U.S. Pledge To Triple Global Nuclear Energy By 2050

I’m a renewable bro. I wanna see as much money pumped into as much infrastructure for renewables as possible. I wanna see solar on every building. I wanna see off-shore wind and tidal energy production. I’m keenly following development of clean, efficient, and cost-effective energy storage technologies, and much is being done in this space to support a future switch to full renewable reliance.

That won’t change the fact that we need on-demand energy now and we need to stop using coal and gas as soon as possible. We currently don’t have energy storage at scale. We will, but we don’t. So in the meantime, nuclear is probably the best option to pursue for use over the next couple of decades while we continue to invest in, and implement, renewables.

I will have to strongly disagree here. The timelines are actually the main reason why I would disqualify Nuclear power as a solution to energy, even as a temporary one.
The time from inception to going online for a new Nuclear reactor is in the range of 15-25 years. Of course we could attempt to shorten that, but that would probably mean compromising on safety. So indeed, if we want to stop using fossil fuels asap, building solar, wind, and hydro, which come online in a matter of months (maybe years for hydro), is much faster.
Aggravating this are two further issues: Current Nuclear energy production is non-renewable, and supply problems are already known to occur at current energy production levels. Second, the global construction capacity is limited, probably to around current levels. Even if we do not push for faster construction times, the number of companies and indeed people who have the necessary expertise are already at full capacity, and again, expanding that would probably imply safety problems.
That is to say, currently running Nuclear power plants are save and clean, so by all means keep doing it until renewables take over. But expanding Nuclear power to solve the energy problem is a non-starter for me, due to the timeline and it being non-renewable. And that is before we start talking about the very real dangers of Nuclear power, which are not operational of course, but due to proliferation, war, and governmental or general societal instability (due to say, climate change).
- The time from inception to going online for a new Nuclear reactor is in the range of 15-25 years.
  In the US. In China, nuclear reactors go from first pour to operation in 5-6 years. Economies of scale apply.
- Of course we could attempt to shorten that, but that would probably mean compromising on safety.
  I think it's less that it would mean compromising on safety and more that it would mean compromising on the appearance of safety because we'd have to stop letting the courts delay construction while they indulge everybody who tries to sue to stop it with meritless claims.
  Also -- and I say this as a Georgia Power ratepayer on the hook for the vast cost overruns for Plant Vogtle 3 and 4 -- we would need to import foreign labor or something because here in the US we are demonstrably too incompetent and corrupt to do it properly ourselves.
- Exactly. I'm 100% on board with both renewables and nuclear, but the time to build nuclear would seem to have passed. We're a few decades too late.
  That's not too say we shouldn't be building any new nuclear plants - in particular modern designs like SMRs, but I think it would be wiser to focus our energy now on large, grid-scale storage to help smooth out intermittent generation from renewables.
- The time from inception to going online for a new Nuclear reactor is in the range of 15-25 years. Of course we could attempt to shorten that, but that would probably mean compromising on safety
  It also takes 20years for a tree to grow, so I guess we should stop planting trees too. Good logic.
  The rest of what you are saying is ignorant at best. "Global construction capacity" is constrained to current levels. How convenient that we can only build exactly the number of nuclear reactors we are currently building. But we can build an unlimited amount of solar panels, wind turbines and "hyrdo."
  How long do you think it takes to "build hydro?" If you ignore any and all environmental costs of flooding valleys, then sure I guess you could do it pretty quickly, you'd probably have to relocate hundreds of thousands of people, but sure that sounds more feasible then building a nuclear reactor.
  Current Nuclear energy production is non-renewably because of cold-war era treaties against enrichment and breeder reactors. The timeline for nuclear fuel to run out if you allow breeders, is after the sun burns out. So that's a non-issue. Not to mention other theoretical sources of nuclear fuel that we don't bother even looking at because it's cheaper to burn more coal.
What exactly do you mean by "in the meantime"? What kind of timeline do you envisage for the large scale rollout of nuclear energy? Do you seriously think it'll be possible to roll out nukes faster than building some more storage?
- The problem is "some more storage" can't be done, the technology doesn't exist
You are not a true renewable energy bro if you allow nuclear to be built /hj
- Hand job?

