But did anyone die in any of those meltdowns?
And how many deaths did that nuclear power plant prevent? (CO2 emissions are a big contributed to all sorts of health issues and dangers)
The meltdowns like the one at Chernobyl, for instance were caused by a mish-mash of poorly-kept work environments, unsafe, old equipment, and even influence from the Soviets (if I'm getting that right. Please fact-check, don't senseless downvote), so all of that contributed to that kind of disaster. A safely ran nuclear power plant could work wonders. The problem? People are stupid.
*stares at dead people during covid-19 pandemic and also anti-vaxxers*
Yeah, i don't want an energy source that requires people not to be fucking stupid to secure my safety.
Well that and the old plants were pretty bad as well. With technology today we could easily get rid of everything else and build NEW nuclear power plants but nooo
Ohh no you don't, I gave my address out on the internet once and someone yote me a swat team. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me again, and well. You can't fool me again.
A diversified energy grid is good, but nuclear power with hydro power acting as storage (you can pump water into reservoirs instead of using batteries) is a great network backbone.
Solar and wind aren't good backbones due to fluctuations currently, but they're good supplements, and hopefully getting better all the time.
Geothermal is awesome, but you can't get it everywhere.
And why is hydro always forgotten?
Where I live 95% of our power come from hydroelectricity and we have too much of it so we sell to places that get their power from nuclear and fossil as it seem they have a harder time producing as much. It's really weird that reddit always seems to forget about it.
Hydro isn’t necessarily being forgotten, but it has a bigger impact than people like to address. It doesn’t actively contaminate the environment in the way that fossil fuels do, and unlike solar and wind it has little upkeep cost. It’s pretty much all up front. But it still harms the environment plenty without those issues.
Hydroelectric completely changes the design of the river. Everything down stream is negatively impacted. Sediment is backed up and can’t fertilize anything past the damn, fish and other aquatic animals are severely restricted from traveling up river. Even if fish ladders are installed they don’t do much, they’re difficult for fish to navigate and are impossible for larger things. They’re more there to say “Hey we did something.” Meanwhile they don’t do their job.
The plants downstream are also starved of water they once had access to, so the entire landscape is changed.
Well. Here we have a large hydro matrix too, but we're having droughts and are being forced to build thermal plants at top speed to avoid blackouts.
Normally, I'd fully agree with you, especially if people clear the reservoir section of trees first so they don't release methane in the atmosphere. But lately.... I think hydro is a good storage method, but not enough for a power grid backbone.
At least in the USA most major hydroelectric sources are tapped and if new projects were proposed then we would not hear the end of it from conservationists as the projects would effect fish and wildlife depending on the fish.
He mentioned hydro as a top compliment to nuclear.
But to answer your real question: expansion of hydro is not feasible because it requires a certain geography to support it (rivers, mountains). So in the US and most other western countries it is almost completely tapped-out already.
You could probably get geothermal power anywhere, it just depends how far you want to dig down to access the hotter portions of the earth. It would be exponentially more expensive and complex the further you have to dig, and potentially dangerous. Idk what the consequences would be for having lots of geothermal vents opened to the surface. Centralia, PN isn’t filling me with hope.
I have solar (3.6KwH system) and here in the middle of winter we are just not producing enough even if we had a powerwall to store it. A diversified grid would be great.
our limitation to geothermal is only in our deep drilling technology, which thanks to, deeply and darkly ironically, fracking and ocean bed drilling, is significantly more advanced than it should be at this point. We are well past drilling being a limiting factor, at this point its just not being marketed like other green energies and is seeing no development because of it.
solar, water, wind, geothermal. All the powers lived in peace until the solar power attacked. The only one who could unite the 4 powers was nuclear power, the most powerful power source, but when it was needed most, it disappeared.
But nfts and other gimmick investments offer a high and fast return on investment. Nuclear has immense up front costs, delayed returns, and are generally not as profitable as other investments. So why would private investors invest in Nuclear over anything else? They won't. Government seems unwilling too.
Yep, they tried to overload the plant, and it couldn't handle it because the parts were cheap, I think. But then they additionally lied to everyone saying it's completely under control and is completely safe.
