5 ms·

I'm not a fan of wind- big, ugly, noisy, and deadly to birds. Why is nuclear not considered an option to fight climate change?

by JTbane 8y ago

pm90 8y ago
Because of 3 mile Island, Fukushima and Chernobyl. If we had invested the same amount of effort in making Nuclear energy safe as we did in lobbying against it, we would probably have reduced our carbon footprint enormously already. Weirdest/Biggest missed chance for climate change.
- tormeh 8y ago
  Nuclear is unsafe for the same reason software is unsafe. Because absent obvious signs of lack of safety, there will always be a drive towards lower cost. It's sociology, not technology.
- tpm 8y ago
  If you did that, you would end up with unbelievably expensive nuclear power plants, which is exactly what is happening (see Hinkley Point C). And that still does not solve the dismantling and long-term safe storage after the plants end of life, so you are pushing additional expenses to the future.
  - pm90 8y ago
    > so you are pushing additional expenses to the future. Is that a necessarily bad thing? Serious question. The nuclear waste that we generate is concentrated in the Nuclear Reactors and thus can be tracked and managed (I'm assuming a reasonable amount of competency and lack of natural disasters etc.). We could just store it locked away in concrete containers far from any human population centers. Perhaps in the future we discover a use for all that waste. Or perhaps space travel becomes cheap enough that we start jettisoning the waste to the Sun, or any other low-cost orbital trajectory. Right now, the CO2 generate from fossil fuels is just dumped into the environment and we know that is causing climate change and is a clear, immediate and existential threat to humanity. Is the decision really that hard to make?
    - caf 8y ago
      We could just store it locked away in concrete containers far from any human population centers. No, we can't, because the spent fuel waste continuously generates heat. It has to be actively cooled to stop it from catching fire and emitting all those decay products into the atmosphere.
      - jabl 8y ago
        Immediately after being removed from the reactor, the spent fuel is stored in water tanks, in order to cool them enough to prevent the fuel rods from melting. After a few years, however, the radioactivity has decayed enough that the fuel can be stored in "dry casks", essentially big concrete containers, with no water or otherwise active cooling necessary. A lot of commercial spent nuclear fuel is sitting around in such dry casks. They are expected to last 100 years or so; if we haven't figured out a better plan by then we can just shift the spent fuel into fresh dry casks.
    - tpm 8y ago
      Yes, I think that's a bad thing. Once you discover a better/cheaper way of generating electrical energy, you can stop a coal plant (this is happening right now). You can't do that with a nuclear plant. My understanding is that renewable energy is curently cheaper than that from new nuclear power stations. Also if you stop fossil fuel power plants, there are still many other sources of atmospheric CO2 and methane.
tim333 8y ago
Googling a bit >Only a decade ago, [US] nuclear reactors were cash cows. But a combination of low natural gas prices and a boom in solar and wind power has rendered them unable to compete in states with price competition for power. Five of the country’s nuclear plants have shut down in the past decade. Of the remaining 99, at least a dozen more may close in the next. Also here in the UK the govenment is spending £20 bn to build the Hinkley Point reactor and "The National Audit Office estimates the additional cost to consumers (above the estimated market price of electricity) under the "strike price" will be £50 billion." As a tax payer I'd rather they'd spent our £70bn on a few windmills.
drchickensalad 8y ago
Feel free to review http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph240/white1/ http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph240/white1/ or other research. There's quite a lot of propaganda surrounding renewables so it's worth doing a little extra investigation.
zdragnar 8y ago
Price to build and run, followed by public perception. A good chunk of cost is safety regulation; until smaller and cheaper reactors are efficient (and with less catastrophic failure modes) come into play, natural gas will out-compete nuclear 9 times out of 10. Sadly, too little research is going into nuclear, largely due to public perception; plants that use thorium or recycle waste have a ton of promise but little public interest. Meanwhile, Germany needs to find out what to do with about a third of their wind turbines in the next few years, as they're about to hit end of life and the parts are difficult or impossible to reuse and recycle. Not to mention the environmental consequences of solar and wind production, but hey, chromium and cadmium poisoning doesn't sound as scary as a mushroom cloud irradiating half the country.
supernovae 8y ago
Fukushima... I'd rather have windmills than an entire town abandoned and a power plant that appears to still be melted down to this day. are they really noisy? the big windmill farms i see here in Texas just seem awesome and they put a smile on my face as i drive through 'em.
Brakenshire 8y ago
> I'm not a fan of wind- big, ugly, noisy, and deadly to birds. Wind does not kill birds in significant numbers, that is misinformation. Offshore wind is many miles out to sea, so it hardly matters if they’re big, ugly or noisy. It also reduces the effect on birds from negligible to nonexistent. In practice they are a few dots on the horizon, if we really are not willing to put up with such a minor inconvenience we might as well give up now.
- specialist 8y ago
  I read speculation that white paint attracts insects which attracts birds. I’d like someone to try some other colors, just to see what happens.
- JKCalhoun 8y ago
  Not an ornithologist, but the sea birds I've observed seem to ride close to the water, within ground-effect it seems. As you say then these elevated wind turbines are unlikely to have a significant impact on birds.
afterburner 8y ago
"big" - uh, smaller than any other type of plant "ugly" - you hate pinwheels??? "noisy" - I've gone right up to the base of farm-based wind turbines and don't remember any terrible noise. And they're never built right next to a house. "deadly to birds" - nope
justinpombrio 8y ago
> ugly Really? I find them beautiful. White, majestic, slowly spinning. When biking, I'll often stop to watch. I'm sorry you feel that way. > noisy In this case the noise is irrelevant because they'll be out to sea. I've never been close enough to one to hear it: what do they sound like?
- JKCalhoun 8y ago
  In as much as they are often in windy areas (surprise) I tend only to hear the sound of wind in my ears — which would be there whether there were wind turbines or not.

