Normally I’m not a “lesser of two evils” type, but nuclear is such an immensely lesser evil compared to coal and oil that it’s insane people are still against it.
Especially when you start counting the number of people that have died either directly or indirectly from coal, oil and every fossil fuel.
If your extrapolate the data into the next hundred years … fossil fuels will have responsible for the deaths of billions.
Compared to nuclear energy … fossil fuels is killing us slowly and will kill us all if we don’t stop using them.
Coal plants gives more radiation through radioactive mercury as a left over from processign
For the love of everything, at least let’s stop decommissioning serviceable nuclear plants.
Looking at you, Germany…
Anti-nuclear people in here arguing about disasters that killed a few k people in 50 years. Also deeply worried about nuclear waste that won’t have an impact on humans for thousands of years, but ignoring climate change is having an impact and might end our way of life as we know it before 2100.
They’re bike-shedding and blocking a major stepping stone to a coal, petrol and gas free future for the sake of idealism.
The biggest enemy of the left is the left
None of them is ignoring climate change, Actually you are more than anyone else since you are promoting an energy source that isn’t green. Many other nuclear accidents happened over the past years but you sound like the kind of person that doesn’t care much about the environment:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accidents_by_country
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste_dumping_by_'Ndrangheta
“Nuclear energy isn’t green” lol. You sound like an anti-vaxxer.
Nuclear is not green https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_energy
You do realise that the article you just shared lists nuclear energy as sustainable, right?
Nuclear power is neither safe nor ecologically sustainable. The waste is immensely toxic for hundreds of thousands of years. The model is centralized so wealthy oligarchs own the power source and sell it to everyone else. Better to move toward distributed power generation that isn’t massively toxic. Greenpeace must stay anti-nuke.
I live less than 2 miles from the last remaining coal power station in England.
I would much rather have nuclear instead of a chimney chucking god knows what into the air (and subsequently into me) for my entire life.
Why go nuclear when renewable is so much cheaper, safer, future proof and less centralised?
Don’t get me wrong. Nuclear is better than coal and gas but it will not safe our way of life.
Just like the electric car is here to preserve the car industry not the planet, nuclear energy is still here to preserve the big energy players, not our environment.
For what I’ve read, it’s beats nuclear tech exists and is ready to be built at scale now. Renewables are intermittent in nature and need energy storage to work at scale. We don’t have the tech for a grid wide energy storage.
If the Great Filter theory is correct, climate change will most likely be our Great Filter.
Our species is simply not equipped with the ability to deal with the problems it created. Many people can, but they’re not powerful to do anything, and there’s too many uneducated people for the masses to rise up about this problem.
We think so short term, it’s impossible for some people to think about the future and accept that we’ll need to change the way we live now so that we can keep living then. They’re hung up on Chernobyl because it was a big bang that killed lots of people at once and it was televised everywhere that has a society and TVs, but they are unable to see that in the long term coal and gas have killed and are still killing way more people than nuclear accidents, because it’s a process that’s continuous and kills people in indirect ways instead of a big blast.
Coal has the same yearly death toll and chernobyl’s total death toll. 80,000.
Holding up coal as a strawman argument in support of Nuclear power is a fallacy. Both are massively toxic in different ways. One does not legitimize the other.
The activist argues nuclear power is a crucial tool against climate change and disagrees with Greenpeace’s concerns about its environmental impact. Greenpeace defends its position, emphasizing the importance of prioritizing renewable alternatives like solar and wind for cutting emissions.
Sounds like young activist has something to learn from these who have been fighting for climate for decades
And what would that lesson be? The people who fought nuclear for decades caused as much damage to the climate as the interim coal companies because that is who supplied the power instead.
And what would that lesson be?
If you are interested go to their website and read what they have to say about nuclear. Climate activists do not advocate for coal and most likely live in such a way that they cause less damage to the climate than the average person, including you.
You skipped over my point. I think the activists let perfection get in the way of progress. I know that they’re not advocating for coal, but by fighting nuclear they left no other scalable solution other than coal. Nuclear doesn’t have to be a forever solution, but it’s a perfect stop gap in the meantime.
Surely these activists contributed to progress on some other, smaller sources of renewable energy, but at the cost of decades of record breaking greenhouse gas emissions.
Nuclear could have put a halt to many if not most coal and natural gas plants until other sources of renewable energy improve and have time to get built out.