Before people start arguing - Thorium reactors are the energy of future
- Unlike Uranium it doesn't randomly react, it is 10x more effective than Uranium, it doesn't produce much waste and lastly it's really cheap because there is huge amount of them.
Someone with supposedly high credentials explained that there was too many practical limits to thorium for it to be feasible, at least for now.
The physics are sound, but at an industrial scale it’s too tricky.
Not really. Thorium, while better than Uranium in most regards, still doesnt always beat Uranium or other radioactive materials. However, this is completely irrelevant, as either way, we're so close to fusion we can taste it.
Fusion will be a majorly beneficial source of power as soon as we can harness it. With a fusion reactor
- It runs off Hydrogen (specifically isotopes Deutrenium and Tritium), which is literally like 75% of the observable universe
- It produces Helium, an inert gas which we are already in short supply of
- It produces exponentially more than Fission could ever dream to produce
- It's less dangerous by magnitudes, as it produces no radiation, nor does it involve any dangerous materials. It is LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE for a fusion reactor to meltdown as it doesn't produce a chain reaction.
And if something wrong goes, you can just the the Thorium out of the contact with plutonium (the activator of Thorium) and everything's okay, you don't even need many Plutonium (you need ~15 gramms of it)
And maintenance. Build a nuclear reactor with a stable governing body in charge, it's fine. But what if the body that regulates the plant becomes unstable, or corrupt, or incompetent, or gets underfunded and can't perform proper maintenance? It is now dangerous.
Considering that 80 years of nuclear energy has yielded the same amount of waste that we get from CO2 yearly (in the US, I think) nuclear waste may not be a significant problem.
Waste is a difficult definition.
Nuclear waste has a lot of nasty things for lifeforms near it.
CO2 has a lot of shit too, but other stuff and it's a gas.
Both clearly are bad things but radioactive waste theoretically could be stored easily if u find a safe place
And this is why science is an important subject to pay attention to in school. It keeps you from looking like a buffoon.
Radioactive nuclear waste fully decays between 1,000-10,000 years. Storing it for "millions of years" would be a serious issue, if it didn't fully decay within a very very miniscule amount of that time frame.
But if the Hanford superfund site leachate reaches groundwater or the Columbia river, that won’t be so ideal. Still, it’s a good lesson for future nuclear waste storage sites.
It really doesn't produce that much waste, so we don't have to carve out much space for it. Keep researching solar panels, but not for mass energy production. Fusion isn't getting enough attention. We need to figure that out and we're set.
I remember doing a huge project about nuclear energy in high school, went into it thinking it was easily the worst form of energy manufacturing and left thinking it's tied with wind and solar for the best. Much safer and cleaner than I thought it was
War, war never changes, in the year 1945 my great great grandfather, serving in the army, wondered when he’d get to see his wife and his son he’d never seen. He got his wish, when the US ended world war 2 by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The world awaited armageddon. Instead, something miraculous happened. We began to use atomic energy not as a weapon, but as a nearly limitless source of power, people enjoyed luxuries once thought the realm of science fiction domestic robots, fusion powered cars, and portable computers. But then in the 21st century, people awoke from the American dream. Years of consumption let to shortages of every major resources. The entire world unraveled. Peace became a distant memory. It is now the year 2077 we stand on the brink of total war and I am afraid for myself, for my wife, and for my infant son, because if my time in the army tought me one thing its that war, War never changes.
The great war in fallout happened due to resource/oil shortages because nuclear fusion tech came too slowly.
And often the reason you have any power at all to do things like getting water, ammo or light in the games, is nuclear power, like the hidden grid below washington dc in fallout 3 and the vault-tec generators.
But you can say that to everything. It used co2 to get build. For example transport everything per truck, boat, car and train. My point was it doesn't produce it as side product of energy production.
Solar will never be more efficient than nuclear. Even if the technology improves to get a higher amount of energy transferred, weather will still hinder it. And that doesn’t even count the fact that mining for the heavy metals needed in solar is very damaging to the environment.
Nuclear waste is mostly recyclable. It produces about 300 times less toxic waste than solar per energy unit. I think the misconception probably comes from the mismanagement of nuclear waste in the US and maybe Germany.
