658
A nuclear plant’s closure was hailed as a green win. Then emissions went up
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2024
658 points (92.2% liked)
News
23014 readers
2 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That doesn’t sound right, it’s fossil fuel simps that are anti-nuclear
More likely they wanted it to be updated
Environmentalists have only come around to nuclear in the last half-decade or so. For a long time after 3MI and Chernobyl, nuclear was the devil.
There was a genuine split on the issue in environmentalist communities. The Sierra Club, for instance, has pretty much always been an advocate for nuclear when it replaces coal. The WWF has also advocated nuclear as a means of reduced mining and drilling.
But both of these endorsements are predicated on long-term waste mitigation and clean-up of industrial sites. The Yucca Mountain waste deposit site that never got built, for instance. Or modernized thorium recyclers to handle the byproducts of traditional uranium waste that the US declined to develop or deploy.
They also almost universally disapprove of the manufacture of plutonium, both because it contributes to higher levels of plant waste and because the plutonium becomes fissile material capable of ending all life on earth.
So it isn't just "environmentalists came around on this lately". Its a whole host of modernizations and waste management actions that NEVER GET BUILT and are then used to prod environmentalist groups into protest.
Must be a regional thing
My whole life nuclear was pushed
After Fukushima there was a pretty widespread movement to get rid of nuclear power.
They probably definitely wanted it closed. To bad they didn't guess the likely alternatives that would take its place, an push for that too...
Literal power vacuum
One of the biggest environmental groups in the world is vehemently anti nuclear
https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/fighting-climate-chaos/issues/nuclear/
Environmentalists are always and forever the prime movers in national politics, don't you know? Cause they've got billions of dollars at their disposal and an enormous base of employees to draw on for electoral activism and lots of friendly former-environmentalists in positions of elected / appointed authority.
Who can forget the wise worlds of former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, when he warned us all of the threat of the Environmentalist Industrial Complex?
There does seem to be a portion of green types who are anti nuclear. You only heard those voices on the issue because the fossil fuel people knew they would benefit anyway.
Renewables are great but you take them when you can make them. Batteries to store it seen to be more expensive than anyone is willing to pay. Nuclear is expensive and only worth running at full throttle. The gaps are filled by fossil fuels which can be fired up very quickly.
Fuck biomass, that's just chopping down trees to burn them. The fuck is green about that?
As someone who was vehemently pro nuclear, unfortunately we missed the boat. The time to invest heavy in nuclear was 50 years ago and instead we did the opposite. Renewables have caught up and nuclear is so far behind that it makes zero sense to build any new reactors when we can just build out more renewable power gen and battery storage for less money and without the whole nuclear waste handling problem.
Best time to plant a tree was 50 years ago. Second best time is now.
Sure, if we could snap our fingers and have a bunch of nuclear plants it would make sense. But the tech is all ancient, and the regulatory structure is oppressive. It will take decades to build out the amount of nuclear capacity we need and cost inordinate amounts of money, and we've already passed the tipping point where renewables are the better choice.
Just as an example, it took us 14 years to build a single reactor in the Vogtle plant costing over $30 billion dollars. We'd need massive reforms to the regulations and supply chain for building reactors to bring those numbers down and that just won't happen fast enough.
Even China, who is the world leader in nuclear power these days is slowing down building of new reactors in favor of renewables, and they do not have the regulations and supply issues we have in the USA.
Please don't be so defeatist.
I wouldn't call it defeatist, nuclear should never be more than a stopgap to 100% renewables. if anything, it's awesome that we've gotten far enough with renewables that switching to them entirely is now a viable proposition. It sucks that we spent so much time dependent on fossil fuels when we could've been using nuclear, but the past is the past and the future is bright.
I will say, small modular reactors might have a place in the energy mix. They would be fantastic for more isolated grids where stability is difficult to achieve with 100% renewable energy. Think small island nations or remote areas. Also would be good for emergency and disaster recovery scenarios. We (as in the USA) also already have the supply chain to build them somewhat efficiently since we use them on our aircraft carriers. Just needs some tweaking to work well on land and for the regulations to loosen up to make it economically feasible.
Battery tech isn’t there yet, the production and sourcing isn’t green enough and the assurances aren’t there
A few years ago you would be right but we're just about there, especially once sodium ion batteries become more mature which is definitely going to be a "next few years" thing, not a speculative maybe it'll happen someday thing. There's also ways to store power other than chemical batteries, like pumped storage hydro.
Eh. No shortage of useful idiots on these forums saying solar should replace nuclear.
They just don't understand how the power grid works.