sv1sjpYoung climate activist tells Greenpeace to drop ‘old-fashioned’ anti-nuclear stance
Good!
Anti-nuclear is like anti-GMO and anti-vax: pure ignorance, and fear of that which they don’t understand.
Nuclear power is the ONLY form of clean energy that can be scaled up in time to save us from the worst of climate change.
We’ve had the cure for climate change all along, but fear that we’d do another Chernobyl has scared us away from it.
originaluciferimagine how much farther ahead we would be in safety and efficiency if it was made priority 50 years ago.
we still have whole swathes of people who think that because its not perfect now, it cant be perfected ever.
So uh, turns out the energy companies are not exactly the most moral and rule abiding entities, and they love to pay off politicians and cut corners. How does one prevent that, as in the case of fission it has rather dire consequences?
DojanI mean it’s not the companies operating the facilities we put our trust in, but the outside regulators whose job it is to ensure these facilities are safe and meet a certain standard. As well as the engineers and scientists that design these systems.
Nuclear power isn’t 100% safe or risk-free, but it’s hella effective and leaps and bounds better than fossil fuels. We can embrace nuclearm renewables and fossil free methods, or just continue burning the world.
Don’t push nuclear power like it’s the only option though.
Where I live we entirely provide energy from hydro power plants and nuclear energy is banned. We use no fossil fuels. We have a 35 year plan for future growth and it doesn’t include any fossil fuels. Nuclear power is just one of the options and it has many hurdles to implement, maintain and decommission.
AstrealixHonestly, if you can, hydro is brilliant. Not many places can though — both because of geography and politics. Nuclear is better than a lot of the alternatives and shouldn’t be discounted.
Wind, solar, etc.
Which each have their drawbacks. Just as an example, though not representative of the majority, what do you do about months of no sun in the Arctic Circle for solar power? There is no single solution to this problem. Nuclear is better than fossil fuels by far, and we should not just throw it away out of fear.
Arctic Circle already uses wind?
Not fear, reality: en.wikipedia.org/…/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident…
And yet nuclear has killed less than even wind. Obviously death is not the only factor, which is why it should be a combination of both.
Again, it’s just an example. There are loads of situations where solar and wind just don’t work — and they are both inconsistent, without battery technology nearly good enough to work on the order of days for an entire national grid, which could be potentially needed in the event of a storm.
Nuclear waste is a problem, but one which is much more easily contained and much less dangerous than the CO2 that’s constantly being spewed into our air.
And what do YOU know about radioactive waste disposal?
Launch it into the sun or Florida
Launching radioactive waste into space is a terrible idea, because rockets on occasion crash. Once that happens it becomes a nuclear disaster.
Instead we can safely store it in depleted mines.
Mines fill up with water if they’re not constantly pumped out. Even the salt mines which seemed like a solution were found to have this issue
Big hole in the side of mountain in a desert, stick the waste in, full it with rubble and concrete, job done. If some primatives in a hundred thousand years stumble across it and dig it out, fuck em, who cares.
Dig a hole, anywhere, now leave. What will the hole eventually fill up with?
The pyramids have chambers that were unopened for over four thousand years, bone dry inside. Pick an area with very little rainfall, surround it with rock and the problem will stop existing on human timescales.
Dig a hole, anywhere, there’s a chance it’ll fill with water. Especially with climate change. We’re seeing moisture getting dropped in areas at greater frequencies that didn’t happen decades ago. There’s no guarantee you can dig a hole anywhere on earth that wouldn’t become apart of our aquifers as the water travels back to the ocean.
There is no guarantee of anything.
But if you’re storing it hundreds of miles from the ocean, the risk is minimal.
It isn’t really minimal since the water cycle on earth is all connected.
Water in the ocean evaporates. It’s carries inland by Hadley cells that deposit the moisture inland. It gets dumped on the highest points which all run back the ocean and creating all our aquifers along the way.
But you’re suggesting we bury toxic material that remains toxic for hundreds or thousands of years somewhere remote that would just be high up in that water cycle. In places where private companies would be out of the eyes of watchdog groups
that would just be high up in that water cycle. In places where private companies would be out of the eyes of watchdog groups
That is not what I am suggesting.
