Sorry for my pro nuke rant but the mind warping environmental groups have done on nuclear has been crazy. Nuclear waste is a non-issue, if you complied all the waste in the US since inception its the size of a single football field 10 yards deep and we dont re-use our nuclear fuel like europe does. NO ONE HAS EVER DIED FROM NUCLEAR WASTE IN THE US. * I mean waste from nuclear power plants not from relics of the cold war or WW2 weapons production. There have been 3 primary nuclear "disasters": Chernobyl which was like driving a 1960's car with out a seatbelt and had no containment structure which I believe all modern plants do nowadays. The UN has estimated that 4,000 people will ultimately died of radiation from that accident. I could say that even if 100,000 people died from that accident that pales in comparison to the ONE MILLION DEATHS ANNUALLY people attribute to fossil fuels. Three mile island: no one died and small amount of radiation was leaked.* at negligible levels Fukashima took a 9.0-9.1 magnitude earthquake and then a fucking 45 foot high tsunami to melt down. Should there have been a plan in place for such an event? Absolutely, maybe they should be placed at higher elevations but fuck. Even with that only one person died from direct radiation, I'm sure there will be increased rates of cancer in several thousand people. 3 events, and people ignore that this shit happens all the time near coal plants. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Edit* for comments later down this page
Absolutely, humans have never gone backwards on the energy density scale. Nuclear power is safe and reliable.
Nuke. In another lifetime my wife was a geologist. 90% of her job was testing the ground water in places throughout New Mexico for radioactivity. It’s fucking insane that we’re even thinking about building more nuclear plants when the risk involved is as high as it is and we have safer, greener alternatives.
Also Chernobyl is one of the wildest places now in Europe, hosting a wide variety of species far from the "wasteland" you've been lead to believe. https://www.wired.com/story/chernobyl-exclusion-zone-rewilding/
Until it’s not and when it’s not it has the potential to be one of the most destructive and long lasting events in human history, like Chernobyl.
Nah I'm sorry, its my own frustration at the anti-nuclear bs thats spewed. I understood you were pro nuke.
Cool. So then it’s safe for people to reinhabit, right? Pointing out that it’s currently biodiverse only highlights that human beings are like locusts and if any area is left alone long enough nature will recapture it. You’re leaving out the fact that radioactivity levels in the animals inhabiting Chernobyl are significantly higher than anywhere else in the world.
Arliden seems to have this covered so I’ll just add that living in a place where wind and solar farms are cropping up, it isn’t particularly green to obliterate the natural space
You are picking a nuclear meltdown that was the equivalent of driving a 1960s car with out a seatbelt getting in a crash and saying Im never using a car again even though we've had 50+ years of experience and knowledge on how to make nuclear safer. We run bloody aircraft carriers and submarines on it. Also if you are so concerned with a large nuclear plant than fine give me a small modular reactor to spread the risk out.
Look, if the options were limited to nuclear or fossil fuels, I’d be one hundred percent with you. But that’s not the case. Solar alone is capable of meeting our energy demands and it doesn’t care the risk, albeit small, of a cataclysmic event.
Let alone the shelf life of all of those is 25 years +/- and they all end up directly in landfills compared to nuclear plants that can run 50+ years https://www.bloomberg.com/news/feat...be-recycled-so-they-re-piling-up-in-landfills
The statement carries as much merit as the one you made about obliterating green spaces. I mean, if you don’t like the way solar panels and wind turbines look, I suppose that’s possible. But it’s pretty easy to tuck these things away out of sight (aside from the day they were installed, I’ve never seen my solar panels unless I was up on the roof). I also don’t recall anyone driving by a nuclear power plant and saying “well that just blends right in with nature”
Again dude you don't get it for one you need cheap fossil fuels to produce polysilicon. There is a reason 80% of all solar panel production is done in China, they use cheap coal and cheap labor. Secondly we do not produce nearly enough solar panels for the world. It would take 20+ years to even come close to that level and it would still need demand reduction and wind turbines to supplement. Third, there is a large land requirement for solar and it competes with humans arable farm land https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...aders-mull-banning-solar-panels-from-farmland As humans we have never gone backwards on an energy density scale, going purely solar would reduce the standard of living for all humans globally.
