this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
248 points (97.0% liked)

World News

38972 readers
1770 users here now

A community for discussing events around the World

Rules:

Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.


Lemmy World Partners

News [email protected]

Politics [email protected]

World Politics [email protected]


Recommendations

For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (5 children)

For all of the base-load talk, this is the real reason people are pushing nuclear.

The projects always go over budget. They always go way over time, too. Both of these things are good for the banks who loan out the billions to build new plants. And they know that if the company goes bankrupt the government will subsidize it.

Nuclear is just not economical enough to be part of a sustainable energy system.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

During the time when Sweden built the current nuclear reactors, some where built in just a few years. Sweden had experienced people back then that knew how to build them. We don't have that anymore. Pretty much no one has.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

We also had less examples of issues we need to be prepared for.

One thing people always get wrong is that they assume Fukushima wasn't build to withstand tsunamis and how stupid that supposedly was. But it was built to withstand tsunamis. Up to 9 meters of height, which was 50% more than the largest one they had on record. And it's not like they had other projects to look for to figure out that a 50% margin of safety was too little for this. Turns out, it was. So now, you want to build at least 100% margin of error in tsunami areas, something you couldn't have known before.

And that's just one example from one rather specific type of engineering during a construction process that isn't even specific to nuclear power. And as accidents happen (see for example Admiral Cloudberg's excellent air crash investigation series!) we figure out more and more things we need to engineer against to prevent this in the future. As a result, what we build nowadays is orders of magnitude safer than what we did in the past. But it also means that building it has become a huge obstacle, if for no other reason than the sheer number of things you need to be aware of, abide by and track during construction and planning.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fukushima was not a failure of engineering or proper safety measures with construction. It failed because they were old plants that hadn't been maintained properly and were in disrepair.

So no, the margin of safety was not too little. The "lesson" learned from the Fukushima Daichi reactor flooding was about proper maintenance and funding.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

That's the fundamental problem with nuclear energy. Where there are corners, they will be cut.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

Nuclear is just not economical enough to be part of a sustainable energy system.

It's chicken and egg. We have no experience building nuclear on budget because nuclear is too expensive.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Yeah well.. Nuclear is too expensive and now I heard another rethoric on how renewables are not making enough profit to be worth it for the big companies. We’re going in circles before these people admit that coal and gas won’t be replaced by anything.