Nuclear is the best btw.
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The biggest issue is that people don’t understand that the shit that will kill you Chornobyl dead burns itself out relatively fast. Sushi grade polonium is only spicy for a couple of weeks.
The “it’s radioactive for zillions of years” stuff is typically a heavy metal hazard far more than a radiation hazard.
If it’s decaying for a zillion years a gram might be popping off a few sextillion gamma rays a second, insignificant.
Jimmy Carter, by shutting down the reprocessing industry, fucked the whole thing sideways.
Nuclear waste sounds scary because you can point to it. Fossil fuel waste is just everywhere, quietly speedrunning the atmosphere.
They watched shit on you tube like the scrappers that found the strontium 90 sources in Georgia and used them for warmth.
There’s no amount of it’s not the same that will make them unsee it
As a Geologist the idea that there are seismically inactive magic rocks that will sit there and not change shape or be affected by anything for eternity and that we can assume placing radioactive waste in them will be fine for an indefinite amount of time is honestly hilarious.
I understand your point. But also, not really the point. I’d rather have barrels of waste that I can point to, then to pump it into the air for everyone to breath.
The barrels are very much in our face, we need to pay attention to them. The air… well that’s someone else’s problem…
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You don’t need it for an eternity, though. Just the half-life of the waste product. Also, you can just dig a hole away from any major fault lines and you’ll be reasonably safe for an indefinite period. The plan to put nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain was about as good as anything we’ve come up with, give or take the need to win Senate races and Presidential ECs in a pivotal swing state.
You don’t need it for an eternity, though. Just the half-life of the waste product.
???
You don’t know what half life means, lol.
Also, you can just dig a hole away from any major fault lines and you’ll be reasonably safe for an indefinite period.
Are you a geologist? How can you say that confidently?
Look at it from a risk assessment standpoint.
The barrels will be made.
You can put them in the deep ocean in the Marianas trench, they will degrade immediately and leak quickly. they will be diluted enough to make the leakage relatively safe. most of the upper foot chain doesn’t get to eat those creatures down there. But bad optics and enivonmentally unreasonable.
You can surface warehouse them. They can be regulary check for leaks, but can be struck by terrorists, meteors, airplanes, capitalism. Still bad optics.
You can bury them outright. can’t check for leaks, they might make it into the water table. bad for animals which might enter the food chain.
You can put them inside a tunnel/vault. You can, until there is an event (and maybe afterward) check for them for leaks. move them to somewhere else, maybe even use them for other things if you find ways to do that.
Nothing is indefinite. But of all the places we can put them, a maintainable underground vault is less likely to get fucked then we as human are at fucking them up.
The only reason the landscape is a static unchanging thing to you is because you haven’t been taught that nothing could be further from the truth by a healthy culture, there is no easy place to put these barrels, most people who aren’t Geologists prescribe most of the Earth’s surface to being a passive background that things happen to and in not a character itself that acts sometimes over great lengths of time and sometimes over shockingly small lengths of time.
That is what people who aren’t Geologists really have a hard time understanding who aren’t leftists or haven’t been raised with Indigenous culture, the landscape is a verb not a noun and this idea there are caverns underground that will be forgotten by the movement above and rest safe for eternity is a fantastical way of thinking of the Earth System. It is a devastatingly incomplete way of seeing the world that sets up future generations to be screwed over by our hubris and lack of understanding of the dynamics we live within.
I am not entirely against Nuclear Power, but I refuse to have people explain to me Geologic lengths of times and contexts who have spent no amount of practical time actually learning how landscapes even far from active fault lines can change radically over time.
Solar/wind are best. Nuclear has serious practical issues (slow to spin up and down, thus requiring either fossil fuels or batteries) and financial issues (the return on investment just doesn’t beat renewables and the batteries they need anymore). It’s also extremely slow to build nuclear so by the time you’re splitting atoms renewables and batteries will be even better.
Nuclear has one major benefit though, it’s a peaceful means to maintain the capacity for nuclear second strikes. Countries like France can’t completely abandon it without leaving themselves vulnerable in a way that Ukraine has learned isn’t wise.
