@cabbagebeets @notjustbikes I’d be happy to *eat* all of the nuclear fuel spent to generate the power I personally use in a year. People really have no concept of how energy-dense it is. This is an aerial photo of the storage for Maine Yankee Nuclear Power Plant, a plant which operated from 1972-1997, rated at 860 MW, with a lifetime capacity factor of 68.2% (so it generated ~586 MW on average). 25 years is 219,150 hours, so this plant generated ~128.5 TWh of power over its life. And this isn’t just spent fuel, it’s all the severely contaminated concrete and steel from the reactor, too. All in a grid about 100’ by 120’.

Last I heard, New York City’s power consumption is estimated at 60 TWh per year, so this picture represents all the waste from powering one of the biggest cities in the world for two entire years.

@cabbagebeets @notjustbikes New nuclear plants probably shouldn’t be built in most areas (people living close to or inside the arctic/antarctic circles may not have better options). Renewables are worthwhile, and should absolutely make up most new power generation. That said, all power generation has waste, and renewables have waste problems of their own which should not be ignored.

We don’t have cost-effective recycling for solar panels. When panels break today (hail, high winds, sand etching the surface over time, etc.), it’s much cheaper to dump them in e-waste landfills in Africa or Southeast Asia, where they poison the groundwater. Better recycling is on the horizon (How long have better nuclear reactors been on the horizon?), but it’s not here yet. Legal changes like making recycling mandatory could help, but most areas don’t seem to have the stomach for that.

Wind turbine blades are composite materials which probably can’t ever be recycled. The best disposal method we have for them today is grinding them up (which risks giving workers silicosis; see quartz countertop issues) and burning them for industrial process heat.