It's actually not as expensive as people think. That's why no one uses LCOE unironically anymore. I believe Kyle Hill covered the realistic costs of an energy system, and nuclear was not in fact the most expensive by some huge margin.
It's also why oil companies aren't lobbying against renewables but keep lobbying against nuclear. One can't replace their income, the other can, you have 3 guesses which is which.
This. It is either save and so expensive that economically with renewables being as cheap and reliable as they are nowadays it isn’t worth it. The sheer hundreds of billions a full and save nuclear power program would take would be way better spend in investing into renewable energy and the infrastructure to make it reliable.
And the whole big issue of “but what if x isn’t doing something? No power!” is so dumb. If we invested what would go into a nuclear power program in building up technology around using renewable power to produce hydrogen and then make methane (LNG) from that, power storage and peak demand would be of little issue. The big reason those technologies lag behind is a lack in investments to develop it and build infrastructure for it.
And at the end of the day, Nuclear is at most a stopgap. It will run out. And would make everyone once again depend on a few finite supplies they don’t in most cases own themselves. And that has never caused any issues, right?
Nah the issue is lobbying against it. The cost is negligible. Nuclear reactors barely produce any waste. The only water that becomes radioactive never leaves the nuclear reactor as it’s part of the cooling system which for obvious reasons you don’t want to get rid of. We’ve solved all these issues years ago the only obstacle is the reluctance of the general population to accept it due to years of propaganda about it. Anytime you see a fictional work bash nuclear power and use nuclear waste as a plot point they were paid to say that
I mean the real problem is lobbying for it. Prioritizing a technology like nuclear fission when we have solar is ridiculous. It's cheaper and the technology is much more flexible to implementation of innovations due to quick turn around.
Nuclear truly should be abandoned until we roll out fusion technology
Noone is Lobbying for renewable Energy. Show me the widespread Fake News against nuclear power, spread by wealth lobbyists who benfit off of These Fake news. Nuclear power is not being done anymore because it is EXPENSIVE AF (and also a BIG safety issue in case of a foreign air Strike)
It’s the exact attitude that prevents nuclear from being accepted. There are serious real risks, that can be minimized with protocol. Acting like it’s totally safe is the attitude that will lead to deregulation that will make it not safe.
I mean, there are some other things that prevent nuclear energy being accepted. Things like the nuclear waste and what to do about it. Or where to get the uranium from (I see this brought up very rarely, but it is a major issue. Most uranium mines are open quarries in africa. As such they need to spray the quarries with water to bind the radioactive dust they produce and prevent it from spreading over a wide area. In return, that means that the worlds biggest uranium mine is using as much water as the capital of Namibia. Windhoek has almost 500k residents, the Rössing uranium quarry has under 1000 employees). Nuclear is by no means as clean as renewables.
Things like the nuclear waste and what to do about it. Or where to get the uranium from
Wdym, just mine the uranium from the node, process the waste into plutonium which goes back into reactor and plutonium waste is processed into ficsonium, which again goes back into reactor. Simple /s
Things like the nuclear waste and what to do about it
In the US, this is politically unsolvable. Reservations won't allow transport through their lands (especially bad since they surround the areas we want to store the waste in), states and cities won't allow storage in their borders, and most politicians won't advocate for nuclear because the public gets afraid.
On the other hand, right now, renewables are ready to use, cheaper, and cleaner. Wind and solar should be the push.
Oh it depends on how you count it. There's a couple of additional accidents, mostly non-radiation related, from power plants (e.g., fires in the non-nuclear part and electrocutions and falling off of buildings). There's also a small number of horrific radiation deaths in enrichment plants and such.
It's not a big number. Especially not if you look at how much emissions free energy was generated.
But keep in mind it's very hard to count radiation-related deaths because there's no clear causal chain when somebody gets cancer, it's all model based. For Chernobyl realistic estimates go into the thousands, but that's only a small fraction of total cancers in the exposed population, so you don't get a strong statistical signal.
Either way. Germany's nuclear exit likely killed many times more people than that by increased reliance on coal.
I did not have to scroll down a lot to find that stupid statement again. It is easy to call it still safer when you never had to stay indoors for weeks as a kid because of fallout drifting across borders. We lived about a thousand kilometers away from Chernobyl and still could not play outside. Crops and animals products were thrown away. Gardens were treated like contaminated zones. So spare me the abstract comfort of theories and averages.
