“Will solar panels be as available as they are today”

Already installed solar obviously has zero dependency on China. In the steady state you need to replace around 3% per year to keep up with panel degradation, but a dependable solar grid has significant excess production so you have wiggle room to build up domestic manufacturing. And you can ramp up alternatives like wind.

Nuclear has more significant systemic risks, which are less obvious. Over half of Frances’s Nuclear powerplants are currently offline for deferred maintenance. If they where nearly as dependent on Nuclear as often reported they would be having real trouble right now.

> Already installed solar obviously has zero dependency on China

> Over half of Frances’s Nuclear powerplants are currently offline for deferred maintenance

There is more. Nuclear power requires continual availability of skilled technicians and engineers, replacement parts that need advanced manufacturing, water and other material, access to road and infrastructure.

And a stable socioeconomical and political and legal system. And military defense.

For some developed countries it can already difficult to provide all these things with 100% reliability. Today, before the bigger impact of climate change.

And what about the remaining 50% of human population? Do you see South American, African and middle-eastern countries being able to run nuclear plants?

And they do, what about plutonium and nuclear proliferation?

> And what about the remaining 50% of human population? Do you see South American, African and middle-eastern countries being able to run nuclear plants?

This is hard to read charitably. It seems like a racist remark, not least because there are nuclear power plants in South America, Africa, and the Middle East. Maybe you aren't racist yourself, but you presume nuclear power proponents to be racist? The ends justify the means, so you can play into the racial biases of those you oppose?

I don't like this.

> seems like a racist remark

It is the very opposite. I'm stating that the global south is being exploited and denied access to technology (and more).

If anything, it is racist to NOT acknowledge the problems that the global south is facing.

Besides, I clearly wrote "countries" obviously referring to the political entities, not the population.

> Maybe you aren't racist yourself, but you presume nuclear power proponents to be racist?

Now you flipped 180?

> The ends justify the means, so you can play into the racial biases of those you oppose?

What does this even mean?

Suggetsing countries like Afghanistan that have had difficulty maintaining basic infrastructure would have more difficulty safely maintaining more difficult infrastructure like nuclear power plants seems reasonable.

There is nothing racist about suggesting South Africa which is the only Africa country with nuclear power might have better odds than Sudan. Similarly Brazil has safely operated nuclear power plants for decades, but nuclear has faced real logistical issues in South America.

> Do you see South American, African and middle-eastern countries being able to run nuclear plants?

South American here. We do have a couple of nuclear plants, and they run fine.

If Bulgaria and Ukraine can run their nuclear plants, why not Brazil or Argentina?

Ukraine has a poor history of running nuclear power plants.

They recently had one suffer a large scale military attack and are of course managing the aftermath of Chernobyl.

The sad part is that the power grid is exceptional vulnerable to military operations and the single most vulnerable source that caused the loss of more lives than any other energy source during war is hydro power. A single hydroelectric dam has the potential energy of multiple nuclear bombs just waiting for a single fuse to go off, and as demonstrated during the second world war, even a mostly failed attempt to set it off can cause a massive amount of death and destruction.

Attacking hydroelectric dams during war is a major war crime for a big and deadly reason.

If WWII is anything to go by, Dams are a surprisingly difficult target.

Operation Chastise cost 53 RAF killed, 3 captured, and the loss of 8 aircraft. Net result 2 hydroelectric dams destroyed, several damaged, and ~1,600 civilian casualties. And it was only that successful do to high water levels at the dams in question.

The difficulty back then was mostly caused by the technology of the day when targeting was done by hand and sight, and where the pilot flew the plane by looking out from a window and using eye sight and memory to figure out where they were.

Those technical issues of bomber planes are long gone, but the vulnerability of damns are just as they were 80 years ago. A bunker buster would go through the concrete as a knife through butter, and the targeting would be done with laser precision. The navigation and execution would today be done by computers.

A cruise missile and a lancaster has very little in shared technology, and depending on definition isn't even in the same category. The construction of a 1940 hydroelectric damn and a hydroelectric damn in 2022 is basically indistinguishable. Concrete holding up water is concrete holding up water.

The technical issues are still significant because you need to detonate underwater next to the dam making current smart bombs useless. Individual, Bunker busters fail because the hole is too small, it’s easy to patch and doesn't let enough water out to be destructive. Multiple bunker busters used together can work, but it’s still challenging.

If look at the actual dams from WWII you notice they all got damaged about half way up and only blew out a section of the dam. This is because thickness increases dramatically with depth and bombs only have so much energy. They needed the pressure of a dam at near maximum capacity to work, which is why several other dams services just fine.

While I agree there would be issues to solve, bombs like the massive ordnance penetrator seem like it could do some damage with its 30,000-pound load (the dam busters used 9,000-pound loads).

But even if we went with the same 80 year old designs of bombs as in world war 2, the biggest challenges with Operation Chastise has been solved today by the user of precision-guided munition, drones and cruise missiles. The pilots of Operation Chastise had a major challenge flying so low, with such a heavy payload, with a very narrow target window, using technology that was neither precise nor easy to use. They could also not avoid flak from anti-air, and the explosion from the bomb was a major threat to the plane forcing the pilot to balance their own and crewmen life with that of the mission. Misty weather also prevented one plane from even find their target. It was a very risky mission.

