Solar Power Is Becoming The World's Cheapest Energy

[Bofferbrauer2]

haqqaton said:

I don't know much about this (energy sources) but the Pandora's Promise documentary says that nuclear energy is by far the cheapest and the most efficient energy source. Besides, it's the source that have less impact on environment.

By the way, they address the point of nuclear toxic wast and - if it's true - we're being desinformed all along. Again, according to them the toxic waste is incredible minimal.

Yes and no

Most Nuclear reactors where build before the Tchernobyl disaster and are based on 60' Technology (Gen II Reactors). Even those build after 1986 are mostly the same old reactors with some slight upgrades(Gen II+/++). That's because they are cheap both in construction and production, but their safety records are not exactly great. The fact that their lifespan keeps getting extended long beyond their design limit also makes them cheaper, but again even more risky.

More modern designs, created after Three Mile and Tchernobyl massively improved on the safety and eliminated most critical design flaws (Gen III). If Fukushima would have been such a Reactor, there wouldn't have been a Meltdown, the reactor would have performed a controlled shutdown all by itself. Their problem: They are very expensive to build and require very specialized materials. Just check how many years the EPR reactors have been delayed because of material problems: Olkiluoto 3 in Finland was expected to go online in 2009 and is right now projected to do so in 2018, Flamanville 3 was expected for 2011 and ist now probably not going online before 2019. These delays cost their operators billions, and operating them is also much more costly than the old pre Tchernobyl designs. Thus basically all upgrades to these new designs are meant for cost reduction, but in construction and operation (Gen III+)

As for the toxic waste, it depends on which kind of reactor the waste comes from. A reactor using uranium 235 doesn't produce much waste, as most of it gets consumed during the runtime of the Uranium's consuption already, as their half-life is mostly pretty short, and those with longer half-lifes are mostly just weakly radioactive. Waste from breeder reactors which are used to produce plutonium are a different kind however, as it is highly toxic and radioactive. Plutonium in general is actually a strong poison (heavy metal poisoning), and as an alpha emitter higly carcinogenic. But the worst are Thorium reactors, as the Uranium 232, which gets produced as by-product, produces highly radioactive isotopes during it's decay cycle, so much that Thorium reactos must have remote handling to not outright kill the operators. However, there are only a handful of Thorium reactors right now, limiting this problem a bit.

The main problem with the nuclear waste is however where to stock them. They will outlive any human made installation, can radiate ground water if stored underground unproperly and must be tightly secured as they can be used to build a dirty bomb. But it's most critical problem is that nobody wants to have a nuclear waste storage nearby, with nearby basically meaning within a 50 miles radius. All this severly limits the options on where to store them until their final decay.

Nuclear power has the least impact on nature, but when disaster stikes it makes whole regions uninhabitable for decades if not centuries or even millenia. Also, cooling water can be a problem if it gets pumped into a river or lake. While cooling water is strictly non-radioactive, it heats up the water, sometimes to the point of killing the fishes as hot water retains less gasses and thus not enough oxygen for them to breathe.