The Great German Energy Experiment

> radioactive waste in general being hard to top in terms of pollution

What? It's extremely easy to top radioactive waste. Every single pollution tops radioactive waste since radioactive waste sits in a storage cask, and the other types of pollution go in the air I breathe. Your position makes no sense.

> I just happen to think waste from nuclear fuel is easier to "not produce" right now.

So instead you want more fly ash? Picking "don't make electricity" is not an option.

> what to do with it once it's there

Don't do anything with it, just leave it there. When technology improves, use it for fuel.

> I find any radiation exposure leading to death by lung cancer horrifying.

And I guess coal dust doesn't bother you? Or ozone leading to lung cancer? Or particulate matter (PM2.5)? It has to be radiation I guess.

> It is inherently a better idea to not use fuel in the first place ... you have to keep digging it up to keep it going ... crucial difference between renewable and fossil sources of energy

Not exactly. Renewable fuels are not actually renewable since you need to build the machine to get that energy, and that building material is not free. Nor is the land area free - I prefer to use land for other things, not cover the earth in energy harvesting machines.

You need to include everything when looking at an energy source, not just the "fuel".

> No matter how "little" fuel you need: on the long scale, it will fail with 100% certainty, eventually.

I think an energy source that will last more than 1000 years is good enough. And consider that we use barely 5% of the energy in uranium, and using that measure we have enough for more than 1000 years.

Use all the energy in uranium and it'll last 20,000 years. Then we can start using thorium, and we have even more of that than we do uranium. By that time we can start mining asteroids.

> how widely used this technology already is

Maybe I missed something but what technology are you talking about?

It's not very convincing.

For instance:

"What it really means is that radiation emissions to the environment from an operating nuclear power plant actually are lower than the radioactivity emitted from a coal plant through fly ash residues. That’s because the reactor vessel, fuel rods, and any radioactive waste on site are well shielded, whereas fly ash, with small amounts of deadly radioactive substances, simply is emitted into the environment."

The author appears to be saying, well, if you ran an un-shielded nuclear reactor and threw all the pollution in the air on purpose instead of containing it, then coal ash emits less radiation into the atmosphere. Well, okay, fair enough, but in practice we don't purposely take nuclear waste and fertilize our crops with it, and I don't think anyone's arguing for that.

Nah, fear isn't really the issue here, I would say that I have a rather calculated understanding of why I find radioactive waste so problematic (and since you asked, you'll have to endulge the full explanation).

For me, it comes down to what kind of pollution we are talking about and radioactive pollution is particularly nasty to me as it represents a chaotic pollution that is just exceptionally hard to deal with.

Let's say the simplest, non-chaotic, kind of pollution is "dirt on your shoe" - you know where it came from (that thing you just stepped in), you know where it is (you see it on your shoe), what it does (hardly anything, except look bad) and how to get it out (wash it off).

With radioactive pollution, knowing where the pollution is coming from can already be a tough job - if you have a known leak, sure, that's where it's coming from. But often, you have to use a Geiger counter to detect it in the first place and often times, you then still have to figure out where the actual source is.

Where it went is mostly a statistical science, which is only comforting if your arm chair is not close to the accident in question. If it is, it's highly distressing.

Next up, it's still completely up for graps what it does - for humans, it can be anything from a challenged immune system to instant death, depending on the dose. (Although the latter is reserved for those rare occurances where you happen to hang out with the direct fallout of an exploding atom bomb, I believe.) Most of the time, in an accident, you only determine how bad it was after the fact. At minimum, it always carries a risk of mucking with your DNA or giving you a higher chance of cancer down the road (we have differed on how "horrifying" this prospect is, before).

How to get it out is where it gets even worse - most of the time, you scrap together everything that you determined to be affected in step two and put it in sealed containers, which isn't helpful if that thing is 'most of your own cells' (although the people around you will differ on that opinion). Your most likely prospect in terms of any kind of unusual exposure is to die slightly earlier and a lot shittier than you had anticipated.

In conclusion, I would say that it's more of a "we simply don't fully understand what we unleash, so let's develop what we do understand" concern. Not a "omg, a castor drove through Italy, I'm gonna get cancer tomorrow" fear.

> There is a pollution action day in my city right now because of people like you, and I'm not happy about it. I want them to shut down all hydrocarbon electric plants (save the hydrocarbons for cars), and switch everything to nuclear.

That almost made me LOL - Why is it "because of people like [me]"? Maybe it's time for me to get off your lawn?

No, because, as has been pointed out to you in another branch of this discussion, it is actually economically reasonable to build a solar cell that will yield more power than you put into building it.

Seriously dude, get over your obsession about solar panels and accept the fact that you simply didn't have your facts straight.

The problem is mainly economic. Wind and solar can produce with essentially zero marginal costs. (The cost of producing an additional kWh is negligible, if one is not accounting for upfront investments.) And therefore they can sell at any price (and generate additional revenue). This forces conventional power plants to shut down and there is possibly not enough reserve capacity if renewables fluctuate. (For engineering it is a problem which can be easily solved with an resistor ;)