Sealing a deep narrow borehole isn’t a difficult problem. The Earth has contained oil and gas underground for millions of years.
Its contained it using geological features but once exposed how is it possible to recreate that. Its also not like this material is goo
The hole would be 0.5m wide and >1000m deep, backfilled with bentonite clay and concrete. At the bottom, the path curves back upward, so waste is not stored at the bottom.
Even if geology doesn’t collapse the hole, it’s hard to imagine material climbing up through 1000m of clogged pipe.
I know it’s a damn lot easier than carbon recapture, if we’re talking waste products. It’s not ideal, but there is no such thing as perfect, and we shouldn’t let that be the enemy of good. Nuclear fission power is part of a large group of methods to help us switch off fossil fuels.
“Easier”? Are you aware of the fact that radioactive waste tombs are meant to stand for millions of years? It requres a lot of territory, construction and servance charges, and lots of prays for nothing destructive happens with it in its “infinite” lifetime.
Have you tried capturing gas? As difficult as radioactive waste tombs are, they’re easier than containing a specific type of air lol.
Read about breathing if you want to know how to capture gas. Also, about photosynthesis.
If you want to buy the land to plant a second Amazon, be my guest. And breathing does the exact opposite of what we want.
I’d rather fill land with trees than with radioactive wastes.
You need a lot, lot more trees. Like several orders of magnitude. And growing trees takes longer than even building a nuclear power plant.
To be specific, growing the types of trees we would want for such a thing in such an amount that it would deal with the problems we have, assuming we stop growth of CO2 and assuming we stop burning the Amazon, would take around a hundred years.
nationalgeographic.com/…/how-to-erase-100-years-c…
“It could take more than a hundred years to add enough mature forest to get sufficient levels of carbon reduction. Meanwhile 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) from burning fossil fuels are being added to the atmosphere every year, said Glen Peters, research director at Norway’s Center for International Climate Research.”
And need an area the size of the United States. I wasn’t joking about a second Amazon.
I’d rather this as well, but we don’t have that many choices. The slower we act and the more we let perfect be the enemy of good, the more people die.
We can bury it in the ground and it will literally turn into lead. How are you doing with carbon emissions? Got a fix?
I think it’s photosynthesis. ‘Bury in the ground’ is an extreme simplification btw.
Also, I am finished with this topic scince long anough. It feels extremely politically biased. If you’d like to reply, I’d hear it gladly. But I m not going to be involved into a discussion.
My country, Sweden, also gets a decent chunk of power from hydro. Back in 2021, about 43% was hydroelectric, and 31% was nuclear.
Why do you think they’re pushing it for a reason? Renewables are very much a great option without the nuclear power. I hate that they’re here, but the nuclear activists are definitely here. 3 words, Fukushima, Fukushima, Fukushima.
The push for nuclear power across social media is 100% an industry sanctioned psyop.
It’s so stupid too, Fukushima just released their contaminated water from over 10 years ago into the ocean last week. Do they not read the news? At least wait until disaster news from actual nuclear power plant disasters aren’t fresh in everyone’s minds.
BuelldozerThe push for nuclear power across social media is 100% an industry sanctioned psyop.
Oh please, I’ve been advocating for nuclear power since before most people even owned a dial up modem. You younger ones see everything through a haze of recency bias.
How many 9.1 magnitude earthquakes do you think there are? And the reports following the disaster showed that there were definitely ways to prevent it from happening, like, for example, not building it so close to the sea.
And do you think other countries would make smarter and wiser decisions? Dude.
I mean, if we want to go down that path, there’s no reason to think that governments won’t just stick to fossil fuels and fuck us all.
Even so, it took a literal once-in-a-century earthquake in the right place to send a tsunami to the perfectly misplaced reactor to actually make just one person die. One. And two died from the aforementioned massive tsunami caused by an earthquake that occurs around once a century.
I watched that in real time, more than one person died and it ruined a whole region that they’re just now sort of recovering from. It was devastating to them. You’re not even making any sense.
The deaths came from the, again, once-in-a-century earthquake. Evacuations, yes. Deaths, no.
