• 0 Posts
  • 22 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: August 31st, 2023

help-circle



  • Yes, given there is no ‘empty land,’ you are always destroying something if you create a windfarm on land. On the other end of this, offshore windfarms unironically create local ecosystems. If your goal is not just decarbonization, but decarbonization in order to better the health of the planet, which it should be, then offshore would be the best option.

    See: Germany tearing down land wind farms in order to mine more coal. Those turbines aren’t going to be repurposed, they’re going to scrap yards.





  • I am in the EU. There is literally no storage for highly radioactive waste.

    Pay to store it in Finland, like everyone else is doing. They currently have a facility that isn’t even a quarter full and can be heavily expanded.

    That’s not true. Nuclear waste can also contaminate ground water, if stored incorrectly. And as we discussed: we have no storage solution for the highly radioactive waste and thus can’t store it correctly.

    Solar panels can contaminate ground water if stored incorrectly, that’s a useless statement.

    And as discussed there are thousands of storage facilities available. Just because your specific economic union has not built one yet, does not mean you cannot use one of the commercial ones, and by the way these long-term storage facilities aren’t the part that store the waste safely. The containers do, and short of a nuclear bomb going off the waste isn’t escaping them. So much so that despite waste existing since the 1960s, there has never been an incident of nuclear waste escaping containment. Ever. Coal spillages have caused more radioactive contamination than nuclear waste.


  • Except can you really say “genociding native americans”

    As a country, the US has spent more of its existence genociding native Americans than allowing women to vote, or having a standing army.

    and “slavery” are a part of American culture?

    The US currently has fully legalized privatized slavery. You, specifically you, can own a slave in the US right now. You can even treat them as if the constitution does not apply to them in any way. Simply buy a prisoner and get a judge to commit that prisoner to you for the length of their sentence. It’s so ingrained in our culture, we’ve never stopped the practice.



  • which is hugely worse for nuclear? What is your point?

    Objectively not. Precious metal mining is more than a thousand times worse for the environment than Uranium or Thorium mining.

    Nuclear power plants require eye watering amounts of concrete.

    Sure, in the 1950s. Modern nuclear reactors can be built in existing Coal plants. Most reactor types don’t require any additional shielding besides what is already present.

    They require continuous (and ever-increasing) extraction of fissile matter such as uranium ore (a limited resource, by the way - if we used nuclear power instead of fossil fuels we would run out pretty quickly, too, all things considered).

    We have mined enough Uranium to power the entire world for the next 10,000 years; there is currently enough Uranium in just known mines for the next 1,000,000 years of current global power usage. And that’s just Uranium. Thorium is a viable technology with the first reactors already online for commercial use.

    Nuclear power also consumes (and irradiates) vast quantities of water.

    No, it doesn’t. This is just outright a lie, one I have no idea where you got. The internal loop never leaves the building, the external loop is never irradiated.

    They are huge nightmares for biodiversity as they are massive projects usually flattening large swathes of land.

    They have a smaller impact than solar or wind farms, by a factor of 100.

    They produce waste which is not only irradiated and hazardous but also a major security risk, so it has to be safeguarded… and/or sealed into a hole in the ground where it will remain a risk for years to come.

    They produce less toxic waste than Coal power plants, and all of the world’s projected nuclear waste for the next 100,000 years fits into existing facilities.

    The building projects themselves are astronomical in scale and require huge quantities of materials to be shipped by fleets and fleets of trucks followed by a lot of industrial work. Then in a couple of decades the site has to be decommissioned which is even more work.

    This is the exact same for renewables, worse, arguably, since wind farms have to be off shore to be efficient and cargo ships are more than a thousand times worse for the environment than any form of overland transport.







  • Storage, we have less Lithium than you seem to think, and pumped hydro is not a solution – not that it’s not a universal solution, it’s simply not a solution. Implementation costs more than a nuclear reactor and maintenance and security costs are way, way higher than a nuclear reactor. We, unless you want to adopt a powerless overnight lifestyle, need on-demand power generation. Nuclear is the best, safest, cleanest, most feasible option for that until we remove all precious metals from energy storage technology.




  • Nuclear power is exactly as renewable as solar power; and ‘highly’ radioactive waste is a fraction of a fraction of the waste generated, with most waste being less harmful than living within 50 miles of a coal mine, or 100 miles of a coal power plant. It’s also entirely defeated by a relatively small amount of one of the most common metals on Earth. Additionally, if we were to power the entire world with just nuclear power, the amount of unusable waste generated per year globally would be smaller than a compact sedan, requiring a little less than a box-truck sized container to store it safely anywhere on the planet. It would take several tens of billions of years to accumulate to a problematic size for safe storage.