• Dojan@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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_v@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • abraxas@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Except that nuclear isn’t the only, or even the cheapest, alternative to fossil fuels.

      • pedroapero@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • uis@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          This doesn’t even factor the space abandonned to store «normal» toxic materials.

          You mean under ground from where it was dug out?

      • umad_cause_ibad@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Both sound terrible.

        I don’t really want to pick the lessor of two evils when it comes to the energy.

        • Astrealix@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • umad_cause_ibad@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            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?

          • umad_cause_ibad@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            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?

            • Astrealix@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              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.

          • umad_cause_ibad@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            The option proposed is that making a small area of the planet inhabitable or worsening climate change. Sorry but that’s a shitty comparison.

            • SocialEngineer56
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              1 year ago

              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.

            • Norah - She/They@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              1 year ago

              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.

              • umad_cause_ibad@lemm.ee
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                1 year ago

                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.

                • Norah - She/They@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                  1 year ago

                  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

                • Norah - She/They@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                  1 year ago

                  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.

        • uis@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Hello, my German friend. I hope your gas reserves are full and coal dust is filling your lungs. /joke

    • umad_cause_ibad@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Astrealix@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

          • Astrealix@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            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.

              • Astrealix@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                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.

          • Astrealix@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            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.

            • EMPig@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              “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.

              • Astrealix@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                Have you tried capturing gas? As difficult as radioactive waste tombs are, they’re easier than containing a specific type of air lol.

                • EMPig@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  Read about breathing if you want to know how to capture gas. Also, about photosynthesis.

                  • Astrealix@lemmy.world
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                    1 year ago

                    If you want to buy the land to plant a second Amazon, be my guest. And breathing does the exact opposite of what we want.

          • radiosimian@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            We can bury it in the ground and it will literally turn into lead. How are you doing with carbon emissions? Got a fix?

            • EMPig@lemmy.world
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              11 months ago

              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.

      • Touching_Grass@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • Buelldozer@lemmy.today
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • Touching_Grass@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            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

        • njordomir@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          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.

          • Touching_Grass@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            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.

            • njordomir@lemmy.world
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              11 months ago

              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.

        • Astrealix@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

            • Astrealix@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              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.

        • Harrison [He/Him]@ttrpg.network
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          1 year ago

          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?

        • radiosimian@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          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.

    • Touching_Grass@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Dojan@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        “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.

        • Touching_Grass@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Yea both are horrible. But we can get off fossil fuels and walk away. We can’t with nuclear. It’ll always be with us and doesn’t solve that we need fossil fuel for other things.

          Jets and ships are still going to need fossil fuels.

          Which is why I think the best thing we could be doing right now is focusing on improving how energy is store. With the right advancement we could solve a lot of these problems with the right battery.

          • OriginalUsername@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            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

            • Touching_Grass@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Sure, but doesn’t that just increase the nuclear waste storage issue if we turn all these vehicles nuclear powered

              • Harrison [He/Him]@ttrpg.network
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                1 year ago

                Not hugely. Actual nuclear waste, not just mildly radioactive uniforms and similar material, is extremely small and compact for the amount of energy generated.

                • Touching_Grass@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  I would say though how much nuclear waste would be acceptable in an aquifer to be an issue. Its great that in relation to the energy produced, its small. But can that small amount still pose a catastrophic risk or not

    • dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      How do you get the uranium or thorium? Generally, it has to be mined. Are we using nuclear powered mining equipment? No. We use fossil fuel powered mining equipment. Then we use fossil fuels to power the trucks that take the depleted nuclear product to the storage depot, which is powered and requires employees who drive there using fossil fuel powered vehicles, using fossil fuel powered warehouse equipment. When does nuclear power phase out the fossil fuel power? Are we going to decommission oil and coal production facilities? Or are we just going to use nuclear to augment the grid?

      • Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Don’t forget all the fossil fuels used in machinery that builds nuclear power plants, and the CO2 emissions from all of the concrete used.

        Oh, and if you start building a nuclear power plant right now it will be online (maybe) in a decade or two and hopefully for only 150% of the initial cost. There’s a nuclear power plant in Georgia that is $17 BILLION over budget.