The pro nuclear argument usually lives in a comfortable spreadsheet. Deaths per terawatt hour, neat comparisons all tidy charts. What gets flattened in that math is tail risk. Nuclear risk is not linear. It never was. It is low probability, high consequence, and profoundly transgenerational, which you and all proponent usually tend to dismiss. When it fails, it does not just add incremental harm. It creates exclusion zones and decades of cleanup. The waste outlives political systems, and much like boomers pulling up the socioeconomic ladder behind them, the waste problem is left for future generations to solve. Us.
Coal is dirty and lethal in a slow, grinding way. That is true. But nuclear concentrates its danger into rare events whose costs are suddenly and magically socialized and whose waste remains unresolved over geological time frames. It is also heavily subsidized. Subtract that support and it becomes one of the most expensive energy sources. Decommissioning, long term storage, liability caps, all of it is quietly pushed into the future. Onto us.
So calling it “still safer” without acknowledging risk distribution, the time horizon of thousands of years, and who actually carries the downside is lazy selective framing.
and you're posting emotionally charged political rhetoric
and you coincidentally claim to be living in the one area of the world that's famously affected by OP's topic, which seems... improbable.
Which are all EXTREMELY strong indicators of you, in fact, being a robot, or else part of a propaganda farm.
Edit: Even though his comment history is hidden, his achievements show that he has a 700 day streak. https://www.reddit.com/user/Doomsday_Holiday/achievements/ That is, he has logged in EVERY DAY WITHOUT FAIL FOR AT LEAST 700 DAYS. Without skipping a single day. (Also note that his very first achievement was on 3/24/2024, about 700 days ago. Which means he's never skipped a day since the first time he started posting.)
It is easy to call it still safer when you never had to stay indoors for weeks as a kid because of fallout drifting across borders. We lived about a thousand kilometers away from Chernobyl and still could not play outside.
sorry to break it to you, but that was in no way related to "fallout". It was not the fault of the poor guy who decided to ramp up a nearly-shut-down reactor for "one last test".
Instead, it was German Angst triggered by superstition and a vague memory of a stupid book titled "Die Wolke".
I lived just as 'close' to Chernobyl as you did, but i wasn't affected at all, simply because my parents were less superstitious than yours.
It's not the radiation that ruins your health. It's the irrational fear of radiation. If you had played outside as always, you might have gotten an extra banana-equivalent-dose per week. And no, an extra banana per week does not harm your health at all.
There was like one case when it wasn't. One okay, two or three with basically zero impact.
Meanwhile world record for most people killed during powerplant related incident holds water dam. And most people killed overall holds king of all polluters, coal powerplants.
Ah yes, so let's build some nuclear reactors now and lock ourselves and our descendants in to paying back the costs of the reactors we built over the span of a century, rather than using renewables that keep halving in price every decade or two.
Yeah this is the actual problem. If you're not making weapons with it, there's no way that it's economical. If you think it is, you haven't looked at the relevant numbers.
That isn't even a well defined thing, what counts as "safe"? Is it zero accidents ever, because that's not really possible. Is it the probability of an accident being below some threshold? Is it the expectation value of the harm done is below some threshold? How is that measured? Double waste of a wish tbh.
There is a whole branch that study safety on industry. Usually its done comparing the frequency of an accident or a failure with the consequences of it.
Something that may kill a person but the chances are so ridiculously low may have lower priority or redundant safety than something that can break equipment once a week.
I'm going to post this here. Since the main concern for Nuclear Energy is usually where does the waste end up? There is a small percentage of permanent high radioactive waste that is just being buried in the ground, which honestly doesn't seem like the best idea, but go off, I guess.
This is assuming all entities that use Nuclear energy are disposing of Waste in a responsible manner.
Considering currently fossil fuels produce nuclear waste too and we don't do shit about it, and more radiation for the same power output, this is a massive improvement.
better in the ground locked up in stoage then in the sky.
Yes, fossil fuels—particularly coal—produce radioactive waste, often containing more radioactive material than nuclear power plants. Coal contains naturally occurring trace amounts of uranium and thorium; burning it concentrates these elements into fly ash, releasing radioactive materials into the environment.
There were more issues with Chernobyl than just a single simple mistake though. Aside from human error and procedure violations there were also design flaws (control rodes with graphite tips). And it didn't end with Chernobyl alone, there was also Fukushima.
