I don’t give a shit at this point. Just stop with the fossil fuels. Whatever it takes. If employing a team of white working class farmer astronauts to run in a hamster wheel is more politically palatable then let’s fucking do it.
It feels like we are either approaching, or have reached, a point where going zero carbon and straight up dumping unprotected nuclear waste in a population center would lead to less suffering and misery than our current trajectory. Obviously that’s not necessary or even possible, but that the situation we are in is extremely bleak and fixing it at this point probably requires a level of ice cold motherfuckerness we’ve never reckoned with.
employing a team of white working class farmer astronauts to run in a hamster wheel
They’re engineers and technicians, but I see you’re already familiar with the Canadian nuclear power industry. “Hide and seek for a grand a week, or stand in plain view for two”
If nuclear helps us phase out fossil fuels quicker than I fully support it.
At least where I live that’s a big if. Nuclear in Australia is most often used by fossil fuel interests as a stalling tactic because of how long it would take to get up and running and how expensive it would be, compared to renewables.
Yet if they just did it, we’d have it by now. Any talking point is stalling at this stage.
Renewables are the main actor for the phase out. Nuclear contribution (less than 8% of the electricity) is ridiculous.
It won’t, but it’ll help the longterm. We can tackle both longterm and short term goals at once.
What we absolutely shouldn’t be doing is engaging in protectionism, and banning imports of cheap solar panels. We don’t have time for that shit.
The discussion should just be about either solar/wind/hydro or solar/wind/hydro/nuclear. Let’s start with the low hanging fruit and then keep discussing nuclear.
Nowv kiss🥰🥰. More seriously I don’t understand this nonsense of make fighting two great solution that help to stop the use of fossil fuel industry. Plus they are complementary since we can’t store great amount of energy and solar and turbine are intermittent energies
Left: Regular green energy.
Right: Glowing green energy.
Exactly 😂😂
I just don’t see why so many people are dead set on only solar/wind/hydro as “green” and nuclear and other more exotic power generation methods that don’t emit greenhouse gases are somehow unacceptable.
Isn’t the goal net zero? Why are we quibbling about how we achieve that?
Can’t we just do whatever we must to get there and move on with our existence?
There’s a great distinction that Norwegian philosopher and deep ecologist Anre Naess makes between long-range and short-range movements which I think helps explain the disagreement a little.
In the short term, we need to reduce CO2 for our own survival. Nuclear helps this, so from this angle it seems counterproductive for anyone who claims concern over the environment to object to its development.
In the long term, humans need to transition away from a society based on resource extraction, and long term damage. It’s a lot harder to see how nuclear helps with this- mining and enriching uranium are destructive processes, and nuclear waste needs containment for thousands of years.
Our current situation is pretty critical, so I think it’s pretty legitimate to think that we might need to make some compromises between the long and short term. But I think the distinction makes it a lot clearer about why people seem to be shouting passed each other sometimes.
The electrical grid, from production, distribution, and delivery, to the outlets in your home/business, is a very complex and distinctly unique system filled with challenges at all points.
I know just enough about all of it to get myself into trouble, or, more frequently, keep myself out of trouble. IMO, nuclear, whether in the form of SMR or something else, should be built to handle the base loads, aka, the power that is always needed, and not necessarily any more than that.
The volatile loads that fluctuate throughout the day, that’s what I’m not sure the best method to address. Is it wind/hydro, which are fairly consistent (the latter more than the former, in terms of consistency), or solar + energy storage, which may be batteries, or some other method of storing the power?
I dunno, I’m no expert. But given the reliability of nuclear, building more or less static systems with it that will supply base loads, seems like a no brainer. We will always need at least that much power, let’s get it from somewhere that can push it out 24/7/365 for years with little to no maintenance. Obviously, all nuclear production needs to be monitored, regardless of the reactor type… For safety. But if the system is basically always doing the same thing, with the same output, constantly, it shouldn’t require a lot of variance.
I think those are pros of nuclear. The alternative to a static system like that would be a very diverse flexible one with lots of different energy types and markets to encourage users to flex usage up or down.
I’m not trying to make a case either way though, just explaining what perspectives might lead people to be concerned about climate change and still anti-nuclear.
I appreciate that. It didn’t come across as anything other than informative, and fostering discussion.
I’m personally a fan of nuclear. I know the long lead times of creating the facilities, largely because of the safety and protection systems that need to be built, tested and validated before the plant can export a single watt of power. All of which I understand.
My background is in IT, and the most stable systems, which are almost always preferred over alternatives, are distributed. What I want to see is that the majority of generation is done by homes in the neighborhood they serve. So the power needed, is the power inside that area; this wouldn’t eliminate the need for a larger grid to interconnect all of those cells of production together, which would allow any single production location to go down and the power would still be delivered to the people in that area, borrowing excess from neighboring areas.
