Mr Musk was talking about nuclear power with the former president when he said people have an unfounded fear of nuclear electricity generation. It is the “safest form of electricity generation”, he argued.
“People were asking me in California, are you worried about a nuclear cloud coming from Japan? I am like no, that’s crazy. It is actually, it is not even dangerous in Fukushima. I flew there and ate locally grown vegetables on TV to prove it," he said during the interview on his social media platform X on Monday.
Don’t know about solar but I know nuclear at least used to be statistically safer than wind per MW just due to injuries during construction. Gotta remember, it takes a lot of solar or wind to make the same amount of power as a nuclear plant and that means a lot of construction work. But I also haven’t seeen those stats for a while so it may have changed.
Nuclear is very safe assuming you don’t build the plant in a tsunami prone area which also happens to be practically on top of 4 different fault lines.
It really depends on the location and situation. With the new generations of reactors they can also do things like seawater desalination with the waste heat alongside power production. You also have situations where the nuclear waste heat is used to heat entire communities far more efficiently than could be done with electricity. There are also many places where solar and wind just aren’t practical for various reasons. In those areas nuclear may be a good option for base load power. Nuclear is also still far less environmentally destructive than hydro.
Yes, nuclear power plants are henoiusly expensive and there are definitely areas that they shouldn’t be built, but they do still serve a purpose in certain areas. Most of the flack nuclear gets is just because most of our reactor fleet was built durring the cold war. New technologies can acheive far more with nuclear power far more safely and cost effectively than those old reactors.
Most of the cost is regulatory, and for good reason. I’d like to think that the new small modular reactors will allow us to reduce cost but it’ll take a lot longer than we have available to us.
Even then I don’t imagine it would be easy. Anything in a nuclear plant needs to be built to an extremely exacting standard that I’m pretty sure old coal powerplant components wouldn’t be. I can’t see how you could convert a coal plant into a nuclear plant without having to completely rebuild everything.
The problem with reusing coal turbines isn’t that they couldn’t work, but that you would have to engineer everything backwards from the turbines to the reactor. You COULD do that, but really, you should be engineering to what the current projections for the power needs to be, not the projected power needs from when the coal plant was built.
Maybe reusing the coal plant site makes sense, but only if the coal plant was already taken offline, which to be fair, a lot of plants are being taken offline.
Two things could remove much of the expense and increase safety:
1- remove lawsuits and NIMBYism to overcome. That’s where a lot of the cost and delay comes from when building these, so if millions didn’t have to be spent on lawsuits just to get the goahead to begin construction it’d cut the cost massively.
2- remove profit from the equation. Without profit motive, the incentives that encourage discarding safety in favor of profit go way down.
Here’s the argument. The byline every conservative I’ve talked to falls back on is “there’s no way to recycle the materials and they don’t last that long”. “Where’s my recycling?” “Same with wind turbine blades”.
You start to notice the repetition of the same statements across republicans when you talk to any number of them.
The repetition is a bit creepy, but this is how conservative talk radio works. They are fantastic at mobilizing their peeps and this is part of how they do it.
I don’t know about solar panels but fiberglass wind turbine blades are kinda recyclable. Fiberglass can be ground up and mixed into concrete to vastly improve the strength of that concrete.
Although he is far from a great person and his comparison with Hiroshima and Nagasaki is at best tactless and a downplay of a humanitarian catastrophe caused by the US, he got a point there…
Nuclear energy is by far the cleanest and one of the safest forms of energy generation. We have a problem with the spend fuel, but that is mostly due to the „not in my backyard“-Attitude and outdated informations regarding long term storage. Nuclear radiation is scary but handling it in a responsible way is much safer than perceived. On the other hand, the huge number of respiratory diseases and accompanied deaths are much more diffuse and not directly attributed by the public to fossile fuels. I think „Kurzgesagt“ has a really good video series covering nuclear energy.
It is a little sad that with all the necessary (and important) regulations the building process of a nuclear power plant is really long and public support (at least in Germany) is non existent. It could have covered our butts during the transition from fossile fuels to renewables.
Sensible people: Nuclear power is quite safe, likening it to a nuclear bomb isn’t really a valid comparison.
Elon Musk: Nuclear power is quite safe, not all that different from nuclear bombs, which get a bad rap.
