A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
If it hasn't been already said: the issue is public perception. If you ask any American in the street what they relate to nuclear power the majority will tell you: Chorynobyl. Even though anyone that's looked up anything knows that technology is leaps ahead of that disaster, that's the fear mongering that everyone jumps to.
The half life of fall-out from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs was a couple of decades.
The half life of nuclear waste from powerplants is anywhere from thousands of years to millions of years, depending on the mix of isotopes.
So. When I was in my junior year of college, the dorm I lived in was built more like a high occupancy apartment rather than a college dorm room, it had a living room and a kitchenette. No built-in stove but we were allowed to have a hot plate, so I went to K-Mart and bought a double burner one.
For some reason, one of my roommates had a cereal bowl that was in the shape of a saucepan. It was made of plastic, but it was black and had a handle. One day I walk into the apartment to an ungodly chemical smell and exactly the image above.
Yup meltdowns happen sometimes. AND there’s the century-long legacy of radioactive waste!
Oh joy, I get to bust out these bad boys again! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aUODXeAM-k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhHHbgIy9jU
There's also that one guy who touched the hot part and is now using that tiny blister to conduct a decades-long smear campaign against the kinds of pots used at Three Mile Island.
I agree. We should deal with nuclear waste in the same way we handle the waste from other fossil fuels: by spreading it over the entire planet in a thin, even coating so that everyone is equally affected!
Back in middle school, our science teacher decided to make the class do a debate about different types of energy sources in order to learn about their advantages and disadvantages. I was on the pro-nuclear team, and we were wracking our brains trying to come up with a rebuttal to "but what about the waste?" until some madlad basically came up with this great argument:
We can just dump all of the nuclear waste on Belgium. It will take a really long time before it fills up, and nobody cares about Belgium anyway
The anti-nuclear team had no good response, and we actually got a point for that argument because we looked up the relevant statistics (nuclear waste output, belgium surface area, etc.) and calculated exactly how long it would take to turn belgium into a radioactive wasteland.
There's a really simple answer to the waste problem though. And it's super, blatantly obvious.
All nuclear material is basically ground up rocks that we dug out of a hole and then filtered the spicy bits out of. So grind it back up, pour it into concrete and stuff it back down the same hole it came from. Of course, you can't legally do that, but that's only because we have a ton of rules what constitutes safe disposal, etc. Recreating the original conditions basically meant you're (re)creating something unsafe, but we do that in a LOT of places.
EDIT: For example there are regions in Belgium and the Netherlands where there is so much naturally occuring arsenic in the ground, that if you scoop a bucket full of dirt, walk 50 meters across the provincial border and put pour it out, you're comitting (at least) three different crimes. That's legally valid, after all, the bucket contains polluted material, but practically nonsense since you literally just picked it up, and it's been like that long before people ever got there.
century-long legacy
At least millenia, might be epochs (million years) ...
Though if Chernobyl is any indication in a few decades nature works its way around it.
Luckily waste storage is a solved problem.
Drill hole in bedrock, put waste in hole, backfill with clay.
Drill hole in bedrock, nuclear waste falls into the void and despawns, problem solved
How’d you get a photo of my stove top from tonight?
And that pot looks iron!
Most of our power generations comes from "make water hot, hot water boils into steam, steam spins magnet"
Nuclear power is just a different source of heat.
to be fair ; its both.
It is not the top one in the typical usage of the word "nuclear energy." Sure, it is nuclear energy, but that normally refers to electrical infrastructure, not nuclear weapons. Nuclear electricity is pretty much always just heating water up in a safe and controlled manner, and using that to spin a turbine.
Water is last year’s news. Helium is the new water now.