this post was submitted on 16 May 2024
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There is this conversation about nuclear power that bugs me. The downvoting part in this section motivated me enough to talk about the following.
The way I see things humanity does not have an energy issue, industries do. We don't need more energy to heat our homes, for example. More energy is needed for the industries to be able to expand. So I don't understand why this SMR "adventure" is so well perceived by the public or even environmentalists.
We know that businesses, corporations etc care only about their monetary profit, and not about the environment or humans. Governments take tones of money to enforce these kind of policies worldwide. Some bribes have even evolved to taxable salaries.
Why are people so eager to defend SMR like it's a solution? It's like pretending that the problem is not related to the eternal growth model of capitalism. No?
As you can tell, I cannot see an ecological solutions withing capitalism. Is there anyone who can? If yes, how would those solutions bypass or change the eternal growth model, to a sustainable one?
I might need to change my point of view, this is why I shared this rant.
A huge part of global CO2 emissions come from various industries, so they certainly have a lot to improve. We should definitely start with that instead of blaming regular consumers of everything.
Switching to completely renewable energy sources requires grid energy storage, which we don’t really have at the moment. While we’re building renewable energy plants and the facilities to balance out the mismatching nature of energy production and demand, we’re still going to need some sort of energy during the transition period, and that’s when nuclear energy comes in handy. The way I see it, it’s not a long term solution for everything, but a temporary tool for managing the transition period, which is apparently going to take decades.
The private sector does what’s economically attractive and viable, but policies dictate what makes economic sense and what doesn’t. Therefore, I think we should all vote for the local politicians who support renewable energy and grid energy storage.
Building large reactors isn’t economically attractive, so maybe SMRs could help with that. Time will tell. Or maybe we need to make it more expensive to build and run fossil fuel plants, and politics would be the right tool for that.
It looks like this is not the case, at least by reading the following:
From Five Things the “Nuclear Bros” Don’t Want You to Know About Small Modular Reactors
If you have a source that claims otherwise, please share.
Yepo, guess it's about using oil & coal is just worse.
Maybe soon we in the west will have "enough" of "stuff" (you can only eat that much every day right) and would transit to another less degrading system.
Or so I hope.