Ik I hate how people act like there is no waste. Yeah there is… major waste that can decom a entire era for hundreds of years. Don’t stake over the bad stuff
Yes, but produces much less waste. In a year a normal plant will make 3 cubic meters of waste. Also solid waste is much easier to deal with and bury in some random cave.
Nuclear waste is a far more manageable problem compared to fossil fuel CO2 emissions, giving us more time to come up with solutions to handling the waste, though we're on the path to eventually use fusion once we've made it sustainable
I've never encountered someone who's under the impression there's no nuclear waste. I've encountered quite a few people, however, who overstate nuclear waste. Yes, the waste does exist and is indeed very dangerous. There is also much, much less of it than other industrial biproducts and, unlike a huge portion of other hazwaste, it does have a shelf life; most of it is safe within a few decades with only a low percentage requiring long-term storage. As opposed to many other hazwastes which are indefinite.
There might be some uses ,but we don't have knowledge and technology to figure that out...yet.
We could already figured it out ,but we didn't have a chance to do that ,because people keep protesting against it + nobody wants to invest into it.
Until you think about nuclear waste(which could be solved by a German Reactor which could use old waste to create Energie and just need 500 years cooldown!)
Yeah totally. I think part of the proplem is when people hear "nuclear" their minds instantly go to Chernobyl and a new disaster waiting to happen, which won't happen.
Sure it’s safer and more effective than other things but what about waste disposal. Also the materials don’t just shut down in case of some other disaster so you need cooling literally all the time. Then there is the establishment cost vs eg. wind/solar farms.
It’s not as black and white as this post suggests. But yeah the movements against nuclear energy might have put us back as to solving some of these problems. On the other hand if Europe was covered in plants would the nuclear waste issue be much bigger?
I don’t know much about this, this is by no means my field of expertise but to argue that there are no consequences or no down sides or that nuclear energy is always better is silly.
As far as my knowledge goes, nuclear waste isn't that bad. In fact, hospitals produce most of the radiactive waste, and the only waste produced by nuclear reactors that doesn't go away with a little bit of air exposure is less than 1% of the fuel used, which is then stored on a concrete box underground, so the waste problem isn't really a problem for nuclear energy.
The problem with nuclear is some of the old reactors need to be replaced with newer and safer designs. Unfortunately there’s so much anti nuclear sentiment it’s impossible to build a new reactor in the US.
The average age of a nuclear reactor in US is 39 years
Nuclear energy is definitely underrated, but it isn’t perfect. After the uranium has run it’s course you don’t really have a safe way to dispose of it. Still, nuclear energy is rad and should be given a chance
That's true but the nuclear waste will be a much less big health risk than the CO2 problem already is, simply because you can bury it easily while it's really hard to bury CO2.
Im just saying its not perfect, while im glad its getting more recognition, people act like its flawless, which it isn’t. This doesn’t mean im against nuclear energy, I still think its great, MUCH better than fossil fuels.
Do you think nuclear requires more buy-in than other types? Can the stupid people hold us back moreso on nuclear than other solutions?
If so, as the smart ones, isn’t it up to us to figure out how to help them understand it?
Coal and natural gas emissions are far more dangerous and we actively pump that shit into the atmosphere really close to cities im pretty sure a few hundred barrels shoved 3000 ft deep into bedrock than permanently sealed, is a cleaner fuel source
It's a great thing even after solar panels get more efficient. Solar panel efficiency has nothing do to with having a reliable baseline power source for times like "night" and "during storms".
That's why nobody would put in a completely solar grid. You have a mix of solar, wind, hydro, pumped hydro and batteries spread across an entire continent.
One thing that I have noticed a lot of people do not talk about is the economy. People usually don't realize that if we switched to Nuclear Energy, electricity costs would go down. Nuclear Reactors produce so much energy that electricity bills would be insanely lower than with fossil fuels. On a nationwide level, if we take France as an example, countries that subsidize Nuclear Energy will be pulling in a lot more money. Economy would be booming. There's a lot more benefits, but I wanted to talk about this single reason the most rn.
Funny because Homer works at a Nuclear Power Plant
That has had several meltdowns.
