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First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled (arstechnica.com)

submitted 11 months ago by otter@lemmy.ca to c/climate

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NuScale and its primary partner give up on its first installation.

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[–] cannibalia 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Thoughts on nuclear? Sounds good to me but I'm so somewhat ignorant.

[–] venoft@lemmy.world 11 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Cleanest energy generation around. It produces a handful of waste per year (the whole US generates around half a Olympic pool per year), which could be further reduced by using some of that waste too in newer generation plants, like in European countries.

The traditional nuclear plant has a design that (on purpose perhaps) produces plutonium, which the government like as they can build nukes with it.

And of course there have been accidents, but mostly due to incompetence or negligence. And don't forget coal plants produce a huge amount of nuclear radiation too and they just expel it from their chimneys.

https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-nuclear-fuel

https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-essentials/what-is-nuclear-waste-and-what-do-we-do-with-it.aspx

The worst part of renewable energies now is the waste. Wind power blades are not recyclable and literally just get buried in big fields (a problem for the next generation I guess..) and solar panels are "not commerically interesting" to recycle, so around 90% of them too just get dumped.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turbine-blades-can-t-be-recycled-so-they-re-piling-up-in-landfills

https://e360.yale.edu/features/solar-energy-panels-recycling

[–] MrMakabar 3 points 11 months ago

To put down the bad site of things:

cost nuclear is significantly more expensive then renewables. For the US and this project is was 30 times more per MW.
it takes about a decade to built a single plant, with cost overruns being common
single plants are so expensive that they can only be built with government support
total certralization of production, so basicly only big companies and governments
nuclear is baseload althou the production can be varied it is hard to turn off a plant quickly and turn it back on again
very real dangour of terrorist attacks
huge failure points in the grid, if you have a problem. Since they produce as much as they do, it causes huge problems, if they do not work properly for any sort of reason and there are a lot of them.

Important to mention the downsides as well, so I thought I help out a bit.