this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2026
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The memes of the climate
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Solar and nuclear power could have solved the energy problem if we invested in it more.
Solar, definitely.
Nuclear is just the coal problem with extra megawatts
Where you storing all that nuclear waste? Lets hope climare collapse doesnt cause a meltdown like in Fukushima. Mayflies almost caused a meltdown in the US, nuclear is not renewable or responsible long term
But nuclear is here right now. Its cleaner than fossil fuels. There are near 440 nuclear plants working perfectly right now. Fukushima meltdown was caused by a tsunami hitting after earthquake, not because climate change. 96% of nuclearwaste is recyclable and the process to recycle waste is becoming cheaper and more efficient to do (there are only few places that do so, because the process is very similiar to enriching uranium and for obvious reasons some countries dont want other countries doing that). Also there are longterm storage facilities made 500m underground in areas where are little to none tectonic movement so we have currently surplus of save storage space for the waste.
What is not responsible, is to opposide one of the best and most stable current method to generate power. At the moment we need first get rid of the current and urgent problems with coal and fossil fuels that do things like:
We cant wait for renevables to catch up to our power needs. We need to cut the worst things now and nuclear power is the best alternative we have right now.
Take a look at pretty much any study calculating the probability of major nuclear accidents (aka "beyond-design-basis event").
The German TÜV performed such a calculation - funded by the government - in 1980 which was then used to argue FOR nuclear safety and expand Germany's nuclear reactors (as the oil crisis a couple years prior was reason to diversify away from oil). The study did not include human error/negligence or sabotage but all possible weather events (flooding, earthquake, lightning strikes into electric equipment), parts failing and an airplane strike.
The result: A reactor core meltdown occurs - in Germany - once every 10,000 years. Extrapolating this to 400 reactors worldwide - not sure how their safety compares to 1980's Germany - would result in one meltdown every 25 years.
Coincidentally Chornobyl and Fukushima just so happened to be 25 years apart. Substiture Chornobyl with Long Island if you want to exclude incompetent Soviet safety engineers.
The study:
https://www.grs.de/de/aktuelles/publikationen/deutsche-risikostudie-kernkraftwerke-eine-untersuchung-zu-dem-durch
Besides: Any money invested into nuclear today is money not invested into solar, wind turbines or battery storage. Why waste money on nuclear reactors that will start operating by 2040 when you can generate hundreds of TWh of electricity with the same money spent on renewables beforehand?
Wind and solar are great when there is wind and sun, but even with battery storage to even them out, there is always a flux. For example where i live in the last 30 there was 72 hour period when wind power worked only 1% of the max capacity and here is 3 month period when sun is over the horizon less than a hour per day and that time is when the energy consumption is on its highest.
Also climate change is bringing more high wind days when running wind turbines is impossible.
If we want to talk about natural disasters wind and solar power can be influenced by volcano eruptions happening thousands of kilometers away.
At the moment even hydropower is being effected by weather as there has not been enough rain to fill the reserves at the pace energy is needed.
Nuclear energy works no matter the weather and upping or lowering its production is relatively fast, making it really easy to adjust the output to the needed levels. Also the fact that from 100 spend uranium rods you can make 96 new ones
Im not against solar or wind. Im against putting all the eggs in to one basked and building a infrastructure that is dependant on things beyond human control.
I assume you mean three mile island reactor? Chernobyl was soviet fuckup, three mile island meltdown wrote a lot of new safety regulations and fukushima was natural disaster. Every one of these incidents has been studied and every one of them has made lot of new mechanism to avoid similiar accidents to happen in the future.
Are you in a Scandinavian country by any chance?
Because their entire economy is predicated on fossil fuels. That's a much bigger problem than reliable generation.
No??? Nuclear is by far the slowest to moderate. So slow, energy prices used to be significantly lower at night in Germany due to the nuclear power plants not being able to adjust to the lowered demand.
It is fairly obvious in the future energy consumption will adjust to the production, instead of vice versa like it is right now. I'm talking decades, the time to build maybe 1.5 - 2 sets of new nuclear reactors. That way you need at most hours of grid storage instead of days.
