Who the fuck cares if we use the same material to make energy instead?
If something goes wrong - not talking about intentional mischief - it's pretty damn expensive and lots of people get sick. As has happened in Fukushima, Chernobyl, or Three Mile Island. Furthermore, as of now nobody knows how to deal with the waste.
Since solar and wind power are so much cheaper per kWh and also not as dangerous, it's economically and ethically sound to not build nuclear power plants.
France has used nuclear for almost 100% of its power generation for like 70 years and all the waste takes up like a 5x5 yard cube because they reprocess it. Yeah it's still dangerous and 10000% needs to be taken seriously, but I would state it isn't nearly as bad as mountaintop removal for coal power. You can see that shit from space on Google earth, the applalacians look like they have leprosy from all the destruction.
Hard disagree, what about the Land? Wind and solar energy end up being dependent on massive tracts of land that would be better off as wilds but instead must support some level of constant human interaction to support the wind and solar repair and maintenance. A thorium nuclear power plant is capable of out producing all of them more efficiently (because sometimes the sun don’t shine and the wind don’t blow) while taking up a fraction of the footprint of either. Not to mention every nuclear accident ever is more or less a steam explosion because of the necessity for pressurized water in a uranium light water reactor. Thorium reactors simply do not have the same capacity for explosive failure because they do not require super heated pressurized water to act as a medium for the heat from the radiation. Also the waste from Thorium reactors has a much shorter half life than what comes out of Light water reactors and could theoretically be used in other applications including other kinds of reactors.
I mean, thorium fears are unfounded. Theres a structural argument that they centralize the energy grid and take power out of the hands of the people, which is why I'm more for decentralized networks of solar and wind cooperatives like Japan is building. But they produce fairly manageable waste that will decay in 500 years.
That said, uranium reactors are actually a huge problem. In Japan, one melted down and they had to evacuate a whole prefecture. It's only a matter of luck that they didn't have to evacuate all 5 cities in Tokyo. Now the government is claiming they cleaned it up, but independent scientists disagree and so there are lots of people just getting irradiated right now.
There's also the issue of disposal. In Japan there's no good place to do it, and in the US we love to do it on indian land. Then it's there for 10,000 years.
Then there's the issue that without maintenance they melt down. States fall and companies go bankrupt, what happens to nuclear plants then?
You're right that nuclear weapons are also a problem, but that doesn't mean we should make the problem worse.
Modern reactors are designed to shut down if they approach critical temperatures without human input
We live in a crumbling empire on a dying planet. We can't make plans that are only safe if we do everything right, because we won't do everything right.
Thorium doesn't melt down the same way, and solar and wind just become hunks of metal when civilizations crash. Uranium reactors become tests of if we actually installed and maintained the safeties.
That's reductionist. We can de-grow the west and use the spoils to bring up the living standards in the rest of the world. It's not nuclear or agrarian society, there are spaces in-between.
Western population degrowth is a good idea. We can do it by improving sex education, improving access to reproductive healthcare, paying a basic income to women, increasing social security, and doing green development of rural areas and the rust belt.
We can also lower the energy needs of the west by stopping new car sales, de-militarizing, rezoning the suburbs, creating policies requiring products to last longer, reducing access to metals and plastics, stop subsidizing beef and dairy, among other policies.
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If something goes wrong - not talking about intentional mischief - it's pretty damn expensive and lots of people get sick. As has happened in Fukushima, Chernobyl, or Three Mile Island. Furthermore, as of now nobody knows how to deal with the waste.
Since solar and wind power are so much cheaper per kWh and also not as dangerous, it's economically and ethically sound to not build nuclear power plants.
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people were brainwashed into thinking nuclear waste could not be contained at all by fossil fuel companies.
France has used nuclear for almost 100% of its power generation for like 70 years and all the waste takes up like a 5x5 yard cube because they reprocess it. Yeah it's still dangerous and 10000% needs to be taken seriously, but I would state it isn't nearly as bad as mountaintop removal for coal power. You can see that shit from space on Google earth, the applalacians look like they have leprosy from all the destruction.
Hard disagree, what about the Land? Wind and solar energy end up being dependent on massive tracts of land that would be better off as wilds but instead must support some level of constant human interaction to support the wind and solar repair and maintenance. A thorium nuclear power plant is capable of out producing all of them more efficiently (because sometimes the sun don’t shine and the wind don’t blow) while taking up a fraction of the footprint of either. Not to mention every nuclear accident ever is more or less a steam explosion because of the necessity for pressurized water in a uranium light water reactor. Thorium reactors simply do not have the same capacity for explosive failure because they do not require super heated pressurized water to act as a medium for the heat from the radiation. Also the waste from Thorium reactors has a much shorter half life than what comes out of Light water reactors and could theoretically be used in other applications including other kinds of reactors.
I mean, thorium fears are unfounded. Theres a structural argument that they centralize the energy grid and take power out of the hands of the people, which is why I'm more for decentralized networks of solar and wind cooperatives like Japan is building. But they produce fairly manageable waste that will decay in 500 years.
That said, uranium reactors are actually a huge problem. In Japan, one melted down and they had to evacuate a whole prefecture. It's only a matter of luck that they didn't have to evacuate all 5 cities in Tokyo. Now the government is claiming they cleaned it up, but independent scientists disagree and so there are lots of people just getting irradiated right now.
There's also the issue of disposal. In Japan there's no good place to do it, and in the US we love to do it on indian land. Then it's there for 10,000 years.
Then there's the issue that without maintenance they melt down. States fall and companies go bankrupt, what happens to nuclear plants then?
You're right that nuclear weapons are also a problem, but that doesn't mean we should make the problem worse.
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We live in a crumbling empire on a dying planet. We can't make plans that are only safe if we do everything right, because we won't do everything right.
Thorium doesn't melt down the same way, and solar and wind just become hunks of metal when civilizations crash. Uranium reactors become tests of if we actually installed and maintained the safeties.
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That's reductionist. We can de-grow the west and use the spoils to bring up the living standards in the rest of the world. It's not nuclear or agrarian society, there are spaces in-between.
deleted by creator
Western population degrowth is a good idea. We can do it by improving sex education, improving access to reproductive healthcare, paying a basic income to women, increasing social security, and doing green development of rural areas and the rust belt.
We can also lower the energy needs of the west by stopping new car sales, de-militarizing, rezoning the suburbs, creating policies requiring products to last longer, reducing access to metals and plastics, stop subsidizing beef and dairy, among other policies.
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Can't farms become closed loop except for labor?
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