Air pollution from coal and oil is estimated to kill 5 million people every year. That’s more than every nuclear disaster combined, and not to mention the signifcant safety advances that have been made since those disasters.
All nuclear waste ever produced can fit in one football field. It’s stored in containers so thick you can go up and hug them safely, and so strong you can ram them with a train without doing significant damage. And if need be, we have the means to bury it deep underground.
Renewables are fine, but they don’t deliver consistently, so they need backup power. Nuclear provides that at much lower environmental cost than, say, giant lithium batteries.
For one, even with disasters factored in, nuclear kills only 0.04 people per TWh of energy produced. Coal kills 160. That is four orders if magnitude more.
Oil fares better, but with 36 fatalities per TWh, that’s still a thousand times more deadly than nuclear.
For two, every milligram of emissions from nuclear power is accounted for, as someone in the other thread said. All the waste fits inside a football field, and is stored in ginormous casks which can stand being smashed by a train, and are so thick you can hug them with no consequences to health and safety.
Meanwhile, emissions from coal and oil are vented to atmosphere. Including volatile radioactive trace contaminants. Which means that ironically, on top of the greater fatalities and the carbon emissions, fossil fuels have worse nuclear emissions.
As for storage, for one, that’s hampered because the oblivious and the malicious get to contribute to the discussions. Fact is that there are sites for long term storage, which are in the process of being filled with spent fuel.
For two, much less of that stuff is needed if spent nuclear fuel is recycled. Which Japan and France do.
Finally, an electricity grid needs three things: capacity, stability and flexibility. Both nuclear and renewables offer stability, but only nuclear offers stability, while renewables offer flexibility.
A nuclear scientist once explained this to me and a few of my friends in such a great way and I can only do injustice to that explaination, but I will try anyway.
What the nuclear disasters are, are tail risks. What he meant by that, is the more severe a disaster is the less chance it has happening, which you can imagine like the tail of a rat: the further away it is from body the thinner it is.
Now the thing about nuclear disasters is that the tail is very long and gets very thin towards the end. That makes it so most incidents reported are incredibly unintresting (thankfully), most of them being non-vital valves gettint stuck and such.
But when those really small (and with advancement always shrinking) chances cause a disaster you may have to evacuate a town.
Then he told us about the Eschede train disaster. What happened was basically that a wheel of a train cracked and through incredible unluck killed half of the passangers.
And looking at the history of trains, while this particular kind of mishap is very rare and we even have systems in place to prevent it from happening, other kinds of catastrophic failures have happened multiple times throughout history, sometimes even killing bystanders, much like a nuclear reactor could.
This didn’t stop people from boarding trains though, since the odds were always in their favor and the usefullness of the train was incredible at the time.
At the end of the day we have to evaluate whether the benefits are worth the risk. And once again this scientist told us that while he may be a bit biased in this regard he does think those disasters are less and less likely to happen by the day and with the amount of energy generated they are quite worth it.
Do me a favor and look at the big chartand see how much of our energy needs are currently met by oil, coal and natural gas and see that 16% of our energy needs are met by a combination of all renewables. While I agree that we do need to continue investing more in renewables. There is only so much sunshine in a day and it isn’t sunny everyday and it isn’t sunny everywhere. We do not have the transmission technology to pipe electricity across continents feasibly. There’s certainly enough Sunshine at the equator. Good luck getting it beyond 30° north or south. The other issue is storage pumped. Hydro isn’t an option in most places because there isn’t enough water or natural reservoirs available to fill. So please elaborate on your battery storage solution for your solar mega farms and how you’re going to distribute that energy feasibly worldwide.
I’m not saying Germany can’t produce solar energy. Currently 5% of all the energy Germany uses is solar. I’m saying Germany can’t run on nothing but solar energy which is why we need something dependable to take up the base load. That is not fossil fuel based.
If you Google “is a nuclear baseload required” you’ll find plenty of articles clearly demonstrating why this isn’t true. Renewables + storage solutions can provide the base load just fine. The biggest issues have been worked out already, it just needs to be built (which is expensive, but so would nuclear be).
Yeah, OP keeps using the lack of current investment in renewables as an argument that it can’t be done at scale. It’s a really weird lack of logic whether they’re aware of it and arguing in bad faith or just fundamentally confused…
OP calling you a “dipshit” and others “fucking shills” is clear evidence OP knows he/she is losing the argument and gets emotional about it.
What’s funny is that nuclear apologists sweep other renewables like geothermal under the rug and only proclaim that wind and solar depend on the elements. Wind and solar do but others like geothermal don’t. Hydropower is also less dependent on flukes of nature.
Also France needs to lower their nuclear energy output in summer because the cooling water from rivers gets too hot.
