A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
Nuclear energy is not economic. Only military and bribery purposes by lying it is economic. Incumbent energy advocates for nuclear competition because completion can be dragged out to 15+ years, and its energy will forever be undercuttable on price.
The US has absurd 100% tariffs on energy, but even with those, Chinese solar imports are cheapest energy option in the US.
Start building the next nuclear plant now and by the time it's finished, solar will be king and most economical and safest with no worries about what might happen
The recent surge in oil and gas prices has indeed sparked a "told-you-so" moment for nuclear energy advocates. As of March 2026, geopolitical instability in the Middle East—specifically involving the closure of the Strait of Hormuz—has driven Brent crude to peaks near $120 per barrel, exposing the inherent volatility of fossil fuel dependence.
How they actually actually do.
Mining for the rare earth elements used in solar panels is pretty ugly, too. But once they’re taken out they can be reused, it’s not like coal or oil where you use it once and it’s gone forever.
That's why the actual solution is degrowth, not a technology of any kind. Nuclear is better than coal, renewables are better than nuclear, but none are good.
Uranium and rare earth elements mining are cause of massive biodiversity reductions, political destabilisations, wars, and they have to be transformed, transported and disposed (and we use a lot of fossil energies for that). So no it's not green, it's just less brown (and the direct effect are mostly sensible in third world countries, so nobody cares in the first world).
Moreover, nuclear and renewables never caused a reduction of coal in a global perspective. They just added themselves to the mix.
We should ban petrol except for ambulances and fire engines
Ambulances and fire engines are probably an example of a top choices to convert to ev. They don’t drive far at all and they are parked at a central location most of the time.
Also puts incentives to install solar panels at hospitals and fire stations.
We should be banning, or more accurately, phasing out combustion engines for all vehicles including government and emergency vehicles. If anything should be EVs these should be it. Also consider that American fire trucks are massively oversized compared to ones in the rest of the world. They don't need to be that big, and thus more compact European-style ones could easily be replaced with electric equivalents.
Combustion engines will likely have a place for a long time. Large equipment just doesn't do well on battery power. They can't get the required runtime. Also, in places where they are used, electrical power is often limited.
Hydrocarbons are an excellent way of storing energy. We will also need to overproduce renewables, to keep grids stable. Synthetic hydrocarbons could be a good solution to both issues. Currently, they are nowhere close to competing with fossil fuels, but that will change in time.
A lot of progress has also been made in hybrid/organic solar panels in recent years. The things state of the art stuff can do is frankly nuts.
(Me reading this while watching Beyond 2000, an 80's show describing state-of-the-art tech (of its time), having speculations of solar energy tech)
You can make a solar panel out of recycled materials or without destroying the planet
Last week, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission just approved a new construction of a reactor for the first time in 10 years, to the Bill Gates backed Terra Power. Cool, except it's projected to cost $4 billion and the government is expected to cover half the cost, to build a reactor with 345 MW of capacity.
In contrast, solar panels cost about $1 million per MW, so an equivalent amount of peak capacity from solar would cost about $345 million, or about 1/12 the price. Solar won't run all day, but the nuclear plants will also continue to cost money to run after construction is complete.
Looking at the different LCOE estimates of each type of power generation shows that advanced nuclear is around $80/MWhr and solar+battery for all day demand tracking is about $53/MWhr.
Basically nuclear is only economically viable with government support at this point, and we should be asking whether we'd rather have the government support towards other forms of energy.
Yeah, unfortunately, nuclear power should have been heavily invested in about... 50 years ago. The "The best time was yesterday, the second-best time is now" line doesn't apply with advancements in other energy sources and the sheer time it takes to build and get a nuclear plant operational. The best time was yesterday - now is perhaps the worst time.
Still, it is always good to push back on anti-nuclear sentiment. Every nuclear plant kept running is a massive amount of fossil fuels removed from power generation. I remember when Merkel closed a ton of nuclear plants in Germany for dogshit PR reasons, handing power back to fossil fuel suppliers.
Also there's a specific type of reactor that is optimal because it allows for more easily recycling the spent fuel to use it again, and unfortunately these have not been built as much as the other type of reactor.
It's because fuel is such an insignificant percentage of the overall cost of building, operating, and maintaining nuclear power. Increasing the complexity of the reactor in order to make the fuel use more efficient is basically a nonstarter, economically.
Also how long until a Trump (or future) administration cuts those pesky nuclear regulations.
Humans are the ultimate risk with nuclear an humans fucking suck.
Frankly, this is why I'm still antinuclear; everyone is always, "It's so easy to store!" but, like, that's a reliance in a world that loves cutting corners (usually because of corporate pressure…).
I'd rather invest in the energy source that doesn't have devastating consequences if we don't do it right or someone decides to drill into it despite all the warnings we put up.
Im pretty sure i read that already happened
The 4b are The estimations for now. As far as i know, every single new nuclear plant that we tried to built in the last years overshot its budget by quite a significant amount.
