this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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With climate change looming, it seems so completely backwards to go back to using it again.

Is it coal miners pushing to keep their jobs? Fear of nuclear power? Is purely politically motivated, or are there genuinely people who believe coal is clean?


Edit, I will admit I was ignorant to the usage of coal nowadays.

Now I'm more depressed than when I posted this

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Obligatory: we didn't stop.

There's also good reasons to have a fistful of generation plants with coal or natural gas.

To put it simply, nuclear is clean, far cleaner than just about anything else we have. If you compare the waste product with the energy produced... It's just not an argument that nuclear loses versus something like coal. Where coal puts out its waste mainly in the form of smoke, nuclear waste, like discarded nuclear power rods, are a physical and far more immediately dangerous thing. The coal waste kind of blends in, and lobbyists have been throwing around "clean coal" for a while... Although coal use has gotten a lot more efficient and produces less waste than before, it's still far more than what nuclear could do. "Clean" coal is a myth, it's just "less bad" coal, with good marketing.

Regardless, coal and natural gas fired plants can ramp up and down far quicker than nuclear possibly could. Where nuclear covers base demand and can usually scale up and down a bit to help with higher load times, to cover peak demand, coal and natural gas can fire up and produce power in a matter of minutes. With nuclear, they have to ramp up slowly to ensure the reaction doesn't run away from them, and to ensure all the safety measures and safeguards are working as intended as the load increases. It's just a fat more careful process.

The grid is hugely complex, and I'm simplifying significantly. But from the best of my understanding, nuclear can't react fast enough to cover spontaneous demand. So either coal or natural gas needs to exist for the grid to work as well as it does.

Wind is unpredictable and solar usually isn't helping during the hours where the grid would need help with the demand. The only viable option is with grid scale energy storage, which can hold the loads while the nuclear systems have a chance to ramp up.

There's still far more coal fired plants in the world than we need for this task alone, so there's still work to be done... But I suspect coal use will diminish, but not be eliminated from grid scale operation for a while.

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[–] Heavybell 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I know Germany is shutting down its reactors and without Russian gas they need to get a reliable baseload power generation from somewhere… :/

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

I'm sure places that are still banning nuclear power aren't helping either.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (6 children)

It will slow when nuclear is the main energy source, especially in the United States (its currently ~47%)

Nuclear can also get recycled, and for the average American, the actual waste that can no longer be recycled is about a soda can (standard 12 ounce can)

Imo, the US needs to work toward nuclear usage being 90-95% instead of using coal. There's still a need for natural gas but it can be minimized

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Fuel reprocessing through the purex process has never been economical and frankly doesn't make much sense. You'd want to increase the volume of those very nasty fission products for eventual storage through vitrification anyway (inverse square law gets very important for big gamma emitters) so you'd need a big site regardless. It's fine if you're recovering plutonium to make a bomb, but it seems to create a lot of chemical waste without much benefit otherwise.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (11 children)

Yes, countries like Germany are turning to coal as a direct result of nuclear-phobia.

The US, with all its green initiatives and solar/wind incentives, is pumping more oil than Saudi Arabia. The US has been the top oil producer on whole the planet for the last 5-6 years. The problem is getting worse.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (13 children)

As people pointed out in another thread, nuclear energy is NOT the future and also a really bad short term solution,so countries like Germany are going back to coal short term to make the transitions to renewables in the meantime.

It's not a great solution, but without Nordstream, there's really not much else more sensible to do right now, just to make the transition.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Tf you mean stopped

  • a German
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