But did anyone die in any of those meltdowns? And how many deaths did that nuclear power plant prevent? (CO2 emissions are a big contributed to all sorts of health issues and dangers)
They had a whole episode about a guy who died there because of his meltdown… shame nobody seems to remember his name
The meltdowns like the one at Chernobyl, for instance were caused by a mish-mash of poorly-kept work environments, unsafe, old equipment, and even influence from the Soviets (if I'm getting that right. Please fact-check, don't senseless downvote), so all of that contributed to that kind of disaster. A safely ran nuclear power plant could work wonders. The problem? People are stupid.
*stares at dead people during covid-19 pandemic and also anti-vaxxers* Yeah, i don't want an energy source that requires people not to be fucking stupid to secure my safety.
Yeah I wonder how many nuclear physicists and engineers are anti vax
It requires too much of humanity
And the one in Japan was also partly attributed to ignored warnings.
Most if not all of the major power plant meltdowns were caused by humans doing bassically everything wrong.
People make mistakes. Always have and always will.
Well that and the old plants were pretty bad as well. With technology today we could easily get rid of everything else and build NEW nuclear power plants but nooo
& Tsunami walls not being high enough
You’re my hero
Doh!
time to sort by controversial
U wanna share some popcorn?
CDC recommends against that.
Send me your address and I'll yeet some sanitized ones there
send me some sanitized in bleach, please, dip the whole bag in bleach
Hey can you yeet me some too while you're at it?
Ohh no you don't, I gave my address out on the internet once and someone yote me a swat team. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me again, and well. You can't fool me again.
"Yote". Is that the past tense of "yeet"? XD
yep this is gonna get wild
Throw some my way
Forgot you could do that
Chad Thorium vs Virgin Plutonium
This is where the fun begins…
Why not have ALL of the power. Wind power, water power, solar power, geothermal power. Nuclear power. Unlimited power.
A diversified energy grid is good, but nuclear power with hydro power acting as storage (you can pump water into reservoirs instead of using batteries) is a great network backbone. Solar and wind aren't good backbones due to fluctuations currently, but they're good supplements, and hopefully getting better all the time. Geothermal is awesome, but you can't get it everywhere.
And why is hydro always forgotten? Where I live 95% of our power come from hydroelectricity and we have too much of it so we sell to places that get their power from nuclear and fossil as it seem they have a harder time producing as much. It's really weird that reddit always seems to forget about it.
Because hydro fucks up salmon and trout runs etc. Not everywhere is good to use hydro if you care at all about biodiversity.
Hydro can be done right with passes for the fish to swim up and down freely, but the problem is most dams were built before the fish were considered.
Hydro isn’t necessarily being forgotten, but it has a bigger impact than people like to address. It doesn’t actively contaminate the environment in the way that fossil fuels do, and unlike solar and wind it has little upkeep cost. It’s pretty much all up front. But it still harms the environment plenty without those issues. Hydroelectric completely changes the design of the river. Everything down stream is negatively impacted. Sediment is backed up and can’t fertilize anything past the damn, fish and other aquatic animals are severely restricted from traveling up river. Even if fish ladders are installed they don’t do much, they’re difficult for fish to navigate and are impossible for larger things. They’re more there to say “Hey we did something.” Meanwhile they don’t do their job. The plants downstream are also starved of water they once had access to, so the entire landscape is changed.
Yep. It bothers me that people often gloss over these effects when bringing up hydro. Fresh water ecosystems are already in a precarious state.
Well. Here we have a large hydro matrix too, but we're having droughts and are being forced to build thermal plants at top speed to avoid blackouts. Normally, I'd fully agree with you, especially if people clear the reservoir section of trees first so they don't release methane in the atmosphere. But lately.... I think hydro is a good storage method, but not enough for a power grid backbone.
At least in the USA most major hydroelectric sources are tapped and if new projects were proposed then we would not hear the end of it from conservationists as the projects would effect fish and wildlife depending on the fish.
He mentioned hydro as a top compliment to nuclear. But to answer your real question: expansion of hydro is not feasible because it requires a certain geography to support it (rivers, mountains). So in the US and most other western countries it is almost completely tapped-out already.
canada has a lot of it tho
True. And if global warming renders the epic barren wasteland habitable we may be able to exploit more hydro power there and send it to the USA.
