So uh, turns out the energy companies are not exactly the most moral and rule abiding entities, and they love to pay off politicians and cut corners. How does one prevent that, as in the case of fission it has rather dire consequences?
Since you can apply that logic to everything, how can you ever build anything? Because all consequences are dire on a myopic scale, that is, if your partner dies because a single electrician cheaped out with the wiring in your building and got someone to sign off, “It’s not as bad as a nuclear disaster” isn’t exactly going to console them much.
At some point, you need to accept that making something illegal and trying to prosecute people has to be enough. For most situations. It’s not perfect. Sure. But nothing ever is. And no solution to energy is ever going to be perfect, either.
That’s why there are lots of regulations for things impacting life safety. With a nuclear power plant, you mitigate the disaster potential by having so many more people involved in the design and inspection processes.
The risk of an electrician installing faulty wiring in your home could be mitigated by having a third party inspector review the work. Now do that 1000x over and your risk of “politicians are paid off” is negligible.
That’s why there are lots of regulations for things impacting life safety
Regulations that a lot of pro-nuclear people try to get relaxed because they “artificially inflate the price to more than solar so that we’ll use solar”. I’m not saying all pro-nuclear folks are tin-foilers, but the only argument that puts nuclear cheaper than solar+battery anymore is an argument that uses deregulated facilities.
If solar+wind+battery is cheaper per MWH, faster to build, with less front-loaded costs, then it’s a no-brainer. It only stops being a no-brainer when you stop regulating the nuclear plant. Therein lies the paradox of the argument.
Regulations are actually generally created by regulatory bodies, which are usually non-political. For instance, the underwriter laboratory is the major appliance, building and electrical approval body in the United States.
In most countries, building codes and safety codes are created by industry specialists, people who have been in the industry as professionals for many decades and have practiced and been licensed in the field that they are riding the regulations for.
There’s a big difference between politicians who are passing these laws, and those writing them who are the regulatory bodies. Generally, as a politicians will simply adopt the codes as recommended by the professional licensing and certification bodies.
I suppose it will be the end of modern civilization if politicians decide to politicize electrical or building codes. Then we’ll be fucked for sure. We’ve seen that happen before with the Indiana pi bill.
“The Indiana Pi Bill is the popular name for bill #246 of the 1897 sitting of the Indiana General Assembly, one of the most notorious attempts to establish mathematical truth by legislative fiat.”
Exactly, just like a windmill running and a nuclear power plant running have very different effects on the power grid. Hence why comparing them directly is often such a nonsense act.
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.
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.
By not picking, you are picking fossil fuels. Because we can’t fully replace everything with solar/wind yet, and fossil fuels are already being burned as we speak.
No, give me an option that doesn’t make a part of the world uninhabitable or increases climate change.
That just a stupid comparison and is there any reason why we can’t also do wind solar thermal hydro also? It’s fossil fuels or nuclear and that’s it huh?
I never said we can’t do also wind, solar, thermal, and hydro; in fact we have to do all of them. But, hydro isn’t possible in most places (and also makes “a part of the world uninhabitable” too — look at how much the Three Gorges Dam displaced, for example), nor is geothermal. And wind and solar are inconsistent — great as part of it, but they can’t be the entirety of the grid, unless you want the entire country to go dark on a cloudy day, cuz we simply can’t make batteries store that much.
I get so frustrated when I see people recommend hydro as a solution to climate change. Human intervention to fresh water systems is still a major ecological disaster. It’s like cutting off one hand to save the other.
No. The original comment said the “worst disaster made a very small she’s of the planet uninhabitable”. Keep in mind this disaster was the result of Soviet incompetence and completely avoidable with standards implemented in the US.
They’re saying our “worst case scenario” using nuclear power is better than worst case scenario continuing to use fossil fuels.
Likelihood of worse case scenario using nuclear power is also extremely low. Whereas worst case scenario (billions of people dying) for continuing to use fossil fuels is EXTREMELY HIGH.
Bet you’d feel* differently if you were a resident of one of the island nations that’s going to drown in the next decade or two. That part of the world’s definitely going to be uninhabitable if we continue to do nothing.