A perfect stop gap in the meantime is not a solution. Remember that coal as a piece of rock it’s not a problem, the problem is caused by society relying on burning coal to satisfy its frivolous consumes. The climate crisis is not caused by activists fighting against it. Renewables could have put a halt to polluting energy the same way you claim nuclear would have, with the difference that it would have been even better because nuclear comes with other issues.
Nuclear energy produces the worst toxic waste guaranteed, and can and has a record of leaking a lot of radioactive material.
When wind and solar are ready alternatives it just makes no sense.
Bullshit. Nuclear waste (more precisely, spent fuel that can be reprocessed for new fuel or other useful radionuclids) is the only waste we have actual good solutions for. It’s not an engineering problem, we know very well how to safely dispose of the small amount of ultimate nuclear waste.
All the other waste, including waste from producing new and retiring old solar panels and wind turbines, basically just gets thrown into the landscape with no containment whatsoever. And some of that stuff is toxic, some will never degrade (plastics used in composite materials the wind turbine blades and towers are made of).
Plus, if you only used nuclear energy throughout you life, the amount of ultimate waste can literally fit into a coke can. That’s how efficient and energy dense it is.
What’s this amazing waste disposal method you’re convinced exists? Last I checked, the waste will still be around for at least a millennia and the only process we have to deal with it is bury it in a hole with a sign that says ‘BAD’ in a way we hope future generations can still interpret.
Last you checked? When was that?
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/02/nuclear-waste-us-could-power-the-us-for-100-years.html
“There would still be waste that would have to be disposed, but the amount of long-lived waste can be significantly reduced,” Gehin said.
“Significantly less” is not defined. Is it 80% less? 50? 30? 10? The guy they’re quoting, who has a vested interest in selling us this tech, sure doesn’t say and uses the qualifier ‘can be’. In fact, I can’t seem to find that information anywhere, let alone this article.
Irregardless, there’s still waste that will take hundreds (thousands?) of years to decay. The solution is renewable energy.
You’re obviously not willing to change your mind, so this will be my last response. Googling “breeder reactor” will show you plenty of peer reviewed papers and findings from past experimental reactors that can answer your questions.
Apart from that, the point of the technology is obviously not to replace renewables, it’s to
- Phase out coal and oil as fast as possible.
- Get rid of the nuclear waste we already accumulated (by turning it into energy).
Especially point 2, you are obviously and rightfully worried about nuclear waste - breeder reactors are the solution, the only one we currently know of. What else do you suggest we should do with that waste? Store it for millennia?
It’s not that I’m not willing to change my mind, it’s that I’m hugely suspicious of the recent push for Nuclear. Energy companies dumped massive amounts of money into the technology and want to see a return on those failed investments. So I am skeptical that there’s not some astroturfing and/or disinformation going on.
That said, when I was doing the research, I was looking up Fast Fusion, not Breeder Reactors so I’ll look into it.
Also, your point about using nuclear to phase out of coal and into renewable has merit, but I think there’s a danger that we get stuck on nuclear as it becomes easier/cheaper than coal and so development in green tech, like batteries, languishes for another four decades or whatever.
Anyways, I’ll look into breeder reactors and, who knows, maybe have a change of heart (maybe).
Can’t you chuck it back into a reactor and reuse it that way, to help reduce the radioactivity, and get more power back out of it?
Out of sight out of mind, right? Great solution. Coke can? Ummmmmmmmmmm nope.
Where do you think the discarded blade of wind turbine go? 🤔
Not into underground storage for tens of thousands of years
That’s precisely where they go—landfills. They’re made of non-recyclable glass fiber-plastic composites that won’t degrade for millions of years.
Landfills arent underground, and theyll break down within a millenia. Well the plastic anyway. Then youre left with recyclable glass if it isnt crushed into sand first
Landfills not being underground is even worse (but normally they are buried under soil when they go unused).
While the plastics degrade mechanically, being reduced into small particles, chemically they are not. They just turn into microplastics which I’m sure you’re aware is a huge problem.
With the small amount of ultimate nuclear waste that cannot be reprocessed further, the solution is simple: drill a km deep shaft into the bedrock, place them at the bottom, fill the shaft with rubble and cement. Done. No-one’s going to accidentally dig them up and they pose absolutely no threat to anyone. The finns are doing something like this as we speak.
Not News. Not Reasonable.
