this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2023
1134 points (97.6% liked)
Technology
59575 readers
3195 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
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
Half of those aren't even relevant.
The actual construction takes about 4 years, but legal issues such as rules changing and politics, legal issues, and additional planning tend to push this up to 6-15 years in extreme cases. To draw a parallel: building a 1GW windmill farm, such as the Thorsminde off shore windmill farm is estimated to take 5 years of pure construction time, and politics and legal issues have so far added 4 years to this from the day it was announced, giving a total construction time of about 9 years without delays.
Cost wise, Thorsminde is projected to cost 2.1 billion USD, and that's without running costs, possible delays, or deconstruction costs at its 30 year end of life. The construction of a nuclear plant usually ( as in the projects that have been finished and we know the total construction costs of) costs anywhere from 6 to 9 billion USD. So yes, nuclear is more expensive, as you said.
Of course windmills don't just pop out of the ground, so heavy machinery will also be required, and the sound of the hammers building the foundation will likely drive away any sound sensitive life in a 100-200 km radius, such as whales. This can be partly mitigated by running the hammers at lower power, adding about 30-50% (might be more, foundations take a long time to build) additional construction time and driving up the price.
The windmills will also change the life of the area dramatically throughout its life, VS nuclear, which requires mines that cause decent damage, but do not pollute in any significant way at the reactor site (unless you pump the waste water from the usually closed first loop directly out to the rivers and sea, or swear on running the power plant without cooling towers during droughts).
Also the resources needed to make a 1GW wind farm are immense, and contrary to nuclear, we can't currently reuse the waste from deconstruction, which there also is quite a lot more of. Furthermore, maintenance will be hell, as you have much more moving parts (not per windmill, but per farm, which has multiple windmills) as a nuclear plant.
Do you realise that you can also build windmills... where you would put the Power Plant? On Land? And that would reduce the time and cost of construction?
You could also fill barren fields with solar panels and use space that not even a solar plant could use, this in turn also gives animals shade and helps biodiversity and bug species.
And doesnt have a third of its construction cost as running costs forever.
You can also scale wind turbines in minutes. Look at France how much it costs to have nuclear plants not running.
In what way can we reuse the nuclear waste?
You do realise how much space windmills would need to produce as much power as a single nuclear plant, right? That is also the reason we try to build them in the water.
And when did I write anything about nuclear waste? I specifically pointed out that I was talking about deconstruction waste, where cooling towers turbines, and general facilities can be reused, and only the core shielding of the nuclear reactor has to be specially disposed of, versus the wings and foundation of windmills, which we don't really know what to do with right now, so we kinda just bury them wherever and hope it doesn't come back to bite us later.
You didn't. I did. What about nuclear waste? It doesnt go away and if we build so much nuclear we also have so much more waste.
The blades can be recycled btw. we just dont do it because we dont have capacity for them.
Which brings me back to the nuclear waste. Oh and Fukushima. Chernobyl. When are we getting rid of those?
The amount of waste produced is extremely small for how much power you get, and is dealt with in exactly the same we we deal with literally all of our garbage: put it under ground and call it a day.