2 ms·

> the land use is no serious problem, Gotta love the complete double standard at play. The ridiculously small amount of land that needs to host radioactive ma

• ben_w 3y ago
  While I appreciate that the public debate about nuclear power is… mis-calibrated[0]… remember that the political issues are people having visions of everything being another Chernobyl, where the land made unavailable is ~52 GW of PV even after assuming both 20% efficient cells and 10% capacity factor. And then there's the large quantity of "free space" in the form of rooftops and car parks (and cars) for PV, and that wind farms don't preclude other uses for most of the land (or water) around them. 10 or so years ago I was very much in favour of more nuclear power; now, while I still think it's neat, I don't have the energy to promote it when there's more palatable alternatives that are also cheaper. [0] one particularly memorable bad take was someone asking which you'd rather have under your bed, a bucket of coal or a bucket of nuclear waste. Obviously the coal, but assuming a 5 gallon bucket packed with coal, 11.3 kg coal, the mass of uranium with the same available energy (about 330 MJ) is 4.2mg with a volume of 0.2 mm^3; and conversely, burning 11.3 kg of coal produces 44 kg CO2, which approximately enough to be a lethal dose in a room of 100 cubic meters.