Downwinders is just a made up thing, then? Or is this like a “people don’t die from AIDS they die from other things” sort of argument?
Yes I don't think its good for the Federal government to test 504 nuclear weapons. That is not the same as nuclear power.
I’m specifically referring to Hanford’s nuclear waste storage, as it’s something I’m quite familiar with given my locale.
arliden being our center right but educated person on energy and economics things is always a trip i mean this as a positive
Ok thats not downwinders but I'll humor you. Hanford is the site of 1940's build up of our nuclear arsenal, yet again people using shit from the 1940s'/1950s as a nuclear power isnt safe today argument. I also don't even think we even use plutonium reactors in the US anymore.
Im not even right, I've voted dems all my life and am from California. I just have my disagreements with people on the left on several specific topics. I believe in climate change whole heartedly but I disagree with liberals on the path to achieving meaningful reduction in emissions while simultaneously keeping the standard of living of human beings at a high level world wide.
Yes. It is. And it’s okay that you want to move the goalposts. But to state that nobody in America has has ever died from nuclear waste is simply not true.
Like fuck off with environmental groups actively pushing to close Indian Point in New York only to watch emissions rise immediately in the years following. Or the fact we reject hydroelectric transmission lines from Canada so people in Boston can continue to burn fuel oil in the winter.
i'm frosty but iirc from our economic discussions you'd be a pretty normal neolib dem on economics, which we could quibble over whether that makes you center right or left but whatever. (it do be center right though)
This sort of issue shows how networks of interests create odd bedfellows. Like environmentalists who loathe nuclear campaigning beside ranchers who want dams to control water supply.
I mean I'm not well versed in what faction my beliefs would label me as. Monetarily I believe the national debt will have to be inflated away ala the 1940s and I think we can do that in a good way if we spend money on infrastructure that improves societal mobility, reduces energy costs, reduces emissions etc. While the stimulus checks were needed (otherwise we would of had the mother of all deflationary collapses) we probably over did it a bit. Which is fine the other side of that coin is terrible. But instead of 2 billion on stimulus checks I'd rather spend 500 billion like china is doing to build 150 nuclear reactors. But in a round about way China spending 500 billion on 150 nuclear reactors is like us building them as we have off shored a good chunk of our manufacturing and emissions overseas anyways.
Your arguments make so many presumptions that current conditions will continue on unchanged it would take more time than it’s worth to debunk each point. It’s easier to just point out some examples: California, the most populated state in the country gets about 35% of its energy from renewables. That includes 17% from solar and doesn’t include 8% from large scale hydro. Renewables overall are up 3.5% from 2020. Only 8.5% of the state’s power comes from its 2 nuclear plants. It’s a great example of steady renewable energy growth. Add to that it results in improved air quality, democratizes energy production and has zero risk of a catastrophe.
Do you work for the nuclear energy sector or something? Genuinely asking because while I think it’s reasonable, and probably even preferable, to use nuclear as a bridge to get to full scale greener solutions, I don’t really know if anyone outside of that industry that’s advocating for the use of nuclear in perpetuity.
i mostly just peg your ideological bedrock as center right for the neolib assumptions under girding it i found it INCREDIBLY useful to dig below the "empirical" facade on many things to learn the ideology behind it for finding a better understanding of things after i started to spin my wheels on things that didn't quite make sense because i was beholden to strict empiricism/pragmatism/etc
This is one of the companies I am very optimistic about. https://www.nuscalepower.com/environment/clean-water Couple comments. A NuScale VOYGR-6 plant, coupled with a reverse osmosis desalination plant, can have one module designated to produce 77 million gallons of clean water per day while the remaining modules cost-competitively provide ~366 MWe to the grid. That’s enough carbon-free energy to power a city of about 260,000 people. A 12-module NuScale VOYGR-12 plant could provide all the water for a city the size of Cape Town, South Africa (a water-scarce city with a population of about 4.0 million). SMR reactors I think are the easiest way to make the largest impact quickly in these challenges quickly.