This would, however, make the grid power a lot more communal of a resource. I’m sure that works inspire a lot of “communist” type arguments…
However, the benefits of such a system would be clear and fairly robust compared to the more centralized systems we’re using now.
I don’t know if that’s really viable, either with SMR (or other nuclear), or using solar/wind/whatever.
¿Por que no los dos?
Exactamente, no entiendo por qué es una discusión.
Wait are we supposed to agree with the guy on the left? Cos the last iteration of this meme I saw, the woman on the right (Summer?) was by far the more open-minded one. I just don’t know this meme well enough.
It’s two people having similar thoughts, don’t read into it so much haha
Do we have a solution for nuclear waste yet?
Reprocess it, salvage useful isotopes for known uses, keep a few others for research purposes, don’t put it too far away because most of it could be useful in the future.
Afaik that is not an economically viable option.
France literally does that. They reprocess 96% all of their used fuel back into usable fuel and useful materials.
The number is false. You make a confusion between what could be recycled and what is actually recycled. And MOX is not a good option (expensive, 1 cycle, toxicity).
Which part? France is basically doing this already.
- Economically it’s not interesting
- It’s one cycle only
- Waste in output is even worst and more toxic
Ah yes, economically viable like destroying the planet.
If destroying the planet weren’t economically viable, no one would do it.
This has been your daily depressing fact.
My point exactly.
clutches pearls won’t someone think of the stock market?
Permanent underground storage where it will naturally decay. Are a couple of different methods available from what I understand. And the amount of material that actually needs to be stored is a fraction of what is instead released into the air, water & soil from fossil based fuel. Not to mention toxins like mercury etc.
We put it back in the ground where we found it in the first place.
I don’t see how people are A-OK with uranium and other naturally occurring nuclear isotopes beneath their feet, but used fuel rods from a nuclear power plant? No fucking way!
Your house is full of radon Joe, the nuclear waste in a sealed casket, buried in the side of a mountain nowhere near you isn’t what is going to give you cancer.
I was gonna make a joke about using it for plutonium production, but I’m pretty sure that still requires neutrons from fresh U235 to hit U238 to make U239 which decays into Pu239
Eat it! So many calories. You will never have to eat again.
We have many. Most aren’t in effect yet though, but it also isn’t a serious issue. They’re stored safely in cement caskets, with molten glass and stuff to keep it together and safe, with effectively zero chance to cause an issue. There are permanent ways to store it safely, but we haven’t invested in them yet for many reason. Mostly, dirty energy companies pushing the anti-nuclear message have purposefully hamstrung nuclear from becoming a great solution, and people who think they’re being smart believe them.
That and they have ways to reuse “spent” nuclear fuel in newer reactors that can use fuel that older reactors have finished using.
Is nuclear waste more radioactive than the uranium we started with?
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Absolutely incorrect. Neutron activation will produce more waste in volume than fission, but without the long lived fission products that are really nasty. We don’t really have a plan yet on HOW we’re going to circulate lithium and recapture tritium and what the waste from that will look like, but we do know it will create a significant amount of waste.
Thank you. While in the context of fission both the risk and the amount of waste seem to be much lower and waste can probably be managed by fission related protocols, my comment was too grossly wrong, so I just deleted it.
Do we have a solution for atmospheric CO2 release yet?
Just put it back in the ground where it came from. Why is this a concern? It was radioactive rocks when we took it out, and it’s radioactive rocks when we put it back in.
Do we have a problem with nuclear waste yet?
Yes
Define problem, because it’s less waste than old solar panels per megawatt. Both of which we just throw away in special places designed specifically for that waste.
Define “less”. By volume? Mass? Ecological impact? If you want to say “per megawatt” then you obviously have numbers, let’s see them.
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Uh, that wasn’t me, please pay attention. Either way, you made a claim - a quantitative claim no less - it’s on you to back it up. Don’t pretend that someone else’s behaviour excuses yours.
Nuclear waste is uncontroversially a serious problem. If you want to convince anybody of anything else you need to be willing to communicate, and this isn’t it.
In EU you recycling is included in the price. It is mandatory and must be done in EU.
we give each yimby a few gallons to put in their closet
Have you seen spent fuel storage solutions? I’ll happily hold onto a cask. It wouldn’t be any more radioactive than the smoke coming from the coal plant down the street.
I think it’s a trust issue. If you see regulations and laws fall in real time, due to deregulating governments, destroying years of work with one strike … you don’t want these people to have supervision over nuclear plants or the waste disposal. Remember the train derailment? Yeah,… that but worse, because they tried to save money.
Need CO2 line go down.
