this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2024
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We really should be using nuclear. I know people are concerned about the longevity of the waste but it's not much different than any other waste like you'd find with mining. There is enough arsenic trioxide at a mine in the NWT to kill everyone on the face of the planet 7x over. It's all underground. Their plan for it? Keep it frozen in perpetuity.
Waste rock dumps from mining can have tremendous amounts of metal that can easily leach out for a very long time given that these dumps are hundreds of millions of tonnes of rock. They are usually covered and left once monitoring indicates they are stable.
There is tons of modelling and engineering that can go into waste mgt. It shouldn't deter us when we are literally staring down the barrel or extinction
All of that is true but there are entire genres of science fiction that people grew up on telling them that nuclear waste is scary green stuff that will do everything from melt your skin off to turn you into the toxic avenger. A major chunk of the population only knows about nuclear waste from that and doesn't care what experts say.
Modern nuclear facilities and storage devices ARE safe but when you bring it up, people will just go "Yeah but Fukushima/Chernobyl, happened, I don't want that to happen in my neighborhood" completely ignoring the fact that the soviet design was flawed from the start, and the Japanese one was located in a Tsumnami zone.
As for other industrial waste, its not visible to the average person so it doesn't exist. We are finally coming to the realization of how pervasive in the environment some of these chemicals are. PFAS/PFOS is basically everywhere, coal fly ash leaks all the time, creosote is essentially on every railroad track, leachate is entering ground water from old land fills, dioxin and mercury so prevalent on the gulf coast that eating the seafood is harmful. But again, none of that is visible. The East Palestine derailment was visible and nothing changed afterwards.
Humanity in general but industrialists in particular destroyed the planet and got paid go do it, then put the bill on the average person when cleanup came.
Nuclear is going to be needed 100% but it is an uphill battle. I hope the battle gets easier and the safety record continues to get better.
I think Frog and silence are right. The amount of time, effort, and money that is required to set up nuclear plants at this point in time has far passed the equivalent in solar or wind projects. Add the fact that the sooner any project is finished, the less CO2 and CH4 is potentially released from nearby coal and gas plants; and since we're already in passing up goals for global warming, the earlier the better.
I diagree, at current tech/time energy storage is the problem with peaky production methods like wong and solar.
You need capacity and quick spinup capacity for when demand occurs off peak production. Nuclear is the only green option with current tech for large scale. Fuel cells would be ideal when powered with electrolyzed h2 created by excess solar generation capacity but the tech isn't there yet and we need something now.
Thermal energy storage and pumped hydro are both viable but spatially problimatic or expensive in the long term. IMO, micro grids with local solar as the source are where we should be going but local storage is an issue even where sun is abundant.