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this post was submitted on 14 May 2026
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I want to say "no shit" but then I remembered that most people have no idea how safe nuclear reactors actually are
There's a huge anti-nuclear crowd, I'd prefer we focus on renewables as much as possible but it's stupid not to phase out oil/gas for nuclear as a more consistent source.
Which was grass-rooted by oil companies back in the 70s.
astroturfed. Because it's fake grass-roots.
Yes! That's the term I was trying to think of.
Source? Most if not all in “anti-nuclear crowd“ (in Germany) are also against the burning of fossil fuels. Instead they really like renewable energy like solar or wind. See the history of the German Green party for reference which was founded out of the anti-nuclear grass roots movement and they are also opposed to the burning of fossil fuels. I don‘t know if that‘s different in other countries.
Ah, yes, the German Green party which famously shut down nuclear plants in favor of...
check notes
COAL plants
This is simply not true. The shutdown of all nuclear plants (second attempt) has been decided by the CDU after Fukushima. The last government where the Greens were part of actually postponed the shutdown for a couple month because of the energy crisis cause by the war in Ukraine.
Germany also decided to shutdown all coal power plants until 2038. Yes, Germany has historically a lot of coal power plants, but the future is renewable. Let me remind you that my comment was in response to someone saying the oil industry started the grass roots anti-nuclear movement.
Here ist good chart of Germany‘s energy mix:
https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/energiemonitor-strompreis-gaspreis-erneuerbare-energien-ausbau
Greenpeace Energy sells fossil fuels while fighting nuclear power. After it became a scandal, Greenpeace officially divested and changed the name but they still share the same office building in Hamburg so I think it's more than fair to say they are strongly ideologically aligned.
I'm sure on paper they would rather renewable than fossil, but they clearly are willing to compromise with them, unlike with nuclear. When they combine forces with the openly pro-fossil fuel lobby right wing, you get the exact mess Germany is in: inexcusably high reliance on gas and a consistently worst-in-class CO2 footprint per kWh for Western Europe.
Yes, I'm extremely bitter about this. The environmentalist political class being unyielding on nuclear but soft on gas set us back more than a decade with the green transition.
Thank you for your reply. I was not aware of that. However I do think that there is a nuance between a selling natural gas product (for heating) vs. electricity produced with natural gas. Greenpeace did the former, because there was/is no way to get enough green gas at the moment. I think this is legitimate, because at the moment that’s the case for every natural gas provider. Then in the future they can transition with their already client base. To be clear Greenpeace never sold non-renewable electricity.
Nonetheless is extremely disappointing that it takes so long and I also understand if current customers feel betrayed.
Does anyone know if there is a better natural gas provider with a higher percentage of green gas in the mix?
Given the massive amount of land we have renewables are the clear winner. Densely populated countries, with little to no coastline, would get better use out of nuclear.
Yes that's why I said both, renewables require a lot of space both for generation and storage and generally has peaks and valleys on generation, vs nuclear which can consistently provide a stable amount generally.
I'm anti-nuclear, but it's because nuclear is so much slower to build and more expensive than solar or wind so the fossil fuel industry is pushing for nuclear to delay the transition away from fossil fuels and use up all the funding.
If you have nuclear plants, you've paid to build them and you're on the hook for decommissioning costs, sure, keep running them. Starting construction on new nuclear in 2026? That's a terrible idea.
You won't be up and running before 2040 and you're not going to be competitive against 2040's renewables and batteries, never mind 2070's.
The 20+ year time to build is at best the direct result of lobbying and NIMBY and realistically just propoganda by antinuclear. The US mean for nuclear construction to production is 8 years. Japan has it down to under 5.
You want to drop safety standards on reactors?
I think they want to drop the lobbying red tape, not the safety standards
That is exactly what they want to do.
https://www.npr.org/2026/01/28/nx-s1-5677187/nuclear-safety-rules-rewritten-trump
China is building them in 5-6 years, the best time to plant a tree was 30 years ago and the second best time is now.
We can't build them in China, though. Only China can do that. My country doesn't even have an existing nuclear industry.
Sure we could start building reactors now, but we can get enough solar and battery storage through the night for less than nuclear would cost.
I'd like to see scientific proof of that
Everyone who's looking to make money is building wind, solar and batteries. Nobody's looking to invest in nuclear. That's what the people with all the financial data and feasability studies are doing.
The only people we've got pushing for nuclear are the people who were trying to build new coal plants a few years ago.
Props to China, but I know how long building projects take in my country. The plan will say 15 years and it will be done in 25 for 3x the price. And all that to have it produce a kWh for 0.50€. No, thanks.
So don't build 1-off designs, look at the most expensive parts of plant construction, and lower those costs. China's nuclear industry isn't just some construction company that commissions bespoke parts for each nuclear plant, it extends to from heavy forging capacity shared with ship-building to colleges producing construction managers.