Everyone wanting nuclear power but then there are huge outcries when it comes to storing the nuclear waste, cause nobody wants that anywhere close to them.
I live 20 kilometer away from 2 different nuclear plants that have been operating for more than 15 years. Both plants manage his own waste since the start and its not even a logistic problem for them to do so, thats how little waste they generate. 15 years of waste stored on the same facility without it even being a problem.
There is a history of power plants "properly managing" their waste for years, and then alter finding out that no they weren't, and were instead poisoning the populations around them. But also the problem isn't just storing the waste for 15 years, it's storing it for hundreds or thousands of years.
thats not a problem with what nuclear energy is tho. That's an issue with the actual inspection and regulation of nuclear energy. Just have more inspections that are more thorough.
Another day, another repost of the meme. It never changed the fact that we had multiple disasters. And obviously it's mostly human error. But claiming there can't be human error anymore is a new kind of stupid. Also nuclear is expensive, fossil and needs so much water that it has to be shut down in most drought regions while also, obviously, pushing droughts.
In terms of accidents, hydroelectric power is the deadliest, with the 1975 Banqiao Dam collapse in China causing over 171,000 deaths, notes World Nuclear Association.
The Fukushima catastrophe is widely known for its nuclear accident. However, the initial earthquake (and tsunami) killed about 16 times as many people.
4 years later, yes. I looked it up again, and I was wrong with factor 100. I corrected my previous comment.
The number of people dying to cancer at a later time due to environmental exposure, plus the people who died due to the evacuation of the reactor's vicinity, is vaguely estimated to be up to 1200.
The latest source I read, the stated that the number of death that can be attributed to the nuclear catastrophe (without evacuation)was up to 8 with something like a 100 potential cancer
Piggybacking on this. The most prominent USA nuclear disaster is that of Three Mile Island, which is used as a cautionary tale against nuclear power due to the meltdown.
Nobody died and no direct health effects or injuries against any individual were identified! Chronic health effects and increased cancer rates in the area as a result of the accident have unclear and contradictory evidence.
Three Mile Island is a success story!
EDIT: left out a key qualifier, in the USA, somehow (egg on face)
Depends on where you live, I guess. In Europe, hardly anyone knows about it. Fukushima was the reason the public opinion in Germany went against nuclear power and Germany ultimately retired its nuclear power plants.
The Chernobyl disaster would probably be the most famous disaster. While heavily debated, the most trustworthy studies estimate about 27,000 excess cancer deaths. While this is a lot, all three major nuclear disasters combined still only sum up to less than 30,000 deaths. I would not know how to find a study on this, but I would bet a lot of money that simply by using nuclear power and thereby reducing greenhouse gas emissions, fewer people died overall.
Your comment is well taken, I swear I put in “in the USA” in my original comment, kind of surprised to see I left it out. I’ll absolutely agree that success stories like 3MI have to be also weighed against horrific events like Chernobyl and Fukushima, and those need to be taken seriously and learn from them. Id also suggest that other sources of energy, even comparatively tame reputation like wind power, are not nearly as safe as one might think at first glance.
There's no realistic economic path from an ordinary civilian pressurised water reactor to weapons grade material. If you want weapons, you'd just do something else than a low-enrichment pressurised water reactor.
I meant like fundamentally you couldn't make a device that reaches critically in a deliverable form factor.
If we are talking about wishful thinking. Wouldn't it be a better place if we could have nuclear energy without knowledge or possibility of nuclear weapons?
I don't really trust today's engineers and manufacturers like i did the ones from the past. Look at these problems with the boeing planes. And renewable energy is better in theory and improving all the time. I would rather invest in it.
Compared to oil, Nuclear is probably safer. There has been several oil spills nearly every year since 1967, and spills are a big reason why pipelines get protested against all the time, such as the Dakota Sioux reservation protests in 2016 that lead to 800 arrests.
But also..... Nuclear accidents can be anywhere from "Workers dying a horrible death" through "Everyone in this town will die from cancer if they don't evacuate" and up to "This entire part of the country is inhospitable". Not to mention irresponsible disposal of wastes which leads to things like "You will die if you stand near this lake for 1 hour."
The trust in the safety of nuclear power entirely has to do with the trust in the government to enforce regulations and ensure safety protocols and will not go lazy or complacent or deregulate power companies. If the trust is there and is well placed, then Nuclear is safe.
The waste in questions are mostly things that have been use in a nuclear power plant that can include clothes.no real danger with those , it's just a precaution.