But nuclear compared to fossil fuel? Yeah split those atoms.
Countries like France can’t completely abandon it without leaving themselves vulnerable in a way that Ukraine has learned isn’t wise.
The “Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons” line always neglects to include how the weapons were under the authority of the military of the USSR. Not the Ukrainian local militia.
It’s akin to saying “Fidel Castro shouldn’t have surrendered nukes for Cuba”. They weren’t his to surrender. They were Khrushchev’s. And he traded the missiles in Cuba to get American missiles out of Turkiye, which moved us away from nuclear war over the long run and benefited civilization universally.
France’s nuclear program is owned and operated by the national government. This is comparatively not true of the UK and Germany, whose nukes are owned and operated by the US. And given the history of France, Germany, and Russia, I would argue that Germany posses the bigger historical military threat than Russia every did. With the rising popularity of the AfD in Germany, this threat may become existential far sooner than anyone in Europe wants to admit.
But nuclear compared to fossil fuel? Yeah split those atoms.
What’s crazy about nuclear power relative to coal power is how much we’ve invested in optimizing the latter since the 1980s relative to the former. Fourth and fifth generation nuclear reactors don’t exist outside of France and China in the modern day. Meanwhile, the juice coal plants can squeeze out of tree-fossils and tree-fossil farts is truly remarkable.
Nuclear should be the obvious alternative, but we’ve let the science atrophy for decades. That’s why countries across the Pacific continue to build new coal plants at a rapid clip, while nuclear new-start construction languishes.
I’ve always wandered that instead of trying to spin down or spin up reactors based on demand, if we could scale the demand instead.
Like when power Usage is low dump all that energy into massive desalination plant or CO2 reclamation machine or something
Nuclear isn’t the best anymore. Batteries, solar and wind are cheaper and take way less time to build
Nuclear isn’t the best anymore.
By $/kwh, green energy is some of the most efficient on the plant. By $/sqft, nothing tops nuclear. That’s why we’re not throwing sails and solar panels up on aircraft carriers.
Transitioning from bunker fuel to nuclear batteries on commercial ships would be a huge improvement to the global fleet. That’s something we can’t expect solar/wind to match.
Don’t forget, that they produce immediately useable energy. No heat loss, due to steam turbines.
And then there is the timespan that nuclear waste stays harmful. OPs “indestructable” container have to stay indestructable for millions of years.
If we assume 40 years as a generation, that will be 50,000 generations. The whole history of mankind is only 400 generations.
have to stay indestructable for millions of years.
If we assume 40 years as a generation, that will be 50,000 generations. The whole history of mankind is only 400 generations.
Talk about pulling numbers out of your ass…
And then there is the timespan that nuclear waste stays harmful. OPs “indestructable” container have to stay indestructable for millions of years.
More like between 30 and 1000 years. Still a long time but you’re being pretty hyperbolic suggesting millions.
Nuclear would be the best if any of the new projects ever came online ever. Solar is winning so hard by being cheapest and fastest, and its not close.
Solar is better in every way
But no boil water spinny thing?!
I’m quite pro nuclear, I think the mass decomissioning of nuclear plants that’s been happening in Europe is the wrong move. But this is an incredibly reductive and dishonest meme.
I’m not pro nuclear but I agree that decommissioning existing nuclear plants to replace them with coal+gas is ridiculous. Totally backwards.
Solar+storage>nuclear>hydrocarbons
First replace the hydrocarbons, then you can think about replacing nuclear.
I thought that it was just a Germany thing. Where else does this happen?
Solar and storage for the win(d)!
FEBREEZE
It’s spelled BREATHE
Breath is what you TAKE Breathe is what you DO
Another tor’s cabinet of curiosities watcher, I see!
Breath is what you TAKE
If you’re The Police.
indestructible
Yeah, I think I’ve heard that claim before. It seems like every time that claim was made something came along to prove it wrong.
Indestructible cask underground is for cowards. In the US we don’t have a long term storage site, so we just ship it around to different temporary sites.
