this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2024
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If you hate nuclear energy because you think it's dangerous or polluting, that is as dumb as choosing to drive instead of taking the train for the same reasons.
Nuclear energy is one of the methods of generating electricity with the smallest environmental impact and also much, much safer than the alternatives. The number of nuclear accidents can be counted on one hand, while the number of people who have died from cancer from coal power plants is conservatively estimated to be in the millions.
Nuclear has its advantages, but there is hardly anything as cheap and maintenance free as solar+batteries. Anyone can set it up, and it just runs all by itself for years and years.
In Europe, the price for electricity on the spot market regularly goes in the negative. Jep, you can get paid money to consume electricity because it's so abundant.
Look at France, their new NPP is taking 12 years and 12 billion euros more than planned. Is it really worth all that financial and environmental risk building something poisonous and explodey that needs constant attention?
The number of kille people by coal is orders of magnitude higher over the same period (lets say 60 years) per GW generated.
Any other arguments?
Uranium is a heavy metal and of course its poisonous. Just like lead, but radioactive. Why aren't we using uranium glassware or uranium paint anymore if it's supposedly not poisonous?
When was the last time a solar farm or a wind park had a catastrophic accident leading to large parts of land being uninhabitable for decades, even centuries?
Of course they are explodey. It's a fission reaction that has to be constantly modulated and cooled to not go critical.
The other argument is the cost of properly storing waste and decommissioning the plant, which is often conviently ignored. Not much of a NPP can be recycled, unlike solar.
Wait, so you think nuclear reactors spew out uranium?
While coal powerplants don't spew out radioactive coal ash??
Lets just say only one of these is true... and it is not the former.
They are not explodey, because they are by design not. The non RBMK (i.e. not cheap Russian, lied-about-safety-by-government) reactors are designed to literally cool off without any power or control, if all went to shit. You can try with all your expertise to make it explode, and short of rebuilding it you will fail. Even if you were to add explosives. At that point, just making your own nuclear bomb is cheaper and faster.
I think it is quite optimistic to think they will even recycle 5% of a solar powerplant. The silicon is not useful, hard to dismantle from metal. Additives make it unusable without special centrifuge processes. Take the easy metals, scrap the rest, use easy, cheap raw materials for controlled process. Most of the NPP can be recycled if you cared, apart from the irradiated reactor, which is a very tiny part of it. It's all wires, steel and other useful electric constructions. Nobody cares to recycle concrete.
I wont talk about storing waste, because I dont know why it is marketed as prohibitively expensive. Apart from it just being lead lined barrels in say an empty mineshaft (which there are an exceptional volume of everywhere). Literally enough space for forever, no need to put anything in the air.
Didn't say that. But I also don't think that it magically appears in the plant.
Please stop this whataboutism.
Not true. Making concrete creates huge amounts of CO2 during production. Sand is becoming a valuable resource. Recycling concrete for aggregate absolutely is a thing, but that's a different topic.
Convenient. Then I will because I'm not finished. You have to ensure containment of the barrels for decades, if not centuries. The mine has to be in geologically inactive area, and you have to be certain that no ground water will seep into the mine in the foreseeable future. We don't want ground water in the mine, its cold and wet and seeps through everywhere.
And you have to figure out how to keep idiots from breaking into the mine in 150 years and using spent rods to heat their homes. If you think that's far fetched I encourage you to read about the Goiânia accident , one of the world's worst nuclear disasters. Some kids found the radioactive source of an abandoned xray machine while playing around.
It's not whataboutism: https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-wastes-coal-fired-power-plants
You said yourself that concrete is not recycled, and it is upcycled only for aggregate, can use any rocks for that. Nobody is converting cement to cement clinker.
Keep idiots from breaking in to the mine that has "radioactive" signs is quite far fetched. You dont just accidentally stumble on an opened mineshaft and accidentally have keys to the lift to go down 100m.
It's worse than stumbling into a mine. Look up RTGs. They're nuclear batteries that have half lives of ~90 years that the USSR loved to sprinkle all over the woods when they couldn't be assed to maintain their own infrastructure for more than a few years. They were largely abandoned during the collapse, but hunters and scavengers still find these things and even drag them back to the village from time to time. Kills a few dumb villagers pretty bad every time it happens. There are more than 1000 of these things still out there, mostly unaccounted, and very few if any even have warning signs, let alone high security like a fence.
Look up NASA's versions of RTGs. Just because Russia did everything wrong doesn't make a technology bad, just mishandled.
There is talk about lifting the restrictions on fuel recycling, so that problem (which isn't as big an issue as folks make it out to be) has the potential to be solved.