My argument is that it has taken us 30 years to reach 16% of global power generated by renewables. And every year we seem to add about two more percentage to that. Any and all progress we make towards divesting away from fossil fuels is great, however we don’t have the fucking time scale to keep that slow rate going rate going. We need to drastically cut oil yesterday and the only thing you can use to replace that much oil in a short time span is nuclear. Never once anywhere have I said that I want less renewables. I want more. I also want a safely generated nuclear base load to replace the oil that is 84% of our sum total energy needs. There is zero reason that we can’t invest in both for a more equitable future.
My argument is that it has taken us 30 years to reach 16% of global power generated by renewables.
And every year we seem to add about two more percentage to that.
Mainly because of the fossil fuel and nuclear lobbies bribing politicians, not any deficiency inherent to renewables as you keep implying.
we don’t have the fucking time scale to keep that slow rate going rate going
True, but the solution is to increase the investment in renewable energy generation at a faster rate, not giving up and pivoting to the slower, less effective and more dirty transition to nuclear.
Meanwhile, a major solar array or wind turbine park can be built in a matter of months and doesn’t have those problems OR the waste disposal issues you keep downplaying.
We need to drastically cut oil yesterday
Again, absolutely true.
the only thing you can use to replace that much oil in a short time span is nuclear
Absolutely 100% categorically false.
Never once anywhere have I said that I want less renewables
Except for repeatedly suggesting that nuclear is a much better option, which it isn’t.
There is zero reason that we can’t invest in both for a more equitable future.
Except for the fact that a combination of the myriad types of renewables is a faster, cheaper, and cleaner way to get off fossil fuels.
Nuclear is the coal of low to no carbon energy generation: it’s an obsolete method that is still used in spite of much better modern technology being available, chiefly because of rich lobbyists bribing politicians and gaslighting regular people.
That depends entirely on what design you go with. Ideally we would be looking at municipal level power generation with modern proven light water Small modular reactor designs reliant on passive safety features we can pump them out of factories at a rate of approximately two per day if we can look at the average aerospace industry rate of construction for jumbojets for a comparable engineering project in size and scope to most SM reactors.
There are also many options to convert existing fossil-fired plants to be nuclear powered at the end of the day a turbine spinning is a turbine spinning. It doesn’t care whether you boiled the water with radiation or coal or oil or gas
deleted by creator
Air pollution from coal and oil is estimated to kill 5 million people every year. That’s more than every nuclear disaster combined, and not to mention the signifcant safety advances that have been made since those disasters.
All nuclear waste ever produced can fit in one football field. It’s stored in containers so thick you can go up and hug them safely, and so strong you can ram them with a train without doing significant damage. And if need be, we have the means to bury it deep underground.
Renewables are fine, but they don’t deliver consistently, so they need backup power. Nuclear provides that at much lower environmental cost than, say, giant lithium batteries.
For one, even with disasters factored in, nuclear kills only 0.04 people per TWh of energy produced. Coal kills 160. That is four orders if magnitude more.
Oil fares better, but with 36 fatalities per TWh, that’s still a thousand times more deadly than nuclear.
For two, every milligram of emissions from nuclear power is accounted for, as someone in the other thread said. All the waste fits inside a football field, and is stored in ginormous casks which can stand being smashed by a train, and are so thick you can hug them with no consequences to health and safety.
Meanwhile, emissions from coal and oil are vented to atmosphere. Including volatile radioactive trace contaminants. Which means that ironically, on top of the greater fatalities and the carbon emissions, fossil fuels have worse nuclear emissions.
As for storage, for one, that’s hampered because the oblivious and the malicious get to contribute to the discussions. Fact is that there are sites for long term storage, which are in the process of being filled with spent fuel.
For two, much less of that stuff is needed if spent nuclear fuel is recycled. Which Japan and France do.
Finally, an electricity grid needs three things: capacity, stability and flexibility. Both nuclear and renewables offer stability, but only nuclear offers stability, while renewables offer flexibility.
The solution is not nuclear XOR renewables.
It is nuclear OR renewables.
Or nuclear AND renewables.
A nuclear scientist once explained this to me and a few of my friends in such a great way and I can only do injustice to that explaination, but I will try anyway.
What the nuclear disasters are, are tail risks. What he meant by that, is the more severe a disaster is the less chance it has happening, which you can imagine like the tail of a rat: the further away it is from body the thinner it is. Now the thing about nuclear disasters is that the tail is very long and gets very thin towards the end. That makes it so most incidents reported are incredibly unintresting (thankfully), most of them being non-vital valves gettint stuck and such. But when those really small (and with advancement always shrinking) chances cause a disaster you may have to evacuate a town. Then he told us about the Eschede train disaster. What happened was basically that a wheel of a train cracked and through incredible unluck killed half of the passangers. And looking at the history of trains, while this particular kind of mishap is very rare and we even have systems in place to prevent it from happening, other kinds of catastrophic failures have happened multiple times throughout history, sometimes even killing bystanders, much like a nuclear reactor could. This didn’t stop people from boarding trains though, since the odds were always in their favor and the usefullness of the train was incredible at the time. At the end of the day we have to evaluate whether the benefits are worth the risk. And once again this scientist told us that while he may be a bit biased in this regard he does think those disasters are less and less likely to happen by the day and with the amount of energy generated they are quite worth it.