So installing a nuclear reactor in my province where we have ample hydro electric power options would save that island?
It’s like you are yell at everyone saying nuclear power or die. There are lots of options to clean reliable energy. In some cases nuclear will be the best option but not always.
You called me suspicious so here I am fulfilling that expectation. Here’s a fucking great video on why dams, and therefore hydro power, are dangerous and ecologically damaging. The only point I was trying to make is that your argument against nuclear, that it might cause an area of land to become uninhabitable, is flawed. Dams always make an area of land uninhabitable.
This is an important comment. We need to collectively, outright, use less of everything.
Admittedly, fighting even my own goddamn subconscious and its desires is tough. “Get that new motorcycle, it’s got better emissions standards than your old bike”… old one’s just fine.
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.
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.
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.
I know it’s a damn lot easier than carbon recapture, if we’re talking waste products. It’s not ideal, but there is no such thing as perfect, and we shouldn’t let that be the enemy of good. Nuclear fission power is part of a large group of methods to help us switch off fossil fuels.
“Easier”? Are you aware of the fact that radioactive waste tombs are meant to stand for millions of years? It requres a lot of territory, construction and servance charges, and lots of prays for nothing destructive happens with it in its “infinite” lifetime.
Big hole in the side of mountain in a desert, stick the waste in, full it with rubble and concrete, job done. If some primatives in a hundred thousand years stumble across it and dig it out, fuck em, who cares.
I think it’s photosynthesis. ‘Bury in the ground’ is an extreme simplification btw.
Also, I am finished with this topic scince long anough. It feels politically biased. If you’d like to reply, I’d hear it gladly. But I m not going to be involved into a discussion.
How many 9.1 magnitude earthquakes do you think there are? And the reports following the disaster showed that there were definitely ways to prevent it from happening, like, for example, not building it so close to the sea.
I mean, if we want to go down that path, there’s no reason to think that governments won’t just stick to fossil fuels and fuck us all.
Even so, it took a literal once-in-a-century earthquake in the right place to send a tsunami to the perfectly misplaced reactor to actually make just one person die. One. And two died from the aforementioned massive tsunami caused by an earthquake that occurs around once a century.
The deaths came from the, again, once-in-a-century earthquake. Evacuations, yes. Deaths, no.
“Nobody died as a direct result of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. However, in 2018 one worker in charge of measuring radiation at the plant died of lung cancer caused by radiation exposure.” — Encyclopedia Britannica. (https://www.britannica.com/event/Fukushima-accident)
The nuclear power plant decades older than Chernobyl that got hit by an earthquake and a tsunami and resulted in a only single death and some expensive clean up?
You know there’s a crapload more reactors than Fukukishima, right? Like over 70% of France’s energy demands are met with nuclear power.
The issue here is that you are parroting the devisive argument that investors in oil have been putting out for decades. You are also ignoring the harm that outputting millions of tonnes of carbon-based effluent has on the world’s population as a whole.
Gram for gram nuclear is safer and your horror stories should be discounted. Retort:
2023 Marco Pol…Sweden, Karlsh…22 October 2023Lennard en z’n …United Kingdo…26 March 20232023 Princess …Philippines, Pol…28 February 20232022 Keystone …United States, …7 December 2022
Cool, keep on with your ‘nuclear bad’ narrative. It does objectively less harm than carbon-based energy.
It would be cool to see huge investments into battery storage.
Globally humanity already invests over 10 Billion dollars per year in advancing battery technology.
If we could create a battery that doesn’t just leak energy from storing…
In order to build what you are talking about will almost certainly require real room temperature super conductors. We can get close, maybe, with the next generation of Aluminum-Air or Iron-Air batteries but this is big pimping. It’s incredibly complicated and difficult.
It’s like Fusion Power. We can see a future where we have it figured out and working but it’s still some years, if not decades, away.
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.
Interesting. Didn’t consider the evaporation. I imagine friction could effect the minecarts, but no idea to what degree. Some loss is gonna happen so matter what. If I’m understanding correctly, even nuclear, built away from population centers, will lose some power due to transmission distances.
