Activists who embrace nuclear power

Yet today, there's about a quarter of a million tonnes of waste in holding storage at various locations awaiting proper disposal. The only deep geological disposal facility currently operational is WIPP and of the three that have ever existed in the world, the other two in Germany have permanently closed. It should be noted that both those sites have major issues with long-term stability and significant ongoing investment is occurring to attempt to remediate them.

The issues at WIPP in 2014 are a clear example of how non-trifling the task is: Underground truck fire, followed a few days later by (unrelated) airborne release of radioactive materials due to a waste barrel being packed with, and I am not making this up, the wrong kind of kitty litter. After a three-year hiatus and at a cost of five hundy million to remediate, it's been running again for a couple of years and due to permanently close in as little as three years.

This will be a good thing because ceasing operations and permanently sealing the site drastically reduces the risk of incidents due to human fallibility. Now in fairness it's a pilot site even in name, so procedures should be improved on the next iterations. But this is a field clearly in it's infancy, it's not yet matured.

I just can't agree that disposal even of the waste generated so far is trifling. When the waste of today is on track for secure, permanent, safe storage I'll be a bit more optimistic.

>You're also ignoring the fact that reactors that recycle spent fuel have been made and can be drastically improved, so demand for storage of waste as well as how hard they are to contain can very realistically go down.

Yeah I hope so. Re-processing of a significant chunk of the existing waste would be an encouraging sign.

I responded to so many messages and I tried my best to always refer to 'solar and wind' in tandem (because without wind as a kind of a complement, solar is completely not feasible), and the one message where I got sloppy and referenced only solar panel with a passing reference to 'rare earth minerals' and that's the only aspect that is picked up. OK. Let's move past this. Let's say neither windmills nor solar panels use any rare earth minerals, just for argument's sake. That's not really true, certainly not for windmills, but let's say that it's true ... because that's not the salient point here.

Re: your calculations. You forgot that Solar and Wind need to be overprovisioned because they not only need to collect enough energy for right now, but also enough to store to bridge the daily, seasonal and inter-annual intermittency. There are no batteries capable of that, but if there were, you have to add that in there somewhere as well because that road leads to more land-use and more ecosystem stress.

>This is 550 thousand km², a circle of 420 km radius (groovy, mang!), about 80% of the area of Texas

That is an insane amount of land - I don't understand why so many are so flippant on this point. After all, you're placing high-tech devices in that area. Devices that need maintenance. Devices that break-down. Devices that need to be decommissioned and landfilled and then replaced. If you're covering an area of 550 thousand km² with panels, there is an equivalent volume that you need to dig up somewhere else, ship and process, and of course you then have to landfill, and you have to do that every few decades forever. Right? Are we OK with that? Is the environment OK with that? After all, this is on top of everything thing else we will be doing, like agriculture and transportation.

And this is for TODAY. The world is projected to grow to around 10-12 billion. At the same time, per capita energy use will continue to increase.

>You should be ashamed of yourselves

This kind of emotional appeal is not conducive to good discourse. I made an argument how I see things today. For all the talk about wind and solar being the energy of the future, I don't actually see where solar and wind are actually powering a modern economy. I see a lot hope and handwaving. I see Germany building pipelines to ship natural from Russia and signing multi-decade contracts with that nation while being held up as a model nation. Why not invest in solar and wind deployment instead, especially since Russia is a geopolitical adversary in many ways?

I don't understand how the intermittency gap is bridged given that there is no battery technology capable of storing excess generation enough to last a minimum of a a few days, but more likely several weeks. And finally, I see a world that while growing in population to around 10-12 billion, will exponentially increase per capita energy requirements at the same time. I look at all that, I shudder at the amount of solar and wind collectors that will be required to manufacture and deploy and the stress it will put on existing ecosystems. I don't understand why so many pretend this is a solved-problem, especially since we have an energy-dense alternative, with no engineering challenges to solve and with decades of experience.

I can’t believe folks like you can’t hear your own idiocy. And if crime is your only measure of a society heading in the right direction, you are denser than lead.

It’s not alarmist to say a dipshit had the football and that scared people. How is that alarmist? Huh? are you saying crime is down, so he wasn’t a dipshit? Or, crime is down so I don’t need to worry.

I think that you'll find the comparison in fuel densities between nuclear and solar/wind does not show nuclear in a good light.

Since nuclear fuel doesn't get converted into energy on its own, you had better also include the reactor, turbines, and cooling system if you are going to talk about comparisons of density.

And once those get factored in, nuclear plants are found to be absolutely massive, with nuclear and the fuel-less solar and wind needing the same order of magnitude of mass to generate electricity.

> What are you basing this on? Nuclear technology is being held back by regulation and economics, not by engineering or technology.

The bad economics are driven by the engineering and technology. And the regulations are also driven by the very nature of the technology. It's not great technology for the modern world.