Today, there is 413GW of nuclear capacity globally. Of that, 57GW is in China.

China plans to reach 300GW of nuclear capacity by 2035. Assuming linear growth, that number will be around 550GW by 2050 (more than double the current global nuclear capacity) There are currently 57 nuclear power plants under construction. 21 are in China. 1 is in the US.

This US pledge is basically useless.

🥱

Does anyone actually take these decades-long pledges seriously?

From a country that's preventing shutdowns on the monthly, fuck no.
Yeah a 20 year commitment when the next party will revert all progress means nothing.
“I’m going to go to the gym three times a week until 2050!”
Then compare the effort in going to the gym three times a week with the effort in tripling the world’s supply of nuclear power.
Absolutely not and this is the shit that infuriates me about the Dems as a lefty. Too much lip service and not enough concrete action.
If you ever criticize the president, someone will undoubtedly give a long list of similar 'actions' as accomplishments to claim that you're foolish for the criticism.
- Exactly. Without a proper foundation these nuclear plants are never going to get off the ground. We need concrete action. We need trucks. We need aggregate. We need forms and rebar. We need a platform to base this power generation.

Nuclear power isn't bad. I used to be anti-nuclear energy because of the specter of Chernobyl, 3 mile island, and Fukushima. But learning more about it, there haven't been many actual problems with nuclear energy.

Chernobyl happened because of mismanagement and arrogance. 3 mile happened because of a malfunction. Fukushima happened because of mismanagement and failure to keep up safety standards in case of natural events.

These are all things that can be mitigated to one extent or another. it's much cleaner than other forms of energy, outputs way more than solar or wind, and with modern technology can be extremely safe. I think we should be adopting nuclear, at least as a stopgap until renewable tech reaches higher output in efficiency.

Kinda annoyed that these investments are going into foreign countries, when we are one of the major contributors to greenhouse gas. We should be building them here first to mitigate our own ghg contributions, then helping smaller countries build theirs.

I do still have concerns about waste removal and storage tho, but I'm sure we could figure that out if we actually wanted to. But I doubt we do, because "dA cOsTs" or some shit.

Chernobyl had such a far-reaching environmental impact. Beyond even the radioactive pollution stuff, it scared everyone away from nuclear power and back to fossil fuels for energy production. I sometimes wonder where we'd be wrt CO2 levels if nuclear energy adoption had continued along the same trend as it was before Chernobyl. Would we have had substantially more time to mitigate climate change? Maybe we'd have been in the same boat (or an equally bad boat) due to other factors; maybe it would have stymied renewables even more due to already having a readily available and well-established alternative to fossile fuels in nuclear power. Idk. But if someone wrote one of those what-if alternative history novels about the subject, I'd read the heck out of it.
- Imagine if every oil spill was taken as seriously
- Chernobyl had such a far-reaching environmental impact.
  Ironically, the main direct impact (i.e. excluding the indirect, but far more important, policy impact you talked about) is that it basically created an involuntary nature preserve.
Nuclear is too expensive. It doesn't make sense to build new reactors.
- It doesn’t make sense to build one new reactor. Tripling the world’s nuclear power generation makes a lot more sense. At that scale it’ll be cheaper.
- Regarding waste; nuclear waste can be turned into diamond batteries.
  If they manage to release, the idea is that small cell batteries can self-recharge themselves practically forever (20,000ish years?). Battery dead? Remove it, swap it, wait. Battery dead? Insert the one you removed previously, the Uranium inside replenished the charge.
  Neat stuff given that it is made from waste byproduct.
It's not "da costs", it's actually really, really really expensive to build new nuclear reactors. Most of that comes from increased labor costs, which in turn have ballooned largely due to increased regulation and oversight requirements, which I would argue is not something we should do away with.
I wouldn't necessarily mind having a reactor or two acting as base generators especially during the winter, but
In Germany we've been searching for a secure waste site since the first reactor went online in 1957. If we haven't found it yet, we never will.
There's not really a reason to hope for cost reduction of reactor construction once we do it at scale, because requirements and local acceptance are too heterogeneous to implement any sort of scaling construction. Every jurisdiction will have its own risk assessment and usually the locals are none too happy about a reactor close to them. I just don't see something happening in that regard. Wind turbines and solar panels on the other hand can be churned out in factories at scale, which is why they're so cheap, comparatively.
Therefore, personally I'd rather invest in green H2 as an energy storage solution. We can easily generate an enormous electricity surplus during the summer months, but lack long-term storage of the electricity. So we shut off solar and wind farms when they're over producing. Wouldn't it be neat to instead let them keep generating and use that surplus energy to power power-to-gas plants E. G. with H2? It's an enormously power-hungry process, but if you do it when power is basically free...
Oh wait, we're already doing that and it's already cost-effective. Now, if we were to take that process and build it at scale... for example by not spending 12-20 Bn 💶 to build another Flamanville, Olkiluoto or Hinkley Point C... I think that might actually work.