“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.
Mercury will always be with us. Arsenic will always be with us. PFAS will always be with us. Natural radiation will always be with us. Fortunately, nuclear waste is easily detectable, the regulations around it are much stronger, the amount of HLW is miniscule and the storage processes are incredibly advanced
Moreover, most Nuclear waste won’t always be with us. A lot of fission prodcuts have half lives in the decades or centuries
Not hugely. Actual nuclear waste, not just mildly radioactive uniforms and similar material, is extremely small and compact for the amount of energy generated.
Big news worthy accidents are a really good way to ensure strong regulation and oversight. And nuclear is very regulated now so that it has lower death rate than wind power.
No, they just have a super incredulous public so even inconsequencal things get blown way out of proportion in the news. So there’s more oversight.
It’s like flying, but to an even greater extent. Because people are afraid of flying and crashes are very public and news worthy, the FAA does a great job investigating incidents and requiring safety improvements. They’ve made it so flying is orders of magnitude safer than driving. A similar thing happens with nuclear. Because the public is scared, the news covers, so the government makes sure it is very safe.
While that’s true, we still have for example safe air travel, although I’m pretty sure companies would be happy to ship their passengers minced to maximize their profit.
Also, thorium reactors would be a great step forward, unfortunately its byproducts can’t be used for nuclear weapons, so their development was pretty slowed down.
Also there was that german experimental Thorium reactor that was so mismanaged, it made Burns’ Springfield power plant look well handled. I think that scared a lot of people off of Thorium for a long time.
Source: Lived right next to that reactor during my childhood.
Or they could just allow everyone to build nuclear reactors in their backyard, everyone is saying that they are safer than a banana so i don’t see any issue
Right now almost 100% of waste is stored on site above ground because they really have no good solution.
You mean there’s so little they don’t even need a dedicated facility for it, and it’s safe enough that people are willing to work where it’s stored? Sounds great!
Easy. Have nuclear power plants operate as government run and backed corporations (what we’d call a “Crown Corporation” here in Canada).
That way you can mandate safety and uptime as metrics over profit. It may be less efficient from an economic standpoint (overall cost might be higher), but you also don’t wind up with the nuclear version of Love Canal.
So uh, turns out the energy companies are not exactly the most moral and rule abiding entities, and they love to pay off politicians and cut corners. How does one prevent that, as in the case of fission it has rather dire consequences?
Since you can apply that logic to everything, how can you ever build anything? Because all consequences are dire on a myopic scale, that is, if your partner dies because a single electrician cheaped out with the wiring in your building and got someone to sign off, “It’s not as bad as a nuclear disaster” isn’t exactly going to console them much.
At some point, you need to accept that making something illegal and trying to prosecute people has to be enough. For most situations. It’s not perfect. Sure. But nothing ever is. And no solution to energy is ever going to be perfect, either.
An electrician installing faulty wiring doesn’t render your home uninhabitable for a few thousand years.
So there’s one difference.
That’s why there are lots of regulations for things impacting life safety. With a nuclear power plant, you mitigate the disaster potential by having so many more people involved in the design and inspection processes.
The risk of an electrician installing faulty wiring in your home could be mitigated by having a third party inspector review the work. Now do that 1000x over and your risk of “politicians are paid off” is negligible.
Okay, so we’ve got a safe nuclear power plant that’s a decade behind schedule and 100% over budget.
By your logic I suggest you avoid any building constructed in the US as nothing would ever be safe enough.
It’s plenty safe now, but my electricity rates have doubled because the plant was so over budget and they need to make their money back.
Regulations that a lot of pro-nuclear people try to get relaxed because they “artificially inflate the price to more than solar so that we’ll use solar”. I’m not saying all pro-nuclear folks are tin-foilers, but the only argument that puts nuclear cheaper than solar+battery anymore is an argument that uses deregulated facilities.
If solar+wind+battery is cheaper per MWH, faster to build, with less front-loaded costs, then it’s a no-brainer. It only stops being a no-brainer when you stop regulating the nuclear plant. Therein lies the paradox of the argument.
