@notjustbikes@social.notjustbikes.com
Post #1238594
2026-04-14 09:00 UTC
Replies (29)
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@mohs@climatejustice.social 2026-04-14 09:05
@notjustbikes the only honest reason for using nuclear power is the desire to have nuclear weapons.
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@CIMB4@norden.social 2026-04-14 09:06
@notjustbikes oh hey, that was actually my missing link as to why fossil fuel companies promote nuclear! :blobcat:
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@wall0159@aus.social 2026-04-14 09:12
@notjustbikes@social.notjustbikes.com I think the term you’re after is “dispatchable power”, which means production that can rapidly be ramped up or down - eg. Renewables firmed with batteries, or some types of fast response gas turbine. “Base load” is a vestige of the old coal power stations, which need to output approximately constant power, so we had to find ways of flattening consumption, eg by incentivising night time consumption.
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@jamesh@aus.social 2026-04-14 09:13
@notjustbikes@social.notjustbikes.com The main centre-right political party was pushing nuclear power at the last election. So it also has some support as a culture war issue. Both of the major parties accept large donations from the mining and resource extraction industries, so it is not just a fossil fuel thing.
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@isotopp@infosec.exchange 2026-04-14 09:18
@notjustbikes@social.notjustbikes.com Fossil fuel companies love promoting nuclear power because ... They also abhor the idea of a decentralized grid, with local production, maybe even in the hands of the people who consume the power, because it threatens the structure of the current grid, with few well known producers and a lot of distributed consumers. There is a tiny piece of truth in this, as a grid that also accommodates a lot of distributed producers requires a lot more digital control and modernization, and it also requires a somewhat different structure in cabling and power distribution, but on the other hand such a structure will be a lot more flexible and resilient, too. Financially, some large scale fossil power producers (RWE in Germany, for example) are partially state owned and profits from them are being used to pay for state pensions or finance other parts of repeating state payments. These parts of the state resist ANY kind of change with an almost unsurmountable stubbornness, and these kinds of dependencies are also badly documented.
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@a2b2c2@todon.eu 2026-04-14 09:18
@notjustbikes@social.notjustbikes.com Yea, the liberals were trying to push for nuclear SMRs last election, but they lost **hard**, but there was such a massive misinformation push, it just failed because... the liberals are such a mess I suppose.
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@stefanlindbohm@mastodon.social 2026-04-14 09:19
@notjustbikes@social.notjustbikes.com This worked flawlessly in the last election in Sweden 4 years ago. The winning coalition bet EVERYTHING on this narrative and it did seem to be part of them winning the election. 4 years later the main outcome of this is almost all renewable projects have been cancelled due to the market uncertainty that was created. Election coming up in September and they seem to bring back the favorite from last time, let’s see if it works twice. Polls indicate no.
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@isotopp@infosec.exchange 2026-04-14 09:22
@notjustbikes@social.notjustbikes.com Solar on suburban homes is a funny thing. At the latitude of Amsterdam, it can lead to demand evaporation for 7-8 months of the year if the home has a sufficiently sized battery. The solar from a typical suburban home can carry 10-15 kWp of solar, leading to 7-11 MWh production per year in east/west configuration and 13-16 MWh production in a south facing ideal deployment. There is a 1:10 production difference between January and June, though, so the household likely needs to buy power Nov-Feb, but will likely break even or almost break even in Mar, and not consume any power from the grid in April to September, and begin to load from the grid lightly on October. Heating with a heat pump will have them but 3-4 MWh during winter. (Numbers based on our 75 kWh/(year and qm) home, and our demand, but they seem to be applicable on a more general scale, too). For power producers this means they have to supply power to homes like ours only for winter. Fortunately wind + battery can actually do that without CO2.