lol using California as the beacon of light in the energy market, just the state with the most power outages in the US. California is Germany but with friendly neighbors. Thankfully as we get 1/5-1/3rd of our power from neighboring states. 8.5% of the states power comes from Diablo (which is one plant with 2 reactors), but it provides almost 25% of the states carbon free electricity. Thats from one single plant. California still gets half its power from natural gas because it still needs dispatch able power something solar can't do.
Please go for the debunk, I'd like to hear them. The fact is solar production world wide is no where in the realm it needs to be to produce the levels that you would need and I haven't discussed its intermittence issues. Which you would then lead you to say but batteries! and then I'd discuss that the supply chains for global transition world wide for EV's and batteries at the same time would is also no where near production levels needed and that the competition would lead to prices sky rocketing.
I honestly can't say I know what any of this means, I just found that when I dug deeper into energy markets and economics I started to see why the world works the way it does and why things have played out in manners that they have.
I am very optimistic about the future of nuclear. if we stack up the waste from solar panels every 25 years I am curious the comparison to the size from spent nuclear fuel needed to generate the same amount of power. I honestly don’t know but I anticipate it’s more than most people think when considering solar (which I am also a huge fan of).
No I'm a firefighter. I've lived within 10 miles of Diablo Nuclear power plant half of my life. You and I had a good discussion back and forth on hunting a while back. To be clear I don't have a problem with solar, but it can not be the sole carrier of the grid world wide.The end goal is a reduction of carbon emissions and again I state never in human history have we gone backwards on an energy density scale. Using solar and wind exclusively would be a regression in the standard of living for humans globally. The tide is turning for nuclear advocacy because people realize its a safe and effective way to generate large quantities of carbon free electricity. There is no reason that if we can run aircraft carriers with nuclear power safely we can't use it for civilian power generation. To me the full scale greener solutions is fusion or deep geothermal, but we have yet to figure out how either.
None of that refutes my point that it’s steadily growing it’s non-nuclear, green energy. And to cite power outages caused largely by natural occurrences- primarily wild fires, is peak bullshit.
Again, presumptions that today’s conditions are static. No one is saying switch to 100% solar tomorrow.
Like look at this grid, and this is with France’s nuke fleet running at its lowest production in years due to delayed maintenance. This is the step forward, yet we have morons like Germany who close nuclear plants down in favor of burning coal and biomass.
Currently, only about 10% of solar panels are recycled, but based on their composition there’s a realistic potential to recycle up to 90% of the materials. But currently, it’s quite expensive to extract the materials. But with a lifespan of 25 to 30 years, there’s a decent runway to refine the process and make it cheaper.
I never refuted Californias growing renewable power because that was never a point I made. We have power outages due to PSPS’s yes, but we also have a grid that is increasingly unreliable and a reason for frequent outages as well. California is a great spot for renewables, again I’m not anti solar. I’m anti only Wind/Solar/Batteries run grid because it’s fairy land stuff. But not every nation is california with adequate sunshine and places for wind, there is a reason China is building 150 nuclear reactors.
Im taking that Stanford futurology Reddit post back there and using their assumptions. People do crazy amounts of hand waving when it comes to manufacturing production and technology. We are still hovering around 23% solar panel efficiency and we are still grinding out small gains. EV batteries have made no crazy improvements in a decade and we are still grinding out small gains. Manufacturing is hard, it takes time, building supply chains take time. Building mines take time. You are not going to go from 200 GW global production a year and ramp to meet 23,000 GW installed capacity in a decade. The logical choice forward is nuclear doing the heavy lifting with solar and wind as ancillary components.