As the title says, I’m interested in this community’s perceptions on nuclear energy.
Personally, as it currently stands, no. But it could potentially be, given better waste treatment practices and far better regulation and consistently enforced safety requirements.
It’s far greener than fossil fuels, when run carefully at least. But between the persistent issues with waste reclamation and harmful leakage, and the massive amount of damage that can be done when mistakes are made or safety is overlooked, I don’t think it qualifies as “green”.
So from a practical standpoint, I still think new resources are better spent developing infrastructure for solar, wind, geothermal, etc. But as we are phasing out other power sources, pretty much everything else should go before we start to decommission nuclear.
When compared to something like a coal fired power station, they too can cause similar levels of unthinkable damage when things go wrong but with the added damage whilst they operate. Nothing feels ideal at this stage and not to say it classes them as green or clean, but the bar is pretty low for improvement as it stands.
True sustainable > Nuclear > Fossil fuels
Transitioning out of fossil fuels is #1 priority. Whatever it takes. Even shortening the transition by one year would be worth 40 more years of nuclear wastes, which are much much more easily manageable problem (unlike CO2 you can literally store nuclear waste in a hole for thousands of years without it messing up the environment)
My long term preferred solution is renewables or fusion, but we are not yet at the point where we can deal with the intermittence (but closing that gap fast)
I am really angry at the anti-nuclear movement. If we had gone all-in in that direction in the 90s we would be out of the fossil fuel economy by now.
you can literally store nuclear waste in a hole for thousands of years without it messing up the environment
No you can not, we still don’t have the technology to store it safety. And we definitely still don’t do it. If you do just a bit of research you will notice that nuclear waste is being stored in big water pools close to nuclear plants. I would not call that “safe, long term solution”.
I am really angry at the anti-nuclear movement.
Current nuclear technology was developed for nuclear weapons, it is a no go. We need to impove reserch into molten salt thorium reactors and fision, but uranium is not an option.
Notwithstanding the fact that “big water pools” would not be an extremely high tech solution and could be a long term solution, you should look into geological storage. Enclosure in glass and concrete, storage deep enough to be below aquifers, do look like they can last millions of years (which, personally I think is a waste: a radioactive material is something that radiates energy. I am sure that within a century or two we will dig up these “wastes” to generate energy, I hope we make their enclosure easily openable)
Current nuclear technology was developed for nuclear weapons
True, and internet was developed by the DARPA. That’s largely irrelevant. The effort to make weapon-grade uranium (90%) is an order of magnitude above the effort to make power plants-grade uranium (20%)
I agree that, in future, we will probably have ways to store and use energy from radioactive waste and I geological storage might probably be solution.
But… we are still not close to it, “we will solve it in the future” is what got us here.
Additionally, I just think there is no need to take such risks when there are other, safer options.
What technologies are missing in your opinion to do geological storage?
Many sites are currently operational across the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository#Nuclear_repository_sites
If you take a look at “Status” column, only four of them are in use. After 60 years of nuclear energy and 440 nuclear power plants in 32 countries.
I call that a big fail, and exact problem I am talking about.
We don’t even need to go into question wether thise will be safe for thousands of years, which is doubtful.
If I show you definite proof of extraterrestrial visits on Earth, it will not matter that 99.9999% of UFO sightings were fake.
I call that a big fail, and exact problem I am talking about.
No, you never specified the hypothetical blocking problems you are talking about. Existence of even one site in operation proves that no blocking problems exist.
We don’t even need to go into question whether these will be safe for thousands of years, which is doubtful.
My good man, these are designed for millions of years. Based on the observation of billions years old natural occurring isotopes. From the WP article:
Despite a long-standing agreement among many experts that geological disposal can be safe, technologically feasible and environmentally sound, a large part of the general public in many countries remains skeptical as result of anti-nuclear campaigns.
Well I am sceptical. Maybe I can believe that US and other rich nations can make it work, I have huge doubts in most of the couries being careful enough.
I have an unpopular opinion.
TLDR: While current nucler has it’s place, it most definitely is not the solution.
Please, do remember - we need solution for the whole planet, not only EU+US.
While nuclear (fision) can be relatively clean (molten salt thorium reactors), cutrent technology is not there yet, and other comments explain why: availability of uranium, processing of it, and storage of nuclear waste, which contrary to popular opinion is not yet solved. Just search around and those idea we were sold during 80s never materialized, we still don’t know how to safely put nuclear waste into the ground.
Even if we do it right, it is extremely expensive and probably is generating more emissions we think.
Current technology was created for making nuclear weapons, promoting use of it is just promoting nuclear weapons.
Do you really want random countries around the world to have acces to processed uranuim?
Would you trust some random dictators that their plants will be safe?
That their nuclear waste will be safely stored?
Current nuclear is not the solution, Thorium and even better fusion is, so we need to push research, not uranium.
And we need to remember that there is no one solution to rule them all, hydro is working nicely for some countries, geothermal for others, wind for some locations, solar definitely has it’s place. Nuclear too, at least to fill the gaps in others.
Other big part of solution, which every nuclear supporter is ignoring: we need to reduce energy consumption.
We need better insulation, more efficient cars, machines, computers. Less traveling, less commuting, more public transportation.
unfortunately we will run into Jevon’s paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
It isn’t the making of more efficient things (which we should do)
It is the changing of human attitudes towards consumption that we need to solve.
Interesting read about Jevons paradox, thanks for the link.
I know that we don’t want to reduce our comfort, but there are ways to keep it and reduce energy demand, or reduce comfort just a little but (ex. using small cars).
well if we encourage proper mass transit, then people wouldn’t need to spend money on liabilities (cars) and we could have substantial improvements in reducing our total energy demand while providing greater mobility and transportation access to those most desperately in need.
I see nuclear as a transitory source of energy. It doesn’t emit any greenhouse gases and FAR better than fossil fuels. We could easily transition to it faster and more cheaply than solar, wind, etc currently. Deaths associated with fossil fuel energy greatly exceed those associate with nuclear energy.
Burning fossil fuels needs to stop and we need to bring down carbon levels to what they were 20+ years ago. Ideally, transitioning to nuclear would be cheap/fast while we build out solar and wind infrastructure, and research how to make these sources of energy more effective.
However, I’m not a policy nor energy expert by any means. I’m just some random person on the internet.
Practical experience shows that nuclear is neither cheap or fast, with ongoing constructions being massively delayed and way over budget.
I would have agreed with you 20 years ago, but now we have way better alternatives and nuclear is too slow to make a difference.
NIMBY is also another factor that delays new nuclear plants. That said, safety is another big concern here. Although not at an nuclear energy facility, there was that incident recently at Los Alamos National Laboratory researching nuclear weapons where they placed 8 rods of plutonium next to each other that could have triggered a disaster. Very high safety standards are required, and humans are known for making stupid decisions.
Well there is a very good reason why modern nuclear reactors have a negative void coefficient (you just turn off the neutron source and the reactor naturally turns itself off
Or if really paranoid have a supply of Xenon-135 handy and that reactor will be shutdown in microseconds (which by the way is naturally produced by the reactor itself and why early prototype rectors kept turning themself off after running for a bit)
