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Nuclear waste is a manageable problem and we shouldn't be afraid to embrace the technology when we can just do the job right
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We will never actually do it right, though. So expect the worst possible case in any nuclear energy project
Shot. Chaser.
Seriously. We don't even maintain our bridges. You want me to trust a nuclear reactor is gonna be properly taken care of when everything really hits the fan?
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Germany shut down their nuclear power plants and replaced them with coal because increasing climate change and pumping radioactive smog into the atmosphere is apparently safer than keeping nuclear waste in storage.
the germans weren't keeping it in storage they were labelling it as fertiliser and selling it to African farmers. Which might well be the most outrageously evil thing they could have done about it
https://www.jstor.org/stable/45130934
I might have misremembered it
Good video, although I've got big suspicions about this private company with boring technology for storing nuclear casks. Where else have I heard about a fishy boring company that has stated goals that don't actually pan out in reality the way they state..?
Nevertheless, nuclear over fossil fuels 100% of the time.
Yeahhhhhh I'm a bit skeptical of this capitalist solution. This bit is making me more doubtful of this guy.
I think that idea might have more legs because it's taking already mature technologies (oil drilling) and repurposing them whereas :melon-musk: is totally full of shit. Still warrants skepticism tho.
Nuclear is safe, but it won't be useful for one reason: no major changes to "prevent" climate change are going to take place until it's way, way too late, and the time to get a new facility built and running is long enough that they won't be online until it's way, way, WAY too late.
It sure would have been a great solution back in the 70s when we conclusively determined climate change was real though!
Nuclear is so popular right now I’m kinda a skeptic I just think we can do it so much better with wind and solar and they wouldn’t have the drawbacks nuclear does. It’s been super popular to minimize the deaths/accidents caused by nuclear, but it’s not just two accidents and they book isn’t closed on how many we will see. Big fan of the ashes ashes podcast on nuclear energy if anyone wants to learn more about the drawbacks of nuclear energy.
there are major drawbacks inherant to wind/solar as they can't be produced on demand
Also the sheer scale of solar panels and wind turbines needed would be enormous
There are major drawbacks to fossil fuels, nuclear, and renewables. As for producing energy on demand, ever heard of a battery?
battery technology struggles to scale that well.
Also very few people have died from nuclear incidents relative to any other means of producing power
Weird blanket statement to make, batteries are used in all kinds of things currently. The scale of batteries is already massive. The power system as it is was designed with fossil fuel in mind, so we can't just replace fossil fuel with batteries and call it a day, but that's no reason to not use it where we can. If we only used fossil fuel for the things renewable can't do than we'd extend our time having a planet long enough to make better renewable tech.
there are size issues with batteries and amount of energy that can be stored. These things do not scale in a linear manner and there are hard physical limits on what is actually possible
so? read the last part of my previous comment. we may not be able to do with renewable exactly what we are currently doing with fossil fuels but that doesn't mean we can't convert our system to one that can.
hospitals for example require a constant stream of energy that cannot be interupted there are many such important systems that for reasons to do with human lives cannot be stopped and started depending on how sunny/windy it is. The requirements for these alone outstip battery technologies ability to handle
Also far more people die per watt for fossil fuels than nuclear energy. by a very significant factor
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
I'm willing to have FF / nuclear power for things like hospitals if it really is not possible to ever power them renewably. that doesn't make renewable sources invalid.
I was never saying we shouldn't do everything we can on renewables I was just saying that as they alone aren't enough of the options available nuclear is the clear frontrunner by a wide margin.
renewable energy is important but it's not enough on it's own
All of this stuff is really a stepping stone right now to the holy grail that is fusion, even if that doesn't work near term we can always do solar reflector to microwave Satalites. Creating ev panels and wind turbine blades are not environmentally friendly by any means, I don't think nuclear is super safe for the record, but we are in a rock and a hard place.
I’m not convinced that panels or wind blades are environmentally unfriendly. Fossil fuels and nuclear have way more environmentally unfriendly infrastructures so that point kinda feels weird to single out.
Aren't solar panels incredibly toxic to manufacture and made of heavy metals & I thought wind turbines killed tons of birds and raised local ground temps and increased soil erosion. Not saying green energy is bad, but it is most definitely not zero impact. People comment on the impact because it is so frequently ignored in larger discourse like the only reason switching to 100% solar & wind isn't done is cost.
Are solar panels toxic? I looked it up, and it seems most aren't, and some have a small amount of lead/cadmium but the most common type is non-toxic. And do wind blades kill birds? I looked it up and it seems like powerlines kill x60 more birds than wind blades (30 million to 500,000) from the numbers I found. I'm willing to listen if you got better info that I do.
And what is capitalism and the american govt doing about FF and nuclear waste? Not the radioactive materials but all the equipment and facilities needed for those power sources? If you've got information on the waste byproducts are different energy sources I'd love to see it.
I don't have any power. I don't think the people in power are motivated by concern for the environmental impact of ALL energy sources.
I remember hearing a claim that there is more energy stored in the fissile material in coal ash than was extracted by actually burning the coal.
It was from this talk:
https://youtu.be/YVSmf_qmkbg?t=8145
specifically talking about Canadian tar sands.
my biggest reservation with nuclear power is not day-to-day maintenance (which granted, can still be fucked up), but is warfare. In the event of warfare, core meltdowns and containment-breaches could be caused by air strikes and artillery fire, right?
they have emergency shutdown systems and are housed in lead lined sturdy facilities to my knowledge
the only reason Chernobyl happened was bc they disabled the normal safety stuff and the emergency shutdown was a flawed system that actually increased criticality for a split second before cooling down
Nuclear power plants are, by necessity, basically just giant bunkers with a reactor buried somewhere within. In a war the only reason to attack one would be typical shock-and-awe tactics to take down electrical grids, in which case it'd be easier to just blow up the substations connected to the plant instead. The only way you'd kick off a Chernobyl would be if you very intentionally decided to do so with some pretty serious ordinance, at which point you'd be the insane motherfucker who just poisoned half a continent for no good reason which might just be overt enough to convince even Americans to toss a few molotovs through your window on general principle.
Modern reactors are designed to take direct hits by an airbus 380 and keep functioning as normal.
