Sure, and never ever would a company cut costs to raise profit and ignore safety standards.
Just visit Asse in Germany and hug some of the rotting barrels with nuclear waste.
The problem isn't technology but greed and stupidity.
I changed my mind about nuclear waste
151–160 of 428 posts
Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste
#152The author, who gives every appearance of being funded by the industry, founded an activist group that claims: > Aim for 50% nuclear at least, as per the science. Which suggests a pretty cavalier attitude to "the science". edit: I take it back, she's in cahoots with Shellenberger and GWPF so it's the fossil fuel industry that she's supporting. I thought the timing was mysteriously exact for both her and Shellenberger…
> Extinction rebellion have a page on her (NSFW warning for some nudity in the banner image Controversial opinion: by scaremongering about nuclear power—which the west could have started adopting in the 1970s like France did—the naked tree huggers did as much to set back climate change mitigation efforts as the oil lobby. At least with the oil folks, they were pushing a status quo that was likely to stand until today…
> Controversial opinion: by scaremongering about nuclear power—which the west could have started adopting in the 1970s like France did—the naked tree huggers did as much to set back climate change mitigation efforts as the oil lobby.
I've always hoped they're secretly funded/friends with the oil lobby, because otherwise that's just pure sadness.
Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
While these are reasons to be suspicious, they do not counter a single point she made in her article. Her logic and her facts were solid. If they're not, I'd love to see a take down of that. But I see no problem with anything she wrote, I remain convinced nuclear is the only rational energy source left, and all this fear mongering about nuclear is causing us to slowly kill ourselves.
The fossil fuel industry is not funding pro-nuclear arguments because they want to see 50% of their business lost to nuclear. They are not worried about losing huge profits to nuclear because from a purely economic perspective nuclear is not cost-competitive with fossil fuels. Hence it doesn’t pose a major threat, absent massive government-subsidized build-outs (which aren’t remotely on the table now.) The fossil fue…
How are renewables more competitive with fossil fuel than nuclear when it comes to storage and transmission? At least nuclear can keep producing when the sun is down and the wind isn't blowing. It's also more energy dense, so it can scale to cover demand. We're not decarbonizing the economy without those factors being accounted for.
Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Extinction rebellion have a page on her (NSFW warning for some nudity in the banner image Controversial opinion: by scaremongering about nuclear power—which the west could have started adopting in the 1970s like France did—the naked tree huggers did as much to set back climate change mitigation efforts as the oil lobby. At least with the oil folks, they were pushing a status quo that was likely to stand until today…
> Controversial opinion: by scaremongering about nuclear power—which the west could have started adopting in the 1970s like France did—the naked tree huggers did as much to set back climate change mitigation efforts as the oil lobby. You would have thought that France would have supplied the European continent with electricity now that Russia cut its gas supply, but it turns out that France received electricity from…
What you don’t know is that in the 2010’s the left wing had a agreement with the Green Party to stop all nuclear by 2050. That’s why we stop financing and maintaining a lot of nuclear plants. It turned out it was a bad idea..
Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste
#155The author, who gives every appearance of being funded by the industry, founded an activist group that claims: > Aim for 50% nuclear at least, as per the science. Which suggests a pretty cavalier attitude to "the science". edit: I take it back, she's in cahoots with Shellenberger and GWPF so it's the fossil fuel industry that she's supporting. I thought the timing was mysteriously exact for both her and Shellenberger…
While these are reasons to be suspicious, they do not counter a single point she made in her article. Her logic and her facts were solid. If they're not, I'd love to see a take down of that. But I see no problem with anything she wrote, I remain convinced nuclear is the only rational energy source left, and all this fear mongering about nuclear is causing us to slowly kill ourselves.
> While these are reasons to be suspicious, they do not counter a single point she made in her article.
True.
> her logic and her facts were solid.
I came to a somewhat different conclusion after reading that article: I felt it was sufficiently blatant, manipulative, and simply wrong that no one would fall for that. Ah well.
Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is one problem with Nuclear power that was never talked about before the Ukraine War: War itself. More specifically, war in the area that is powered by nuclear. Damage to reactors, power plant workers fleeing, damage to nuclear waste containers, and more.
