China is emerging as a fierce competitor to the US in the race to build small modular reactors and fusion that can help power data centers.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/51898350

https://archive.is/WW6ji

Their fusion and fission work is very impressive,” the Microsoft Corp. co-founder said of China’s nuclear innovation efforts. The country is investing more in fusion “than the rest of the world put together, times two

  • solo@slrpnk.net
    2·
    8 hours ago

    The lifecycle emissions of nuclear plants are similar to (…)

    The link you provided talks about something more specific than what you just said. It’s about the Life Cycle Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Electricity Generation. This means that the decommissioning of a nuclear plant for example is not taken into account for these emissions, and it is well known that decommissioning a nuclear power station can easily take several decades (example from world nuclear news)

    Nuclear waste is not and has never been a real problem.

    The links I added above about France tell another story.

    Edit: I looked a bit more into decommissioning and found the following from the International Atomic Energy Agency, and thought of sharing for easier visualisation

    • turdas@suppo.fi
      1·
      7 hours ago

      The link you provided talks about something more specific than what you just said. It’s about the Life Cycle Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Electricity Generation. This means that the decommissioning of a nuclear plant for example is not taken into account for these emissions

      No it doesn’t. And yes, it does account for the decommissioning costs of everything on the chart. See table 1 on page 3, column “One-Time Downstream”.

      The links I added above about France tell another story.

      The first link you posted says that a solution is already in the works, and would you look at that, they’re doing exactly what I said should be done: building an underground storage facility.

      On the other hand, Greenpeace’s idiotic and anti-scientific stance on nuclear is nothing new, and their activism on that front is quite possibly funded by the fossil fuel industry (they do not disclose their donors) like that of many other anti-nuclear groups. Some of the other work Greenpeace does is OK, but you would do well to not trust anything they say on nuclear.

      • solo@slrpnk.net
        1·
        4 hours ago

        • If I got this right, from in table 1, p3 one could get to the conclusion that to decommission photovoltaics creates 7 times more CO2 (more precisely g CO2e/kWh), than decommissionning a nuclear plant for decades, as shown above. It made me wonder how they arrived to these measurements. But the link to the study for the nuclear is dead (see Heath, Garvin A., and Margaret K. Mann. 2012). So this cannot be verified.

        • Having a solution in the works, is very different from what you said, which was: Nuclear waste is not and has never been a real problem.

        Bye-bye now

        • turdas@suppo.fi
          1·
          4 hours ago

          Nuclear is incredibly energy dense and reactors have a very long lifespan, so it makes sense that decommissioning it would be cheaper than solar panels. For example the 1.6 GW reactor in Finland has an operational lifespan of at least 60 years, whereas solar panels currently last 20-30 years. Given that they last half the time and that a 1.6 GW solar installation would be absolutely massive (something like 40 km²), it stands to reason that solar would create more CO2e/kWh to decommission.