this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2026
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Well yeah, it's a service. Expecting profit from necessary services is stupid and counter-productive but it makes a few people rich so of course it happens then you get memes like this.
Efficient use of resources still matters in a service-driven model.
The service in this case is to provide electricity - if other alternatives can provide the same system of electricity while using less resources in the process, then it is clearly preferable.
Externalized costs are a thing though. For instance, a coal plant spewing smoke (and radiation) costs everyone else money. A nuclear plant OTOH is usually responsible for dealing with all of its own shit. So it's not always an apples to apples comparison to consider just the profitability of a project.
Absolutely. I don't know that anyone is arguing for coal, except for Trump, but he's also completely deranged.
Wind and solar have very little externalities, however. I'd even call their externalities trivial.
Water vapor from the cooling tower is also a greenhouse gas but all heat exchange power plants at such scale emit it, and it condenses quickly (and increases albedo if the cloud is visible). Plus the nuclear waste, if not economical to recycle, may become its own long-term problem too. So the overall externalities of a nuclear power plant are small (it's the least deadly one!) but not zero.
It sure isn't apples to apples, but it's also not like nuclear plants actually dealt with their waste
You do realize that they made nuclear recycling illegal in the USA right?
Which is ironic because nuclear waste is 97% pure fuel and the remaining 3% has other uses in medicine or have half-lives measured in minutes/hours or are stable (like gold)
I don't know what this has to do with my post at all to be honest
It's relevant because the less-resource-efficient oil industry has lobbied to make nuclear power artificially inefficient so that their industry can continue to exist.
I don't think anyone is arguing for the oil industry.
Even if nuclear power plant byproducts were re-used at 100%, this would still decidedly not make nuclear energy more resource efficient than solar and wind.
Solar and wind are nuclear powered. It is just very inefficiently being collected from the massive inefficient fusion reactor in the sky.
Maybe true only at small scale.
Spending excessively to provide a service that could have been supplied cheaper is not good a sign of good policy.
The things are very much run as private companies under the pretense of being profitable. The whole purpose of nukes (other than providing weapons grade material) is shoveling public money into private pockets.
Sounds like a political science and economics problem, don't know why we needed to harass physics nerds about it
That does not sound universal, that sounds like an artifact of how things are done in your country.
Well you could just like, put all that tax money into decentralized renewable energy sources...that would also be profitable.
While not causing waste that cant be touched for the next million years.
While also lessening your dependence on nuclear fuel imports from political less than optimal nations or sources where the mining of it causes radio active dust to contaminate the population (Russia/USA and Australia).
Yes, but i would argue that when you mine neodymium or gallium once you then can recycle them for ever, while the same cant be said for uranium, in the long term that does make a big difference.
Yeah you can reprocess nuclear fuel, but latest information i have on that is that its nowhere close making sense cost wise and mostly theoretical, i may be wrong on that tho.
When i yeet a solar cell or electric motor into a furnace its possible to refine basically everything, sure here and there a motor in a hair dryer will hit the landfill, but for industrial Motors/Generators is very very low.
Million year really , so you talk about the EXTREMELY small portion of nuclear waste ? Also why not both , why not nuclear AND solar / wind / hydro electricity? Because all those renewable energy sources are either limited (hydro electricity) or intermittent (solar / wind) And I know you dont care but Yes we can bury nuclear waste if we do it properly, there already were natural nuclear reactor on earth way before humanity and it didnt kill everything where they were.
Uhm, a river flowing thru low grade non enriched uranium deposit isnt a reactor in the way we build em today, like not even close.
"it's not exactly the same, so the waste and radiation it produced naturally is irrelevant to this ~~cherry picked~~ discussion"
But that would enrich the oligarchy slightly more slowly! Won't anybody think of the poor oligarchs?
This has got to be the single silliest take I have seen so far on this website, like holy shit this is pants-on-head silly
No, you couldn't. You need base load. Countries like Denmark and Germany freeload on the base load of France, Sweden and Finland. And the moronic EU laws that currently enable this will eventually change to charge them for that.
Baseload has always been bullshit, see e.g. https://www.ceem.unsw.edu.au/sites/default/files/migration_files/ceem/publication-documents/MarkBaseloadFallacyANZSEE.pdf
It's even more irrelevant now that battery storage can level out multi-day variability.
Great. Fucking build it then. Go ahead and build your non-hydro non-nuclear baseload, and I'll shut the fuck up. Until then, I'll call you out every time you say that nuclear and hydro is too expensive.
I'm in Australia, it's already happening.. https://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/green-energy-is-shielding-australia-from-a-global-power-price-shock-20260608-p604sc.html
The article is paywalled, but just from the first snippet I don't see how it's relevant. If you're replacing oil or coal based power generation with wind, then that's awesome. But my assertion is that you do actually need to supplement that with something that can be tuned on the fly to keep a stable frequency in the grid. So far the experimental designs to do so with massive "batteries" have not looked very promising to me.
A rule of thumb is that you need a minimum of 20% of your grid to be tunable. That's a hard minimum.
We're literally about to turn on snowy hydro 2.0 for base load AND storage
Tell me, how are the french nuclear plants dealt with the last heat wave?
You're deflecting because you don't have a real argument to come up with. It's true that global warming is having a negative impact on nuclear power in France, Switzerland and other places, but it doesn't change the fact that you need some way to keep a stable voltage and frequency over your grid.
I whole heartedly agree. And to anyone who complains about dunkelflaute, if we wouldn't immediately burn our biogas, and instead stored it where we currently store our fossil gas, we would have a way more comfortable safety margin. Also a stronger European powergrid would be sufficient for almost all usual cases throughout the year.
Did I miss something in the edited post, or are you just violating rule 1 out of spite?
Stop projecting lol
In Canada nuclear power generation is more about creating jobs by rebuilding 50 year old reactors than it is about producing cheap energy.
those people could also build and maintain windmills tho
And where there’s no wind?
Not many places where there's no wind AND no solar within a reasonable distance of a large population..
Probably the same solution they used to make cars work without power cords.