5 ms·

I don't think you're fully aware of the facts (not "propaganda") of nuclear. Old fission reactors are the silent workhorses of our civilization and without them

I don't think you're fully aware of the facts (not "propaganda") of nuclear. Old fission reactors are the silent workhorses of our civilization and without them we'd be a much much deeper trouble than we already are. Had previous administrations invested more in fission, climate change would be a much smaller and more manageable problem today. Nuclear has other advantages over solar as well, such as not requiring the vast amounts of land solar does, sometime which will probably cause more and more problems as the industry grows.

candiodari 8y ago
Yeah this is something people keep forgetting. The reason fossil fuels have such an impact is because the industry is happening at such a scale. Solar and wind are working at miniscule size ... and ... "no" impact (well, wind clearly has impact already, but ... let's forget that). Well actually, solar does have an impact. In Spain there's a couple large wind farms I visited and ... not that it should surprise anyone but there's nothing growing near or below them. Below the panels there's dried out, sad grass. Now I guess this is what you'd expect, but still. It kinda sucks. What happens when we have regions in every country the size of a decent state/province essentially covered in solar panels ? Habitat destruction, of course (even in deserts). But for now, when we're talking a decent number of football fields, we can all happily pretend no impact. Truth is, for the amount of power it produces, nuclear fission is not just amazingly, but almost absurdly low impact (meaning you'd get laughed out of the room if you predicted it in 1950). Far LOWER, not higher than solar, in impact, in danger (in lives lost / KwH, even if you include nuclear bombs), in place occupied, in nature poisoned/displaced ("environmental impact"), ... Fusion can do better. That makes it worth pursuing.
- vegetablepotpie 8y ago
  I think Fission would be great if we had somewhere to put the waste, if it didn't cost $10 billion dollars to set up a plant and people weren't phobic of it. Overall Nuclear makes more sense than coal and arguably more sense than wind and solar. But then there's the risk of the meltdown. No politician, no utility CEO, no corporation commission is going to take the risk of a meltdown when the political cost of pumping just a little more CO2 into the air is very small.
  - mdavis6890 8y ago
    Your point about political risk is very valid, but your points about the waste and cost need to be reconsidered. A big part of the cost is artificial, not inherent: regulation. A person may or may not think the regulations are a good thing, but it's not an inherent cost. The waste is not much problem. The amount of waste to power the lives of a whole family for their entire lives would easily fit in a shoebox and be easily contained in water. And most of that radioactivity dissipates very quickly.
    - pitaj 8y ago
      Don't forget to mention that old waste can even be consumed in modern reactors.
      - Fjolsvith 8y ago
        Perhaps one day we'll put the waste in cars, a la "Back To The Future ".
  - fromMars 8y ago
    This thread on reddit had an excellent discussion on nuclear power. There was some especially interesting discussion around thorium based nuclear power which has the potential to be much less dangerous. https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/a1c7kt/why_do_people_dislike_nuclear_energy_dont_people/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/a1c7kt/why_do_peop...
  - earthboundkid 8y ago
