Nuclear reactors are built with a lifespan measured in decades, not centuries, so investing in them when there are decades of economically viable fuel left is reasonable. I couldn’t find your 40 year number (I saw 230) but either way, it shouldn’t be a problem.
It will be a problem at some point, but not so that we should avoid it now.
I mean I guess if it is indeed 40-70 years… We’re looking at 5-10 years for all the planning and the permits… At the current construction timeframes we see in other countries, it’s another 15 years to build the thing. So if we decide to build nuclear power plants right now, it’s some 20-30 years until they start producing energy. And you’re certainly right, we need to look at the long-term picture in centuries, but also measure in decades. For reference, a nuclear power plant is good for about 40-50 years. On the upside, uranium ore isn’t the main cost of nuclear power. Even if it’s 3x or 5x as expensive as today, that’ll only make electricity like 1-2ct more expensive. But the downside is, we only have a few decades left until we definitely need to put in more effort, so that additional effort is going to cut into environmental impact, price and everything. And it also means another transitioning period of 20-30 years because we need energy in the next few years, and building them is slow. That’s then going to be fueled by yet more coal. Which isn’t great either.
I think everything has it’s time. But it doesn’t look to me like nuclear fission is the energy source of the future. At least not for Germany with our situation as is. It’d just be transitioning from one mid-term sustainable solution to another mid-term sustainable solution and spending money and more carbon dioxide to make it happen. But in the mid to long term, we need some kind of proper solution anyway. Something that’s cheap and doesn’t require constant digging up of finite resources. And by now we got the opportunity to go straight for that.
Nuclear reactors are built with a lifespan measured in decades, not centuries, so investing in them when there are decades of economically viable fuel left is reasonable. I couldn’t find your 40 year number (I saw 230) but either way, it shouldn’t be a problem.
It will be a problem at some point, but not so that we should avoid it now.
That’s the numbers the German government came up with. But I keep reading roughly the same estimates in other publications as well: https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/509082/5594603c3ecf27933ad76d31faf89c27/uran-als-kernbrennstoff-data.pdf (Edit: Seems that document is 20 years old 😳 I should probably dig for a more recent estimate. I believe we learned somewhat recently how there’s more uranium in Australia(?) than we thought?!))
I mean I guess if it is indeed 40-70 years… We’re looking at 5-10 years for all the planning and the permits… At the current construction timeframes we see in other countries, it’s another 15 years to build the thing. So if we decide to build nuclear power plants right now, it’s some 20-30 years until they start producing energy. And you’re certainly right, we need to look at the long-term picture in centuries, but also measure in decades. For reference, a nuclear power plant is good for about 40-50 years. On the upside, uranium ore isn’t the main cost of nuclear power. Even if it’s 3x or 5x as expensive as today, that’ll only make electricity like 1-2ct more expensive. But the downside is, we only have a few decades left until we definitely need to put in more effort, so that additional effort is going to cut into environmental impact, price and everything. And it also means another transitioning period of 20-30 years because we need energy in the next few years, and building them is slow. That’s then going to be fueled by yet more coal. Which isn’t great either.
I think everything has it’s time. But it doesn’t look to me like nuclear fission is the energy source of the future. At least not for Germany with our situation as is. It’d just be transitioning from one mid-term sustainable solution to another mid-term sustainable solution and spending money and more carbon dioxide to make it happen. But in the mid to long term, we need some kind of proper solution anyway. Something that’s cheap and doesn’t require constant digging up of finite resources. And by now we got the opportunity to go straight for that.