I would love to learn about the mortal danger solar panels put me in
Don’t know about solar but I know nuclear at least used to be statistically safer than wind per MW just due to injuries during construction. Gotta remember, it takes a lot of solar or wind to make the same amount of power as a nuclear plant and that means a lot of construction work. But I also haven’t seeen those stats for a while so it may have changed.
Nuclear is very safe assuming you don’t build the plant in a tsunami prone area which also happens to be practically on top of 4 different fault lines.
I was bullish on nuclear for a while but having looked at how expensive it is to build out I don’t think it really makes much sense anymore
It really depends on the location and situation. With the new generations of reactors they can also do things like seawater desalination with the waste heat alongside power production. You also have situations where the nuclear waste heat is used to heat entire communities far more efficiently than could be done with electricity. There are also many places where solar and wind just aren’t practical for various reasons. In those areas nuclear may be a good option for base load power. Nuclear is also still far less environmentally destructive than hydro.
Yes, nuclear power plants are henoiusly expensive and there are definitely areas that they shouldn’t be built, but they do still serve a purpose in certain areas. Most of the flack nuclear gets is just because most of our reactor fleet was built durring the cold war. New technologies can acheive far more with nuclear power far more safely and cost effectively than those old reactors.
Most of the cost is regulatory, and for good reason. I’d like to think that the new small modular reactors will allow us to reduce cost but it’ll take a lot longer than we have available to us.
What about the conversion of coal fired power plants to nuclear ones? I’ve seen that proposed quite a bit.
Wouldn’t only the turbines and cooling tower be reusable? I thought the hard part was the reactor itself.
Even then I don’t imagine it would be easy. Anything in a nuclear plant needs to be built to an extremely exacting standard that I’m pretty sure old coal powerplant components wouldn’t be. I can’t see how you could convert a coal plant into a nuclear plant without having to completely rebuild everything.
The problem with reusing coal turbines isn’t that they couldn’t work, but that you would have to engineer everything backwards from the turbines to the reactor. You COULD do that, but really, you should be engineering to what the current projections for the power needs to be, not the projected power needs from when the coal plant was built.
Maybe reusing the coal plant site makes sense, but only if the coal plant was already taken offline, which to be fair, a lot of plants are being taken offline.
From the little I know it’s a pipe dream. Just completely different scales.
Two things could remove much of the expense and increase safety:
1- remove lawsuits and NIMBYism to overcome. That’s where a lot of the cost and delay comes from when building these, so if millions didn’t have to be spent on lawsuits just to get the goahead to begin construction it’d cut the cost massively.
2- remove profit from the equation. Without profit motive, the incentives that encourage discarding safety in favor of profit go way down.
Here’s the argument. The byline every conservative I’ve talked to falls back on is “there’s no way to recycle the materials and they don’t last that long”. “Where’s my recycling?” “Same with wind turbine blades”.
You start to notice the repetition of the same statements across republicans when you talk to any number of them.
The repetition is a bit creepy, but this is how conservative talk radio works. They are fantastic at mobilizing their peeps and this is part of how they do it.
Yep. From people who also say recycling is a scam
I don’t know about solar panels but fiberglass wind turbine blades are kinda recyclable. Fiberglass can be ground up and mixed into concrete to vastly improve the strength of that concrete.
Remember, Trump thinks windmills give you cancer.
https://www.factcheck.org/2019/04/trumps-faulty-wind-power-claims/
Although he is far from a great person and his comparison with Hiroshima and Nagasaki is at best tactless and a downplay of a humanitarian catastrophe caused by the US, he got a point there…
Nuclear energy is by far the cleanest and one of the safest forms of energy generation. We have a problem with the spend fuel, but that is mostly due to the „not in my backyard“-Attitude and outdated informations regarding long term storage. Nuclear radiation is scary but handling it in a responsible way is much safer than perceived. On the other hand, the huge number of respiratory diseases and accompanied deaths are much more diffuse and not directly attributed by the public to fossile fuels. I think „Kurzgesagt“ has a really good video series covering nuclear energy.
It is a little sad that with all the necessary (and important) regulations the building process of a nuclear power plant is really long and public support (at least in Germany) is non existent. It could have covered our butts during the transition from fossile fuels to renewables.
404 that clip not found 🤔
Privacy-protecting mirror to that other site
The part that is problematic is lower down on the article:
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed but now they are full cities again," the multibillionaire owner of Tesla, SpaceX and X said.