News

23376 readers

2336 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. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.

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

[email protected]

665

A nuclear plant’s closure was hailed as a green win. Then emissions went up (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

313 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Shuttering of New York facility raises awkward climate crisis questions as gas – not renewables – fills gap in power generation

When New York’s deteriorating and unloved Indian Point nuclear plant finally shuttered in 2021, its demise was met with delight from environmentalists who had long demanded it be scrapped.

But there has been a sting in the tail – since the closure, New York’s greenhouse gas emissions have gone up.

Castigated for its impact upon the surrounding environment and feared for its potential to unleash disaster close to the heart of New York City, Indian Point nevertheless supplied a large chunk of the state’s carbon-free electricity.

Since the plant’s closure, it has been gas, rather then clean energy such as solar and wind, that has filled the void, leaving New York City in the embarrassing situation of seeing its planet-heating emissions jump in recent years to the point its power grid is now dirtier than Texas’s, as well as the US average.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] -3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

How much of those costs are due to obstructionism by anti-nuclear folks like yourself?

Also, breeder reactors are not "potential future tech". There are numerous contemporary breeder reactors designs, and the very first nuclear reactor to generate grid power in the United States was a breeder reactor.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

If you have any data at all that shows that the price is a function of regulation, I would encourage you to share it.

Nuclear costs orders of magnitude more than renewables. You need to offer strong evidence to account for that difference being due to regulation.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I never said the cost of nuclear was a function of regulation. I do believe that NIMBYism has a lot to do with it.

The thesis of your remarks seems to indicate that you think that nuclear power generation is inherently more expensive, and I'd be interested in hearing your non-circular reasoning for that implicit assertion. So far, all I've heard is "Nuclear is more expensive because it is."

A study by MIT in 2020 found that most of the excessive costs related to building nuclear plants are due to lack of decent standardization. Part of the problem is that because of emotional opposition to nuclear, the industry has had little opportunity to actually deploy any of the modular reactor innovations that have been developed in the last 50 years.

Here's a link to the MIT article: https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118

Again, I'm interested in hearing your reasoning for why nuclear is more expensive, other than "it just is" and "renewables are better".

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

My reasoning is based on the about 80 years of history we have building these.

They did sort of standardize around some reactor designs, and nothing is or was stopping companies from forming consortiums to reducing R&D and manufacturing costs.

They have had 80 years to do it and they have not. Nuclear is very, very challenging power generation that has an easy side of runaway reaction, not a low cost mix of things.

Nuclear has had plenty of time to prove itself and to lower its costs. It has failed to do so and renewables and storage are now so cheap that nuclear no longer makes any real sense.

But yeah, I doubt we are changing each other's minds.