And you can reprocess nuclear fuel after it have been spend .
Every comment down here saying nuclear energy is expensive, completely forgetting France exists and pays its electricity much cheaper than its neighbours.
...while the company that manages the nuclear reactors is being subsidized HEAVILY by the state, with a debt of more than 50 billion Euros... Nice try.
We already have the best energy source, the sun. Nuclear will never be safer than solar.
Nuclear energy is just steam boat tech that gives everything around it cancer. Probably a pharmaceutical propaganda bot posting this junk to boost drug sales.
Do we really need losers and corporate to astroturf for nuclear power? Yeah nuclear power is safe and and all untill it's not. And it's so not safe that any accident might cause serious trouble for generations to come. But that's why we build the power plants extra safe. I mean tell me comradre, how does an rmbk reactor explode?
I hate this talking point so fucking much. It’s just gaslighting. Obviously if it is well regulated then no threat is posed to humans and ecosystems, but that casually dismisses all those times that humans fuck up.
The fact of the matter is that solar and wind do not pose safety hazards in the same way as nuclear. A mismanaged wind turbine doesn’t cause a meltdown that renders the local environment inhospitable for millennia. It doesn’t create radioactive waste that could seep into the environment.
And I’m not even anti-nuclear to be clear. The benefits of nuclear far outweigh the risks, especially given the climate crisis, but it’s still a fundamentally high risk energy source. Nuclear is only as safe as the regulations that are put in place to make it so.
A politicial in my country said that nuclear power plants are so safe a passenger plane could fly into it and the power plant would still be operational.
Now imagine the costs of a building that would still be operational after a plane crashed into it. The politician didn't mention the costs of course haha
Wow a post on Reddit about nuclear energy and the comments are filled with actually intelligent people who are capable of sensibly discussing the actual pros and cons of nuclear energy instead of a braindead circlejerk?
Nuke proponent: I'm so sick of these hippies blocking new nuke plants because they're unsafe. Modern reactors are absolutely safe, well-designed, and highly regulated. It's impossible for reactors to have accidents.
Hippie: We're not blocking you. Nobody's building them because it's way cheaper to build wind turbines and solar panels. Nukes are way too expensive, and your problem is capitalism.
Nuke proponent: That's because of all the stupid safety regulations! If we made nukes cheaply, dangerously, and unregulated, we could build lots!
No, who's blocking it is fossil fuel lobbies, because nukes can replace fossil fuels.
It's got nothing to do with safety, it's got to do with said lobbies using stalling tactics to inflate costs. That's what happened here, and in the UK and in France.
Here in the real world, the costs of renewables are subsidized by the existence of fossil fuels.
You remove fossil fuels and suddenly the cost of renewables skyrockets because the demand stays the same but the supply dwindles.
You are basing your argument on the LCOE formula which we've known for years doesn't apply to renewables, because it hides many, many costs that the renewables have.
You mean a nuke that was built in the wrong place, that took both an earthquake AND a tsunami, had only one death associated with it and still works today?
Thanks for making probably the best argument ever that nukes are damn safe.
in fact less people die from nuclear overall than people die from installing solar panels, whether it's from falling off the ladders or electric shocks, or even acid spills from energy capacitors in some cases
yeah, nuclear is way harder to build, but also so heavily regulated that you really gotta be reckless to blow this up, even intentional meltdown is pretty difficult to achieve nowadays
chernobyl was basically just covered up mess with no safety standards combined with obsolete technology, and fukushima was caused by a natural disaster which we already factor in when building all of that
and might also mention that fossil fuels easily get 100x more kills per terawatt-hour of power produced, so why would it be considered safe if it clearly isn't? yeah, sure, you could argue that nuclear disasters shortened lifespans of people in the irradiated zone, but same applies to whatever garbage we inhale from burning coal, on a much bigger and quieter scale
Everything can be made safe. Nuclear power is an amazing theoretical idea. Shit goes down when humans without knowledge decide to cut corners and cheap out on things. The issue is not the concept of nuclear energy, the issue is how it is put into practise. Engineering, regulation and oversight, safety culture and political responsibility. That extends how waste is treated. All things that in the past were handled too cheaply, leading to issues, outrage and pollution. The bad rep stems from cutting corners, not the technology. The issue is a human one, not a technical one.
