this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2024
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Mildly Interesting
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I have nothing against nuclear energy personally. I wish we'd build more of it. Currently about 2/5th is wind power, 2/5th nuclear and 1/5 hydro. When there's no wind and it's cold outside we see prices in the 30 - 70c/kWh which is insanely expensive. If we had huge storage capacity and much, much more wind turbines then maybe it could work.
Compared to fossil fuels I tend to prefer nuclear as well, because even though mining uranium has quite some ecological impact including emitting carbon emissions, running a nuclear power plant doesn't have carbon emissions and that's important.
What worries me is that there are nuclear power plants around the world and despite the first nuclear power plant having been built 70 years ago, not a single ultimate disposal place for the radioactive waste has been found/created.
Having "cheap" electric energy for 3-4 generations and putting a burden on the next 40,000 generations just does sound like a bad deal to me.
Until we have more wind and hydro, keeping nuclear running might be a price we have to pay.
Not being able to dispose of some more (thousands of) tons of radioactive waste is making the problem only quantitatively worse and not qualitatively.
Onkalo spent nuclear fuel repository
Also something to keep in mind is that high level waste which is the spent fuel is only about 3 - 5% of the total radioactive waste from nuclear power plants. Majority of the waste has way lower levels of radiation and it's things like reactor parts and safety equipment.
I stand corrected regarding ultimate disposal and apparently they are planning to use it in a clever way.
Thank you for letting me know!
Well it's also the first and only one of its kind so you weren't too far off.