“clean energy”
Don’t nuclear power plants produce waste which is highly problematic because it’s hazardous and radioactive? I wouldn’t call that clean. And SMRs generate even more waste than big nuclear plants.
highly problematic because it’s hazardous and radioactive?
Thing is, there’s very little of that waste, with much less impact than say, burning coal.
Also, it’s highly radioactive only when taken fresh out of reactor - this waste is stored in pools, until it decays. What you’re left is weakly radioactive, long term waste that needs to be buried for a long time.
Burying the small amount of waste in a stable non-actively forming mountain for a few thousand years is 1000x better than burning things and putting them into the air.
I’m not so sure about that. We already had to pay a lot of taxpayers’ money to fix bad issues with those storage facilities. And it’s just been a few decades with at least tens of thousands of years to go. That could become very, very expensive. And nasty to deal with for future generations.
I’d say just burying your waste where no one can see it isn’t a good solution. Neither is just dumping it into the ocean. And knowing a worse alternative doesn’t make it right.
You’re correct, burning yet more oil and coal and putting that CO2 into the atmosphere isn’t a viable option either. That’d ruin the climate and be unhealthy for us.
If the choice is spend more to hold onto the byproducts or let the byproducts slowly make the entire earth uninhabitable I’m kinda in favour of the former. Ideally completely green energy would be preferred but I guess it just doesn’t scale well with consumer demands and patterns :/.
It does, and it’s cheaper and faster to implement. Solar and wind are dirt cheap. Storage has long been the bottleneck, but we’ve made gargantuan progress in scalable battery technology (sodium batteries, for example).
A green grid would also help distribute energy production closer to where people live, and reduce single points of failure. It goes to increase grid resilience and reduce dependence on a few large energy corporations.
Nuclear was a useful technology, and likely safer than coal. But anyone pushing for nuclear (over 100% renewables) nowadays is helping uphold the status quo of centralized energy production in the hands of a a few rich capitalists.