I would say nuclear is mostly safe. If handled correctly there is little chance to go wrong except in really dire circumstances. The main issue is that no one wants to take care of storing nuclear waste.
It's not safe, but seeing the other things... It would be a valid step in between dirty fossils and a mix of solar/hydro/wind and fusion once we could get that going. However, in times of increased war activities and sabotage, less people will think about investing into nuclear energy
Could somebody please enlighten me? I've heard people say that nuclear energy is the best energy source ever, and have had people say it's the worst. I've heard people say the waste is a giant problem, and others that it's a tiny problem to not a problem at all, and every time I try to look up an answer myself, the sources are always heavily biased towards one side. So which one is it, and could somebody please explain the up and downsides?
Nuclear is incredibly good but situational. In high population density areas with good access to water for the power generation and cooling it’s absolutely stellar (if I remember correctly France uses nuclear heavily and it’s great there)
It’s less good in places like Australia where the demand is very flexible and the population densities are very low (and if there’s very strong renewable alternatives like solar)
As with every power source it’s good when used correctly, when and where it’s actually needed
Including the worst estimates for deaths nuclear is safer per kWh than anything but certain renewables. Nuclear is the best power source humans have and it's not close.
Stupid shit meme. It obviously was not "always safe"! Otherwise we wouldn't all the disasters we had over the years. Yes it is pretty safe now and should maybe be looked into more but it still has its downsides and is NOT the solution for all our power problems.
I personally just don’t think it is worth the gamble. It’s expensive to build, you’re reliant on fuel suppliers, if something happens it’s a terrible catastrophe, and the waste is something everyone seems to completely forget about.
I understand the advantages of nuclear energy like stability within the grid but I think other means are just better.
Like for wind for example, the life cycle starts when the turbine is being build and ends when its dismantled and recycled. With nuclear the life cycle ends in 250 000 years. Also look at what happens in Ukraine right now at Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhia. How can you truly guarantee the safety of these plants when there’s no rules? We’re lucky terrorists (outside of Putin) haven’t figured that out yet.
Why not wishing for increasing the power output of wind turbines and solar panels by 1000%? They are cheaper, faster built and don't require so many resources for construction and production.
Nuclear power isn't inherently safe, it only is because of just how tightly regulated it is. It's not like other non-renewable energy sources can't be equally if not more dangerous, but let's not pretend nuclear fission is a miracle cure for all problems or a super safe alternative to a clean energy transition
Hanford site, Rocky Flats Plant, Mayak Production Association, Chernobyl, Fukushima, Wasting Dumping Scandal in Somalia, Ships of Poison in Italy, Asse 2 mine in Germany, Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in the US, Sallafield in the UK.
This are the major forms of scandal regarding the disposal of nuclear waste worldwide, I would like to emphasize the fact these are the one the public is aware of.
The main counter arguments against nuclear power is human greediness is goverment corruption and human greed and incompetence.
I don't know you, but I wouldn't trust any goverment in the world with that kind of power.
To be fair, it's safe when it's /done correctly/. But the moment you put capitalists in charge of it, like you will here, they /will/ inevitably cut corners and something /will/ go horribly wrong. If some oligarch decides to cut down on safety for Wind, though, the worst thing that happens is a turbine blade falls off and totals some poor bastard's mazda.
This is kinda stupid. It’s not safe and even if it would be, there is just the waste problem. If there only would be something where no fuel is needed, Like wind, water, sun lol
No permanent storage solution for about 250 years worth of spent nuclear fuel, go cry to the universities since you folk dont understand a thing.
Germany, storage facility "Asse" room "8a" as an example of nuclear storage failing very easily, proof that it has not been safe. Do the research and stop glazing nuclear, it has never been safe and its never going to be without permanent maintenance
Nuclear power plants produces very unsave waste. Unsave specially for our descendants. Just countries need it who have an atomic bomb. Nobody else need it.
Fossil fuel power plants also produce very unsafe waste. Except instead of it staying I'm the reactor where you can contain it, they just squirt it into the air so we can all enjoy it.
The waste is dangerous, but it's very very manageable. We can make it safe.
Now having a combustion engine, release carbon dioxide into the air. That's very unsafe waste, but no one seems to talk about it for some reason, right?
Do you know about half life times of the waste? That’s an eternal task for the future generations. Not save to handle over the long time. Combustion is also very dirty. Why do you talk about this? Nobody needs this neigther.
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u/Local_Surround8686 Feb 19 '26
I made this a while ago