Even if/when we replace fossil fuels with renewables, we still need a solution for surges, and nuclear would fit that very well
I thought nuclear was slow to ramp up and down and basically has to operate 24/7, providing a baseload. Batteries otoh are the quickest source to respond to surges from my understanding. Renewables+batteries are have been cheap enough for years that they're also good for baseload.
I'm in favor of nuclear, but no. Nuclear can't handle surges. It takes up to 3 days for a plant to sync to the grid.
The only power sources that can handle surges are hydro, batteries, and natural gas turbines.
Then nuclear power is good at is providing baseline power and slowly ramping that up and down to handle seasonal fluctuations, since solar power peaks during summer. Something else is needed to pick up the slack during winter
I live in a dry but mountainous area. I'd like to see them pump water uphill with any overpower so we can just use turbines to recapture that energy later. The average american keeps impressing me with their turnip-level intellect to the point where I don't want them running a carwash, much less a nuclear reactor. There are a lot of IRL Homer Simpsons out there.
And also really depends on the needs of the community. Solar, especially, can be deployed cheaply and relatively quickly, and may meet the needs of the community while phasing out oil and gas. Nuclear power plants are very expensive to build and take a really long time, but provide a large amount of power. A local community may not need a nuclear power plant.
Nuclear power plants are also expensive to maintain and tend to attract questionable investors.
"tend to attract questionable investors" what does this even mean, every industry attracts questionable investors and there's basically zero nuclear in the US to even gauge that from.
He's talking about that shady coyote who's always chasing after that flightless bird.
Tangentially related, anyone else excited for Coyote Vs. Acme? It looks fantastic IMO, the premise is a 10/10 idea.
Nuclear is THE single most expensive source of electricity on this planet. So economically it makes zero sense to switch to nuclear. Other than that I agree with you.
Because of all the red tape and overzealous safety regulations slapped on it because of fossil fuel lobbying. The fact that it can be profitable or exist at all today despite having a boot on its neck for the last 60+ years says a lot about its viability.
Well when annoying orange decided to cut the safety regulations on nuclear they became a bit more sketchy but yeah still would rather have that than a data center... One benefits all and the other benefits shareholders feelings till the bubble pops
Great Bubble 2: Meltdown
Why dont we have nuclear cars then. Thinking
Same reason we don't have wind powered cars.
What about hydroelectric powered cars, huh? Checkmate.
Fairly different reason actually, I'd say.
I mean in both cases it's physics, but it's different issues!
I know how safe they haven’t been - so that’s something.
I know environmental regulations mean nothing anymore and safety costs a lot of money. And profit is always the aim.
I’m sure it’s decades ahead of what was tried in the 70s and 80s. I’m sure it’s light years over coal and gas. And yet, I’m hesitant.
Can we just have renewables please? Look- other people got ‘em all over now. Wind, solar, wave, geothermal, battery types and capacities improving all the time. Ffs this was what it was it was supposed to be the whole time.
You can probably name every major nuclear accident or incident that's ever happened. Not because they were all major catastrophes that caused mass loss of life. But because they happen so infrequently and blown out of proportion.
Fukashima was the worst accident in the last 30 years with 0 fatalities. In the US alone over 100 people died due to wind turbines from things like falling ice or structural integrity failure. None of those people worked on turbines and happened to be bystanders to the incident.
Things like fossil fuels have thousands of deaths. But you're trying to say nuclear is dangerous?
There is at least one fatality. Reported in 2018, a worker has died from a lung cancer. 2400 people died during the evacuation.
The number of deaths in these "accidents" is minimized, partly due to a lack of transparency and government interests, and partly because it is often difficult to establish causal links. Finally, the calculation models are outdated and rely on datas from Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.
In other words, "there is no causal link"
No, you really don't.
Compare what you think you know with the reality of how nuclear power is used all over the world and safely.
Even Fukushima wasn't that bad in terms of human casualties. It was the tsunami that caused all the loss of life and damage.
Not to say that the Fukushima nuclear incident wasn't a disaster. But there were no direct deaths from it, and as far as anyone knows, no one has died of even indirect causes.
And there are a LOT of operating nuclear plants all over the world.
Edit: nuclear power generation has the 2nd least amount of deaths attributed to it out of all energy sources, beaten only by solar and only by a small margin.
do you? Nuclear, Solar, and Wind are all roughly equally safe.
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Ok, how safe haven't they been? How many were worse than deepwater horizon?
I'm guessing you've happily consumed what was given to you on a spoon and accepted that it was representative of the bigger picture.
I grew up an hour from a 1GW reactor that got shut down in part due to "concerned citizens" like yourself. The site it stood on is still periodically checked by the DOE but is now a recreational area. How often do old coal plants do that?
Hydropower causes more deaths than nuclear reactors
sauce
Edit: sorry, changed the link because I had copied the wrong one. New one is not AI slop, I apologize
the website appears to be an ai slop farm
And those windmills are probably chopping up squirrel suit base jumpers on like a daily basis now too.
Yeah I could see that. But it’s not a particularly strong argument for nuclear. Just a strong argument against terraforming.