I'm not a fan of wind- big, ugly, noisy, and deadly to birds. Why is nuclear not considered an option to fight climate change?

by JTbane 8y ago

I'm not a fan of wind- big, ugly, noisy, and deadly to birds. Why is nuclear not considered an option to fight climate change?

pm90 8y ago

Because of 3 mile Island, Fukushima and Chernobyl. If we had invested the same amount of effort in making Nuclear energy safe as we did in lobbying against it, we would probably have reduced our carbon footprint enormously already. Weirdest/Biggest missed chance for climate change.

tormeh 8y ago
Nuclear is unsafe for the same reason software is unsafe. Because absent obvious signs of lack of safety, there will always be a drive towards lower cost. It's sociology, not technology.
tpm 8y ago
If you did that, you would end up with unbelievably expensive nuclear power plants, which is exactly what is happening (see Hinkley Point C). And that still does not solve the dismantling and long-term safe storage after the plants end of life, so you are pushing additional expenses to the future.
- pm90 8y ago
  > so you are pushing additional expenses to the future. Is that a necessarily bad thing? Serious question. The nuclear waste that we generate is concentrated in the Nuclear Reactors and thus can be tracked and managed (I'm assuming a reasonable amount of competency and lack of natural disasters etc.). We could just store it locked away in concrete containers far from any human population centers. Perhaps in the future we discover a use for all that waste. Or perhaps space travel becomes cheap enough that we start jettisoning the waste to the Sun, or any other low-cost orbital trajectory. Right now, the CO2 generate from fossil fuels is just dumped into the environment and we know that is causing climate change and is a clear, immediate and existential threat to humanity. Is the decision really that hard to make?
  - caf 8y ago
    We could just store it locked away in concrete containers far from any human population centers. No, we can't, because the spent fuel waste continuously generates heat. It has to be actively cooled to stop it from catching fire and emitting all those decay products into the atmosphere.
    - jabl 8y ago
      Immediately after being removed from the reactor, the spent fuel is stored in water tanks, in order to cool them enough to prevent the fuel rods from melting. After a few years, however, the radioactivity has decayed enough that the fuel can be stored in "dry casks", essentially big concrete containers, with no water or otherwise active cooling necessary. A lot of commercial spent nuclear fuel is sitting around in such dry casks. They are expected to last 100 years or so; if we haven't figured out a better plan by then we can just shift the spent fuel into fresh dry casks.
  - tpm 8y ago
    Yes, I think that's a bad thing. Once you discover a better/cheaper way of generating electrical energy, you can stop a coal plant (this is happening right now). You can't do that with a nuclear plant. My understanding is that renewable energy is curently cheaper than that from new nuclear power stations. Also if you stop fossil fuel power plants, there are still many other sources of atmospheric CO2 and methane.