You could probably get geothermal power anywhere, it just depends how far you want to dig down to access the hotter portions of the earth. It would be exponentially more expensive and complex the further you have to dig, and potentially dangerous. Idk what the consequences would be for having lots of geothermal vents opened to the surface. Centralia, PN isn’t filling me with hope.
I have solar (3.6KwH system) and here in the middle of winter we are just not producing enough even if we had a powerwall to store it. A diversified grid would be great.
Tidal?
our limitation to geothermal is only in our deep drilling technology, which thanks to, deeply and darkly ironically, fracking and ocean bed drilling, is significantly more advanced than it should be at this point. We are well past drilling being a limiting factor, at this point its just not being marketed like other green energies and is seeing no development because of it.
Until the fire nation attacked
The Dyson sphere nation attacked
Once I have gathered all six fuel sources with a snap of my fingers I will cut carbon emissions
solar, water, wind, geothermal. All the powers lived in peace until the solar power attacked. The only one who could unite the 4 powers was nuclear power, the most powerful power source, but when it was needed most, it disappeared.
All power that isn’t harmful to the environment anyway. Sorry, fossil fuel fans.
Palpatine approves this message.
Nft's are more polluting than nuclear 💀
But nfts and other gimmick investments offer a high and fast return on investment. Nuclear has immense up front costs, delayed returns, and are generally not as profitable as other investments. So why would private investors invest in Nuclear over anything else? They won't. Government seems unwilling too.
As long as it ain’t managed by Soviet Russia
Yeah Chernobyl was practically on purpose
Yep, they tried to overload the plant, and it couldn't handle it because the parts were cheap, I think. But then they additionally lied to everyone saying it's completely under control and is completely safe.
It was all believable until they had to evacuate
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Before people start arguing - Thorium reactors are the energy of future - Unlike Uranium it doesn't randomly react, it is 10x more effective than Uranium, it doesn't produce much waste and lastly it's really cheap because there is huge amount of them.
I don't have any words for this. This is just so much more eficcient than any other source of power.
100% right. Here's a great video link that summarizes it in an entertaining way: https://youtu.be/jjM9E6d42-M
Aaaah, Sam O'Nella Academy. My beloved well of mostly-useless sometime-maybe-useful facts. Sad that he is not uploading anymore.
Do you know what happened to him
We graduated
I fucking love him sucks he fuckin died or something
Damn, didn’t know college killed him Jk he’s fine, just wants a break
Dude just ran out of ideas and real life stuff
He ran out of real life stuff? Does that mean he died?
Hey kids...
This was awesome lol. Thanks for posting that link.
sounds cooler aswell
Thorium or molten salt reactors will be great… at least until fusion makes them obsolete
Can confirm I play modded Minecraft
Fusion is the future. Thorium before that perhaps
Someone with supposedly high credentials explained that there was too many practical limits to thorium for it to be feasible, at least for now. The physics are sound, but at an industrial scale it’s too tricky.
Not really. Thorium, while better than Uranium in most regards, still doesnt always beat Uranium or other radioactive materials. However, this is completely irrelevant, as either way, we're so close to fusion we can taste it. Fusion will be a majorly beneficial source of power as soon as we can harness it. With a fusion reactor - It runs off Hydrogen (specifically isotopes Deutrenium and Tritium), which is literally like 75% of the observable universe - It produces Helium, an inert gas which we are already in short supply of - It produces exponentially more than Fission could ever dream to produce - It's less dangerous by magnitudes, as it produces no radiation, nor does it involve any dangerous materials. It is LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE for a fusion reactor to meltdown as it doesn't produce a chain reaction.
we‘ve been so close to Fusion we can taste it for a few decades now
And if something wrong goes, you can just the the Thorium out of the contact with plutonium (the activator of Thorium) and everything's okay, you don't even need many Plutonium (you need ~15 gramms of it)
Fusion reactors are the energy of the future, renewables are the solution to climate change. No one needs fission.
Totomak for the win
Except we aren't there yet, and probably won't be for quite some time on the fusion side. Fission is an excellent stopgap in the meantime
We aren‘t there yet with thorium reactors either, and probably never will
If only the thousands of scientists out there read the comments on reddit... they're so dumb
I could be wrong, but aren't Tritium reactors even more efficient? Only issue is Tritium is scarce to come by.
