this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2025
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It takes time to come to the realization that a lot of what we do is inefficient because that's just what people are used to doing. Some towns survive solely due to coal mining, and they see it as an existential threat if it were shut down. Nuclear power also takes very knowledgeable individuals, years of planning, and many resources to get started. Coal is cheap, dirty, and primitive.
and makes steel.
Use hydrogen for that (using coal creates 1.5 tons CO² per ton steel). Green steel needs no phosphor and sulfur too, making it stronger.
Hydrogen isn't cheap, though.
Gets cheaper though.
It is if you have a nuclear power plant
Ah yes, the famously cheap nuclear power plant.
How expensive is it per MWh compared with coal if you account for removing the CO2 from the atmosphere?
Most countries don't and won't do that, though. Coal is only expensive when a society agrees to stop externalizing the costs, and that only works if either most major countries are doing it or when they severely restrict trade with countries that keep externalizing the costs.
and that is unfortunately game theory problem without working solution, which is why we are fucked :(
Hooman make fire, fire make warm, fire make food, fire good, huk!
Eh...a lot of what we do is inefficient because that makes the most money for people who already have too much money.
Nuclear was kneecapped by the fossil fuel industry. They're still fighting against renewables.
We're going to destroy the planet so that the rich get richer.
Don't forget pride and an extreme disrespect for any new idea.
Nuclear also isn‘t even a good energy source. Way too expensive and the waste is a problem for millenia. Renewables + hydrogen/battery/mechanical energy conservation is simply superior. Fusion would be cool too
Nuclear is a great energy source. My state (Illinois) generates over half of all its energy from nuclear. France is a great example of a country that maximizes the potential of nuclear energy. The waste is not a problem if it's stored properly. The much bigger problem are carbon/methane emissions which are fucking our climate right now. Also, nuclear waste can be reprocessed to make it less volatile and radiotoxic, but that requires an advanced application of technology.
Batteries and solar absolutely yes, we need to be scaling up battery technology as fast as possible, particularly sodium-ion batteries for static energy storage from solar power. The biggest problems with wind/solar is the actual storage of the energy. No wind? No power. No sun? No power. That's why you need batteries, and battery technology has only gotten good enough in the past couple years.
Scaling up hydrogen is very difficult, it's extremely volatile, and can realistically only be used in large scale power plants because transporting hydrogen is extremely expensive. Fusion could be good, but it's still being worked on, and who knows how long it'll really take for us to have a practical implementation.
Yes battery + solar seem to have gotten good enough in recent years. So much so that it seems they are more cost effective than nuclear for newly build systems. Nuclear even seems to be the most expensive one. Link
We have an increasing number of windmills here. The wind never drops below 15mph (there are a few airfields taking advantage of that) so like, the one time I remember the wind stopping there was a tornado 30 miles away. Ages ago.
France only pushed for nuclear, because they need an excuse for the costs of their nukes and nuclear submarines. The disadvantages of high cost and nuclear waste remain.
For millennia, which we can't do yet.
Which needs energy.
France's 80 years of nuclear waste takes about the space of an Olympic swimming pool and half.
In a millena, it'll be 150 swimming pools, and that's assuming we haven't found a way to repair/reuse/recycle it in 1000 years. Or not decided to just yeet it on the nearest inhospitable planet via railcannon or something.
Nuclear waste is a non issue.
If it's such a non issue, how come we still don't have a single long term storage facility for spent nuclear fuel in the world? After more than 70 years of nuclear energy production.
"If it's not an issue, how come we haven't built a thing to solve it"
Yeah, that must be the reason why the United States pay half a billion dollars of tax payer money each year to the utility companys to compensate their failure in finding a suitable storage location.
In general, one should not look at what happens in the USA and use it as a basis of reality for the rest of the world.
Weird ass country full of whackjobs who dedicate their entire lives into finding the worst possible solutions to problems nobody else but them have created for themselves.
Hey! I also need to lose weight
We do, it's called really big hole
The money hole?
Which is still not operational, just like the dozens of other potential storages, we started building just to find out last minute that they are not suitable. Or even better, those we started using just to find out they were not suitable to begin with later. I'm curious to read how many billions it will cost to retreive the waste from Onkalo in 30 years when we've learnt that it's also not safe for the next million years.
"not operational" as in "construction is not complete", sure, but they were able to start testing at that facility in 2024, and it will be complete and ready for full operational use in 2026. Just because other storage facilities didn't work out in the past doesn't mean new ones are doomed as well. This project has been in development for a few decades now, and they're learning from all those previous mistakes.
Edit: where in the Yucca Mountain article does it say it's "not a suitable site", as you imply? I'm reading the exact opposite in multiple places, and it seems like the halt of operations/construction there was due to political pressure and local sentiment, not because of any safety risks.
Did you even read my comment? There already are ways to efficiently store electricity generated by solar and wind turbines. These methods use conservation of movement, gravity or hydrogen made through electrolysis to flatten out the fluctuations in sun and wind availability. That and nuclear fusion is the future, coal AND nuclear are outdated and we should get away from them as quickly as possible. No new nuclear power plants and no coal mining anymore.
Modern reactors can run on the spent fuel of older generation reactors. The waste issue isn't as big of a deal as it was a few decades ago.
They're expensive to build because we don't build enough of them.