator, it is the size of the grid to millions and millions and millions of customers.
People who go offgrid in more isolated areas know how expensive the new poles and wires cost.
Bigger grid capacity is stupendously expensive on the national scale.
This is an info commercial youtube video.
80% of the world's population live in dictatorships. Do we export millions of tonnes uranium yellowcake to the nuclear industries in the dictatorships ??
impossible now - they allowed 30,000,000 illegals into the US
they OPENLY call for attacks on nuclear
THE ONLY REASON THE LEFT ARE COMING AROUND ON NUCLEAR POWER IS THEY KNOW THEY'VE MADE IT IMPOSSIBLE BY ERODING THE SECURITY OF THE COUNTRY
there is NO WAY to have nuclear today, AT ALL, because we have HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of well funded terrorists in the USA that want to bomb these reactors.
I agree that the electrical grid needs to be upgraded. Regardless, if the energy source is nuclear or renewables, the price will be the same. What is not understood is the transition to a decentralized generation system. The future is a battery based system of independent nodes. The grid will become bidirectional. The only purpose of the grid will be inter-node battery charging. As to nuclear, a better bet will be enhanced geothermal.
Nuclear power is 6-12 times the cost of solar and wind + battery storage, and won’t take off.
It pays for itself in less than a decade.
@@WillmobilePlus That is not what the markets say... even Texas is pumping money into renewables ...
Offcourse it's more expensive, they don't get build. Vogtle 3 & 4 where the first in 30 years in the US. EU has the same problem, almost no new builds in 30 years. Olkiluoto 3 was the first new reactor in the 21st century that got turned on in the EU. If you don't build things in the masses, it's really expensive.
@@WillmobilePlus it never pays.
@@1968Christiaan No kidding?
When ignorant people that think that a plant is like what you see in the Simpsons, most places avoid the headache of having to deal with stupid.
Nuclear needs water to cool their system. A shortage of water may well result in accident all the way to meltdown…
A shortage of high-risk investors will kill it off even before. France had the problem you were talking about... and if EDF was a private firm they would be bust.
Except for special purposes like research or navel vessels, nuclear is not competitive. Renewable energy has already replaced coal. Distributed roof top generation is rabidly developing. Massive solar parks are coming online. Across the board battery installations are balancing the load. The only selling point for nuclear is as base load and that is being challenged by geothermal and load shifting. Investing in nuclear is investing in a stranded asset.
I disagree with this take
Can you give me a source where it says that renewables have fully replaced coal? I can't think of any country where it has done so. Coal is mostly replaced by natural gas or biomass. And just to be clear, i mean an industrial country not just a village without any industry.
Thanks
My mistake, I should have said: "already replacing coal".
Scientific American, August 3, 2024, article by Benjamin Storrow E&E: " U.S. Wind and Solar Are on Track to Overtake Coal This Year...Two renewable resources, wind and solar, together have produced more power than coal through July-a first for the U.S."
Also:, The Guardian: "Coal in the US is now being economically outmatched by renewables to such an extent that it’s more expensive for 99% of the country’s coal-fired power plants to keep running than it is to build an entirely new solar or wind energy operation nearby, a new analysis has found".
Natural Gas has replaced coal and was a driving factor in it's elimination. Solar is intermittent and there hasn't been nearly enough battery build out to make it work.
Nuclear Power is only expensive because of excessive regulations. About 1/3rd of the cost is unnecessary regulations.
I'm an all of the above guy on energy, but people basically keep asking nuclear to stop hitting it's self like a proper bully. It's based on emotional overreaction.
@@chrisconklin2981 Thank you for the information.
Although the articles are overly optimistic. For example the last one from The Guardian. "On average, the marginal cost for the coal plants is $36 each megawatt hour, while new solar is about $24 each megawatt hour, or about a third cheaper." While this is factually true, it isn't quite on the same playing field. the $36/MWh is a continuous source while the other one is not. don't get me wrong, wind and solar are great additions to a grid, but that's it, they are additions not a full substitution at this point.
the achiles heal of wind and solar has been and still is storage. There are projects that are significant in storage for wind and solar but they do not represent the same quality as a "base load" source.
disclaimer: i am not advocating for coal or gas, these just are the facts of the current energy market.
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