Young climate activist tells Greenpeace to drop ‘old-fashioned’ anti-nuclear stance

https://lemmy.world/post/4133901

Young climate activist tells Greenpeace to drop ‘old-fashioned’ anti-nuclear stance - Lemmy.world

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.

imagine 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?

I 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.

Honestly, 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.
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
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.