With climate change looming, it seems so completely backwards to go back to using it again.
Is it coal miners pushing to keep their jobs? Fear of nuclear power? Is purely politically motivated, or are there genuinely people who believe coal is clean?
Edit, I will admit I was ignorant to the usage of coal nowadays.
Now I’m more depressed than when I posted this
In my country, because of a decades long fearmongering and disinfomation campaing that destoyed the nuclear energy industry. So now we're stucked with coal to keep the power running at night and during winter.
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But we could have worked on these issues for years by now. Abandoning the entire industry also lead to slowdown in research and inovation in the field. Of course now we're hopelessly behind.
Oor the ressources could be better spent in renewables, which are available as long as the sun exists, while nuclear will run out of fuel within the 22cnd century.
Also with nuclear Europe is entirely dependent on imports, primarily from Russia and russia-aligned countries. Being pro nuclear in Europe means being pro Putin.
And the feddit.de misinformation brigade has arrived.
I am quite sure i know a thing or two about politics that happened during my lifetime and i actively followed. Also i used to be a proponent for nuclear power when i was younger. But unlike the nuclear shills i am willing to accept when a technology is inferior and risky.
Why are you pro-coal?
i am pro renewables. It is the pro nuclear faction that tends to be pro coal too, just that they pretend they aren't. But it is the same businesses, the same industries and the same lobbying against renewables that unit pro coal and pro nuclear.
If you are anti-nuclear you are pro-fossil fuels. 100% renewables is a pipedream that is pushed by the energy companies amongst sports ads with scenic pictures of windmills in the background, while you ignore the other 44% of energy generation.
They're not wrong, I think initial estimates was 500 years, but that will change as more reactors get built.
That is indeed very wrong. With extracing Uranium from sea water and recycing fuel in breeder reacots, this goes up to like 90.000 years. And that's just Uranium, other fuels can be explored.
Unfortunately, it's not as simple as that. Theoretically, if everyone was using state-of-the-art designs of fast-breeder reactors, we could have up to 300,000 years of fuel. However, those designs are complicated and extremely expensive to build and operate. The finances just don't make it viable with current technology; they would have to run at a huge financial loss.
As for Uranium for sea-water – this too is possible, but has rapidly diminishing returns that make it financially unviable quite rapidly. As Uranium is extracted and removed from the oceans, exponentially more sea-water must be processed to continue extracting Uranium at the same rate. This gets infeasible pretty quickly. Estimates are that it would become economically unviable within 30 years.
Realistically, with current technology we have about 80-100 years of viable nuclear fuel at current consumption rates. If everyone was using nuclear right now, we would fully deplete all viable uranium reserves in about 5 years. A huge amount of research and development will be required to extend this further, and to make new more efficient reactor designs economically viable. (Or ditch capitalism and do it anyway – good luck with that!)
Personally, I would rather this investment (or at least a large chunk of it) be spent on renewables, energy storage and distribution, before fusion, with fission nuclear as a stop-gap until other cleaner, safer technologies can take over. (Current energy usage would require running about 15000 reactors globally, and with historical accident rates, that's about one major nuclear disaster every month). Renewables are simpler, safer, and proven ,and the technology is more-or-less already here. Solving the storage and distribution problem is simpler than building safe and economical fast-breeder reactors, or viable fusion power. We have almost all the technology we need to make this work right now, we mostly just lack infrastructure and the will to do it.
I'm not anti-nuclear, nor am I saying there's no place for nuclear, and I think there should be more funding for nuclear research, but the boring obvious solution is to invest heavily in renewables, with nuclear as a backup and/or future option. Maybe one day nuclear will progress to the point where it makes more sound sense to go all in on, say fusion, or super-efficient fast-breeders, etc. but at the moment, it's basically science fiction. I don't think it's a sound strategy to bank on nuclear right now, although we should definitely continue to develop it. Maybe if we had continued investing in it at the same rate for the last 50 years it might be more viable – but we didn't.
Source for estimates: "Is Nuclear Power Globally Scalable?", Prof. D. Abbott, Proceedings of the IEEE. It's an older article, but nuclear technology has been pretty much stagnant since it was published.
If you are making a cost argument against nuclear energy, then you are supporting coal. If you are positioning renewables against nuclear, then you are supporting coal. Stop supporting coal and other fossil fuels. People like you have been hampering clean energy for 50+ years and are responsible for the fact that the world is burning more coal then ever before. Stop being a shill for coal.
Australia and Canada both have very large amounts of nuclear fuel that are currently unused because of short-sighted comments like this.