It's not bad, its just bullshit. None of that shit is going to happen, and if it does happen, it'll be China leading the charge not the US.

Yeah, but China bad. Remember?
- Personally don't like China, but I will say when they want shit done they get it done.

Nuclear power is good imo. Batteries are not a viable solution to the intermittency problem of renewables, you need that baseload

It's not often I agree with you guys, but this is one of those times. If we're aiming to reduce out energy usage we are going to seriously limit ourselves for the future. We need lots of renewables with a strong baseload (nuclear), because energy usage is most likely only going to go up. Especially if we want to get into vertical, local farming and stuff like that.
- Well you’ll never see it under capitalism, that’s for sure.

Tbf, long term goals are a good thing. National planning having a lifespan of 4-8 years is fucking insane, and probably contributes non-trivial to federal expenditures and waste. We'd be better off if we could follow long term goals. But you're right, though, it was performative planning by and large.
- Actual genuine question here. Has any US administration made a decades long plan like this, announced it to the public, and then a future administration saw said plan through to fruition?
- As a general fuck-up in life I’ve found it far more valuable to make promises on a timeframe I can manage, even if they’re really tiny, than to make big promises.
- Long term goals? Sure. Long term deadlines? No. We're either not going to meet them and nobody is going to be held accountable. Or we are going to meet them and we could've done better.
  You don't trust a person or business to keep their promise 30 years from now, why would you trust the US government?

I’ll believe it when I see it. I’d prefer that they build something modern rather than hauling out the tired old plant designs we’ve been using since the 70s.

Small modular reactors are modern. And it's where the majority of the research is happening.
It's a bit of a chicken and the egg situation right now. Once the factories ramp up, they'll be pumping out some of the cheapest power producers by MW ever designed.
Unfortunately, those factories can't ramp up until the sales start coming in, and the sales aren't coming in because without the factories going full steam ahead, it's incredibly expensive to make the reactors.
Solar and wind had the exact same problem back in the day. They just didn't have two separate lobbying groups trying to kill them off.

2050? They probably know this shit isn't going to happen and just put it out there to make it look like something is being done.

Next they'll say that fossil fuels will be phased out by 2075.

Are US pledges like this worth much?

It depends on who you are and what you think about/place value on. This news has little value to cynics, but may have value to investors.

How about cutting our energy usage?

That's not going to happen.
- You mean a maximum per* house?
Good point, you should also look into bringing the world population down to less then 100million.
- Disinformation. A majority of power use is industry. Also careful, depopulation is fascist narrative which pushes for a mass genocide.

I mean this seems like around the time that billionaires have bunkered up and people are roaming the wasteland scavenging for food, shelter, and safety in the blazing heat

Hey, who cares what actually happens in 30 years. This man made a pledge and that's what really matters.
- "Why talk about policy actions when this fantasy ive concocted says we are all living a video game?"
  Good stuff

What does any of what you just said have to do with the US making a pledge to increase global energy sustainability (energy and fossil fuels specifically being the crux of global catastrophe)

Sometimes I think posters just like to jab for rage bait

It doesn't, I shared my experience understanding the article. Does a different perspective irritate you?
- Nah, just calling out an attention addict

Where are my renewable bros at? Tell me this is bad.

