Can we just stop with this nonsense? If you have a byproduct that has be buried in special containers in the desert, and that land can't be used, and there are people actually trying to come up with symbols that indicate danger that could span all language and culture in case a meteor hits the earth and civilization slowly rebuilds then finds the site, then it isn't "safe" be any stretch of the imagination.
Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest
351–360 of 679 posts
Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest
#352The ironic thing is, and I'll probably be downvoted for even positing this, but Chernobyl was the best thing that ever happened to that local environment, at least when you look how local wildlife has bounced back since it's been cordoned off as an exclusion zone. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/060418-chernobyl-...
I get your point, but I think it should be clarified. What is good for "the environment" and what is good for mankind are very different things. Wild boar in Bavaria have less reasons to be eaten by humans, now that they are radioactive. For us humans it is of course less beneficial to live in a regions where we should not eat game and mushrooms.
Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's mostly due to the chemistry required to liberate the Uranium from the ore. What you have in the ore is mostly Uranium oxides. You have to strip away those pesky oxygen atoms in order to further process the Uranium. And in that process quite the amount of CO2 is produced. Now keep in mind that this must be done to all the Uranium, before it undergoes enrichtment. So for every atom of U235 you get about 200 (give…
How is that compared to mining for battery and solar material? It's a double standard to hold nuclear accountable for manufacturing when the same is not applied to solar/wind.
I didn't compare it to battery/solar at all. I just wanted to point out one source for the chemical environmental impact of Uranium refinement.
Alas, if we really compare to solar, then keep in mind that for a solar cell you can use 100% of the refined silicon, whereas with uranium you end up throwing away a large fraction (over 95%) with low enriched fuel, and an even larger fraction (over 99%) with high enriched fuel.
Add to that that uranium is not among the most abundant elements on Earth (about 1ppm), whereas silicon is the second most abundant element in the Earth's crust (about 27%). That alone gives silicon a huge advantage in energy/chemical impact on the environment compared to uranium.
Oh, and maybe I should point out that the chemistry to work with uranium is also a lot more nastier than with silicon. Uranium is a heavy metal, so it all happens through complexes and acidic chemistry, which limits the options on chemical pathways. Silicon OTOH is very similar to carbon in its chemistry, so there are vastly more options to process silicon, and that alone allows for far more efficient processes.
Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest
#354I believe the politicization of nuclear energy (the resulting lack of investment & innovation) will go down as one of the major blunders in human history. We'd be in a far, far better situation with greenhouse gasses if we (as a human race) had continued to invest in nuclear energy. There would have been mishaps along the way, but at a much smaller scale than we're experiencing now with deaths from air pollution and…
This is a debate we have all the time, here in France, where we chose nuclear energy as main source of energy for several decades. Nowadays, everybody but lobbyists (because for those reasons, nuclear industry is strong, here) seems to agree renewable is the way to go (but we're far to be able to replace nuclear with renewable), mainly because:
* we don't know what to do with nuclear wastes, and we start to have a lot
* every now and then, you have to dismantle old nuclear plants, and it appears the cost is totally exuberant
Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest
#355Apart from the waste. We really don't know what to do about it other than bury it and leave it for a few tens to hundreds of generations in the future to deal with with the hope that they will know what to do. So it's the safest option. But only for now. We might just be dooming our descendants to deal with the mess and they might be in a worse state than we are now.
Lots of industrial processes create dangerous chemical wastes which remain dangerous forever . Why are you so worried about nuclear waste which is only dangerous for 10,000 years?
I'm worried about both!
Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest
#356Before we even get to the safety, and the disposal of the nuclear waste, we have huge difficulties with the basic economics and construction of nuclear in the US. The two plants under construction, Summer and Vogtle, have been plagued by construction difficulties and cost overruns. The Summer plant was just finally cancelled today. It seems that the Vogtle plant is going to follow the same route. The management compe…
> The management competence and institutional knowledge needed to build these large, insanely expensive projects seems to have disappeared. And whose fault is that? Not the fault of nuclear-power supporters and advocates! Nuclear didn't die, it was killed.
Hold on, there's more than enough blame to go around.
Westinghouse Electric Company's bankruptcy and lies to Toshiba [1] weren't caused by nuclear's opponents. That's all on the heads of Westinghouse's management. And if management was competent, perhaps Summer would have been closer to being on budget.
It's not as though the AP1000 is impossible to build, other countries are doing it just fine. It's just impossible for US contractors to pull through, apparently. That's not the fault of nuclear's detractors.
[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/westinghouse...
Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean "politicization"? Please saw the movie the China syndrome and then 3 mile island happened. Then people were very afraid. These were real possibilities. Does anyone want to live near a nuclear power plant? Do you? I sure as hell would not. How can you twist fear of a disaster in "politicization"? You are also looking thru the lens of our current situation. Very little was being discussed about the ris…
so what is the alternative in the meantime? Everyone breathing coal particles and many people dying of lung cancer before their time? How is the current energy production safe by anY standards? did you even read the article ?
Natural gas, wind, solar, hydro where available.
Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest
#358I believe the politicization of nuclear energy (the resulting lack of investment & innovation) will go down as one of the major blunders in human history. We'd be in a far, far better situation with greenhouse gasses if we (as a human race) had continued to invest in nuclear energy. There would have been mishaps along the way, but at a much smaller scale than we're experiencing now with deaths from air pollution and…
The recalcitrant problem of nuclear waste storage is now a permanent part of human history going forward even if not one single nuke plant is ever onlined again. So the dangers of nukes are here to stay no matter what. Making a new nuke plant or not will not change this problem. One could even argue that if we continue developing nuke plants we'll get better at dealing with the waste. If we don't we'll get worse. Hav…
Breeder reactors mostly fix the waste problem. Even without breeders, you should think hard about the tradeoff of having a fairly limited amount of solid stuff that you have to take care of for a very long time versus altering the climate of the whole planet and potentially messing up phytoplankton for a very long time, all while also causing all kinds of pollution.
Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with nuclear goes back to the beginning. The original reason for nuclear research, and even the first reactors, was to breed bomb material. Nuclear power was an extension of "atoms for peace" which was originally political cover to continue weapons programs. Some commercial reactors are secretly used for this purpose even today. Nuclear may have a bright future but it's extremely difficult to cleave energ…
Do you have a source for your claims?
Common sense is hard to link to.
Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nuclear energy was politicized from day minus one. It was developed out of government driven military technology. In day zero nuclear energy was set up by politicians: goals, strategies, financing, deployment, risk handling, etc. Everything was coming from energy politics. Investments were directed and the market®ulations for nuclear were set up. Government largely financed it and insures it. The large scale, the…
Fukushima was safe, by all standards. This was not related to corruption. It was simply not designed for the rarity of a magnitude 9 earthquake and the scale of the tsunami that followed. Your house in a five hundred year floodplain is not unsafe for lacking stilts. Safety costs money, this wasn't corruption.
this comment is completely on point, and also downvoted. :(