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Yeah not a hot take for anyone who’s well informed
Enthusiast
Yes nuclear is a nice base load, should replace oil&gas. I like the distributed aspect of solar though, like anyone with $ and space can install and the engineering isn’t as complex. Nuclear projects are massive and take time, but typically worth it when ready.
Enthusiast
With respect to disposal, if you look at the nuclear plants in Ontario for example, they haven’t even had to store outside of the plants yet and plenty of room left inside the plants still. Ontario Power Generation is planning and proposing for future storage locations, but have a pretty solid method of keeping the nuclear waste sealed. Of course, if there’s an accident then there’s an issue.
Rising Star
Give or take a nuclear meltdown every decade and tons of nuclear waste that occasionally leaks into the water supply
It’s a cost thing mostly. Renewables are increasingly cheaper at scale depending on your geo and costs are declining - nuclear will not likely decline in cost
Pro
Yes it’s the best option. Even the nuclear waste their is a company who can put a mini reactor on top of the waste and reuse it. The biggest cost and issue is security. But yes nuclear is right but even better is pumped storage from renewable and clean perspective. Lots of other options beyond wind and solar but none with the marketing and subsidy power
Rising Star
Many of the issues with nuclear (cost, waste, etc) are political problems, not engineering/design problems. Two of my cousins are nuclear plant engineers, one private sector and the other at DOE, and the sheer amount of superfluous red tape involved with anything involving a reactor is absolutely insane. Waste could either be reprocessed or, hell, Yucca Mountain could actually be used, but we've been twiddling our thumbs on those for decades.
Gen IV reactors in general, and SMRs in particular, show real promise for improving the efficiency, lowering the cost, and moving towards a distributed energy supply, but red tape is making the progress with them a ridiculously slow process.
On top of all that, based on the headlines I've seen in the past couple of months, admittedly without having read the actual literature beyond the headline, there appear to have *finally* been some breakthroughs with nuclear fusion, which could open the door to some revolutionary nuke design in the coming decades provided those headlines aren't wildly overstating the actual state of nuclear research.
I'm 100% on the nuclear bandwagon and think it's hands down the best baseline energy source provided the political issues can be resolved.
Not a hot take at all, and the best part, we already have the technology.
That said, would you want to live next to one?
Actually it’s a lot more complicated than that. Most energy experts I know argue for a mix
Send the waste into the sun.
Chief
Nuclear better than all alternate forms. Yes, agreed, the disposal is most certainly an issue, but I believe it to be more efficient and produce less waste than its alternatives.
Chief
I’m pro a mix of both. The anti-nuclear lobby really shot us in the foot for climate action, but nuclear has a few challenges:
1) Scale. It’s incredibly expensive and time-consuming to build new reactors, and you have to shovel money into them for decades until they’re online. Solar/wind is ready in months
2) Security. It’s fissile material and inherently gotta be tightly controlled. Nuclear proliferation and risk of dirty bombs is not something to understate.
I think containment of waste and reactor stability is fine and easily doable. As long as you use Western designs with controlled feedback loops and not Soviet RBMKs, you’re good. Just don’t build them in flood or fault zones.
Rolls Royce is building mini nuclear reactors now, very cool https://www.bbc.com/news/business-59212983
The only issue is what are you going to do with all the nuclear waste produced which takes centuries to break down
This video was very informative: https://youtu.be/N-yALPEpV4w
TLDR, the waste takes a long long time to breakdown but it takes up significantly less space. If we can have large landfills and propose to use millions of acres for solar, this seems more reasonable in comparison