It's a waste of resources. Perfect timing for the NuScale drama https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2023/11/15/2781465/0/en/NuScale-Power-Corporation-Sued-By-Block-Leviton-LLP-for-Securities-Law-Violations.html

exactly, we can't spend that much to slow or stop climate change. it's not an option, the money is more valuable.

Its wierd to have these two posts next to each other today

https://feddit.de/post/5764680

Pleges for nuclear power if photovoltaic is already cheaper?

Anyone with basic knowledge about anything knows that diversification is generally a good thing, this applies to energy as well: you don't command the wind/sun and large scale electricity storage is to this day an unsolved problem. For all the big plans we have about a greener and carbon limited future, we need large amounts of dependable cheap and low-carbon energy, nuclear very much fits the bill (in complement to the other low-carbon energies).
it seems like the development of a diverse portfolio is in the works
I'm admittedly, just an internet stranger with no formal training in interpreting media or the global energy market

Lots of nuclear bros being confidently incorrect in here. Same as it ever was.

This is fucking amazing! This is making my day.

Is this just an election year promise thing? Is it real?

Fuck no. Why not real green energy which does not produce nuclear waste that has to be stored safely for thousands of years and where most places dont have a place to store it in?

Why not real green energy which does not produce nuclear waste that has to be stored safely for thousands of years and where most places dont have a place to store it in?
Because that's not a real issue. Not only is it true that we do have a perfectly-good place to store it that we refuse to use for no good reason, we don't actually need to store it at all because we ought to be reprocessing it instead.
Every place has a place to store it. It's pretty safe and easy to store and does not need to be significantly contained for that long of a period. It's relatively safe. "Real" green energy also produces a lot of waste and dangerous byproducts that "need to be" (read, should but often not) contained. Do you think solar panels grow on trees? No, the resources need to be mines and refined.
- Besides, solar photocells have a limited lifetime. Recycling them is possible but expensive so people just make new ones instead. Kind of like plastics if you think about it.
Probably because we can't reach energy demands with just renewable energy.
You should look up how the power grid works. Most energy is generated on demand. When the sun isn't out and the wind isn't blowing, you have to rely on stored energy.
I don't know if you've been paying attention to energy storage technology, but it's not very good right now. Until it improves, foregoing additional sources of energy that we can generate on demand is asinine.
To be honest though, you're just a victim of propaganda that exists to funnel as much money to Solar as possible. Be careful. Whenever there is a bunch of money being passed around, there will also be a bunch of misinformation and grifters.

Hi, pro-nuclear here,
That's the eventual ideal, but energy storage technology isn't there yet. The biggest issue facing renewables currently is the ability to maintain a base load demand that is increasing faster and faster each year.
Currently, the cheapest way we have to store energy is to store it chemically, in the form of coal, petroleum, or fissle fuel. Of these, the fissle option is by far the best. It's by far the most energy-dense, doesn't release any carbon into the atmosphere when used, and the amount of waste it produces is dangerous, but miniscule in comparison. All the high level waste ever produced since the late 50s could fit in a single building.
It's not realistic to fully replace everything with renewables until some very difficult engineering problems are solved. So our choices right now are:
build more renewables
Pros: getting cheaper and more efficient but worse than current tech, no carbon pollution
Cons: experience more power failures as it cannot meet current energy demands
build a coal/petroleum plant
Pros: very cheap and very efficient
Cons: accelerate climate change, increase pollution
build a nuclear plant
Pros: can easily meet base load demands, very efficient, no carbon pollution
Cons: expensive, special waste management is required.
As things stand now, I would like to replace aging petroleum power plants with nuclear while continuing to build more and more renewables. Then, once we've either found a way to reduce energy demand or improve storage, start to phase out the nuclear plants
- One big con often goes unmentioned: nuclear reactors take at least a decade to construct, often longer and they are really expensive along the way.
  We don't really have time for that. We could do it in parallel to spamming as much solar and wind as we can, but in reality, more nuclear plants sadly mean less solar and wind.
Okay. Go study batteries and let us know when you make a breakthrough.