You are saying, regulations will fix this? Politicians create the regulations, the fines, and enforcement.
Political parties are running on platforms of deregulation right now.
Regulations are actually generally created by regulatory bodies, which are usually non-political. For instance, the underwriter laboratory is the major appliance, building and electrical approval body in the United States.
In most countries, building codes and safety codes are created by industry specialists, people who have been in the industry as professionals for many decades and have practiced and been licensed in the field that they are riding the regulations for.
There’s a big difference between politicians who are passing these laws, and those writing them who are the regulatory bodies. Generally, as a politicians will simply adopt the codes as recommended by the professional licensing and certification bodies.
I suppose it will be the end of modern civilization if politicians decide to politicize electrical or building codes. Then we’ll be fucked for sure. We’ve seen that happen before with the Indiana pi bill.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill
“The Indiana Pi Bill is the popular name for bill #246 of the 1897 sitting of the Indiana General Assembly, one of the most notorious attempts to establish mathematical truth by legislative fiat.”
a wind mill going down and a nuclear plant blowing up have very different ramifications
Exactly, just like a windmill running and a nuclear power plant running have very different effects on the power grid. Hence why comparing them directly is often such a nonsense act.
The risks are lower in literally everything else…?
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.
You mean under ground from where it was dug out?
The plant itself, water inevitably getting in contact with wastes and leaking also.
You mean water under ground? It was in contact million years before any of us was born.
Million years were sufficient for the radioactivity to decay before life started to evolve on earth.
Both sound terrible.
I don’t really want to pick the lessor of two evils when it comes to the energy.
By not picking, you are picking fossil fuels. Because we can’t fully replace everything with solar/wind yet, and fossil fuels are already being burned as we speak.
No, give me an option that doesn’t make a part of the world uninhabitable or increases climate change.
That just a stupid comparison and is there any reason why we can’t also do wind solar thermal hydro also? It’s fossil fuels or nuclear and that’s it huh?
I never said we can’t do also wind, solar, thermal, and hydro; in fact we have to do all of them. But, hydro isn’t possible in most places (and also makes “a part of the world uninhabitable” too — look at how much the Three Gorges Dam displaced, for example), nor is geothermal. And wind and solar are inconsistent — great as part of it, but they can’t be the entirety of the grid, unless you want the entire country to go dark on a cloudy day, cuz we simply can’t make batteries store that much.
I get so frustrated when I see people recommend hydro as a solution to climate change. Human intervention to fresh water systems is still a major ecological disaster. It’s like cutting off one hand to save the other.
No, give me an option that doesn’t make a part of the world uninhabitable or increases climate change.
That just a stupid comparison and is there any reason why we can’t also do wind solar thermal hydro also? It’s fossil fuels or nuclear and that’s it?
You posted this 21 hours ago. I believe I answered you already.
Yeah I’m getting some strange issues with memmy today sorry.
All good
We are on a time limit thanks to climate change. We can’t afford to complain about picking the lessor of two evils.
The option proposed is that making a small area of the planet inhabitable or worsening climate change. Sorry but that’s a shitty comparison.
No. The original comment said the “worst disaster made a very small she’s of the planet uninhabitable”. Keep in mind this disaster was the result of Soviet incompetence and completely avoidable with standards implemented in the US.
They’re saying our “worst case scenario” using nuclear power is better than worst case scenario continuing to use fossil fuels.
Likelihood of worse case scenario using nuclear power is also extremely low. Whereas worst case scenario (billions of people dying) for continuing to use fossil fuels is EXTREMELY HIGH.
Bet you’d feel* differently if you were a resident of one of the island nations that’s going to drown in the next decade or two. That part of the world’s definitely going to be uninhabitable if we continue to do nothing.
So installing a nuclear reactor in my province where we have ample hydro electric power options would save that island?
It’s like you are yell at everyone saying nuclear power or die. There are lots of options to clean reliable energy. In some cases nuclear will be the best option but not always.
I’m not that pro-nuclear. You just made a shitty comparison ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Edit: Also if you think hydro is the solution, again, more uninhabitable land. Dams are their own ecological disaster.
