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Cleanest even when people make a mistake. Nuclear has in all it's time killed less than coal does in a year, cars do in a year, nature does in a year. More peo
by ThomPete 8y ago
Cleanest even when people make a mistake.
Nuclear has in all it's time killed less than coal does in a year, cars do in a year, nature does in a year. More people die from setting up solar or wind, the amount of animals that get killed by wind is in the millions I could go on.
The new nuclear power plants uses physics so there will be no meldown. Furhtermore more investing in Thorium and Fusion would be much much more beneficial and clean.
Alternative energies are linear solutions to exponential problems.
- lucb1e 8y ago> The new nuclear power plants uses physics so there will be no meldown. Oh it uses physics? Not code and algorithms? (For those out of the loop, it refers to this meme: https://old.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/5ylndv/so_thats_how_they_did_it_its_brilliant/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/5ylndv/so_... ) Sorry to nitpick, I totally agree with what you're saying. But I am curious what this "physics" thing is that would magically prevent meltdowns.
- kortex 8y agoI read that to mean "uses [a] physics", meaning a specific reaction chain, not physics the entire field. Kind of like talking about "battery chemistry" meaning Li-based, Pb-based, etc., does not mean "the field of chemistry". Could it have been worded better? Sure.
- blihp 8y agoI think that's referring to newer designs which fail-safe by using things like gravity so that the reaction automatically terminates in the event of failure.
- jabl 8y agoUsually it means that the plant relies on natural processes like gravity or convection to cool down the reactor after it has been shutdown, rather than needing "active" measures like emergency generators providing electricity to run the water pumps etc. E.g. the Fukushima reactors melted down because the tsunami destroyed the emergency generators (as well as blocking the roads so they couldn't get new generators on site in time). A newer design using, say, convection to get rid of the decay heat wouldn't have this problem.
- kwhitefoot 8y agoIf we are insisting on end to end analysis of solar then we must do that with nuclear which means including not only the decommissioning but also the mining of the fuel.
- jabl 8y agoOf course. And I don't think anybody is claiming uranium mining is a particularly benign industry. The point is that the energy density of uranium is so huge that you need an absolutely minuscule amount of it over the lifetime of a nuclear power plant. And if we ever deploy breeder reactors and reprocessing at scale, we can further extract about two orders of magnitude more energy per kg of uranium ore. Heck, with the amount of depleted uranium lying around as tailings, spent reactor fuel, surplus military nuclear fuel, with breeders and reprocessing we could power the planet for a couple of centuries before needing to start digging up more. We haven't deployed breeders and reprocessing because uranium is so cheap it doesn't make economic sense.