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Nuclear energy is clean

collectifission.nl

21–30 of 709 posts

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#21
Plutonium problem multiplies in top predators. Here already for thousands of years now thanks to nuclear plant disasters. Which are avoided by causing a slow power plant disaster by releasing radioactive pressure to the environment. Guy Debord's comment on this from Comments on the Society of the Spectacle: "much more civilized to sip a littl wine all of the time than to drink the whole bottle all at once like a Pole" :-)

Nuclear energy is a subsidised energy source, lobbied by powers that be on the corridors of power in the EU and everywhere else. Solar is cheaper.

Humanity is out of it's depth with this stuff. Could cause massive extinction event eventually even if we stopped now by killing and mutating sperm cells and all that. Go have a holiday in Fukushima. Go visit the deformed children still born in Uzbekistan near these places.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#22

We saw another downside of nuclear power in Ukraine: When Russian troops attacked towards Enerhodar and there was shelling in the area the safety of the reactor could not be guaranteed. In the end, containment can be guaranteed w.r.t to internal accidents but no facility can ever be safe from outside issues like war, natural disaster or politics. Solar has less single points of failure and if it fails not much happen…

Nuclear energy is safe but humans are not.

Yep. It's amazing the effort we have to spent to avoid disasters provoked by our own specie.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#23

We saw another downside of nuclear power in Ukraine: When Russian troops attacked towards Enerhodar and there was shelling in the area the safety of the reactor could not be guaranteed. In the end, containment can be guaranteed w.r.t to internal accidents but no facility can ever be safe from outside issues like war, natural disaster or politics. Solar has less single points of failure and if it fails not much happen…

Look at the numbers though. Fossil fuels kill many people every year, while nuclear accidents are almost entirely hypothetical. The point of the article is to show that fears like the ones expressed above just aren’t supported by the data.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#25
post #7

> The argument is well known: nuclear power causes pollution It does? News to me.

Nuclear power has a paradox with respect to pollution: it's a highly dangerous form of pollution (heavy metals which are also radioactive), but in normal operation, it's completely contained (and nuclear power operators tend to be very paranoid about it; minor amounts of radiation which would be considered harmless everywhere else are treated as unacceptable outside the designated radioactive areas). So depending on how you look of it, it can either have a high amount of dangerous pollution, or none at all.

(There's another form of pollution from nuclear power plants, which is heat pollution from discharged cooling water, but most people aren't talking about that.)

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#26
Ok, so another pro-nuclear puff piece. Why do I say that? Because it talks about nuclear waste without ever mentioning the other kind: fuel processing waste.

Nuclear fuel needs to be enriched. Enriching is simply upping the percentage of U-235 (the rest is mostly U-238). Civilian reactors tend to have relatively low enrichment rates. So-called weapons grade is enriched to a very high percentage and requires different processes.

So U-235 and U-238 are chemically identical. So how do you enrich a sample? Centrifuges. You make a Uranium gas. The U-238 molecules will be heavier. Spin them in a centrifuge and you can extract them at a greater percentage and then pass on the gas to the next centrifuge. You do this repeatedly until you get the enrichment level you want and then extract the metal from the gas.

The gas of choice is UF6 (Uranium Hexaflouride). That itself is a toxic byproduct that needs to be stored or otherwise dealt with. We don't really have a good solution for this either. There is some reprocessing that basically turns UF6 into less toxic UF4 but it's not really economic.

As always, pro-nuclear propaganda focuses on deaths because deaths doesn't capture the negative impact of nuclear. Why? Because the Chernobyl disaster directly killed less than 100 (it also probably killed tens of thousands through cancers in the following years but that's harder to attribute and easier for people to collectively ignore).

But still the Chernobyl absolute exclusion zone, from one incident, is quite literally 1,000 square miles even now, almost 40 years later.

Deaths or deaths per TWh just doesn't capture that impact and those failure modes, which is precisely why such propaganda focuses on deaths.

But none of that is the big problem with commercial nuclear power. It's the fallibility of humans to manage, maintain, build and transport and store (fuel and waste) to a sufficient level to avoid disasters. The profit motive provides an incentive to skimp on some or all of these. Corruption is an issue with both corporations and governments.

Humans are just incredibly bad at managing long-term consequences, which is why we have the climate crisis to begin with.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#27
I really want to believe nuclear is as clean as the author says, but the biggest challenge is storing the waste for three hundred years.

were talking small amounts, sure, but contamination of groundwater and surrounding soil isn't something we in the US have a stellar track record with. camp lejunes benzene contaminated drinking water happened in only a 29 year span, and the only real remedy is a class action lawsuit. no one admitted fault.

most of our reactors are elderly, and most of the regulatory capture means they leak like a sieve and rarely face any consequences or shutdowns. until we reform the edifice that controls this waste I fear nuclear will just be another headline crisis event.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#29

I think nuclear power plants aren't worth the risk. I often hear arguments such as that modern reactors don't have the issues old ones had etc.. As long as it can't be guaranteed to me that e.g. a terror attack doesn't cause a 1000 km2 area around the plant to be unlivable for 100 years, I most likely won't change my opinion. I think living in the stone age is better than taking the risk.

I think this line of thinking has defaulted us onto a path of drastically increased carbon in the atmosphere, with no signs of stopping, which is at best going to drastically change the world and take centuries to remove, and at worst could trigger a massive biosphere collapse that drives our species to extinction.

The Earth has 150 MILLION km2 of land. We could literally have hundreds of reactors blow causing 1000 km2 unlivable patches of ground and still be perfectly fine.

Prioritize your fear.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#30

We saw another downside of nuclear power in Ukraine: When Russian troops attacked towards Enerhodar and there was shelling in the area the safety of the reactor could not be guaranteed. In the end, containment can be guaranteed w.r.t to internal accidents but no facility can ever be safe from outside issues like war, natural disaster or politics. Solar has less single points of failure and if it fails not much happen…

Nuclear energy is safe but humans are not.

Yes.

So we have to make decisions with those two factors in mind

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