And about the scary "sun and wind is subject to variations" part - of course it is. Which is why it's best to also invest into significantly expand the European power grid to adjust. When there's a power drought somewhere it is very likely somewhere else produces more than enough energy to export. As an added benefit, this makes the grid much more resilient.
Centralized power generation is not a sensible thing to invest into in today's age anyway. Putin would merely have to send a double digit number of drones/rockets to cause blackouts. Compare that to a fully decentralized energy grid where for instance every house has solar panels and battery storage.
Also, not a single nuclear accident is preventable. Why was the Fukushima reactor not designed to handle its event? Because it's cheaper. Why did Chornobyl explode? Because it was a cheap reactor type. Three Mile Island (to be fair, that's pretty long)? Because again design failures due to cost cutting. And cost cutting refers to being able to humanly construct a nuclear reactor - if every scenario were considered no plant could be built. It's like trying to design a plane that will never ever crash - impossible.
Modern plants can change their power output 3-5% of their total capacity per minute, but they dont often do drastic adjustments like, because its more efficient to run them on the designed power output and it is something that is fully solvable with battery banks, because the output is steady. Unlike with solar and wind.
One of the Germanys stupidest decitions latelly was to shut down their nuclear plants. It made them use 7% more fossil fuels, it made them dependent on Russian natural gas and some calculations say they could have been producing 70% less of carbon emissions between 2002-2022 if kept running on nuclear.
The exact moment the pipe dream if decentralized energy grid gets any where near working condition ill change my mind. Until then nuclear is the best option.
Like i said. Im not against solar or wind. Im against coal and fossil fuels and we cant get rid of them quick enough if we are naive and wait for solar and wind to grow enough to replace those. Lets get rid of the real pollutors first and then start to replace nuclear with something else.
Dont start to fix the broken window before the fire on the roof is under control.
shlarblegarble schnornobyl sure thing bud
ai writing this shit for you? long fucking island? NY?
you mean 3 mile island, PA.
it's hard to take anything you write seriously when you don't understand basic geography.
I don't even disagree with you, mostly, we'd be better off going all in on renewable and storage, but some heavy industries - concrete production, smelting, heavy industrial processes, chemical manufacturing - all require a baseload that renewables struggle to provide while providing residential and business coverage. Having dedicated renewable generation solely for those loads might work with plentiful storage, but you'd have to over-buildout your generating network to handle both.
That said, I'd rather just continue with the nuclear we have - the enormous investments have been made already, keeping them running - and avoid SMRs and other silly shit. Nuclear + renewables would completely wipe obviate coal/oil.
Nuclear is the most expensive energy solution, the hardest to maintain and the worst possible outcome for human error. Solar panels can be easily installed and will generate some power most days of the year. Wind farms produce more energy altogether but run less often. Use both with batteries and you dont care if its sunny or not. Also, power grid? Energy is made somewhere and sent elsewhere. You can do this by putting solar where, on average, it is very sunny such as a desert and wind where it us windy, such as near the beach. Then you run power cables to your cities. The whole project would costs as much as like two nuclear facilities. Oh and nuclear takes like decades to build. You have to make Fukushima/Chernobyl before you can accidentally melt it down. That takes at least 5-10 years of investment. Or you could put the same money into solar and get energy within months...
Firstly. Desert is horrible place for solar panels. High heat makes them work poorly and sand/dust is problematic for the maintanence and cleaning them requires water, that is scarce in the desert.
Coast and offshore are good places for wind farms (alltough we dont fully know the offshore farms effect on the ecosystem and offshore is difficult to build and maintain.) But similary to most things coast is going to have its own set of problems with too high wind speeds and the likely hood of rising sea level.
That all aside im not saying we need to start building hundreds of reactors. Just dont be morons and start to lobby against them untill we have capasity to get rid of the coal, gas and oil plants that are the real and pressing problems right now.
I have no doubt that in the future with combinations of hydro, wind, solar and even to some small capasity thermal power combined with battery tech going foward we can build reliable and fully renewally powered energy grid, but in the mean time we need to lean towards nuclear power.
Moronic desitions like Germany shutting down their nuclear plants, just to notice that they did not have the capacity to replace the energy with green alternatives and then opened plants using fossil fuels to keep up with the demand were naive, stupid and played right in to foreign nations hands.
Fundamental misunderstanding of how nuclear waste is handled