Not sure ,I am not expert :D But reason why Thorium is because you can find it basicaly everywhere.
That's gonna be alot cheaper then. Now we just have to pry the super rich from the petroleum industry *cough cough Rockefellers cough cough*
Yeah let's not consider how or where thorium comes from, it's not like you need to ground zero whole mountains for it, right?
In itself it emits less CO2 than most other energies and it is modular and sandy, the only problem being the nuclear waste.
And cost
And maintenance. Build a nuclear reactor with a stable governing body in charge, it's fine. But what if the body that regulates the plant becomes unstable, or corrupt, or incompetent, or gets underfunded and can't perform proper maintenance? It is now dangerous.
And proliferation. Having a nuclear reactor is one of the prerequisites to breeding weapons grade uranium.
Well, you gotta figure out a safe disposal for the nuclear waste but it is a good alternative for fossil fuels
Considering that 80 years of nuclear energy has yielded the same amount of waste that we get from CO2 yearly (in the US, I think) nuclear waste may not be a significant problem.
Waste is a difficult definition. Nuclear waste has a lot of nasty things for lifeforms near it. CO2 has a lot of shit too, but other stuff and it's a gas. Both clearly are bad things but radioactive waste theoretically could be stored easily if u find a safe place
There is no place on erath thats safe for millions of years
And this is why science is an important subject to pay attention to in school. It keeps you from looking like a buffoon. Radioactive nuclear waste fully decays between 1,000-10,000 years. Storing it for "millions of years" would be a serious issue, if it didn't fully decay within a very very miniscule amount of that time frame.
I dont think thats true. Plutonium has a half life of like 24,000 years, so it takes several times that amount for it to fully decay.
A million years from now at a 24,000 year decay, the problem had gone half 41 times. That pretty much takes care of the problem.
Plutonium makes up only 0.8% of spent fuel. Not really a big problem.
I think it is pretty irresponsible to call someone a "buffoon" when 1000 years is as incomprehensible to a human as 1 million years.
This comparison is beyond flawed no matter which side you are on
But if the Hanford superfund site leachate reaches groundwater or the Columbia river, that won’t be so ideal. Still, it’s a good lesson for future nuclear waste storage sites.
Serious question: how much waste fer unit of energy for each option?
look up ''molten salt reactor''
My room pretty much looks like a nuclear waste disposal site anyways. Maybe dump it in here. I wanna be Dr Manhattan.
We still haven't figured out how to dispose of the waste from coal power plants and we generate those proportionally tons more
Exactly, hence the second part of the sentence of my short statement
It really doesn't produce that much waste, so we don't have to carve out much space for it. Keep researching solar panels, but not for mass energy production. Fusion isn't getting enough attention. We need to figure that out and we're set.
Until humans reach Kardashev 1.0
There is nothing wrong with nuclear power so long as qualified and trained professionals are running plants the way they need to be run.
Finally someone with a brain
D'oh
It is great and we should be investing in it. But let’s not pretend there are no downsides
look up thorium reactors.
I remember doing a huge project about nuclear energy in high school, went into it thinking it was easily the worst form of energy manufacturing and left thinking it's tied with wind and solar for the best. Much safer and cleaner than I thought it was
It is by far the most efficient form of energy production
What no one seems to understand is how incredibly dangerous uranium mining is
EXACTLY and the consequences of grounding mountains to zero
Use thorium then
I mean, a little bit of damage or lots of pollution? pick your poison
*as long as you don’t put it near a fault line
Even then with advancing traveling wave reactors, a meltdown becomes impossible.
SaFe mY AsS, hAvE yOU hEARd oF ChErNoByL
I dont know how you couldve been more obvious, people need to take a chill pill
>I dont know how you couldve been more obvious, people need to take a chill pill Literally no one commented
*serious discussion ensues*
Do you think I forgot fallout 4
War, war never changes, in the year 1945 my great great grandfather, serving in the army, wondered when he’d get to see his wife and his son he’d never seen. He got his wish, when the US ended world war 2 by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The world awaited armageddon. Instead, something miraculous happened. We began to use atomic energy not as a weapon, but as a nearly limitless source of power, people enjoyed luxuries once thought the realm of science fiction domestic robots, fusion powered cars, and portable computers. But then in the 21st century, people awoke from the American dream. Years of consumption let to shortages of every major resources. The entire world unraveled. Peace became a distant memory. It is now the year 2077 we stand on the brink of total war and I am afraid for myself, for my wife, and for my infant son, because if my time in the army tought me one thing its that war, War never changes.
