Doesn’t feel quite “world news” worthy article.
Context for the news: Olkiluoto 3 is one of the newest nuclear power plants in Finland and originally it was meant to be complete in 2009. It ran in 2021 for the first time and was fully running in 2022 in its test runs. It was operational in 2023-ish?
It has been a huge money sink with the delays in its constructions and constant malfunctions while running it (no danger thanks to safety regulations). Olkiluoto 3’s delays and malfunctions have decreased the citizens’ interest in nuclear energy tremendeously. When it actually runs properly, it is a noticeable margin on Finland’s energy production.
I feel like it’s good world news - some people still have this revulsion to anything nuclear due to trauma from Chernobyl etc… a good example is apparently the entire brain dead nation of Germany which recently fully switched off nuclear power and are now in the middle of a fucking energy crisis.
Nuclear power can certainly be criticized for its cost but it absolutely deserves to be in the conversation about green energy as we take drastic actions to minimize climate crises.
Look into the maintenance costs of Germany’s 1970s reactors before calling an entire nation brain dead.
The cost of nuclear today is high and continues for thousands of years. Cost is the entire problem.
Nuclear power isn’t green, it’s just at the beginning of the cycle where it’s waste is seen as a small problem because there isn’t a lot of it. Like fossil fuels were a century ago.
Unfortunately we don’t have a lot of suitable places to put nuclear waste so the small amount we already have is already causing problems in Europe. The US being a bigger place may get to that point a little later than us. But nuclear waste stores are already oversubscribed in the UK, Germany, and France.
Nuclear power is short sighted.
The money spent should be on renewables and grid storage. Then more efficient heating and insulation.
Not nuclear, not carbon capture.
Proponents of nuclear power never look at the total lifecycle cost of a reactor. In fact it’s usually deliberately hidden.
Nuclear reactors have always been and will always be military technology. They should be funded as military spending.
By all means put a price on carbon so they can get a better price on energy but the military should be funding the reactors they need and dealing with the waste out of their budgets.
This can all be disproven using simple logic and analysis.
You claim that nuclear is short sighted, but then you claim we should be using renewables. Where do those renweables get their energy? From nuclear.
Thats the entire reason we are trying to get nuclear working. Fission was a nice first step, it showed the world the power of nuclear and proved that it was a concept that works. But now we need to get fusion working as it is the future. Its the third to last power source humanity will ever harvest. All the energy generated by renewables are simply byproducts of nuclear, so why not cut the middle man and harvest the nuclear directly?
Its easy to make the argument that we didnt have to pay the upfront costs of the sun, but the sun itself isnt renewable. Even if you invested fully into renewables now, for humanity to last long term you would STILL have to eventually go nuclear. And what about deep space habitats? They cant use renweables pretty much at all.
Why the fuck would anyone care about wasteful space colonization and the next million years when we aren’t even close to solving our current problems?
Renewables are significantly cheaper than nuclear and will remain so for the foreseeable future. The “cheap nuclear energy” Germany got a few decades ago isn’t as cheap if you include the costs of managing the nuclear waste. By the way, Germany intends to find - not build - a long term nuclear waste storage construction site by 2070. Right now the “temporary” solution of dumping everything into caves is used.
Once we start colonizing space - and only then - does it make sense to start discussing the viability of nuclear energy. That will be centuries off.
You claim that nuclear is short sighted, but then you claim we should be using renewables. Where do those renweables get their energy? From nuclear.
Yeah… a nuclear fusion reaction that has about 18*10^29 kg of hydrogen available at its disposal and is conveniently placed in a vacuum, mostly unaffected by gravity other than its own, with magnetic fields enabling it.
When we speak of nuclear as a source of electric energy, it’s about nuclear fission. And it’s not like we’re not trying, nuclear fusion research is going on since over 60 years, with insane amounts of money invested into it and yet no result that is practical for large scale electric energy generation.
Its easy to make the argument that we didnt have to pay the upfront costs of the sun, but the sun itself isnt renewable. Even if you invested fully into renewables now, for humanity to last long term you would STILL have to eventually go nuclear. And what about deep space habitats? They cant use renweables pretty much at all.
If you think humanity (or actually, any form of life) can sustain once the sun no longer exists as it does now (probably becoming a red giant), you’re probably wrong. But that consideration is of no importance when talking about covering today’s energy needs
it’s also built by a subsidiary of rosatom, if i’m not mistaken
It was built by Areva and Siemens. Reactor itself was built by Japan Steelworks and Mitsubishi.
hm, wonder where i got rosatom from then. i remembered there being something in the papers about it at least…
Hearing “not particularly prone to faults” in context of a nuclear powerplant isn’t exactly comforting :D
Well, no faults that would be dangerous.
Olkiluoto 3 specifically though is basically a glorified prototype and has had many issues with the massive turbines. Last time they said they’ve installed the last spare and had no timeline when the next would arrive, as it’s a unique part for this reactor only with leadtimes in months. If it breaks again, who knows when it will be able to start back up.No more than any other is fine with me.
11 million people to be transported in a day ok syds
