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Hello it’s your chapo dot chat geologist and climatologist here to tell you that nuclear power plants release less radiation than coal burning plants. Sounds weird but it’s true
Kinda crazy how combusting shit you pulled out of the ground actually releases more shit you find in the ground than just putting it in a box and not setting it on fire
Are these our only options?
Or is there, like, other energy sources beside nuclear and coal?
I definitely trust the governments that cannot keep the power on to run Nuclear facilities
:dril:
Literally struggling to keep water running over the plants we already have.
I can't speak for anywhere besides the US, but as someone who has worked at a nuclear power plant for 10 years, the amount of regulations and oversight is extensive (the NRC, INPO, WANO, etc). There is so much continual training, required qualifications, sharing of operating experience between plants all over the world, benchmarking, constant modifications to plant equipment...I could go on for a while but it's just to reiterate that things aren't half-assed the way the general public worries.
Yes, mistakes are made, but we are only human and the processes and procedures in place are there to catch them. Just making minor updates to documentation can be a ten-step process! Commercial nuclear power for sure has its issues, I won't deny that. I've never felt unsafe at my job and I've worked in some crazy/intense environments. I would have no fear living right next to the plant I work at. I don't know if this is reassuring at all but just wanted to share the perspective of someone in the industry.
Isn't "nuclear or coal/oil" a false dichotomy though? Wind and solar are much more relevant as they are the cheapest to produce (in overall $/kWh), and what environmental activists tend to hold up as the least unsustainable alternative, while nuclear energy is among the most expensive to produce.
The nuclear power struggle sessions are extra funny to me because the ruling class does not give a single fuck what you or I think about the issue. They will continue doing whatever they want until a mass movement stops them. Until then you're gonna be stuck using this deteriorating infrastructure whether you like it or not.
Nuclear power is good, but not unproblematic. Overall should still be used in an interconnected system of energy production.
Nuclear okay but it's incapable of substantially meeting global energy needs unless thing radically change. Source
The World Nuclear Association (2011) conservatively projects 80 years of economically extractable uranium at the current rate of consumption using conventional reactors. The 2010 figure for installed nuclear capacity worldwide is 375 gigawatts. If this were to be scaled up to 15 terawatts, the 80-year uranium supply would last less than five years.
An examination of the relative abundance of chemical elements in Earth’s crust shows that many of the metals used for nuclear containment are in low abundance (Abbott, 2011). What is alarming is that the annual growth rates in consumption of these metals (typically in the 10 to 20 percent range)17 are enormous compared with, say, the growth rate for consumption of crude oil—which has dropped below zero in recent years (Abbott, 2011). If we were to scale up to 15,000 reactors, we would either rapidly exhaust these materials or drive them into a high-price-volatility regime, creating market instability. In a nuclear utopia, a new nuclear station would need to be finished every day. In such a scenario, the supply of containment materials would not be able to keep up with the construction demand.
If nuclear stations need replacement every 50 years on average, producing 15 terawatts of nuclear power would mean building one new nuclear power station—and decommissioning another—somewhere in the world every day. This is questionable, given that nuclear stations today typically take 6 to 12 years to build (Ramana, 2009) and 20 to 50 years to decommission
Moreover, Thorium/Fusion is not a magic bullet that solves all these limitations
Given all the above problems with nuclear fission, can nuclear fusion lead us to a nuclear utopia? The answer is no, because the underlying problem of neutron embrittlement will limit scalability as it does with fission. The rate of commissioning and decommissioning fusion reactors would be equally untenable.
Furthermore
If a nuclear utopia is not feasible, are we doomed? Is there a competitive, massively scalable alternative to fossil fuels? Yes, and it turns out that the only renewable energy solution that is scalable well beyond 15 terawatts is solar thermal technology...The amount of solar power that reaches the planet’s surface is 5,000 times mankind’s current global power consumption, or about 80 petawatts
80 years of economically extractable uranium
I feel like 'economically' is doing a lot of work when you consider that the environmental damage of coal/hydro/oil is rolled into externalities and not priced in.
There's functionally infinite uranium within the Earth, however at a certain point it takes more energy to obtain uranium than you can get out of it in a reactor. The linked paper argues that; that point is well below an amount which would make nuclear viable as the sole energy source for our planet. And little of the environmental damage relating to nuclear, such as; the damage of nuclear waste or the very negative impact of uranium mining, is priced in either.