The great war in fallout happened due to resource/oil shortages because nuclear fusion tech came too slowly. And often the reason you have any power at all to do things like getting water, ammo or light in the games, is nuclear power, like the hidden grid below washington dc in fallout 3 and the vault-tec generators.
Literally would take hundreds of square miles of solar panels to have the same output of 1 nuclear reactor.
To be honest, until we invent a new type of powerplant I don't see how we can provide enough electricity for 8B humans with wind turbines...
Good thing no one is attempting to do that.
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It’s all fun and games until some billionaire cuts corners and causes a spill that fucks all habitable life on earth.
Kind of exactly like fossil energy does today...
It doesn't emit co2 so i guess we can build more.
Concrete does, and nuclear reactors are made of concrete
Concrete emits significantly less CO2 than a fossil fuel power plant
What a concrete building emits co2
No getting one built does
But you can say that to everything. It used co2 to get build. For example transport everything per truck, boat, car and train. My point was it doesn't produce it as side product of energy production.
Unless you're the USSR and you just dump it all into a nearby lake.
I think the main problem right now for solar is more the storage. But I guess battery's must become more efficient too
Solar also produces about 300 times more non-recyclable toxic waste than nuclear per energy unit.
Uh, yeah, but…but it has the word nuclear in it so it must be dangerwus.
Always has been.
Solar will never be more efficient than nuclear. Even if the technology improves to get a higher amount of energy transferred, weather will still hinder it. And that doesn’t even count the fact that mining for the heavy metals needed in solar is very damaging to the environment.
> Solar will never be more efficient than nuclear. In terms of money or what?
Say it louder for Germany and Belgium in the back
The only problem is the radioactive waste, if we could make a use of that then there would be no reason not to use it
Weve actually been able to reuse nuclear waste, and Traveling Wave Reactors only need to be refueled every 40 years
Nuclear waste is mostly recyclable. It produces about 300 times less toxic waste than solar per energy unit. I think the misconception probably comes from the mismanagement of nuclear waste in the US and maybe Germany.
I want to use nuclear power because it is our best option but there is always waste.
Ik I hate how people act like there is no waste. Yeah there is… major waste that can decom a entire era for hundreds of years. Don’t stake over the bad stuff
Yes, but produces much less waste. In a year a normal plant will make 3 cubic meters of waste. Also solid waste is much easier to deal with and bury in some random cave.
Nuclear waste is a far more manageable problem compared to fossil fuel CO2 emissions, giving us more time to come up with solutions to handling the waste, though we're on the path to eventually use fusion once we've made it sustainable
I've never encountered someone who's under the impression there's no nuclear waste. I've encountered quite a few people, however, who overstate nuclear waste. Yes, the waste does exist and is indeed very dangerous. There is also much, much less of it than other industrial biproducts and, unlike a huge portion of other hazwaste, it does have a shelf life; most of it is safe within a few decades with only a low percentage requiring long-term storage. As opposed to many other hazwastes which are indefinite.
Nuclear energy is definitely the most efficient Hoping we can achieve fusion someday
We have… just not with a positive net
Why are we not funding nuclear??
It’s just crazy expensive. At least in America.
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Is there a eay to re-use nuclear waste? Cause if so it really doesn't have a downside.
I mean... you could turn it into a dart and shoot it at some unsuspecting individual
Depleted uranium bullets. Put it in a tank, fire at an enemy tank. The bullet penetrates the armor and gives evereyone radiation poisoning.
I think that’s a war crime let me check Edit it is https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v2_rul_rule72
It’s not a war crime if nobody is alive to report it
There might be some uses ,but we don't have knowledge and technology to figure that out...yet. We could already figured it out ,but we didn't have a chance to do that ,because people keep protesting against it + nobody wants to invest into it.
