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Nuclear power is not a solution to climate change. It would bind too many resources (which are also finite in economical quantities). Last year the first perman
by raxxorrax 5y ago
Nuclear power is not a solution to climate change. It would bind too many resources (which are also finite in economical quantities). Last year the first permanent storage worldwide opened, it is not a solved problem. Nuclear processing plants have elevated cancer rates around their location and it is still legal to dumb contaminated water into the ocean. It was only restricted for barrels.
The construction costs are very relevant, not only from a CO2 perspective. Nuclear power is not very attractive, only if you reduce environmental protection to CO2 output, which is insufficient. So no, the greens of former years were not that wrong. It is questionable to shut down working plants, but if nuclear was that feasible, it would already play a larger in energy production today. If you start building plants today, you will need at least a decade to get them operational. You can look at France for the youngest examples of that.
And would you want to mine Uranium? Have fun with that.
https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-is-nuclear-energy-good-for-the-climate/a-59853315 https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-is-nuclear-energy-good-for-...
- VHRanger 5y agoBase load Base load Base load Any green energy plan that dismisses nuclear without addressing base load issues with a concrete plan (no future tech that doesn't exist yet) is profoundly unserious
- raxxorrax 5y agoIt is important to mix your energy, but it is an insufficient argument. https://www.nrdc.org/experts/kevin-steinberger/debunking-three-myths-about-baseload https://www.nrdc.org/experts/kevin-steinberger/debunking-thr...
- pfdietz 5y agoThe technology for addressing baseload exists: renewables, batteries, and long term chemical storage (like hydrogen). All these exist, it's just a matter of pushing the costs down via deployment and experience. If you object to these because they are not scaled out, I will point out that a nuclear powered world will also need new tech of that kind: either seawater uranium extraction on a massive scale, or a breeder-based fuel cycle. Existing burner reactors would, if they powered the entire world, exhaust available uranium resources in just a few years.