cen.acs.org/environment/pollution/…/i12
Still haven’t found a good way to get rid of nuclear waste, which remains dangerous for a long time.
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Flax_vert@feddit.uk 5 months ago
Same logic applies to nuclear energy. More people fall off of hydroelectric power plants or drown or something, or fall off of wind turbines, than get poisoned by radiation from a nuclear power plant
Dagwood222@lemm.ee 5 months ago
Venator@kbin.social 5 months ago
Coal produces more toxic waste per MWh than nuclear, and it just spews it into the atmosphere, not into nice neatly packaged barrels you can just store in a hole underground...
Dagwood222@lemm.ee 5 months ago
Where did I say coal was a good idea?
I would vote for improving the power grid. Create tons of jobs and make the system less prone to blackouts. Remember 2003
TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee 5 months ago
We know what to do with it, the same thing countries like France do, deep isolation.
The problem with America, is the same problem we have for any federal level infrastructure. The states have too much control and are prone to NIMBY campaigns.
Dagwood222@lemm.ee 5 months ago
imho “deep isolation” isn’t a solution, it’s kicking the can down the road.
Improving the power grid would increase the available supply without causing problems.
TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee 5 months ago
it’s kicking the can down the road.
Why? And what would be the alternative?
Even if we don’t start relying on more nuclear power, nuclear waste is still going to be produced. Even if it’s just maintaining the nuclear power we have right now, or just dealing with an aging nuclear arms cache.
I don’t see how kicking it down the road is really a problem in this scenario, as that’s pretty much all you can do with nuclear waste, wait until it’s not dangerous.
Improving the power grid would increase the available supply without causing problems.
That’s kinda a general statement… Part of improving the power grid could be interpreted as including more nuclear power.
The imperative in this scenario isn’t just making sure we’re not “causing problems”, it’s moving towards a power source that minimizes our dependence on fossil fuels.
It’s “kicking the can down the road” vs ecological collapse.
dev_null@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
Which is much better than not kicking the can down the road, and just spewing emissions into the atmosphere like fossil fuels. Nuclear is not perfect, it’s just better than fossil fuels.
Aux@lemmy.world 5 months ago
The problem with America and some other countries like Russia is what you consider a waste is a weapon grade material to these governments. And you don’t want to bury your weapons too deep.
heckypecky@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
Yes, fission sucks. But still better than fossils.
Flax_vert@feddit.uk 5 months ago
Recycle it. And the bits you can’t recycle are so negligibly small you can store it in a single dedicated national dump
echodot@feddit.uk 5 months ago
Dumping it on the ground doesn’t seem like a particularly sophisticated strategy but it’s actually perfectly safe. It’s not going to leak out or anything it’s in massive blocks of concrete.
Worrying about it is pointless.
For we know in 50 years someone will come up with a way to recycle it and it’ll be a complete non-issue anyway. This pretty good research on recycling you can a material already so 50 years is not an unreasonable time frame. The current containing solutions are good for thousands of years.
Aux@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Compared to other options, including renewables, nuclear produces close to no waste at all.
joostjakob@lemmy.world 5 months ago
The danger of nuclear isn’t so much on the daily stats of what actually went wrong, but in the tiny risk of having huge problems. The worst case scenario for a Chernobyl style disaster is actually losing huge parts of Europe. Even in well run plants, if enough things go wrong at the same time, it could still mean losing the nearest city. These “black swan” events are hard for humans to think clearly about, as we are not used to working with incredibly small chances (like deciding to plan for a 1000 year storm or not).
Flax_vert@feddit.uk 5 months ago
Basically every nuclear disaster has been very very preventable. And even then in incompetency, it was a small chance.
joostjakob@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Preventable, but they still happened, even with the crazy security at plants. But what you’re saying is like “we’ve only had small earthquakes so far, so there are likely to be no big ones”. When it’s really absolutely the other way around.
Ibaudia@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Nuclear just isn’t a good short-term value proposition so most people are dismissive of it. Plants take along time to create and are generally expensive. Not to mention the NIMBYs who would rather dump tons of chemicals into local riverways, air, and land with coal than have a clean-burning nuclear plant within 10 miles of their city.
SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
Wind and Solar are cheaper now, and we won’t have to trade a dependence on oil from foreign countries for a dependence on uranium from foreign countries. We won’t in the future have to hear about how the people of Kazakhstan will greet us liberators when we invade the country to establish freedom and have to pretend it’s merely a coincidence they happen to have the energy resources we’re dependent on.