Do me a favor and look at the big chart
and see how much of our energy needs are currently met by oil, coal and natural gas and see that 16% of our energy needs are met by a combination of all renewables. While I agree that we do need to continue investing more in renewables. There is only so much sunshine in a day and it isn’t sunny everyday and it isn’t sunny everywhere. We do not have the transmission technology to pipe electricity across continents feasibly. There’s certainly enough Sunshine at the equator. Good luck getting it beyond 30° north or south. The other issue is storage pumped. Hydro isn’t an option in most places because there isn’t enough water or natural reservoirs available to fill. So please elaborate on your battery storage solution for your solar mega farms and how you’re going to distribute that energy feasibly worldwide.
If Germany can have viable solar energy generation, and they do, then everywhere can
I’m not saying Germany can’t produce solar energy. Currently 5% of all the energy Germany uses is solar. I’m saying Germany can’t run on nothing but solar energy which is why we need something dependable to take up the base load. That is not fossil fuel based.
If you Google “is a nuclear baseload required” you’ll find plenty of articles clearly demonstrating why this isn’t true. Renewables + storage solutions can provide the base load just fine. The biggest issues have been worked out already, it just needs to be built (which is expensive, but so would nuclear be).
Yeah, OP keeps using the lack of current investment in renewables as an argument that it can’t be done at scale. It’s a really weird lack of logic whether they’re aware of it and arguing in bad faith or just fundamentally confused…
OP calling you a “dipshit” and others “fucking shills” is clear evidence OP knows he/she is losing the argument and gets emotional about it.
What’s funny is that nuclear apologists sweep other renewables like geothermal under the rug and only proclaim that wind and solar depend on the elements. Wind and solar do but others like geothermal don’t. Hydropower is also less dependent on flukes of nature.
Also France needs to lower their nuclear energy output in summer because the cooling water from rivers gets too hot.
That’s not my argument. Dipshit.
My argument is that it has taken us 30 years to reach 16% of global power generated by renewables. And every year we seem to add about two more percentage to that. Any and all progress we make towards divesting away from fossil fuels is great, however we don’t have the fucking time scale to keep that slow rate going rate going. We need to drastically cut oil yesterday and the only thing you can use to replace that much oil in a short time span is nuclear. Never once anywhere have I said that I want less renewables. I want more. I also want a safely generated nuclear base load to replace the oil that is 84% of our sum total energy needs. There is zero reason that we can’t invest in both for a more equitable future.
Mainly because of the fossil fuel and nuclear lobbies bribing politicians, not any deficiency inherent to renewables as you keep implying.
True, but the solution is to increase the investment in renewable energy generation at a faster rate, not giving up and pivoting to the slower, less effective and more dirty transition to nuclear.
Speaking of not having time, nuclear is already getting less effective and less safe due to climate change, a tendency that’s going to get much worth in the several years, probably decades, it would take to transition from fossil fuels to nuclear.
Meanwhile, a major solar array or wind turbine park can be built in a matter of months and doesn’t have those problems OR the waste disposal issues you keep downplaying.
Again, absolutely true.
Absolutely 100% categorically false.
Except for repeatedly suggesting that nuclear is a much better option, which it isn’t.
Except for the fact that a combination of the myriad types of renewables is a faster, cheaper, and cleaner way to get off fossil fuels.
Nuclear is the coal of low to no carbon energy generation: it’s an obsolete method that is still used in spite of much better modern technology being available, chiefly because of rich lobbyists bribing politicians and gaslighting regular people.
Please tell me your plans for renewable storage to meet 84% of our power needs in the next 5 years
Please remind me how long it takes to build new nuclear plants?
That depends entirely on what design you go with. Ideally we would be looking at municipal level power generation with modern proven light water Small modular reactor designs reliant on passive safety features we can pump them out of factories at a rate of approximately two per day if we can look at the average aerospace industry rate of construction for jumbojets for a comparable engineering project in size and scope to most SM reactors.
There are also many options to convert existing fossil-fired plants to be nuclear powered at the end of the day a turbine spinning is a turbine spinning. It doesn’t care whether you boiled the water with radiation or coal or oil or gas
But we can only get 10% of power from the sun and that power is also spread across half the globe, half the time.