this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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I'm "against" it in current reality in the sense that I see it as the techie way to greenwash energy production. It relies on a lot of mining, typically in third world countries, to supply the energy consumption of the imperial core.
That wrecks the local environment and the society getting wrecked is never gonna benefit from that energy. I'm pretty sure Europe which relies a lot on nuclear barely has any mines themselves. Building the infrastructure is also very expensive (specially since a shoddy job would be so dangerous to first worlders), to the point where it makes other large scale projects like dams sound plausible.
They just aren't made instead beause they'd be changing and possibly harming the core environment rather than the peripheral one.
Nuclear proponents always have this (possibly very real) strawman in their heads about how "nuclear is unsafe" or "nuclear weapons" with good counterarguments for both, but I've yet to see one explicitly countering the position that nuclear power is just externalising the damage to overexploited countries. The current Niger situation comes to mind.
And nuclear waste disposal as it exists is also very unsustainable.
Now, if the same countries that extract the uranium/plutonium had the right to decide if that's acceptable to them democratically, and got help from "green" countries to set up their own end-to-end nuclear infrastructure with no strings attached for the good of the human race, then I'd be very interested.
But hydro, wind and solar are all right there with way less drawbacks.
Ok? But all those renewables you list require the exact same mining, environmental destruction, and exploitation, but a hell of a lot more of it.
I would argue that hydro is even more horrific to local ecosystems.
I understand your points. I'm just not convinced that renewables avoid the issues with externalized damage due to mining, production, and waste. Simply based on the amounts of materials needed, renewables are pretty resource intensive, and a lot of these resources come from over-exploited nations just as raw uranium often does.
China and Russia are, as far as I am aware anyway, sharing technology that does allow formerly colonized countries to build their own nuclear power and potentially use their own uranium resources to fuel it.
I see waste disposal as a social and political problem rather than a technical problem. We could manage it sustainably, but we choose not to because of all the cultural fear and anxiety we have surrounding anything nuclear.
They don't 100% avoid it, but the point is that after the thing is built, both the damages and benefits are felt mostly by the same nation. Nuclear on the other hand requires a stable stream of material, and it's a privilege usually reserved to technologically advanced nations. Third world nations on the other hand can afford to build their own dams, like Brazil or Ethiopia.
Like others pointed out, hydro (dams) are a mess for the environment too, but you can't build a dam in Africa and export the energy to Europe. Uranium can be exported though, and that's how it's implemented currently.
I'm not against it as an ideal, just that the discourse around it often ignores the current material conditions of it. The countries that can afford to move their grid to nuclear are either huge and advanced like China or Russia/USSR, or rely on blood uranium from their colonies.
But I'm happy those two are helping out and it might eventually be universally feasible, even if from my naive position I'd prefer a >90% green grid.
this is objectively correct. like everything, it is not ethical under a imperialist world order
I don’t know if hydro should be lumped in with other renewables. It’s very disruptive for the ecosystems involved with the river.
I include wave power in hydro (which might be incorrect), but I mainly mean dams and I don't disagree that they're also quite harmful.
In Brazil we have had a majority of our energy be generated by hydroelectric dams for a long time, which had a ton of negative side effects, including native lands and the historical ruins of a Christian commune getting flooded and submerged. I vaguely remember some new plans for another dam displacing some tribes too.
But at least the product of that destruction is bound by our battery technology to stay within our borders, which is my main (only?) issue with mining for nuclear fuel.
That’s a battery, not an energy source.