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First U.S. nuclear reactor built from scratch in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia (www.nbcnews.com)
submitted 3 years ago by [M, B] to c/technology@lemmy.world
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First U.S. nuclear reactor built from scratch in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia::ATLANTA — A new reactor at a nuclear power plant in Georgia has entered commercial operation, becoming the first new American reactor built from scratch in decades.

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[–] 103 points 3 years ago (2 children)

Ooh a lot of people here seem very pro-nuclear-power. That's cool!

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  • [–] 78 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    Unfortunately, there's still that one guy in the comments trying to say that hypothetical, largely unproven solutions are better for baseload than something that's worked for decades.

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  • [–] 43 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    That or the fear-mongering talking points. That's what caused our local power plant to be decommissioned, and now those same people are complaining about how much their electrics cost now.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    The old soviet legacy. And a bit of actual disasters and from the 2 significant ones (hiroshima and chernobyl) half are beacuse of the soviets.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    *Fukushima

    Hiroshima was the freedom bombing disaster

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    If you mean renewables by that, it's hardly hypothetical or unproven. I'm in Australia and south Australia and Tasmania (two of our states) have fully renewable grids, Tasmania for the past 7 years. South Australia does still occasionally pull from an interconnect but most of the time they're exporting a bunch of power.

    Renewables with storage are cheaper and faster to build than nuclear and that's from real world costs. Nuclear would be fine if it wasn't so stupidly expensive.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Tasmania

    Generates nearly all its power using hydro electric, which is great but pretty dependent on geography.

    South Australia

    Wiki says a pretty big hunk of that is still gas

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_South_Australia#/media/File:Electricity_generation_SA_2015-2021.svg

    In Ontario Canada where I am from it would take > 4000 wind turbines all working at once (not including the batteries) to supplant our nuclear capacity. Even the largest battery storage are in the hundreds of mega watts and only for a few hours at the cost of about half a billion dollars.

    I think it is more productive to approach these technologies as complementary as any proper grid should have both for the near future if we want to reduce global warming.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    Ah sorry, my mistake on that one. Despite how many wind turbines working at once it may take, the power from the is cheaper by a long shot than nuclear.

    The reason I don't think nuclear is the main solution is just cost + build time. It's horrendously expensive. Much more so than the cost of renewables with proper grid integration (transmission, storage etc.) that has been modelled.

    Maybe in a while the small nuclear reactors may come close, but currently the full sized reactors are too expensive and smr's aren't really a thing yet because of cost.

    If power prices can come down instead of go up it's going to be a lot easier to convince everyone to transition away from fossil fuels, and from modelling that's been done (e.g. by csiro) that can be the reality

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    South Australia is 70% renewables, as per their own official energy site.

    Batteries are the limiting factor for renewables. Building battery storage that can supply a large city is expensive. Even the battery South Australia had Elon Musk build can only supply a town for about an hour. I'm hoping battery tech improves soon, but it seems to have stagnated for a while.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Ah sorry, my mistake. I messed up there.

    The battery in SA is really just for grid stabilisation, not long term storage. Batteries are not really a good soln for longer duration storage. You need surprisingly little storage though when they've modelled fully renewable grids which is why the projected costs aren't stupidly expensive.

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  • [+] -6 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    The nuclear lobby is alive and well on social media. Never before has the internet apparently agreed on something so controversial with some of the most cookie cutter, copy and paste, AI generated comments on the subject I've ever seen.

    The talking points seem to gloss over the fact that nuclear storage always fails, meltdowns happen, and you still have to mine uranium out of the ground. It's far from a clean source of energy.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 years ago

    That the "nuclear lobby" is paying people to post stuff on Lemmy, a social media platform that accounts for a small part of single percent of all social media users, is a hot take I haven't heard yet. Congrats, you've definitely imagined a scenario that nobody else in history has ever thought of. A true original thought.

    Pity it's an absolutely fucking brain dead take masquerading as something more than nonsensical blithering from a total nincompoop, but you should bask in this moment nonetheless.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 years ago

    Nuclear power is something we should be using if you support science. If you don't support science well you have a lot of other problems. Nuclear and renewable energy both need massive investments at the same time to replace fossil fuels.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago

    It's not the cleanest, but in term of CO2 and other toxics produced per Giga-Watts, it's the best compromise.

    Fission is hopefully, coming in the next decades. Like the other guy said, anything but coal/petrol.

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