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this post was submitted on 14 May 2026
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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.
Wait, is that what astroturfing refers to?! That makes so much sense now.
Yeah, I learned it after years of seeing it on reddit, because someone finally explained it lol
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
Fukushima happened in early 2011. Your graph doesn't start until 2016. Sketchy af.
After Fukushima, they decided to shutdown all plants until 2022. You can't just shutdown all plants overnight.
As the commentor pointed out, this was then later delayed to 2023 after the Russian attack on Ukraine.
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?
Biogas and hydrogen are both greenwashing products. Neither is better than electric alternatives where they are being sold. They have major major flaws that the fossil fuel industry (y'know, the one selling both of those products) won't advertise to you:
And even if the above wasn't true and biogas was awesome (it's awful), the simple fact that they are selling trace amounts in order to promote fossil gas as their main product is an obvious act of greenwashing unto itself.
Greenpeace knows all of the above very well. I can't say for sure that they are corrupt and bought out by the fossil fuel industry. All I can say is that I don't have a better explanation for their stupidity.
I am still not convinced. I am a big fan of heat pumps (especially the large one they have in Denmark), however not everyone has the luxury to choose their heating solution. Greenpeace doesn‘t make the laws which make landlords not transition away from fossil fuels.
So Greenpeace is offering the best in-class "green" natural gas product. You didn‘t name another provider, which is better. May be there is one. You can‘t really critize the best for not being even better, because there are obviously reasons for it or someone else would have already done better.
Secondly even though we we will not need that green gas infrastructure for personal heating in the longterm, because there is much better option available (the heatpump), there are certain industries which need it badly. These are the steel, chemical and aviation (in that order). Therefore it is important to bootstrap green hydrogen generation additionally to what is already being done.
At last let me emphasize that what Greenpeace is doing is not ideal. Ideally the government would follow a plan where personal natural gas heating would not be needed, because heat pumps would be installed everywhere.
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.
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 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.
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'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?
That's a bad faith argument. As someone who spent years in the nuclear industry, a lot of the regulation exists to strangle the industry.
An example was at Vogtle in Georgia, where a section of pipe was determined by the NRC inspectors to be too small and ordered it redesigned.
When that happens, that's where huge delays come in. The design has to go back to home office and be redesigned and bench tested. While that happens, worm is stalled on that section of the plant. That costs money because all the workers still need to be paid.
They redesigned the pipe and installed it just for the NRC to go back and say that the original pipe was correct and to put it back.
The cost of nuclear also comes from the way we manage energy utilities. When a solar farm is built, the builders can just sell it to the utility and walk away, no consideration for decommissioning or waste disposal or environmental considerations.
A nuclear plant requires a whole plan and money on how it will be decommissioned by the builders themselves. Nuclear is the only power type held to this standard.
Nuclear power is a good thing, and its time the greens and people left of center get on board. Its scientifically sound and immensely powerful with no greenhouse gasses released.
Yes and no. I wrote it in a blunt way, but to deregulate nuclear plants I want to be sure it doesn't impact safety.
Your story does nothing to convince me that the industry is regulated to "strangle" it. You don't say what the pipe did. It may have been part of a coolant loop in which case it's safety critical and having the wrong pipe might mean early failure of joints of connected components. Getting that right could be important and so it's right to be regulated.
The problem is actually that it took far too long to be sure what was right, and that's down to companies / people being far too dogmatic about how they work.
Well yes, because the site isn't a million tonnes of low level nuclear waste that needs to be dismantled in a controlled fashion, and specially processed. A solar farm might have some toxic metals in the panels when ground-up, but all are quite easily reclaimed. There's no special skill / process needed for anyone dismantling it. It just needs responsible disposal.
Completely different scale of responsibility.
The point of that story is to illustrate the gross inefficiency and bureaucracy of engineering design changes in the nuclear regulatory cycle. What the pipe did doesn't matter as much as how regulators chose to approach the problem. They effectively wasted months of manpower and materials for nothing.
That to me is strangulation of an industry. Another is how the Obama administration handled Yucca mountain and how the federal government, by law, owns all the uranium and is thus legally responsible for its disposal.
No real movement has been made on this front by the NRC and is the main cause of why we have all our spent fuel sitting on concrete outside of the plant instead of a long term geological repository.
It came out of the ground, so just dig under the water table into the bed rock and leave it there.
"Completely different scale of responsibility"
And completely different scale of power generation. Nuclear plants are far more power dense, and that is the ultimate factor in "potential danger". Solar is great for places that we have already developed but are underutilized, like roof tops or farms, but they aren't going to power an arc furnace or a manufacturing facility or a data center. The power simply isn't there vs. The land cost that would be required for it would be astronomical.
Nuclear and " renewables " are two different tools for the same toolbox. One shouldn't be excluded over the other because both are extremely beneficial. The "green" infighting only serves the fossil fuel lobby.
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.
I work in construction, and that's just not the way things work in America. Any government project is required to have a bidding phase with multiple options for nearly every required item so that every company has a fair chance to compete.
I do doors, and even when a government project is calling for some hyper-specific Blast+RF+STC door that only one company can even make, my manager still makes me reach out to a bunch of other companies to get a second number just to have something, even if I then have to qualify that what they're able to make doesn't actually fit the specifications.
It's not uncommon for a large, complex project to spend 4+ years in the bidding phase alone, getting rebid over and over with dozens of addendums and RFI's working out all the kinks, without even mentioning the time spent in the planning phase beforehand and the lengthy construction phase afterward.
The issue here isn't that there is a bidding process, it's that only 1 company makes the thing, and that company isn't even an SoE so it has no reason not to charge infinity dollars while delivering as little as possible.
I am not familiar with the specifics of how large complex projects happen over here, but it's not magic, it's insane that we've seen them lap us in every productive measure, and aren't trying to study what they're doing right.
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.
I didn't realize we put a dollar price on fixing the climate.