Ask the French and Romanians how well Nuclear Fission Power Plants are going for them rn lol
For anyone who didn't see the reports, I believe this is what is being referenced.
Solar power + battery? Or hydropower? That way there won't be, well, nuclear waste at the end? You know, the kind of waste that's highly radioactive? The waste that doesn't have a plan to be safely stored away for tens of thousands of years?
I can see why people have been scared by the waste, but it's really not a concern. There are long term storage solutions, but they just haven't been implemented in many places. Kyle Hill actually just did a video on one the other day.
The waste just isn't a big enough concern to have put the resources into long term storage yet. The radiation level around the casks is so low that you can be around them and hug them without concern. Flying in a plane is more concerning. This argument is mostly fear mongering so we don't phase out dirty energy. We could have thousands of reactors running, but they've made us scared of the solution so we don't replace them.
It's not even the waste, that we still need to learn how to recycle. Or the apparent incapacity of any operator to reliably follow the theoretical safety guidelines...
If we put all our effort into a nuclear boom today, the plants will only arrive a decade or two after the planet has been cooked, it won't be enough to replace anything, and we will have to learn entire new ways to mine the fuel in a few decades before the stuff we can get easily is gone.
Meanwhile we are about half-way done with renewables, and the nuclear fans keep denying that...
I'm a fan of both, but fully accept that fission is now too late to be useful. We also have fusion right on the tipping point of viability. That could likely fill the use cases of fusion quite well, with far less issues.
FYI, nuclear produces 3 sorts of nuclear waste. High activity is nasty, but short lived. Put it in a pool for a few years and it decays away. Low grade is the stuff like lab waste and contaminated pipes. You don't really want it going in normal landfill, but it's not going to kill anyone with radiation (heavy metal toxicity is another matter). It's only the last type, medium activity that is problematic. It lasts a long time, while still putting out enough radiation to cause potential problems. Unfortunately, older "power" plants, were actually bomb factories. They were intended to make plutonium, and so produce a lot more of the medium activity waste than they could.
Forget it, i tried that argument a bunch of times. Also, you are depended on other countries, big plants are an easy target for a drone with some explosives, cost of nuclear is rising while all others are down, etc. People want to believe in a magic, water heating rock
Crazy idea but what if we launch waste into space
Sure, until you oopsie a nuclear waste filled rocket and spread it over half a continent.
Yes, but you need something with turbines to regulate power flow during off-peak. Hydropower can do that in some places, but not everywhere. That's the gap that nuclear should be aiming for (replace coal plants as minimum power regulator)
Coal and nuclear re very bad for regulating power spikes because they are inflexible and can’t be turned on or off very fast. That’s why most country’s build gas as an intermediary power source right now
That's why it's for baseline power. No one is claiming it handles spikes. We have solutions for that though. Solar and wind also obviously don't handle spikes. Many types of batteries do, and they don't care where the power came from.
Rotational energy is actually a pretty good battery, which has no conversion cost with nuclear, since rotational energy is what it produces with the turbine. You spin your flywheel up, and you drain power from it as you need it. Chemical batteries also work, with the conversation cost that all sources pay equally.
Doesn't Sweden or someplace have a giant abandoned salt mine to store a thousand years of nuclear waste somewhere?
Not that I'm in favor of building nuclear anymore, we should've done that in the sixties.
Finland., although many places have looked at old mines for this purpose. It's a fairly obvious solution.
We should be pouring money into fusion instead of datacenters
If we had nuclear fusion, we could produce so much power with so little fuel that it would be economical to literally scrub the atmosphere of carbon dioxide and chemically refine it back into gasoline. You could keep your vroom vrooms and we wouldn’t be facing a dying planet.
But no, everyone thinks it’ll be like The Jetsons when is going to be like every Black Mirror episode combined.
Thanks for the future, assholes
Do you have a moment to talk about our Lord and Savior, Wind and Solar Power?!?
Nuclear is actually promoted by old guard mining and energy oligarchs because it provides a centralised means of control.
The peoples needs can be met with 100% renewables and battery storage. The oligarchies needs can never be met, because they are a malignant cancerous parasite.
This is conspiracy level misinformation. You can't do 100% wind+solar with batteries, many countries have tried and failed. Germany and Denmark are great examples of highly industrialized nations with high population density that has tried to do what you're suggesting, and they've proven that it's a fantasy.
Wtf are you talking about, we have only just started building out renewables
Base load is a myth.
Bullshit. Germany and Denmark's irresponsible energy policies are carried hard by their neighbors.
Germany has tried no such thing lol. Actually there are appliances for gigantic amounts of battery storage because it’s a simple buy low sell high business case that everybody wants to get into.
no dirty emissions
Uhhhh......
*spicy emissions
It all comes down to money. Those currently in power and the wealthy are funded by the institutional oil and coal companies.
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