“Nobody died as a direct result of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. However, in 2018 one worker in charge of measuring radiation at the plant died of lung cancer caused by radiation exposure.” — Encyclopedia Britannica. (www.britannica.com/event/Fukushima-accident)
Fukushima accident | Summary, Date, Effects, & Facts | Britannica
Fukushima accident, disaster that occurred in 2011 at the Fukushima Daiichi (‘Number One’) nuclear power plant on the Pacific coast of northern Japan, which was caused by a severe earthquake and powerful series of tsunami waves and was the second worst nuclear power accident in history.
Wow, that article is not helping your case, lol.
"Oh we had to evacuate a region because a nuclear disaster, people died because of these measures but it's not like nuclear energy is bad because of it" - this point
The nuclear power plant decades older than Chernobyl that got hit by an earthquake and a tsunami and resulted in a only single death and some expensive clean up?
You know there’s a crapload more reactors than Fukukishima, right? Like over 70% of France’s energy demands are met with nuclear power.
The issue here is that you are parroting the devisive argument that investors in oil have been putting out for decades. You are also ignoring the harm that outputting millions of tonnes of carbon-based effluent has on the world’s population as a whole.
Gram for gram nuclear is safer and your horror stories should be discounted. Retort:
2023 Marco Pol…Sweden, Karlsh…22 October 2023Lennard en z’n …United Kingdo…26 March 20232023 Princess …Philippines, Pol…28 February 20232022 Keystone …United States, …7 December 2022
Cool, keep on with your ‘nuclear bad’ narrative. It does objectively less harm than carbon-based energy.
It would be cool to see huge investments into battery storage. If we could create a battery that doesn’t just leak energy from storing, we could generate power in one location and ship it out where it’s needed. Or we could generate a ton of power all at once, store it and use it as needed rather having to have on demand energy production
It would be cool to see huge investments into battery storage.
Globally humanity already invests over 10 Billion dollars per year in advancing battery technology.
If we could create a battery that doesn’t just leak energy from storing…
In order to build what you are talking about will almost certainly require real room temperature super conductors. We can get close, maybe, with the next generation of Aluminum-Air or Iron-Air batteries but this is big pimping. It’s incredibly complicated and difficult.
It’s like Fusion Power. We can see a future we’re we have it figured out but it’s still some years, if not decades, away.
We could just use energy to fill a big hole with water and put plastic wrap over top until we need to get the energy back then we pump it through a dam.
Then profit.
Problem solved
Semi-Hemi-DemigodIt’s like Fusion Power. We can see a future where we have it figured out and working but it’s still some years, if not decades, away.
Allow me to share the most frustrating graph I have ever seen
Moving batteries seems like a terribly inefficient way of replacing power lines.
Power lines would still mean we need energy on demand though wouldn’t it. And if we can transport energy from an area like a huge solar array in the Sahara to Kazakhstan or China it would be better. I was just raising it as an off thought like maybe theres more ways to think about solving this problem than just building plants. What level of storage ability could we have that would let us build a large solar array in the Sahara to power Africa and Europe vs just building more plants. I think our end goal will be energy storage and like you brought up transport/transmission. I think that because I think we have energy production pretty well solved
Kind of an unconventional battery, but I’ve heard of solar and wind being used to pump water uphill into reservoirs and then released through a hydro plant when the sun/wind aren’t shining/blowing. I’d be curious to know the amount of production lost from storing it this way.
I heard the loss comes from evaporation. Another cool idea I heard was using a mining cart. So its not practical but I think the idea is cook because I’m pretty science illiterate but it got me thinking about what a party actually is. So you drag a mine cart up a hill with energy produced using renewable energy and then let it go down the hill and collect the stored energy with its motion. Technically there isn’t anything like evaporation so you could store the mine cart up the hill with no energy loss.
Interesting. Didn’t consider the evaporation. I imagine friction could effect the minecarts, but no idea to what degree. Some loss is gonna happen so matter what. If I’m understanding correctly, even nuclear, built away from population centers, will lose some power due to transmission distances.
renewables
We don’t have to put all our eggs in one basket, but we should definitely avoid the basket that is literally setting fire to our planet right now.
We needs a permanent national nuclear waste disposal site now, before the spent nuclear fuel stored in 35 states becomes unsafe
scientificamerican.com/…/nuclear-waste-is-piling-…
Well, vote to make it happen then? I don’t care about the U.S.; I’m not American.