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@krejgo@mojos.eco 2026-04-14 09:27
@notjustbikes@social.notjustbikes.com there's a lot of nuclear FUD in Australia... and far too many people are swallowing it without question
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@thehole@dasforum.org 2026-04-14 09:31
@notjustbikes@social.notjustbikes.com isn't one big downside of nuclear energy that the tractors are inert/lazy to react to the load?
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@The_Sun@solarcene.community 2026-04-14 09:37
@notjustbikes@social.notjustbikes.com Lots of nuclear trolls/shrills. Not all of them are real people. Here in Australia, we have lots of mainly uncontrolled rooftop solar. The sun shines and The commercial solar farms get pushed out. The constant on "baseload" coal plants lose money with negative prices. They have started to learn to dance. Like the UK coal plants. Ramping their output up and down. But they have their limits. No longer baseload.
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@sortius@infosec.exchange 2026-04-14 09:45
@notjustbikes@social.notjustbikes.com that was literally what the conservative (Liberal & National Party coalition) opposition pulled at the last election here in Australia: Cancel renewables. Start up a nuclear program (despite multiple failed attempts). Throw money at gas and coal. They didn't win the election
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@kravietz@agora.echelon.pl 2026-04-14 09:46
@notjustbikes@social.notjustbikes.com It took 4.5 years to build one of the recent nuclear power plants in China and if we buy all our PV & inverters from them they clearly must know what they’re doing, don’t they?
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@DrorBedrack@mastodon.social 2026-04-14 09:51
@notjustbikes@social.notjustbikes.com My theory us that it's smart, liberal, pro-science, pro-enviornment. But they grew up in the 70s-80s, when nuclear was the "cool" solution to oil. They are intelligent and educated people, but their information is out of date.
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@lionelb@expressional.social 2026-04-14 09:52
@notjustbikes@social.notjustbikes.com There seems to be a widespread desire to forget that there is such a thing as a battery.
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@Disputatore@masto.pt 2026-04-14 09:57
@notjustbikes@social.notjustbikes.com I'm not an electrical engineer, but it seems to me that the concept of base load is useful because, at least for now, we don't have enough yearly renewal production to cover the consumption needs. But we also need better ways of using excess production. Two of them are storage and hydrogen production. It would probably make businesses sense for renewable power plants to invest in plugging storage or hydrogen production solutions to their operations.
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@stufromoz@aus.social 2026-04-14 09:57
@notjustbikes@social.notjustbikes.com the right wing of Australian politics (indeed to some extent, all of it bar the Greens) is captured by the mining industry, and coal and gas companies especially. The former govt was fixated on delaying the roll out of renewables as much as possible (and also trying to get enthusiasm up for nuclear power plants, despite the obvious cost barriers to developing our own nuclear energy system) - they loved to toss the “renewables can’t do base load “ line around as if it was obvious to everyone, while everyone with a brain was going “it doesn’t work like that!” Back at them… so yes, I’m not surprised by the references to base load linking back to us. We used to be almost totally coal dependent for electricity generation, and now the biggest source is probably rooftop solar . Times change
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@AuntyRed@aus.social 2026-04-14 09:59
@notjustbikes@social.notjustbikes.com as far as I can tell, a lot of the "fossil fuel companies" are really just mining companies, and they suspect they can pivot to uranium mining far easier than adaptating to a low mined commodity world
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@bencourtice@aus.social 2026-04-14 10:06
@notjustbikes@social.notjustbikes.com I worked as a campaigner for more renewable energy circa 2011-2013 and you're right. it is something that Australian fossil fuel supporters liked to rave about (and may still do). They mostly talk pro-nuclear, but that is never going to be built here (and the smarter ones, the puppetmasters, actually know that). It's in reality part of a delaying tactic, so they can sell & burn as much coal and gas as possible for as long as possible before renewables win out.
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@Sweetshark@social.tchncs.de 2026-04-14 10:06
@notjustbikes@social.notjustbikes.com Its not so much renewables, they already lost that battle -- its the coming battery boom that threatens to stabilize the cost of electric production below where fossils can compete.
