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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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I mean it's not the companies operating the facilities we put our trust in, but the outside regulators whose job it is to ensure these facilities are safe and meet a certain standard. As well as the engineers and scientists that design these systems.
Nuclear power isn't 100% safe or risk-free, but it's hella effective and leaps and bounds better than fossil fuels. We can embrace nuclear, renewables and fossil free methods, or just continue burning the world.
The worst nuclear disaster has led to 1,000sq miles of land being unsafe for human inhabitants.
Using fossil fuels for power is destroying of the entire planet.
It's really not that complicated.
Except that nuclear isn't the only, or even the cheapest, alternative to fossil fuels.
Except that powering the world with nuclear would require thousands of reactors and so much more disasters. This doesn't even factor the space abandonned to store «normal» toxic materials.
Don’t push nuclear power like it’s the only option though.
Where I live we entirely provide energy from hydro power plants and nuclear energy is banned. We use no fossil fuels. We have a 35 year plan for future growth and it doesn’t include any fossil fuels. Nuclear power is just one of the options and it has many hurdles to implement, maintain and decommission.
Honestly, if you can, hydro is brilliant. Not many places can though — both because of geography and politics. Nuclear is better than a lot of the alternatives and shouldn't be discounted.
Wind, solar, etc.
Which each have their drawbacks. Just as an example, though not representative of the majority, what do you do about months of no sun in the Arctic Circle for solar power? There is no single solution to this problem. Nuclear is better than fossil fuels by far, and we should not just throw it away out of fear.
Arctic Circle already uses wind?
Not fear, reality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-waste-is-piling-up-does-the-u-s-have-a-plan/
And yet nuclear has killed less than even wind. Obviously death is not the only factor, which is why it should be a combination of both.
Again, it's just an example. There are loads of situations where solar and wind just don't work — and they are both inconsistent, without battery technology nearly good enough to work on the order of days for an entire national grid, which could be potentially needed in the event of a storm.
Nuclear waste is a problem, but one which is much more easily contained and much less dangerous than the CO2 that's constantly being spewed into our air.
My country, Sweden, also gets a decent chunk of power from hydro. Back in 2021, about 43% was hydroelectric, and 31% was nuclear.
It would be cool to see huge investments into battery storage. If we could create a battery that doesn't just leak energy from storing, we could generate power in one location and ship it out where it's needed. There could be remote energy production plants using geothermal or hydroelectric power that ship out these charged batteries to locations all over. It would let us better utilize resources instead of having to have cities anchored around these sources.
Or we could generate a ton of power all at once, store it and use it as needed rather having to have on demand energy production
Hell with better batteries even fossil fuels begin to be climate friendly since you could store the massive energy created and know you're using close to 100% of it.
Moving batteries seems like a terribly inefficient way of replacing power lines.
Power lines would still mean we need energy on demand though wouldn't it. And if we can transport energy from an area like a huge solar array in the Sahara to Kazakhstan or China it would be better. I was just raising it as an off thought like maybe theres more ways to think about solving this problem than just building plants. What level of storage ability could we have that would let us build a large solar array in the Sahara to power Africa and Europe vs just building more plants. I think our end goal will be energy storage and like you brought up transport/transmission. I think that because I think we have energy production pretty well solved
Kind of an unconventional battery, but I've heard of solar and wind being used to pump water uphill into reservoirs and then released through a hydro plant when the sun/wind aren't shining/blowing. I'd be curious to know the amount of production lost from storing it this way.
I heard the loss comes from evaporation. Another cool idea I heard was using a mining cart. So its not practical but I think the idea is cook because I'm pretty science illiterate but it got me thinking about what a battery actually is. So you drag a mine cart up a hill with energy produced using renewable energy and then let it go down the hill and collect the stored energy with its motion. Technically there isn't anything like evaporation so you could store the mine cart up the hill with no energy loss.
The problem is its potential for harm. And I don't mean meltdown. Storage is the problem that doesn't seem to have strong solutions right now. And the potential for them to make a mistake and store the waste improperly is pretty catastrophic.
"Nuclear waste" sounds super scary, but most of it are things like tools and clothing, that have comparatively tiny amount of radioactivity. Sure it still needs to be stored properly, very little high level waste is actually generated.
You know what else is catastrophic? Fossil fuels and the impact they have on the climate. I'm not arguing that we should put all our eggs in one basket, but getting started and doing something to move away from the BS that is coal, gas, and oil is really something we should've prioritised fifty years ago. Instead they have us arguing whether we should go with hydroelectric, or put up with "ugly windmills" or "solar farms" or "dangerous nuclear plants."
It's all bullshit. Our world is literally on fire and no one seems to actually give a fuck. We have fantastic tools that could've halted the progress had we used them in time, but fifty years later we're still arguing about this.
At this point I honestly hope we do burn. This is a filter mankind does not deserve to pass. We're too evil to survive.
We do have fantastic options, water, wind, and sun renewables. Let's focus on them.