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Young climate activist tells Greenpeace to drop ‘old-fashioned’ anti-nuclear stance
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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The oil and coal lobby is pushing nuclear in markets it's losing - both to slow the transition to renewables with endless debate, and because nuclear takes so damn long to build.
So does hydro, solar and wind energy generation.
Hydro is the better option but requires changes to water supply, solar requires massive fields of empty land, wind generation is loud and disturbs local wildlife while at the same time has the largest fail rate.
Nuclear is the best option. It's the cheapest when considering the energy output, most environmentally friendly, and takes up the least amount of space.
The largest radioactive disaster was misuse of medical equipment.
Average time to build a nuclear plant is 88 months. The high end for solar is 24 months - it's generally a fraction of that. The cost per kwh for solar is also a quarter of the cost of nuclear at worst - and that's factoring the cost of batteries.
Hydro is about the most situational power source their is - making the blanket statement that it's the better option a suspicious one.
Chernobyl would have turned a good portion of Europe into a radioactive wasteland if people hadn't resigned themselves to one of the most unpleasant deaths imaginable. 37 years later, it's still uninhabitable, with no change to that in sight.
Fukushima, which is still being actively cleaned up over a decade later, had the potential to do functionally destroy to Tokyo, displacing over 30 million people while doing untold economic damage.
Quicker to build, cheaper power, less dangerous, less environmental damage, no nuclear waste to manage, no supply chain issues with nuclear material. Last I checked, the US isn't running out of space, so remind me - why would we want nuclear?
Chernobyl disaster was a one off caused by old tech and user error and more people have died from wind turbine accidents than they have due to nuclear reactor accidents.
The cost per kWh for solar is 7 times higher than that of modern nuclear power plants.
You failed to address Fukushima - and wind turbines don't have the potential to render a continent uninhabitable.
Bullshit - solar costs a fraction of nuclear. this isn't a remotely controversial statement.
Roof of chernobyl was literally made out of wood
Fukushima's too? Can you guarantee that things will be better managed in say... The US?
Lost us nuclear weapons - the crumbling silo infrastructure is also well documented. I'm sure that the Department of Energy will be able to afford better controls with it's ~$30bn budget compared with the ~$700bn budget of the Department of Defence. It's not as though the hundreds of nuclear weapons that have been lost nuclear are more dangerous than nuclear generators or anything.
Slower to build, more expensive, needs fuel dug out of the ground, potentially continent-destroying... Why?
Fukushima did not a fundemantel design flaw. Its was literally next to sea. Also renewables can never replace oil if they cant even store excess energy yet lmao
The plant wasn't poorly designed, it just wasn't designed to be where it was and nearly wiped out Tokyo as a consequence? This is an argument in favour of nuclear?
A lot of renewables don't need storage - including geothermal, wind, tidal, salt solar, hydro... But photovoltaics with batteries is still a fraction of the cost of nuclear, takes a fraction of the time to build, is far safer, and is orders of magnitude more relisient against demand spikes.
...so why nuclear?
It's the most environmentally friendly, if you don't consider that it is not renewable and that there are no waste management solutions for the highly radioactive waste.
Nuclear power is exactly as renewable as solar power; and 'highly' radioactive waste is a fraction of a fraction of the waste generated, with most waste being less harmful than living within 50 miles of a coal mine, or 100 miles of a coal power plant. It's also entirely defeated by a relatively small amount of one of the most common metals on Earth. Additionally, if we were to power the entire world with just nuclear power, the amount of unusable waste generated per year globally would be smaller than a compact sedan, requiring a little less than a box-truck sized container to store it safely anywhere on the planet. It would take several tens of billions of years to accumulate to a problematic size for safe storage.
So we build more Nuclear Power Plants, because the highly toxic waste is not "enough" to care? Where are keeping it then?
Literally in any of the hundreds of current underground sites? It's also not highly toxic, it's radioactive. There's a pretty huge difference. Nuclear waste doesn't leech into the water cycle like the run off of broken solar panels or turbine arms.
I am in the EU. There is literally no storage for highly radioactive waste. There has been talk for years that one will be available, but so far... nothing.
That's not true. Nuclear waste can also contaminate ground water, if stored incorrectly. And as we discussed: we have no storage solution for the highly radioactive waste and thus can't store it correctly.
Pay to store it in Finland, like everyone else is doing. They currently have a facility that isn't even a quarter full and can be heavily expanded.
Solar panels can contaminate ground water if stored incorrectly, that's a useless statement.
And as discussed there are thousands of storage facilities available. Just because your specific economic union has not built one yet, does not mean you cannot use one of the commercial ones, and by the way these long-term storage facilities aren't the part that store the waste safely. The containers do, and short of a nuclear bomb going off the waste isn't escaping them. So much so that despite waste existing since the 1960s, there has never been an incident of nuclear waste escaping containment. Ever. Coal spillages have caused more radioactive contamination than nuclear waste.
They don't have storage for highly radioactive waste (as I said), only low to medium radioactive. A high radioactive solution is planned for years, but currently it is still not available.
That's still a strawman argument. Just because I argue against nuclear power, I don't automatically believe that another solution is perfect. Also that doesn't change that the highly nuclear waste has no storage.
We can't use one, because there is none.
Currently Castor Containers are used. They are designed for 40 years of storage. That's nothing compared to the time the waste has to be stored safely.
That's also not true. We even have two new species of alligators because of containment with nuclear waste: Tritagator and Dioxinator
It not being renewable doesn't really matter when talking about its CO2 emissions. And the neat thing is, radioactive waste decays on its own so the "waste management" needed is to bury it somewhere and leave it there. It ain't that complicated.
It's a bit more complicated. Where are you gonna bury it? It has to be somewhere, where normally nobody is. Also you have to keep the waste containers safe (and in one piece) for a very, very long time. How are you gonna mark it that people thousands of years in the future still know that it is dangerous?
There is a giant hole in a mountain specifically for the purpose of waste disposal.