Earlier quoted context omitted.
Has affected millions of peoples health already and whole ecosystems. And the consequences will cumulate from this thousands of years. Count that in your equation and get more informative numbers.
Whose health? Any actual data?
Nuclear energy is clean
131–140 of 709 posts
Re: Nuclear energy is clean
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Hydroelectric dams typically cause even more damage when they fail, but I rarely see people worrying about whether using them for power will lead to war-time issues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure I believe the reason people worry less about hydroelectric dam failures is because, if they fail, they do not leave behind a contaminated area. Besides, it's just water; many people are used to floods caused by…
Rio Doce was 43.7 million cubic metres and 18 deaths. If someone blows up Kakhovka dam in Ukraine, it'll be about 18e9 m3, hundreds of thousands dead, wholesale destruction of everything downstream, shutdown of every energy plant that uses the resevoir for cooling, not to mention the hydroelectic station, and untold damage when winds blow the exposed sediment all over the steppe. Which is one of the most productive a…
Intentionally breaching the dikes of the Yellow River killed nearly a million people, displaced several million more, and was a contributing factor to people turning towards the Chinese Communists and away from the KMT.
Re: Nuclear energy is clean
#133The article is a bit fast and loose with its data. Borssele indeed has limited high-energy radioactive waste; the article omits that there is also low-energy radioactive waste - a lot more, in fact. Similarly, recycling may be a problem for solar panels, but is that better for nuclear? I have never heard / read about how to recycle the (radioactive) non-fuel parts of a nuclear reactor. I'm not against nuclear per se,…
There is no cadmium in solar panels. There was a small amount in thin film panels briefly favored by utility-scale solar plants but thin film is economically dead and nobody is buying those.
Antimony is used in the glass, not the panel. The glass contains ~1g/kg of antimony, and PV panels contain about 50 tonnes of glass per MW (most of the panel mass is the glass). That works out to 50kg of antimony per MW, i.e. basically none. If you took all the antimony out of a 1GW solar plant and somehow dissolved it in water - which can't happen because antimony trioxide isn't even soluble in water, and dissolving metals out of glass with water is practically impossible - and if you dumped all that into Lake Shasta, it would still be within drinking water standards. And again, nobody will dump this into the environment because fifty million kilos of high-grade glass is going to get recycled, not dumped.
I think it's sad that the nuclear boosters are being duped into spreading these lies about solar panels.
Re: Nuclear energy is clean
#134We 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…
When you say "nuclear", do you mean all forms of fission reactors? Or do you mean today's inferior designs? Your comment makes sense in the context of conventional light-water reactors. However, there exist more advanced reactor designs that are essentially meltdown-proof.
Re: Nuclear energy is clean
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do we communicate to civilisations in the future what we did in that mountain?
> How do we communicate to civilisations in the future what we did in that mountain? The more dangerous stuff burns itself out quickly (short half-life), and the longer-lasting stuff is not very dangerous given the type of radiation it is and can be blocked quite easily So, probably bury it deep enough with little external sign that it's actually there, and if it is actually discovered it won't be that big of a deal:…
Long term thinking > Short term thinking > Extreme long term thinking.
Re: Nuclear energy is clean
#136> 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…
Re: Nuclear energy is clean
#137We 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…
This is one of the few good arguments against nuclear, especially large installations that produce a huge percentage of a region's power. Even if you can design it in such a way that an external attack is very unlikely to cause a meltdown, it's a juicy and easy target for an adversary to cripple your electricity production. A few dozen well placed missiles might be all you need to take an entire nation that's heavily…
Re: Nuclear energy is clean
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eh, we live in an age when a few dozen well placed missiles can kill millions and destroy entire countries, not just their electrical grid. A few retaliatory strikes later and an entire region is gone, if not the world as a whole. That doesn't sound like a very useful way to make decisions about anything except maybe missile defense and second strike capabilities. Anything can be destroyed with sufficient violence.
While this is technically true, I think a developed-ish nation might blow up your electric facilities before it would destroy a city.
If all you want to do is to knock out the electrical system of a country, you can use an EMP burst bomb over that country, and the grid will be down for months.
Re: Nuclear energy is clean
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 k…
Why do you think you have to decide between bad and worse? I think we should prioritize our planet over economy and lifestyle.
Re: Nuclear energy is clean
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Hydroelectric dams typically cause even more damage when they fail, but I rarely see people worrying about whether using them for power will lead to war-time issues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure I believe the reason people worry less about hydroelectric dam failures is because, if they fail, they do not leave behind a contaminated area. Besides, it's just water; many people are used to floods caused by…
Rio Doce was 43.7 million cubic metres and 18 deaths. If someone blows up Kakhovka dam in Ukraine, it'll be about 18e9 m3, hundreds of thousands dead, wholesale destruction of everything downstream, shutdown of every energy plant that uses the resevoir for cooling, not to mention the hydroelectic station, and untold damage when winds blow the exposed sediment all over the steppe. Which is one of the most productive a…
Not under the Geneva Convention "Works and installations containing dangerous forces, namely dams, dykes and nuclear electrical generating stations, shall not be made the object of attack, even where these objects are military objectives, if such attack may cause the release of dangerous forces and consequent severe losses among the civilian population." https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v2_rul...