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 energy produces waste that burdens present and virtually all future generations. There is no operating repository anywhere in the world. And even if there were, the question of the risks to future generations will always be one that, from today's perspective, can only be answered in a projection-based manner. Positing that the issues of final disposal and long-term safety for the next one million years have been technically solved is thus insufficient. (https://www.base.bund.de/SharedDocs/Kurzmeldungen/BASE/EN/2021/1109-brussels-nuclear-energy-is-not-green.html)
Completely valid point, but I think it's important to talk about the amount of waste produced compared to other methods and how the comparably negligible amounts are manageable until we decide to clean it or "fire it off at the sun" or whatever.
It isn't even close to comparable for the amount of environmental impact coal or plastic has had.
I mean, comparing that to coal isn't a very impressive feat. Nuclear power is very expensive, fission material is limited and sourced from dodgy countries, storage is difficult etc. The emissions are the only good thing about it. There are good alternatives to that. I guess using the existing ones until they need to be decommissioned is still a good idea though.
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?
Batteries scale horribly and are extremely toxic themselves.
SOME parts of Europe are cheap some are expensive and are subject to bad price spikes.
The reality is we need everything. More solar/wind is great! But we also need secure stable baseline generation that works. Nothing comes close to nuclear.
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.
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.