I wouldn’t be worried. Nuclear waste is fairly easy to detect and carries a unique signature from the reactor that it came from. If an operator starts dumping waste, they’re going to be caught very quickly.
That requires someone to want to catch them and not be corrupted.
What is this? Just 75 years of illegal waste dumping, poisoning thousands of people. And the Government made sure to help cover up and downplay the issue.
Bribes, bribes and more bribes seem totally normal for the nuclear industry.
Noone sane would trust these kind of people to organize safe storage for hundreds of thousands of years.
They both suck. Going renewable is the only way.
Fossil fuel based solutions are significantly worse for climate change than nuclear. Saying that the other renewables are better is matter of discussion, but renewables without nuclear are not going to make the cut. Using both renewables and nuclear is best to cut emissions.
nuclear is not viable. It is not stabilizing but endangering the grid as nuclear plants are vulnerable to heat waves and dry spells. The kind of westher events to increase drastically with climate change. In Europe many nuclear reactors had to be powered down in the last summers because they couldnt get cooled anymore. Also they put further stress on limited water ressources by literally evaporating the water away.
You can life without electricity but you cant life without water.
You should search the term grid scale storage and get back to me with a viable solution.
How about a mixture of batteries (redox-flow, LiFePo, NaFePO, iron-air, Li-Ion), thermal storage (porous volcanic stone, heated water, liquid salt), mechanical storage (giant rotating masses, compressed air), pumped hydroelectrical storage, power-to-gas or power to liquid(hydrogen or ammonia) and creating interconnected power grids?
That should do. Would not create a single point of failure and prevent having everything in the hands of probably a single entity.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity
Already a thing m8
Silly me I didn’t realize we were just going to install mountains every time we needed a battery. Unfortunately most of humanity lives on the coast unfortunately most of the coast is flat…
Furthermore we would still need to increase a renewable production by over 60% before we would be able to maintain base load and even need the pump storage but go on.
Our country barely has any coast. And we’re done with nuclear anyway, so that sounds like a you problem.
That’s not viable everywhere or at scale. Creating new reservoirs would also cause great environmental damage.
creating nuclear plants is worse. nuclear plants have a conversion rate from thermal to electrical energy of around 35% So for every kWh you receive from your socket almost 2 kWh are used to heat or evaporate water. That is more environmental damage than a pumping reservoir.
Also the premise is wrong. We dont need the same amount of storage so we can continue using electricity like before.
Most electrical use can be sheduled to align with the availability of energy in the grid. The sun is up at noon? good time to do laundry and dishes. There is a steady wind tonight? Preheat the water in the tank and no need to heat in the morning.
The same can be done for many industrial applications. It just requires innovation and investments, which is why they rather lobby for destroying the planet.
Well since your arguments depend on niche and experimental technology I don’t see why Nuclear proponents can’t either. The waste heat from nuclear energy is only a concern when it is contained within water, which is pretty easy to use for warming houses or providing houses with warm water. There are already cities that do this. This has huge efficiency savings. https://www.powermag.com/district-heating-supply-from-nuclear-power-plants/
This all seems a bit theoretical to me. The important thing is to stop fossil fuels right now. If we use a nuclear plant to buy us 50yrs to find renewable alternatives for the specific conditions of the site in question I say go for it. Every location has unique needs here, we can’t look at any one technology as a golden bullet for every problem everywhere. We don’t have the decades needed for huge innovation and cultural changes to support smart grids like you describe.
We proooooibably could do that if everyone agrees and we all do it together everywhere of the world. Will that happen? No. So we can not agree on that and therefore no big nuclear Masterplan will be build.
Let’s say we also try to get everyone on the full renewable boat, try really hard. Will that work so that everybody agrees? No. So as we can not agree on that no renewables will be built. Wait… Stop… That’s wrong. I still can built renewables even alone on my house. And here is the difference. For the nuclear plan we would almost all all over the world have to agree to make it work. For renewables, it will happen, because we can do it right here right now, everywhere, large scale, small scale. Doesn’t matter. It’s like with gravity and religion. For religion to “work” you need to believe. Gravity will work, if you believe it or not. That’s what gives me at least a little bit hope, renewables are so fucking good, they are unstoppable by now. Question is just if we are fast enough.
Friendly reminder that air pollution from fossil fuels kill ~9 million people per year
The title of this post is sarcasm
Oh yeah, I understood this is a pro nuclear meme. I agree with your meme.
The number of people who told me that they were against nuclear and wanted to shut down nuclear plants yesterday but can’t comprehend that they will be replaced by coal fire… Inspired this meme. https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/15/europe/germany-nuclear-phase-out-climate-intl/index.html
That is bullshit. They are not replaced by coal plants. They are replaced by renewables as can be seen by the percentage of renewable energy in the German grid increasing since. https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-media/press-releases/2023/german-net-power-generation-in-first-half-of-2023-renewable-energy-share-of-57-percent.html
Stop lying to peddle your agenda against renewables.
Show the rest of the chart. https://images.app.goo.gl/Dt1xAeP87Bjy6xxV6
how is the chart ranging until 2022 relevant for 2023?
Germany needs to do a lot more to go fully renewable, like all countries need to do. And the conservative government under Merkel has been desastrous for the expansion of renewables.
But claiming that the remaining nuclear power that was shut off now as sheduled would have been replaced by coal is a lie.
Also Merkel didnt decide to exit nuclear in 2022. The decision was made in 2002 with the plan to ramp up renewables.Then Merkel throttled renewables and exited the exit from nuclear power only to exit the exit from the exit two years later. As a result 6 Billion Euros in “compensation” was thrown at the nuclear industry and renewables were not put back on track but left at a low burn.
If we went with the original plan wed be mostly renewable and much cheapr now, but well conservatives and “liberals” always need to fuck things over in favor of fossil industries like nuclear.