Oh, I agree.
I was a big, big nuclear proponent 20 years ago. But seeing how Vogtle and VC Summer played out, and how that "cheaper" and more "scalable" AP1000 design put Westinghouse into bankruptcy, basically turned me off from the economics of nuclear power.
Oh, and because of how utility generation is paid for, ratepayers in Georgia will be paying for the Vogtle construction and cost overruns in their electric bills for the next 75 years, as the nuclear plant is shielded from competition by price regulators (state Public Utilities Commissions and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission), so even if newer and better technology comes online, customers in 2080 will still be paying for 2020 technology.
The technology is still neat but I don't believe there's an economic future for civilian nuclear power generation. Not anymore.
What is the bottom bar on that graph? And how it contributes to the overall cost?
Which graph? I linked to a PDF with a ton of graphs.
The one you're quoting under the link
Are you talking about battery storage itself being about $126/MWhr? Yeah, that incorporated into the solar+battery LCOE, because solar itself is $31, battery is $126, and the weighted average of how much energy is expected to come directly out of the solar panels onto the grid (at $31) and how much is expected to be stored for later ($31 plus $126) averages out to $53, presumably because most demand matches the daytime solar curve and doesn't need to be stored for later.
Do we really want to flood the world with crocodiles, tho? The dinosaurs had their time.
Florida would be the first to fall.
~so~ ~yes~
Florida man would like to beg your finest pardon.
.... Buuuut he's busy howling at the moon.
The time of archosaurs, however, is now.
I thought they peaked during the Triassic.
Does “how they actually do” include whitewashing the energy industry with Fox News?
Look all I’m saying is we shouldn’t mix big lizards and nuclear power. Trust me bro, there’s a documentary.
"FOR THE LAST TIME KEVIN, THE COOLING TOWERS ARE RELEASING STEAM. THEY ARE NOT 'BURNING' URANIUM"
I guess that's a positive spin on heat waste, I'm sure there are a lot of negative consequences from hot waste water going into streams...
Not like nuclear is the only thing that does this though, this is a problem with data centers too.
Nuclear is the lesser evil. But I think we should be clear that nuclear can Have a catastrophic effect on the environment if manged incorrectly. Like render entire swaths of earth inhabitable. Like beyond high temperature. Places that mean immediate silent death
But properly managed nuclear is like the greatest thing to ever happen to humanity.
But I will say in light of recent... Events, my faith that humanity could properly manage our waste if nuclear were to become more prolific has wained dramatically.
I mean, we COULD manage it properly, but we also NEED to slowly chip away at that safety budget each quarter to please shareholders.
I mean, last quarter you did it on 5% less than the previous quarter, surely you can do it on 5% less again?
I have 3 issues with nuclear power plants.
And yet, people will tell me how nuclear is the way to go. They ignore all these reasons, while insisting that nuclear plants are safe.
This feels like when people tell you that we need to help the poor but they get mad when our taxes go up, and most of us don't do shit for them on their own. It is so cheap to speak.
Hey! That's my town.
For anyone curious, We have a nuclear plant that uses cooling canals in the coastline instead of cooling towers, here's what they look like.
The temperature change and marshy environment in Florida creates the perfect condition for Crocs (Not gators, those live inland in the everglades)
I have solar panels and my backup power company runs three hydroelectric dams in the area, which have replaced the nuclear power station.
How much do they pay you to spout bullshit?
Just because Coal is waaayyyy worse, it doesn't mean that nuclear scores are a joke to deal with.
But sure, Coal is WAAAAAAAAY WORSE.
Nuclear is the lesser evil. Even my former boss who is an environmental scientist agree we should still maintain nuclear power plants, but only as stop gap before renewable energy becomes more ubiquitous.
https://pubpeer.com/publications/AEA87585FB0365719098E2C0D06B31
Nature =/= Nature Communications
Excellent breakdown of flaws, this one is the most damning to me:
Cancer sites are not considered. Exposure to radionuclide pollution from Uranium fission products is known to be associated with specific tumors (thyroid cancer, lung cancer, leukemia) due to the chemical nature of the products of its decay chain (radioactive isotopes of Iodine, Radon, Cesium). Stratifying by tumor site would have provided evidence to support the assumption that tumors are caused by radiation exposure.
Who cares if you find more bladder cancer if this radiation isn’t associated with bladder tumors? This makes the study absolutely stink of a conclusion looking for evidence, especially in combination with the failure to use the actual radiation data readily available from nuclear sites.
That's what PubPeer is best for. :) Highly recommend grabbing the browser extensions, it helps contextualise a lot and authors do respond.
Thanks for making me aware of it, I dunno how active the humanities side of it is but I’m definitely going to be checking my sources on it when I’m doing class work 👍
A little banner will pop up on wikipedia and journals if the article itself has comments or its' cited ones do. It's relatively unintrusive. It's less active on humanities journals, but still around. :)
