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The Green Nuclear Deal: Eliminate Fossil Fuels with Nuclear Power
- mimixco 8y agoIf this dude really worked in the nuclear industry then he would know a few things that are missing from this tweet thread: 1) There isn't enough uranium in the world to provide the baseload power in nuclear plants that's currently provided by coal. 2) There's nothing green about uranium mining or fuel processing. 3) There's no solution for high-level radioactive waste. Most of it sits in swimming pools at nuke plants because it has to be kept cool and we don't have a better solution. 4) Nuclear is fundamentally uneconomic and requires huge subsidies everywhere it's been used. Even with those subsidies, plant operators are backing away. The only nuke plant under construction in the US is facing cancellation and no one is signing up to build another. Several countries have announced a total phaseout of nuclear. So much for the "nuclear renaissance!" 5) Scaling up Navy ship reactors is exactly how we got to the BWR and PWR nuclear plants we have today. Nuclear plants have to be huge to supply the load that a city requires. Is he suggesting we just string together thousands of small reactors like they have on Navy ships? 6) Thorium, molten salt, and fusion reactors are "just around the corner," just like they've been for 50 years. If these technologies actually worked, we'd have them already. It's time to stop subsidizing the nuclear industry (which only came into existence because we needed nuke plants to make plutonium for bombs).