The issue with current penetrators is they aren't designed for the mission. Reusing old designs but now with better guidance systems is really designing a new weapon system based on older principles which means a full R&D cycle and hoping people haven't built defenses for such an old approach.

There are three basic angles of attack, from the front, top, and water. Anything that comes in from the front or top and then detonates has a large hole to let energy back out without damaging the structure. The same issue also applies to a water entry with current perpetrators as these things are designed for high speed impacts which creates a large void behind the bomb.

Ideally you want something that lands in exactly the right spot and then slowly sinks to the right depth. And of course no netting to be around the dam to make the mission that much more difficult. Which gets back to my previous point, it’s clearly possible, just technically difficult.

Sure, there have been these two incidents. But whats the real argument here? Do these indicents mean that Ukraine has an intolerably poor track record? I don’t see how it does—especially since one occurred when Ukraine was part of the USSR, which was actually the nation operating the plant, and the other was caused by a neighbor’s aggression.

And the actual point here was about Latin America. Ukraine was just an example. Is it really so implausible to think that, for example, Brazil and Argentina could not safely operate nuclear plants?

The point is if you want to consider how successful a major infrastructure project then you should base things on similar countries. Brazil has multiple nuclear reactors though South America has very few.

If the history of nuclear incidents should tell us anything it’s the importantance of understanding failure modes. To use a Brazil example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goiânia_accident

Massive complex infrastructure projects in poor countries often fail to finish or suffer from substandard construction etc.

The Chernobyl explosion happened during Soviet times, 6 years before Ukrainian independence. So I wouldn't blame Ukraine as such for it.

The fact that an aggressor chose Ukrainian nuclear plant as a target and impromptu military dump isn't Ukrainian fault either. This could have happened to Finland or Sweden, too, in case of a Soviet/Russian attack. (Neither country was under NATO's protective umbrella.)

Actually attacking it is on Russia. However, placing troups inside the nuclear power station is on Ukraine. It’s for similar reasons that you don't station troups inside a school, which apparently Ruissa has been doing.

Because if they do some other country up north might get skittish and stage a coup or a little war.

Russia and its allies are major providers of uranium. This impacts even the US: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/exclusive-us-utiliti...

Kazakhstan is the main uranium provider of France.

What do you think about the reliability of the global supply chain for uranium ore and fuel rod production? Canada has some high-grade ore but the United States and Europe don't seem to have much at all.

Canada is fine with me. Finer than China.

You can also stockpile rods easier than, say, gas. They don't take up as much space, given how energy dense they are.

Having a three year strategic reserve is thinkable, not so much with other means of electricity production.

The strategic reserve of sunlight and wind isn't susceptible to disruption due to war or economic collapse. It does take some work to collect that energy, i.e. a domestic PV and turbine and battery manufacturing capacity, but these are not consumables like oil, gas, coal or uranium - they're durable goods that should last for years to decades, and which can be recycled.

Manufacturing of PVs and batteries on a large enough scale (and that means much larger, at least volume- and weight-wise, than a fleet of SMRs) needs enormous amounts of minerals that are produced in either unstable or potentially hostile regions. The sheer energy density of uranium cannot really be downplayed here.

PV’s require minimal rare materials because the part that makes power is only ~1/5000th of a meter thick. It works out to around 80 gigawatt hours per cubic meter and most of that material is silicon. By comparison a nuclear powerplant goes through around 240 kg of uranium to generate that much power.

The casing on the other hand can be made from an extremely wide range of materials. And of course long term you can recycle PV panels because they arn’t consuming the material.

> It works out to around 80 gigawatt hours per cubic meter and most of that material is silicon. By comparison a nuclear powerplant goes through around 240 kg of uranium to generate that much power.

Well, one cubic meter of uranium is ~19000 kg, so not sure what your point was.

The point was Silicon isn't rare, it’s 28% of earths crust.

If ~99.5% of the 1 cubic meter is silicon then, the rare bits assuming uranium density are ~95kg which is less than 240kg of uranium.

There is a gorilla in this room: the more we obtain uranium (prospecting, mining, milling...), the more we add to the associated carbon footprint.

Known reserves or uranium may provide for the current reactor fleet at best for the upcoming 200 years.

Therefore a sustained growth of installed nuclear capacity will lead us to exploit mines at always lowering ore grades => more emissions.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2051332

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222817608_Life_cycl...

And how much raw material needs to be mined and processed to manufacture those rare minerals that generate the power?

Have you accounted for the recycling of uranium? Only a minuscule amount of the energy in fission material goes to generate power and what is left can be recycled over and over again until it is fully "spent".

Exact numbers depend on panel technology, but if you really want to get into the recycling argument stuff that isn’t consumed to generate power is obviously a net win over nuclear fuel. Reprocessing doesn't let you create energy from nothing while solar does let you create energy from material inside the sun.

In term of mining, look at all the material needed to construct and maintain a nuclear powerplant. A significant portion of why nuclear is so expensive is all the stuff needed to build and maintain one.

There is not a single industrial adequate recycling reactor, after 70 years of intensive R&D. Can you name one?