IMHO I do not think nuclear will save us from climate change - it takes too long to get going to be effective - but this is going to really agitate some chud/nerd brains worms
IMHO I do not think nuclear will save us from climate change - it takes too long to get going to be effective - but this is going to really agitate some chud/nerd brains worms
Huh? A leak/breach of nuclear waste containment would be bad for the local environment surrounding the containment facility, but nothing dramatically worse than your typical oil spill or coal plant exploding other than radioactivity. And considering that long-term storage generally consists of "find a spot of inhospitable desert, dig really far down, dump it there, seal the lid" and local storage consists of "store it in a pool in literally the most secure bunker we can build staffed with armed guards 24/7" I'm failing to see a situation in which there's a dramatic leak of radioactivity into the local environment.
Even if we scale up nuclear usage a hundred-fold the concern would be sourcing enough fuel and figuring out an acceptable form of long-term storage. The failure of the latter is purely due to neoliberal governments not wanting to come off of fossil fuels or spend money on infrastructure, not a lack of ability to do so. There's no concerns that we "risk destroying the planet."
This fairytale idea of "the most secure bunker we can build" being sufficient to store highly corrosive materials for millennia without massive containment breach has absolutely no academic basis in materials science that I know of. Also I don't think you appreciate the dynamics of radioactive materials when leeched into a "local environment", because they don't stay "local" for very long. I don't know of a single colleague actually working on this problem that would share your optimism and confidence about anything you've said.
The difficulties in developing "acceptable" long-term storage go way beyond being "purely due to neoliberal governments". Yes neoliberal governments don't help, but issues of we don't actually have the technology aren't just solved magically with more money, especially when they aren't even close to being solved in a laboratory environment despite many well-funded and capable teams working on it, let alone upscaled to industrial use which is an even bigger issue. People just think science works like that because science journalists and YouTubers don't sufficiently address this point, so people make vapid dismissals like this while not understanding the actual underlying issues and the very real reasons why the Hot New Technology Distraction might not actually save the planet.
The "most secure bunker we can build" was referring to onsite short-term storage at nuclear power plants, not a long-term solution. The long-term solution is still "find inhospitable area that's geologically stable and doesn't share a water table with anything important, build giant concrete bunker inside a mountain, throw lead-wrapped spent fuel rods in there and close the door until it's no longer radioactive."
If I'm missing information, please let me know, but as far as I'm aware the only major concerns with this is that the containment shells around the fuel rods may break down over thousands of years and potentially leech radioactivity into the water table or someone stumbling across the storage bunker and thinking it's something valuable and taking it elsewhere. Both of these are very, very long-term issues that aren't even guaranteed, and even if they occur the damage would still be miniscule compared to what fossil fuels are doing actively right now. We're talking about something that we would have thousands of years to go back and fix even if it does become a major issue, as opposed to us hotboxing our entire biosphere right here and now.
I completely agree with you that degrowth is absolutely fundamentally necessary for dealing with climate change, but even with degrowth we're still going to need to produce a shitload of energy that is currently provided by natural gas, coal, and oil, and renewables alone are not going to fill that gap. Nuclear is consistently one of the least carbon-producing energy sources, has been around for decades of real use, does not rely on changing conditions like solar/hydroelectric/wind, and works well with our existing centralized energy grids. It's not the Hot New Thing Here to Save Us, it's the tool that's been sitting in the back of our toolbox underutilized for far too long.
(sorry if my last message came across a bit pissy btw dude, I'm having a rough day but I didn't intend for that to come across like I worry it might have done)
I get what you meant about the bunker, but the long-term solution still hinges on some type of bunker that doesn't exist yet. Some of the issues with projects like you mentioned: areas like you described are very rare. Very little of the planet is a decent distance away from human settlements and habitats, and even if the local water table isn't adjacent to anything important, the nature of the hydrological cycle and the patterns of settlements and habitats mean that contaminated water from some inevitable, unforeseen failure modes will eventually run somewhere that there's wildlife, and then everywhere that there's wildlife. Also, digging giant caves both in mountains and other rock, ensuring they're structurally sound (even just for centuries), then shipping the building materials out to the site, constructing a sealed container large enough to be useful, then ensuring the safe transport of nuclear waste to the site is an overwhelmingly enormous infrastructure project filled with failure modes, and all that for what amounts to creating a single landfill. We don't even know how to build enough of these to store the enormous amount of waste we already have, let alone enough to accommodate the massive amount from any serious increase in nuclear's generation capacity. All this is to say that yeah we can temporarily manage some amount of nuclear waste, but we really can't deal with a huge increase in energy generation like we can with renewables without creating the absolutely colossal problems that insufficient containment of massive amounts of nuclear waste would cause. And even if we could store it all in ideal conditions, our lack of sufficient containment technology would require its continued monitoring and maintenance, possibly long after we're even capable of performing it. Landfills in the event of actual social collapse WILL at some stage (albeit over a very long period of time, but if nobody is around to stop it then that becomes arbitrary) release their contents across the planet alongside all the other landfills, most likely killing everything on it.
How come you don't think that renewables would be able to fill the gap in a degrown energy landscape? And yeah the current most commonly generated forms of renewable energy suffer from intermittancy and (at the moment) curtailment issues, but accompanied by storage systems like flow batteries etc. they're just as compatible with the grid network as the highly tunable generators from coal and nuclear plants. While materials and energy are consumed in the production of solar panels and wind turbines etc., to me at least it's far more preferable to use abundant materials for clean, scaled-back energy generation without the logistical nightmare of creating huge landfills for ticking time bombs we're then charged with maintaining for millennia.
No worries, in hindsight I'm vaguely being that :reddit-logo: nerd arguing with an expert on their own field so I can imagine how that wouldn't help lol
I hadn't considered the sheer expense and effort involved in those long-term storage solutions, and you are correct that it's hard to be sure that a water table is actually isolated especially over extremely long time periods. It's a shitshow, but I think our back is already against the wall with climate change and it seems like the lesser evil.
Other renewables are quickly getting better, but they still fundamentally fall into issues of not doing enough fast enough or being too dependent on good conditions. Photovoltaic solar cells have a frontloaded carbon footprint that takes a few years to "pay off" by replacing fossil fuels (admittedly this is getting much better than it used to be) and only works in sunlight, reflective solar plants are massively space-wasteful and only really work in desert settings and also only work in sunlight, hydroelectric exasperates water conflicts, wind farms are okay but have the same issues as reflective solar. Low-tech battery infrastructure is a hard requirement either way but I don't think you can entirely cover the required minimum load on the grid with water pumps and such; you need something that can pump out consistent loads no matter what at least until we figure out fusion. Nuclear is the only real option that I see there.
It is basically kicking the can down the road, but at least the can gets smaller and doesn't cause megahurricanes.