tim333 8y ago

Googling a bit >Only a decade ago, [US] nuclear reactors were cash cows. But a combination of low natural gas prices and a boom in solar and wind power has rendered them unable to compete in states with price competition for power. Five of the country’s nuclear plants have shut down in the past decade. Of the remaining 99, at least a dozen more may close in the next. Also here in the UK the govenment is spending £20 bn to build the Hinkley Point reactor and "The National Audit Office estimates the additional cost to consumers (above the estimated market price of electricity) under the "strike price" will be £50 billion." As a tax payer I'd rather they'd spent our £70bn on a few windmills.

drchickensalad 8y ago

Feel free to review http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph240/white1/ http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph240/white1/ or other research. There's quite a lot of propaganda surrounding renewables so it's worth doing a little extra investigation.

zdragnar 8y ago

Price to build and run, followed by public perception. A good chunk of cost is safety regulation; until smaller and cheaper reactors are efficient (and with less catastrophic failure modes) come into play, natural gas will out-compete nuclear 9 times out of 10. Sadly, too little research is going into nuclear, largely due to public perception; plants that use thorium or recycle waste have a ton of promise but little public interest. Meanwhile, Germany needs to find out what to do with about a third of their wind turbines in the next few years, as they're about to hit end of life and the parts are difficult or impossible to reuse and recycle. Not to mention the environmental consequences of solar and wind production, but hey, chromium and cadmium poisoning doesn't sound as scary as a mushroom cloud irradiating half the country.

supernovae 8y ago

Fukushima... I'd rather have windmills than an entire town abandoned and a power plant that appears to still be melted down to this day. are they really noisy? the big windmill farms i see here in Texas just seem awesome and they put a smile on my face as i drive through 'em.

Brakenshire 8y ago

> I'm not a fan of wind- big, ugly, noisy, and deadly to birds. Wind does not kill birds in significant numbers, that is misinformation. Offshore wind is many miles out to sea, so it hardly matters if they’re big, ugly or noisy. It also reduces the effect on birds from negligible to nonexistent. In practice they are a few dots on the horizon, if we really are not willing to put up with such a minor inconvenience we might as well give up now.

specialist 8y ago
I read speculation that white paint attracts insects which attracts birds. I’d like someone to try some other colors, just to see what happens.
JKCalhoun 8y ago
Not an ornithologist, but the sea birds I've observed seem to ride close to the water, within ground-effect it seems. As you say then these elevated wind turbines are unlikely to have a significant impact on birds.

afterburner 8y ago

"big" - uh, smaller than any other type of plant "ugly" - you hate pinwheels??? "noisy" - I've gone right up to the base of farm-based wind turbines and don't remember any terrible noise. And they're never built right next to a house. "deadly to birds" - nope

justinpombrio 8y ago

> ugly Really? I find them beautiful. White, majestic, slowly spinning. When biking, I'll often stop to watch. I'm sorry you feel that way. > noisy In this case the noise is irrelevant because they'll be out to sea. I've never been close enough to one to hear it: what do they sound like?

JKCalhoun 8y ago
In as much as they are often in windy areas (surprise) I tend only to hear the sound of wind in my ears — which would be there whether there were wind turbines or not.