    I can believe that human beings can run one nuclear fission plant successfully for one hundred years without a serious accident. I cannot believe that we can run thousands of plants for hundreds of years without a serious accident. There is too much complexity to prevent a black swan event, and in the case of nuclear fission, a black swan renders the surrounding area uninhabitable for an immensely long time. Nuclear fission is a fine bridge technology, but we cannot build systems that rely on it and expect them to be sustainable.
- thoughtstheseus 8y ago
  Regarding solar placement, we can place panels on housing and commercial buildings and parking spaces. Check out canopy style parking covers(sun protection)in the southern US.
  - martythemaniak 8y ago
    I once did my own calculation to answer the question: "How much land do you have to cover with solar panels to meet Toronto's electricity needs". The answer: about 3.5x the size of the city. Covering every square inch of the city is not sufficient, you need a lot more land. You can double-check my calculations: take the output of largest solar farm installations, note their land area, adjust for solar radiation at your chosen location/latitude, then use the target city's electricity consumption to see how many of these solar installations will be required. Note, I'm talking solely about land-use requirements here, not cost/battery requirements etc. So covering cities in solar would work great if the overall electricity mix was 50% nuclear for base load, 50% solar/wind/hydro for peak times, but relying heavily on solar will bring its own issues.
    - eloff 8y ago
      At Canadian solar intensity levels? I'd be surprised if it's only 3.5x. You can't count on average intensity for the year either, you really need to look at the lowest intensity and go with that number. You can use battery storage, but you are not going to be storing electricity from the summer for the winter. Anyway even at 10x, Canada has a LOT of land, that's totally viable and wouldn't even make a dent in land-use compared to say agriculture.
      - martythemaniak 8y ago
        Yeah, it's probably a conservative number. But the Toronto area (~20% of Canada's population) would not be much different from Chicago, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, etc. And yeah, Canada has a lot of land, but once we ask Canadians "How would you like to chop down 5 Torontos worth of forest to cover them in silicon panels and make it into a lifeless desert?", then maybe some people will reconsider the relative merits of nuclear.
- TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
  Your facts appear incorrect. Renewables consistently produce more than 60% of Portugal's energy needs, and have topped 100% on occasion. The figure for Spain is more than 35%, and more than 35% of electricity consumption in Germany. I'm not sure how you get from 60% to "no impact". It's really quite a puzzling statement. As is the suggestion that windfarms cause some kind of ecological blight to farmland. Not only is there no scientific basis for that claim, but if it were true, anti-wind propagandists would surely have jumped on it and made sure they mentioned it at every possible opportunity. Perhaps you have some independent evidence to back you beyond the "couple large wind farms in Spain" you visited?
  - randallsquared 8y ago
    The GP's post had "below the panels" in the description of the "wind farm", which was preceded by "actually, solar does have an impact". Surely the charitable explanation is that "wind" was just a mistake?
  - detritus 8y ago
    I'm very pro-renewable and new nuclear, but when you say "60% of Portugal's energy needs, and have topped 100% on occasion" do you mean the entire country's energy requirement, or just 'electricity'?. Because as rosy as that sounds, I doubt it takes into account oil-based travel infrastructure, which if the last pie-chart I recall seeing for an average country has any bearing, is a BIG slice.