There is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution
As far as I am aware there is no final storage for atomic waste anywhere. France wants to build one in 2030 but we’ll see then I guess.
2 just from tom scott
https://youtu.be/aoy_WJ3mE50
https://youtu.be/PB7HT3BZLzMAccording to Wikipedia the first site goes live somewhen this year running for 70 years and the second one was a major groundwater breach that has been cleaned up and is being monitored.
I’d hardly call these success stories. I love nuclear but it’s hard to sugarcoat the long standing issues.
Yeah, but at least everyone else has long term storage solutions even if it’s not permanent. The US just has short term storage where you can only keep it for a number of years before having to shuffle it to a different short term storage facility via train or semi truck.
The US highway system, the ideal nuclear waste storage site
Huh. We don’t either in Germany, but I assumed, it was largely because the whole place is inhabitated. Is there not some desert or Alaska or something in the US, where no one minds?
We actually have a perfect place for it in the yucca mountains that was designated in the 1980s, but the actual construction of it has been held up since then thanks to nimby shit.
I would love to see the US head towards nuclear power, but I’m not hopeful it’s ever going to happen. By design the federal government just doesn’t have the power to mandate a state to do anything it doesn’t want too, and a functional electric grid powered by nuclear would require more federal control than what is possible in the foreseeable future.
Our government was designed to grant corporations and the aristocratic class to be able to exert a huge amount of influence over the government. They have decided that it’s a lot more profitable to not progress past fossil fuels.
Well, nuclear power, at least for now, is quite expensive. As long as no new technological breakthrough comes along, it’s simply cheaper to use wind and solar as main power producers. Of course, this has its own problem in the form of power storage, but at least we already have the technology for this.
Power storage is only half of it. Most grids transmit AC power, and in order for that you need SOMETHING in the grid that provides a stable frequency aka a stable prime moves whose speed is unaffected by changes in load. That can be provided by fossil fuel plants, nuclear plants, or hydropower (as long as shifting climate patterns continue to keep reservoirs full).
Wind turbines don’t have a consistent enough prime mover (the wind, so unreliable that it’s a metaphor for constant, rapid change). Solar panels supply DC power, so another option is figuring out long range DC power transmission, which is what China is doing I believe. It’s an incredibly costly and resources intensive solution though.
Power generation is more complicated than just making something spin. You have to consider loading, reactive load, what to do with excess power during off peak hours, balancing load between multiple power sources. Unfortunately, solving the climate crisis is going to take more than “just build renewable sources”.
It also doesn’t help that our infrastructure is out of date due to refusing upgrades because they included green sources (Trump preventing off hore wind farms, for example, also prevents infrastructure upgrades) and/or NIMBYism.
Source: I work in nuclear power.
I didn’t want to trivialize the problems with switching to greener alternatives; I just wanted to say that we don’t need some ‘future tech’ to get it done. All we need is what is already known and implemented somewhere in the world.
Also building more nuclear facilities - without any groundbreaking new improvements - is more expensive than the alternative.
Still better than coal
At least we can trust the fossil fuel industries storage place.
A warehouse in the Ohio River valley’s flood zone?
Oh well when you put it like that I suppose we should just ignore all issues with another type of energy. Surely this will not come back to bite us in the ass like fossil fuels have.
Every Nuclear plant one builds is an inexcapable burden for future generations. Every Nuclear plant is built on the assumption the nation in which it stands will be stable forever and no malicious act will be done unto it. It is built with the assumption all eventualities have been considered.
Once it is built it demands to be considered for all future events - war, change of government, pandemics, etc. And while catastrophes are rare on nuclear plants, they do happen and when one happens it is magnitudes worse than other power-generating systems.
While we are long past the days of Chernobyl and 3-mile-island, we cannot pretend like nuclear energy is some sort of panacea for all our ills. Especially not when we live under capitalism, where capitalists are the ones that would evaluate when, where, why and how plants should be built and driven.
Doing so is pure idealism.“So you love gasoline???” no dude, that’s a completely different sentence.
3-mile island where the safety systems worked and anxiety caused more health issues than the accident