You called me suspicious so here I am fulfilling that expectation. Here’s a fucking great video on why dams, and therefore hydro power, are dangerous and ecologically damaging. The only point I was trying to make is that your argument against nuclear, that it might cause an area of land to become uninhabitable, is flawed. Dams always make an area of land uninhabitable.
https://youtu.be/AL57dSIXqBM
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This is an important comment. We need to collectively, outright, use less of everything.
Admittedly, fighting even my own goddamn subconscious and its desires is tough. “Get that new motorcycle, it’s got better emissions standards than your old bike”… old one’s just fine.
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Hello, my German friend. I hope your gas reserves are full and coal dust is filling your lungs. /joke
Gas reserves are 93% full and prices are back to pre-war level, thanks for asking
sauce: https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/live-dashboard-real-time-statistics-on-germany-s-gas-supplies-a-8c021b20-d3d7-416b-a89e-5d91bdb0849f
I’m not German, I’m Canadian.
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.
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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.
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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.
And what do YOU know about radioactive waste disposal?
I know it’s a damn lot easier than carbon recapture, if we’re talking waste products. It’s not ideal, but there is no such thing as perfect, and we shouldn’t let that be the enemy of good. Nuclear fission power is part of a large group of methods to help us switch off fossil fuels.
“Easier”? Are you aware of the fact that radioactive waste tombs are meant to stand for millions of years? It requres a lot of territory, construction and servance charges, and lots of prays for nothing destructive happens with it in its “infinite” lifetime.
Have you tried capturing gas? As difficult as radioactive waste tombs are, they’re easier than containing a specific type of air lol.
Read about breathing if you want to know how to capture gas. Also, about photosynthesis.
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Launching radioactive waste into space is a terrible idea, because rockets on occasion crash. Once that happens it becomes a nuclear disaster.
Instead we can safely store it in depleted mines.
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Big hole in the side of mountain in a desert, stick the waste in, full it with rubble and concrete, job done. If some primatives in a hundred thousand years stumble across it and dig it out, fuck em, who cares.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/04/deep-isolation-aims-to-bury-nuclear-waste-using-boreholes.html
We can bury it in the ground and it will literally turn into lead. How are you doing with carbon emissions? Got a fix?
I think it’s photosynthesis. ‘Bury in the ground’ is an extreme simplification btw. Also, I am finished with this topic scince long anough. It feels politically biased. If you’d like to reply, I’d hear it gladly. But I m not going to be involved into a discussion.
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How many 9.1 magnitude earthquakes do you think there are? And the reports following the disaster showed that there were definitely ways to prevent it from happening, like, for example, not building it so close to the sea.
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I mean, if we want to go down that path, there’s no reason to think that governments won’t just stick to fossil fuels and fuck us all.
Even so, it took a literal once-in-a-century earthquake in the right place to send a tsunami to the perfectly misplaced reactor to actually make just one person die. One. And two died from the aforementioned massive tsunami caused by an earthquake that occurs around once a century.
deleted by creator
The deaths came from the, again, once-in-a-century earthquake. Evacuations, yes. Deaths, no.
“Nobody died as a direct result of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. However, in 2018 one worker in charge of measuring radiation at the plant died of lung cancer caused by radiation exposure.” — Encyclopedia Britannica. (https://www.britannica.com/event/Fukushima-accident)
The nuclear power plant decades older than Chernobyl that got hit by an earthquake and a tsunami and resulted in a only single death and some expensive clean up?
You know there’s a crapload more reactors than Fukukishima, right? Like over 70% of France’s energy demands are met with nuclear power.
The issue here is that you are parroting the devisive argument that investors in oil have been putting out for decades. You are also ignoring the harm that outputting millions of tonnes of carbon-based effluent has on the world’s population as a whole.
Gram for gram nuclear is safer and your horror stories should be discounted. Retort:
2023 Marco Pol…Sweden, Karlsh…22 October 2023Lennard en z’n …United Kingdo…26 March 20232023 Princess …Philippines, Pol…28 February 20232022 Keystone …United States, …7 December 2022
Cool, keep on with your ‘nuclear bad’ narrative. It does objectively less harm than carbon-based energy.
