Majority of America's underground water stores are drying up, study finds

We, as a society can't tighten the bolts on plane doors.

Its not a question of IF we have an accident its how many, how often and how bad. It's gonna be greed, trying to get more out of the plant, or cutting corners on keeping it safe, its two people who had fights with their partners and dont cross check, Its a tidal wave and a sequence of events that no one thought of.

And we know the scope of those things: Chernobyl, 20k years 1000 mile exclusion zone. It will take them 100 years to clean up the buildings that are there, we will likely need to build ANOTHER rolling roof to continue that work. Fukushima is a cluster fuck still. They just recently started removing spent uranium fuel rods that were on site. Most nuclear sites have cooling pools filled with radioactive material, that needs to be stored for a scale that is beyond human comprehension. Meanwhile no one has a good or straight answer on how to deal with the meltdown, the fuel IN the ground, still hot.

All that fuel is waiting for someone to turn it into a dirty bomb. Or we can start recycling it and running breeder reactors (and they are dangerous and have the down sides, typically they dont generate much power).

Right now we have about 379.79GW of nuclear generation globally from 400 odd rectors. At the ongoing cost of the two meltdowns. Right now solar is growing by 228 GW a year.

TO keep pace with solar, you're going to have to build 200 reactors a year, every year, for the next 20 years. The solar has its "death toll" built in at install time. The reactor's death toll is one of human factors, it's not an IF it's a when. And that cost could be 3 mile island, or a Chernobyl. That cost could be some wack job breaking in and stealing waste for a dirty bomb, or an accident moving it to the long term storage that we DONT have right now, and dont know how to secure for the time scale that it will be deadly on.

> We, as a society can't tighten the bolts on plane doors.

And yet planes are the single safest places you can be at any given time. Even on a 737-NG you're far more likely to die driving to/from the airport than during the flight.

I would strongly suggest rethinking how you evaluate and manage tail risk.

> Or we can start recycling it and running breeder reactors (and they are dangerous and have the down sides, typically they dont generate much power).

I'm not going to get into it with you because this is just gish gallop, but no, they do not generate less power than conventional reactors. They require dramatically less fuel, several orders of magnitude. Some of them even produce more fuel than they consume. They're not really used only because the cost of Uranium is about $0.005/kWh and there's plenty of it, so there's no need for breeder reactors.

I refer you once again to Brandolini's law. Pretty much everything you claim is wrong and easily disproven with a quick Google search.

Don't facts get in the way of a good narrative, I guess.

And the amount of water for farming that is used to grow crops for animals rather than humans, with beef needing an absurd amount[0] yet is has always argued on for different research methods and money from sources that want to confused us[1].

To quote another study [2] on the issue.

>Agriculture accounts for 92% of the freshwater footprint of humanity; almost one third relates to animal products. ... >In the western countries, the WF of meat can be reduced by changing consumption, requiring a transition in the present nutrition pattern and a reduction of food wastes. Obviously, the WF of the livestock sector is only one of the concerns to be taken into account. Other factors include animal welfare, food security, public health concerns and environmental issues other than water, like contribution to emission of greenhouse gases.

It took a while for me to come to grips that I needed to change food comsumption to only non-animal products. Way to many reasons. Maybe comments on threads like this can slowly change other people as well. We need compounding changes to really make a difference.

[0] https://www.watercalculator.org/news/articles/beef-king-big-... [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB120001666638282817 [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221237171...

>>> It will typically get buried deep in the earths crust

IN the us, above ground, on site, in dry casks (Fukushima had this same issue too) There is no plan for where to put it. Yuca mountain is stalled and no way to finish (and problems with the site)

https://www.nei.org/news/2019/what-happens-nuclear-waste-us

Sweden got their shit together, but they dont have much in the way of power and their site has massive cost over runs.

https://www.politico.eu/article/sweden-approve-nuclear-waste...

But, even underground, on the time scale were talking about, its complicated: https://longnow.org/ideas/the-other-10000-year-project-long-...