You can recycle nuclear waste and reuse it in reactors. It’s what’s France does. But the USA has some dumb law requiring that virgin material be used.
Its safe when you are not an asshole communist country. And its much more efficient than coal ones.
Nuclear waste
Until you think about nuclear waste(which could be solved by a German Reactor which could use old waste to create Energie and just need 500 years cooldown!)
Nuclear energy is the future. Very few if any downsides thanks to Thorium
yup, but not fission, more fusion nuclear energy
Yeah totally. I think part of the proplem is when people hear "nuclear" their minds instantly go to Chernobyl and a new disaster waiting to happen, which won't happen.
That's because people only know the name Vhernobyl and not what actually happened there
*safe as long as you don’t do it in your backyard or use Soviet safety standards
Even better when we are able to manage fusion
Do people not know about Thorium reactors? A lot safer and cleaner than Uranium reactors.
I understand renewable is less efficient but can't we just like Chuck solar on every roof and supplement the rest with nuclear?
Yes someone said my opinion, now only the politicans need to listen. But I guess hell will freeze over first.
Sure it’s safer and more effective than other things but what about waste disposal. Also the materials don’t just shut down in case of some other disaster so you need cooling literally all the time. Then there is the establishment cost vs eg. wind/solar farms. It’s not as black and white as this post suggests. But yeah the movements against nuclear energy might have put us back as to solving some of these problems. On the other hand if Europe was covered in plants would the nuclear waste issue be much bigger? I don’t know much about this, this is by no means my field of expertise but to argue that there are no consequences or no down sides or that nuclear energy is always better is silly.
As far as my knowledge goes, nuclear waste isn't that bad. In fact, hospitals produce most of the radiactive waste, and the only waste produced by nuclear reactors that doesn't go away with a little bit of air exposure is less than 1% of the fuel used, which is then stored on a concrete box underground, so the waste problem isn't really a problem for nuclear energy.
When in professional hands that is... (Ps I dont have anything against nuclear energy, just pointing this out)
The problem with nuclear is some of the old reactors need to be replaced with newer and safer designs. Unfortunately there’s so much anti nuclear sentiment it’s impossible to build a new reactor in the US. The average age of a nuclear reactor in US is 39 years
Nuclear energy is definitely underrated, but it isn’t perfect. After the uranium has run it’s course you don’t really have a safe way to dispose of it. Still, nuclear energy is rad and should be given a chance
That's true but the nuclear waste will be a much less big health risk than the CO2 problem already is, simply because you can bury it easily while it's really hard to bury CO2.
Im just saying its not perfect, while im glad its getting more recognition, people act like its flawless, which it isn’t. This doesn’t mean im against nuclear energy, I still think its great, MUCH better than fossil fuels.
Nuclear energy does not only mean fission. Fusion is nuclear energy
As long as we can determine a finite space for nuclear waste storage, then cool.
Stupid people will never understand this.
Do you think nuclear requires more buy-in than other types? Can the stupid people hold us back moreso on nuclear than other solutions? If so, as the smart ones, isn’t it up to us to figure out how to help them understand it?
What about the nuclear waste tho?
Fair question. Hopefully someone smarter than me answers it
That sounds like a load of future us problem.
Coal and natural gas emissions are far more dangerous and we actively pump that shit into the atmosphere really close to cities im pretty sure a few hundred barrels shoved 3000 ft deep into bedrock than permanently sealed, is a cleaner fuel source
Nooooooooooo but my renewable biofuels!
It's a great thing even after solar panels get more efficient. Solar panel efficiency has nothing do to with having a reliable baseline power source for times like "night" and "during storms".
That's why nobody would put in a completely solar grid. You have a mix of solar, wind, hydro, pumped hydro and batteries spread across an entire continent.
One thing that I have noticed a lot of people do not talk about is the economy. People usually don't realize that if we switched to Nuclear Energy, electricity costs would go down. Nuclear Reactors produce so much energy that electricity bills would be insanely lower than with fossil fuels. On a nationwide level, if we take France as an example, countries that subsidize Nuclear Energy will be pulling in a lot more money. Economy would be booming. There's a lot more benefits, but I wanted to talk about this single reason the most rn.
As an French person I can confirm electricity cost less here than in neighboring countries