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@mpjgregoire@cosocial.ca 2026-04-14 10:13
@notjustbikes@social.notjustbikes.com I know this isn't very helpful, but I was first exposed to the idea that Ontario nuclear capacity is important because of "base load" watching #TVO's The Agenda about 15 years ago. I don't recall the details though.
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@hembrow@todon.eu 2026-04-14 10:27
@notjustbikes@social.notjustbikes.com Yes, definitely fossil fuel propaganda. I hear any amount of anti-solar, anti-wind, pro-nuclear, pro-fossil propaganda all the time from right wing politicians, but anyone who paying attention sees that renewables actually do work. That's why our total energy bill last year was €120 (including taxes, connection fees etc.) because solar panels, heat pump, insulation... Meanwhile, the nuclear power station that I protested against in the 1980s (Hinkley C in Somerset, UK) still isn't running. It was cancelled at least once (not due to protests, but because then PM Margaret Thatcher could see it was obviously not economical), then deacds ago the proposal came out of retirement and they started building again. Let's talk about intermittency: my solar panel installation began decades after Hinkley C and they've operated for a decade and a half, but Hinkley Point C has yet to produce a single kWh of electricity. Let's talk about cost: The bill merely for construction of Hinkley C has risen to a whopping €18000 per kW output, which is a far cry from the ~€500 per kW that you pay retail for a solar installation. And that doesn't even include the uranium that they need to import from Russia to run the thing - while the sun costs nothing. At this point, nuclear just looks absurd.
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@adamarmfield@mastodon.green 2026-04-14 10:31
@notjustbikes@social.notjustbikes.com orsted are building 2 offshore farms in the UK, they will generate about 2.5gw between them, which is the same amount as hinkley C (massively overbudget nuclear station which is also being built)
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@scroeser@kolektiva.social 2026-04-14 10:42
@notjustbikes@social.notjustbikes.com I see a lot of Australians have jumped in here, and I think it's worth mentioning the huge amount of money that Advance Australia (linked to the Atlas Network) is pumping into politics here: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-26/atlas-network-mont-pelerin-society-neoliberal-think-tanks/105700628 [Edit] Oh, maybe this link is better for looking specifically at fossil fuel propaganda being spread by Advance: https://theklaxon.com.au/advance-spread-fossil-fuels-lies-before-federal-election-study/
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@Weirdaholic@snowmans.land 2026-04-14 10:47
@notjustbikes@social.notjustbikes.com same with Fusion reactors. They would rather make us wait for some magic solution that solves all the problems instead of letting us do what is possible now.
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@Ormur@mellified.men 2026-04-14 10:52
@notjustbikes@social.notjustbikes.com I used to be very into the idea of nuclear in addition to renewables and I still think shutting down plants before renewables came in was unwise but since then I've come to assume the economics of solar and prospective battery advances have made the construction of new nuclear power plants unneccesary. I imagine the case for gas as a stop-gap would be stronger.
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@billiglarper@rollenspiel.social 2026-04-14 11:48
@notjustbikes@social.notjustbikes.com Thanks. ❤️ I hope at least some folks will listen. But there seem to be some folks who don't want renewables to work, and eagerly soaking up any justification of that worldview they can get their hands on.
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@Techaltar@mas.to 2026-04-14 12:22
@notjustbikes@social.notjustbikes.com Yeah it's like conservative politicians advocating for maglev trains. It allows them to simultaneously pretend to suppor transit while knowing full well that the specific transit they "support" has no chance of succeeding so they know the actual outcome is just more cars
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@mossman@social.vivaldi.net 2026-04-14 12:23
@notjustbikes@social.notjustbikes.com thank you - and yes, I have also had stupid online arguments about this with stupid people who were either blowhards or must have connections to the oil/nuclear industries. Base load *was* a thing, but not any more. Now it's about smoothing the variable sustainable load with batteries, pumped storage etc.