Solar panel waste may not be as bad as we thought

Well, actually, yes. Coal plants cause 100 times more radiation than nuclear plants per unit of energy produced:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

And typical background radiation is 10x more than even that.

And this is for plants built in the 1970s. Tightening requirements beyond that while still allowing coal power to continue their emissions, was completely absurd.

> You do not have the contrafactual evidence of what nuclear safety would be like without that regulation.

To the contrary. Most nuclear power in existence is still produced by plants that was built BEFORE many of the excessive regulations were put into place. That's part of the reason they were so much cheaper to build. (I'm not making an argument for building Chernobyl type plants, but rather plants with safetly levels corresponding to those built in the 70s in Western countries.)

> LNT hypothesis for radiation effects

The LNT hypothesis has little to no evidence supporting it over a null hypothesis that radiation below a threshold of about 80 mSv/y. Which is based on statistics for huge groups of people. And the typical radiation received per year from living next to a nuclear plant is around 0.001 mSv/y, 80000 less than the amount where we have any data to indicate that the exposure is harmful.

If you have 1 xray taken in a hospital, that's as much radiation exposure as living next to a nuclear plant for 100 years. If you have a CT scan, that's like 1000 to 10000 years. Or, if you fly from LA to NY, you get 0.035 mSv of radiation, the same as 35 years. Do a round trip, and it corresponds to a lifetime.

Whether or not you believe in the unfalsifiable hypothesis called LNT, the risk from nuclear power is incredibly tiny compared to ANYTHING we do.

Meanwhile, the potential benefits of cheap nuclear power would be massive, both in terms of local air polution (when it becomes cheap enough to replace coal and natural gas), economical benefits or global warming mitigation.

And it has a proven track record. France was able to almost completely cut fossil fuels for their electricity production over a few years, with a moderate investment into nuclear. Meanwhile, Germany has spent 100s of billions of € on "renewable" energy, but has almost as high percentage of their electricity produced coming from fossil fuels now as when they started. (They did have some reduction in CO2 emissions due to moving from coal to natural gas, at the cost of becoming highly dependent on Russia)

> You're being so unfair! ... whining about the LNT hypothesis....

This kind of emotional response makes it seem that something else is at stake.

Of course, if we were able to provide clean air and stop global warming using nuclear energy, some people would lose their jobs, both people selling other forms of energy (fossil, wind, solar) or people working for "environmentalist" organizations or political parties.

a week a few years back.. that doesn't sound too bad honestly and looks like something you can prepare for on future project. i know that Poland had just greenlit two huge nuclear power plants which i think it's a great idea, wish we would do the same in my country.

there's simply no such thing as a grid scale battery. it doesn't exist and never will work current technology. the batteries in Australia are not what you think they are, in reality they're there to fix another huge problem with renewables which is frequency leveling and NOT to provide power when there's no renewable energy for which it would be good for a whooping 8 minutes. So.. the only viable way is to go with what's called power2x where you can create hydrogen, ammonia or something else, this process however it's quite inefficient requiring you too install around 7 times the capacity you need, as well building new infrastructure and power plants to use these synthetic fuels, this might still be a bit cheaper than nuclear, but we actually don't know that yet.

it's also not a solution to just build insane overcapacity??? are you really suggesting we go several hours a day or even weeks without electricity?? i live in a country where we've give all in on wind and let me tell you.. it's freaking annoying to have to look up the current price to see if you should turn on the washing machine, charge your car etc. and it's simply not true that houses in central Europe can stay comfortably hot more than a day during winter.

to be honest you sound very out of touch, but i guess that's what happen when you make a good developer salary and live in a cheap country. if your house can really stay warm more than a day in winter and still have fresh air to breath you must live in a high tech mansion.

That's nice but you still have to wear a dosimeter around fly ash.

There's a lot to be done to get enough battery manufacturing and recycling. (In particular, sodium-sulfur has to catch on.)