It actually seems to be a case study that empirically proves the opposite. Hundreds of thousands dead in the Russian invasion of Ukraine so far, untold injuries. Incredible amounts of destruction of cities and civilian infrastructure. But yet none from an exploding nuclear power plant. Why? Because its not really possible and it serves very little point. If the goal is to terrorize people and inflict damage there are…
Control/operation of nuclear plants has already been a target of brinksmanship. And while your point about dams is a good one, disasters like a dam collapse (which just happened as a result of the Turkey/Syria earthquake, and is adding to the already catastrophic devastation), are more localized in time than nuclear incidents which present long-term environmental challenges. Sometime I'd like to visit Chernobyl, but I'm not sure I'd live there.
Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste
#157> I learned that I had been confusing waste from nuclear energy with waste from nuclear weapons. That is a rhetorical tactic that kind of misses the point - it's not that weapons reactors produce fundamentally leakier waste than civilian reactors, it's that the military has a long history of not disposing of dangerous chemicals the right way. It happens with non-radioactive toxic waste too and a lot of bases and the…
Or more importantly, would the same motivators for the military exist for private industries. My example would not be nuclear, but waste in general. I did 5 years in the Navy. Out at sea, by regulations, we have really strict standards of how certain materials get disposed. Clean metal, like aluminum cans from the galley can go overboard, into the ocean, and so can food waste. Plastic can't, batteries cant, etc. Do b…
Do you mean to imply that you're not supposed to throw your dead car batteries into the ocean to help charge the electric eels?
Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately nuclear doesn't appear to be a viable supplement. Suppose a grid with just nuclear and solar. Nuclear may be overall very stable, but solar is still not, and so you still need storage. The only difference is how much of it you need. But nuclear has a terrible problem: it's not really economical. Solar is much, much cheaper and therefore any economically minded person would build solar if they had a choi…
If you want the cheapest power, then burn lots of coal and don't hold power plants accountable for their emissions. Do you really want the cheapest power?
> If you want the cheapest power, then burn lots of coal and don't hold power plants accountable for their emissions.
That's not the cheapest, because the price for the emissions gets paid (whether or not we choose to account for it).
The cheapest is the source of new power capacity that provides the lowest total levelized cost - including its externalities - at a given level of reliability (firmness). Right now, that's a race between renewables+storage and combined cycle natural gas.
Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste
#159The author, who gives every appearance of being funded by the industry, founded an activist group that claims: > Aim for 50% nuclear at least, as per the science. Which suggests a pretty cavalier attitude to "the science". edit: I take it back, she's in cahoots with Shellenberger and GWPF so it's the fossil fuel industry that she's supporting. I thought the timing was mysteriously exact for both her and Shellenberger…
> Extinction rebellion have a page on her (NSFW warning for some nudity in the banner image Controversial opinion: by scaremongering about nuclear power—which the west could have started adopting in the 1970s like France did—the naked tree huggers did as much to set back climate change mitigation efforts as the oil lobby. At least with the oil folks, they were pushing a status quo that was likely to stand until today…
I can't believe you're blaming "tree huggers" for this, when the clear beneficiary is the global fossil fuel industry, who've been lobbying against nuclear power since the 50s. Shit, many anti-nuclear groups have been funded by fossil fuel industry for decades. At best, their protests were political cover for governments to do what the oil industry paid them to do.
Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately nuclear doesn't appear to be a viable supplement. Suppose a grid with just nuclear and solar. Nuclear may be overall very stable, but solar is still not, and so you still need storage. The only difference is how much of it you need. But nuclear has a terrible problem: it's not really economical. Solar is much, much cheaper and therefore any economically minded person would build solar if they had a choi…
If you want the cheapest power, then burn lots of coal and don't hold power plants accountable for their emissions. Do you really want the cheapest power?
What I want doesn't really matter. What I'm saying is that solutions must be possible to implement.
So say somehow I've got $10 billion burning a hole in my pocket. Would I build nuclear with that? No, it'd be stupid, because chances are high I would never see a profit.
So I would build solar. It's not reliable and troublesome for the grid? Well, not my problem to solve, I'm merely a power provider, balancing the grid isn't my responsibility.
Ok, say there's a really well intentioned politician, will they use lots of tax money to build nuclear? But why would they? In modern countries such things are achieved by consensus, which means one person can hardly take credit for it, and they may never see it actually start operating during their term.
A political party then? Power tends to switch back and forth, and the next power in party is fairly likely to sabotage their predecessors legacy. Since the plants take a long time to build the chances are slim for a party in favor to see the benefits.