candiodari 8y ago

Yeah this is something people keep forgetting. The reason fossil fuels have such an impact is because the industry is happening at such a scale. Solar and wind are working at miniscule size ... and ... "no" impact (well, wind clearly has impact already, but ... let's forget that). Well actually, solar does have an impact. In Spain there's a couple large wind farms I visited and ... not that it should surprise anyone but there's nothing growing near or below them. Below the panels there's dried out, sad grass. Now I guess this is what you'd expect, but still. It kinda sucks. What happens when we have regions in every country the size of a decent state/province essentially covered in solar panels ? Habitat destruction, of course (even in deserts). But for now, when we're talking a decent number of football fields, we can all happily pretend no impact. Truth is, for the amount of power it produces, nuclear fission is not just amazingly, but almost absurdly low impact (meaning you'd get laughed out of the room if you predicted it in 1950). Far LOWER, not higher than solar, in impact, in danger (in lives lost / KwH, even if you include nuclear bombs), in place occupied, in nature poisoned/displaced ("environmental impact"), ... Fusion can do better. That makes it worth pursuing.

vegetablepotpie 8y ago
I think Fission would be great if we had somewhere to put the waste, if it didn't cost $10 billion dollars to set up a plant and people weren't phobic of it. Overall Nuclear makes more sense than coal and arguably more sense than wind and solar. But then there's the risk of the meltdown. No politician, no utility CEO, no corporation commission is going to take the risk of a meltdown when the political cost of pumping just a little more CO2 into the air is very small.
- mdavis6890 8y ago
  Your point about political risk is very valid, but your points about the waste and cost need to be reconsidered. A big part of the cost is artificial, not inherent: regulation. A person may or may not think the regulations are a good thing, but it's not an inherent cost. The waste is not much problem. The amount of waste to power the lives of a whole family for their entire lives would easily fit in a shoebox and be easily contained in water. And most of that radioactivity dissipates very quickly.
  - pitaj 8y ago
    Don't forget to mention that old waste can even be consumed in modern reactors.
    - Fjolsvith 8y ago
      Perhaps one day we'll put the waste in cars, a la "Back To The Future ".
- fromMars 8y ago
  This thread on reddit had an excellent discussion on nuclear power. There was some especially interesting discussion around thorium based nuclear power which has the potential to be much less dangerous. https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/a1c7kt/why_do_people_dislike_nuclear_energy_dont_people/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/a1c7kt/why_do_peop...
- earthboundkid 8y ago
  I can believe that human beings can run one nuclear fission plant successfully for one hundred years without a serious accident. I cannot believe that we can run thousands of plants for hundreds of years without a serious accident. There is too much complexity to prevent a black swan event, and in the case of nuclear fission, a black swan renders the surrounding area uninhabitable for an immensely long time. Nuclear fission is a fine bridge technology, but we cannot build systems that rely on it and expect them to be sustainable.
thoughtstheseus 8y ago
Regarding solar placement, we can place panels on housing and commercial buildings and parking spaces. Check out canopy style parking covers(sun protection)in the southern US.
- martythemaniak 8y ago
  I once did my own calculation to answer the question: "How much land do you have to cover with solar panels to meet Toronto's electricity needs". The answer: about 3.5x the size of the city. Covering every square inch of the city is not sufficient, you need a lot more land. You can double-check my calculations: take the output of largest solar farm installations, note their land area, adjust for solar radiation at your chosen location/latitude, then use the target city's electricity consumption to see how many of these solar installations will be required. Note, I'm talking solely about land-use requirements here, not cost/battery requirements etc. So covering cities in solar would work great if the overall electricity mix was 50% nuclear for base load, 50% solar/wind/hydro for peak times, but relying heavily on solar will bring its own issues.
  - eloff 8y ago
    At Canadian solar intensity levels? I'd be surprised if it's only 3.5x. You can't count on average intensity for the year either, you really need to look at the lowest intensity and go with that number. You can use battery storage, but you are not going to be storing electricity from the summer for the winter. Anyway even at 10x, Canada has a LOT of land, that's totally viable and wouldn't even make a dent in land-use compared to say agriculture.
    - martythemaniak 8y ago
      Yeah, it's probably a conservative number. But the Toronto area (~20% of Canada's population) would not be much different from Chicago, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, etc. And yeah, Canada has a lot of land, but once we ask Canadians "How would you like to chop down 5 Torontos worth of forest to cover them in silicon panels and make it into a lifeless desert?", then maybe some people will reconsider the relative merits of nuclear.
TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
Your facts appear incorrect. Renewables consistently produce more than 60% of Portugal's energy needs, and have topped 100% on occasion. The figure for Spain is more than 35%, and more than 35% of electricity consumption in Germany. I'm not sure how you get from 60% to "no impact". It's really quite a puzzling statement. As is the suggestion that windfarms cause some kind of ecological blight to farmland. Not only is there no scientific basis for that claim, but if it were true, anti-wind propagandists would surely have jumped on it and made sure they mentioned it at every possible opportunity. Perhaps you have some independent evidence to back you beyond the "couple large wind farms in Spain" you visited?
- randallsquared 8y ago
  The GP's post had "below the panels" in the description of the "wind farm", which was preceded by "actually, solar does have an impact". Surely the charitable explanation is that "wind" was just a mistake?
- detritus 8y ago
  I'm very pro-renewable and new nuclear, but when you say "60% of Portugal's energy needs, and have topped 100% on occasion" do you mean the entire country's energy requirement, or just 'electricity'?. Because as rosy as that sounds, I doubt it takes into account oil-based travel infrastructure, which if the last pie-chart I recall seeing for an average country has any bearing, is a BIG slice.