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Globally humanity already invests over 10 Billion dollars per year in advancing battery technology.
In order to build what you are talking about will almost certainly require real room temperature super conductors. We can get close, maybe, with the next generation of Aluminum-Air or Iron-Air batteries but this is big pimping. It’s incredibly complicated and difficult.
It’s like Fusion Power. We can see a future where we have it figured out and working but it’s still some years, if not decades, away.
Allow me to share the most frustrating graph I have ever seen
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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.
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Interesting. Didn’t consider the evaporation. I imagine friction could effect the minecarts, but no idea to what degree. Some loss is gonna happen so matter what. If I’m understanding correctly, even nuclear, built away from population centers, will lose some power due to transmission distances.
Moving batteries seems like a terribly inefficient way of replacing power lines.
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My country, Sweden, also gets a decent chunk of power from hydro. Back in 2021, about 43% was hydroelectric, and 31% was nuclear.
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“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.
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Mercury will always be with us. Arsenic will always be with us. PFAS will always be with us. Natural radiation will always be with us. Fortunately, nuclear waste is easily detectable, the regulations around it are much stronger, the amount of HLW is miniscule and the storage processes are incredibly advanced
Moreover, most Nuclear waste won’t always be with us. A lot of fission prodcuts have half lives in the decades or centuries
Jets and ships can be nuclear powered. It’s just not a very good idea for jets at least.
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Not hugely. Actual nuclear waste, not just mildly radioactive uniforms and similar material, is extremely small and compact for the amount of energy generated.
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We don’t have to put all our eggs in one basket, but we should definitely avoid the basket that is literally setting fire to our planet right now.
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Well, vote to make it happen then? I don’t care about the U.S.; I’m not American.
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Yeah voting is something we do in democracies. I know the options are limited in the U.S. but you could work for it, no?
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Build one then
Big news worthy accidents are a really good way to ensure strong regulation and oversight. And nuclear is very regulated now so that it has lower death rate than wind power.
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No, they just have a super incredulous public so even inconsequencal things get blown way out of proportion in the news. So there’s more oversight.
It’s like flying, but to an even greater extent. Because people are afraid of flying and crashes are very public and news worthy, the FAA does a great job investigating incidents and requiring safety improvements. They’ve made it so flying is orders of magnitude safer than driving. A similar thing happens with nuclear. Because the public is scared, the news covers, so the government makes sure it is very safe.
Not that driving was safe anyway
It’s a risk virtually everyone considers accountable.
While that’s true, we still have for example safe air travel, although I’m pretty sure companies would be happy to ship their passengers minced to maximize their profit.
Also, thorium reactors would be a great step forward, unfortunately its byproducts can’t be used for nuclear weapons, so their development was pretty slowed down.
That actually sounds more comfortable than normal airline travel
Also there was that german experimental Thorium reactor that was so mismanaged, it made Burns’ Springfield power plant look well handled. I think that scared a lot of people off of Thorium for a long time.
Source: Lived right next to that reactor during my childhood.
If only we had a non fossil energy source we could safely export to developing nations instead of ICE technology.
(Intenal Combustion Engine)
Nationalise energy production.
Or they could just allow everyone to build nuclear reactors in their backyard, everyone is saying that they are safer than a banana so i don’t see any issue
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Is it quote from 60-ies? We have. At least Russia has. US had too.
You mean there’s so little they don’t even need a dedicated facility for it, and it’s safe enough that people are willing to work where it’s stored? Sounds great!
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I trust the material to just sit there like big slabs of concrete usually do.
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Much much tighter regulations. Our cars aren’t aluminum cans waiting to crush everybody inside them because of strict safety regulations.
Make them live on site?
Easy. Have nuclear power plants operate as government run and backed corporations (what we’d call a “Crown Corporation” here in Canada).
That way you can mandate safety and uptime as metrics over profit. It may be less efficient from an economic standpoint (overall cost might be higher), but you also don’t wind up with the nuclear version of Love Canal.