Uranium isn't the only fissile material that can be used in reactors, and the current mode of generation is based around rapid consumption of uranium fuel because they don't want reactors having fuel long enough to make materials for a bomb. If we could get past that, the waste fuel we have could actually still be used for power generation.
It's the devil you know versus the devil you don't. Definitely no shortage of environmental problems with mining for uranium, processing it, or disposing of the waste.
The "economically" part illustrates how you run up against diminishing returns as you get that low-hanging accessible deposit. The environmental problems only escalate as you mine uranium more aggressively.
Right but for the most part, the environmental damage doesn't contribute to global warming, at least. We kinda need to do everything we can to avoid that catastrophe.
It's better than our other options, but it's not the silver bullet.
when a wind turbine falls down it maybe kills one person if they're really unlucky
when a nuclear power plant falls down it renders half the continent uninhabitable for several millennia
Counterpoint: A nuclear power plant that is managed safety and at a significantly remote distance from the public can produce cheap, reliable, and efficient power accessible to billions.
I recommend a large continuously operating plant located at the center of a large gravity well in the middle of the Solar System. This power plant is accessible planet-wide while providing the additional benefit of intermediate lighting, heat, and induced precipitation.
Like someone mentioned above solar and wind still have their problems, you can't use them efficiently everywhere, and they still require the mining and land for batteries and materials. It's more decentralized, yes, but not all centralization is bad in itself. A combined renewable and nuclear grid could cover all the downtime in renewable production.
I'm overall pretty neutral on the issue, but my main problem with it is when it has gone bad, it has gone really bad.
I think it's appropriate to use it (rather than fossil fuels) to fill gaps for solar, wind and other renewables, but I'd be lying if I said I'd feel comfortable living near a nuclear facility either.
That and I really have a tough time trusting the United States properly taking care of the waste, but that's true for literally everything toxic lol.
Less people have been killed or harmed by nuclear power since it was invented then were killed by coal power last week.
I mean yeah, fuck everything about fossil fuels, I don't have my concerns with nuclear energy because I am interested in fossil fuels or anything. They've been absolutely catastrophic on our existence from micro-plastics, greenhouse gasses, its extraction, creating car culture, to air pollution etc. etc. I wish they were phased out and all but eliminated decades and decades ago.
Like I was stating above, I'm hopeful on solar and wind meeting more of the future energy needs than nuclear power. I know both also have massive environmental issues with lithium/rare earth metal extraction, or airborne wildlife impacts from wind farms, but they don't have the potential to displace hundreds of thousands or millions of people when they go wrong either.
That's basically my only concern, but I'm also worried about the potential impacts of how the waste is stored hundreds, thousands of years down the line too. Idk, I trust it enough if it's guaranteed to be run properly, but how can we make certain governments won't fuck it up like they've let fossil fuels utterly destroy biodiversity, the environment, and people's health?
I don't think you really understand how invasive solar and wind is on local environments. Wind in places that aren't costal requires mountaintop removal. Solar uses up thousands of acres of land and last for like a decade before they start disintegrating. Nuclear is much more energy dense and can be built anywhere in a footprint of a factory instead of an entire county.
Again, solar and wind are important for preventing bottlenecking and supply chain failures, but are in no way better for the environment than nuclear.
Also we still approach nuclear as if GEs shitty design from 70 years ago is the best it can get. Nuclear waste products are still fissile. They can still be used for power generation in breeder reactors, but because some of the transitional phases involve nuclear material that can be used to make a bomb, it's not allowed. These regulations also make sure that the existing reactors will continue making money for years to come as they "burn through" their fuel when it still has 98% of its energy left.
Does this sort of accounting include say, indigenous communities displaced by Uranium mining?
I mean, compared to the communites displaced by LNG and oil pipelines? You could avoid displacement from uranium mining with better planning, but capitalists need their labor, so they destroy their communites and make them mine uranium.
Nuclear power without socialism is a dead end though. Capitalists will corrupt it and just turn it into another resource extraction endeavor.
That does not exactly fill me with confidence to see that a primary reason for the difference is that there has been no need to scale it up to those levels.
Nuclear is still the second largest source of energy behind coal and natural gas. I also really don't understand your point unless you're just an anprim that's trolling. Do you think that solar and wind don't require massively exploitative mines to keep them operational?
