Fossil fuels produce terrible waste we store in the air that we breathe.
Yes, but when things go wrong, the boom is relatively small and contained.
We can’t run a regular coal or natural gas power plant here without fucking it up and getting people killed. Despite the safety of modern plant designs, I do NOT trust the people in charge here with fissile material.
Go lookup CANDU reactors, we have designs already that can’t steam explode themselves and instead will fail safe. Also just to be clear nuclear reactors don’t perform a nuclear explosion if they fail, the Chernobyl explosion was a steam explosion that threw nuclear material into the air.
The level of incompetence I’ve grown to expect of my state government would suggest that they’d have fissile material delivered and stored in a leaky shed, where it will create runoff which contaminates the local reservoir, before a crackhead steals it, takes it to the scrapyard, and it is never seen again.
…and rendered an area the size of a county unsuitable for humans for hundreds of generations.
You’re going to have to show me a government that isn’t half-full of people who hate education, who hate science, and most of all who hate accountability before I vote for more nuclear power.
You know, the beautiful thing about being a society is we can all just agree to regulate them. I think that’s called a government.
Like I said, we can’t/won’t effectively regulate the power plants we have now.
Our government is only good for generating moral panics and building roads. I hope that changes one day, but it has been getting worse for a long time, so I won’t hold my breath for it to all be fixed tomorrow.
Yes, but when things go wrong, the boom is relatively small and contained.
Not so: https://daily.jstor.org/the-tragedy-at-buffalo-creek/
I don’t think even one of those fast fission reactors is still in operation. Wonder why that is.
Because, it does not destroy all waste, despite a cartoon claiming as such and gullible people falling for it? Even “short-term” waste needs to be stored somewhere for about 500 years. Sure, it ain’t like the others in terms of length of time but anyone who thinks that is a cheap fact or trivial is an idealogue. Since they can exist at both extremes.
So the issue of the water table or general environmental contamination is not addressed the way OP claims. There are also higher costs and higher grade fuel is required. Not to say that there are not some advantages but the cartoon is just plain incorrect and taking a toodler’s view on some serious concerns. The Wikipedia article has a list of disavantages for anyone to look into.
I blame Nixon for why nuclear power in the US sucks. He axed research on any reactor types that didn’t produce plutonium for weapons, including thorium reactors. Hope he’s rotting in hell.
According to the future-documentary Futurama, his head is in a jar somewhere, waiting to assume the presidency once again with the headless body of Spiro Agnew.
Canada has CANDU breeder reactors, still in use. They also produce the majority of medical isotopes.
CANDU reactors are pressurized heavy-water reactors not Fast-neutron reactors.
Since there are economic, ecological, conceptual and engineering problems, only five Fast-neutron reactors are operational at the moment. Three in Russia, one in India and one in China. Not surprisingly these are countries that also have an interest in producing weapons grade Plutonium, which FNRs are capable of.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2968/066003007
https://spectrum.ieee.org/china-breeder-reactor
https://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs15glaser.pdf
https://energypost.eu/slow-death-fast-reactors/
https://sussex.figshare.com/articles/report/
And while nuclear energy production peaked 1996 at 17% and was nowhere near overtaking fossil energy production in it’s 70(!) year long existence, Renewables will overtake fossil fuel power production in 2025, with only minute risks for the biosphere.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/renewable-power-set-to-surpass-coal-globally-by-2025/
https://www.renewable-ei.org/pdfdownload/activities/REI_NuclearReport_201902_EN.pdf
So why cling to an outdated technology when there are viable solutions at hand, which are nowhere as complicated and dangerous as nuclear fission? It’s the monetary interest of a dying nuclear industry and its lobbyists.
It’s not really needed. Waste is a boogeyman, but not really a problem. It takes an incredibly small volume to store the waste, and it can be reduced with reprocessing to run in the exact same reactors.
At some point in the future when there actually is a huge amount of waste causing issues, then it might make sense to build a reactor to use it.
when there actually is a huge amount of waste
Over 60,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel are stored across Europe (excluding Russia and Slovakia), most of which in France (Table 1). Within the EU, France accounts for 25 percent of the current spent nuclear fuel, followed by Germany (15 percent) and the United Kingdom (14 percent). Spent nuclear fuel is considered high-level waste. Though present in comparably small volumes, it makes up the vast bulk of radioactivity.
~ 2019 https://worldnuclearwastereport.org/
Last “brilliant” plan I heard was dumping it in a hole deep enough we’d never need, nor be able to recover it.
A quick question . Other than a suprisingly lot of complexity involved in diggin the hole of sufficient size and depth why wouldnt it work ( or is that the reason )?
Weight is a way to make the problem sound worse than it is, because nuclear waste is so incredibly dense. It’s not enough to be a big deal yet. Dumping it deep into the ocean is an option, but it’s only going to happen to waste that doesn’t have potential uses first.
Have a look at the size of the Finnish waste repository.
“They’ll hold a total of 5,500 tonnes of waste,” says Joutsen. “So Onkalo will take all the high-level nuclear waste produced by Finland’s five nuclear power plants in their entire life cycles.”
The Finnish repository is designed with a life of 100,000 years. Homo sapiens (i.e us) have existed for about 300,000 years.
Article about the problems warnings that will comprehensible in 10,000 years https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200731-how-to-build-a-nuclear-warning-for-10000-years-time
So nuclear plants of the future won’t be run by companies who cut important corners on safety to maximize shareholder profits while offloading the consequences to the government and public?
I mean that’s how things work in China with state owned companies. I don’t see why everybody shouldn’t be doing that.
The problem with Nuclear Power is that people with strong opinions about it either way are some of the most annoying you’ll ever see.
Or just bury it miles underground in the desert, but for some fucking reason a state is as likely to store it upstream in a concrete shack as they are to ship it to the mojave where the pit is literally already dug out and designated.
Legal says don’t touch the nuclear waste
You don’t want to be the guy who fucks that up
The fact that any nuclear power plant has ever ran anyways is because unspent nuclear materials were transported to the facility. We as a society should have the means to transport these things safely in large sealed containers. The only feasible downside to this idea is that the containers will eventually heat up, so chop fucking chop mates. Get it there.
