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Young climate activist tells Greenpeace to drop ‘old-fashioned’ anti-nuclear stance
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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Nuclear energy produces the worst toxic waste guaranteed, and can and has a record of leaking a lot of radioactive material.
When wind and solar are ready alternatives it just makes no sense.
A coal power station belches far more radioactive contaminants in to the atmosphere than any nuclear power station.
Wind and solar aren't ready, that's the whole point! They're great when it's windy and sunny, but useless when it's still and night time. Until mass power storage is a solved problem, wind and solar are unable to provide the base load power that can be provided by fossil fuel/nuclear power stations needed by advanced nations.
To preface, i dont support coal at all, its way worse than nuclear.
If i remember right, the coal thing was measuring radioactivity in the air around coal and power plants. Thats not the nuclear waste im talking about. Spent nuclear fuel is dangerously radioactively for longer than the whole of human civilization. It puts plastic's lifespan to shame. Its no where on the scale of volume as fossil fuel waste, but pound for pound i believe it is the worst substance we can produce.
If you remind me later today ill explain how energy storage is easily solvable, itll take longer than i have now
So you don't mind radioactivity in the air you breathe around the power stations, but when it's buried deep inside a mountain it bothers you?
The air radiation thing is misleading, saying the area around coal plants is more radioactive than nuclear plants isnt saying anything, because the air around nuclear plants isnt radioactive.
Most US nuclear waste isnt buried, because we dont have anywhere ready to. Its stuck in on site storage. It might be safely stored for now, but that waste is gonna accumulate like nothing before because of how crazy long it remains dangerously radioactive. Nuclear waste produced 10000 years from now is still gonna be competing with nuclear waste produced today for room to be safely stored.
@blazera @sv1sjp @13esq
The company Moltex Energy claims they can “recycle waste from existing nuclear power stations, and use it to produce more clean energy”. If true it could solve several problems at once.
https://www.moltexenergy.com
@blazera
@dilmandila
Inaccurate. To take it back to basics:
Radioactive material radiates, because it decays. The more it radiates, the faster it decays. The highest level radioactive material from nuclear fission reactors has half-life measured in decades (30 years), that is, half of it will decay in that time. It does NOT take thousands of years. Conversely, the long-lived isotopes radiate much less, thus are easier to store and process.
https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/radwaste.html
Alright its later today so heres how renewable energy as a baseline supply works. We actually already have a working example of it, hydro electric. Renewable energy thats used as baseline. When you think energy storage i think most people think of batteries, but theyre mostly suited for mobile energy storage, like cars and handheld devices. For utility power we have much more scalable, and simpler energy storage. For hydroelectric, they take excess electricity generated, and power pumps to pump the water back uphill, to use for later demand. Its physical energy storage. You can power a motor to lift a weight and pulley system with excess energy, then run it in reverse as a generator for demand. This is basic engineering, and its as scalable as you need it.
I understand pumped storage well. The problem with it is the required size of the reservoirs and the availability of suitable locations.
Pumped storage as it stands in the UK is really very useful for managing dips and spikes in power demand but unfortunately far, far short of being able to get us through a day or two of no wind.
Right, pumped storage hydro electric was an example of renewable electricity being baseline load. I gave a different suggestion for wind and solar storage if you dont have a good location for pumped storage.
I honestly think the weight lifting and dropping idea is pipe dream stuff. It's good on a black board but near impossible to implement practically in real life.
Can you imagine how much stored weight we'd need to cover the energy demands of a nation given a few days of no wind?
You need to ask yourself why, if these ideas are so great, have they not already been implemented.
It’s not a question of nuclear vs wind/solar. It’s a question of running baseline power from nuclear or coal/gas, which kill people every single day. It just doesn’t make the news.
Bullshit. Nuclear waste (more precisely, spent fuel that can be reprocessed for new fuel or other useful radionuclids) is the only waste we have actual good solutions for. It's not an engineering problem, we know very well how to safely dispose of the small amount of ultimate nuclear waste.
All the other waste, including waste from producing new and retiring old solar panels and wind turbines, basically just gets thrown into the landscape with no containment whatsoever. And some of that stuff is toxic, some will never degrade (plastics used in composite materials the wind turbine blades and towers are made of).
Plus, if you only used nuclear energy throughout you life, the amount of ultimate waste can literally fit into a coke can. That's how efficient and energy dense it is.
Kyle Hill has a very educational video about this if you're interested:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=4aUODXeAM-k
https://piped.video/watch?v=4aUODXeAM-k
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=4aUODXeAM-k
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Way ahead of you this time, bot. Keep fighting the good fight.
Can't you chuck it back into a reactor and reuse it that way, to help reduce the radioactivity, and get more power back out of it?
Last you checked? When was that?
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/02/nuclear-waste-us-could-power-the-us-for-100-years.html
You're obviously not willing to change your mind, so this will be my last response. Googling "breeder reactor" will show you plenty of peer reviewed papers and findings from past experimental reactors that can answer your questions.
Apart from that, the point of the technology is obviously not to replace renewables, it's to
Especially point 2, you are obviously and rightfully worried about nuclear waste - breeder reactors are the solution, the only one we currently know of. What else do you suggest we should do with that waste? Store it for millennia?
We already have more nuclear waste than we have capacity to store. And we arent reusing that nuclear waste. If you wanna become a nuclear engineer and get them to start using it please do, but right now the nuclear waste plan is to bury it for many millenia
Out of sight out of mind, right? Great solution. Coke can? Ummmmmmmmmmm nope.
Where do you think the discarded blade of wind turbine go? 🤔
Not into underground storage for tens of thousands of years
That's precisely where they go—landfills. They're made of non-recyclable glass fiber-plastic composites that won't degrade for millions of years.
Landfills arent underground, and theyll break down within a millenia. Well the plastic anyway. Then youre left with recyclable glass if it isnt crushed into sand first
Landfills not being underground is even worse (but normally they are buried under soil when they go unused).
While the plastics degrade mechanically, being reduced into small particles, chemically they are not. They just turn into microplastics which I'm sure you're aware is a huge problem.
With the small amount of ultimate nuclear waste that cannot be reprocessed further, the solution is simple: drill a km deep shaft into the bedrock, place them at the bottom, fill the shaft with rubble and cement. Done. No-one's going to accidentally dig them up and they pose absolutely no threat to anyone. The finns are doing something like this as we speak.
Wind and solar are not magic bullets. Better than fossil fuels, yes. But they come with their own "the ocean is too big to pollute" type quagmires that we overlook when deployed on the small scale. The most basic example: solar panels are dark in colour -- deploying a few of them is trivial, but deploying a lot of them over time will cause the average albedo of the earth to change, heating it. This won't be a problem today, but would be in a century. Etc. Still better than greenhouse gasses though.
Nuclear likewise has issues. You're just straight up adding heat to the system. And depending on the reactor design, you have waste. But it's a huge improvement over fossil fuels.
Solar panels arent typical light surfaces, they dont convert all the light absorbed into heat, their whole point is they convert some light absorbed into electricity.
Add onto the fact black is already a popular roof color.