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Why build nuclear when solar and wind is cheaper and at worst the turbine catches on fire? There’s no waste to worry about for thousands of years. Did I mention

Why build nuclear when solar and wind is cheaper and at worst the turbine catches on fire? There’s no waste to worry about for thousands of years. Did I mention it’s cheaper?

roenxi 3y ago
If we held nuclear to a similar safety standard to the airline, coal or solar industry it'd probably be cheaper. > There’s no waste to worry about for thousands of years. The waste from solar and wind never decays. It is permanent. That is worse.
- ViewTrick1002 3y ago
  Let's phase out the Price-Anderson act as well so we do not socialize the accident insurance for nuclear plants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear... What waste from solar and wind is not recyclable?
  - defrost 3y ago
    Of the top of my head, cadmium and lead, low level radioactive waste from associated lithium extraction from spodumene concentrates, pools of acids as a result of rare earth processing, etc. Solar, wind, batteries etc are growing but as yet are only a small percentage of the energy produced by coal - as coal is phased out and replaced the waste from renewables will grow. To be absolutely clear, I am not anti renewable energy .. but there are some serious waste issues associated with all forms of rare earth and other concentrate pocessing. Pretending there isn't would be just head in the sand greenwashing of recycling issues. The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) did a 100 page report 8 years ago on the need to harvest solar panels to recover materials to form a closed cycle. To date we're still dominated by end-of-life e-waste going to landfill to be recoved "later". https://www.irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Publication/2016/IRENA_IEAPVPS_End-of-Life_Solar_PV_Panels_2016.pdf?rev=49a75178e38c46288a18753346fb0b09 https://www.irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Publication... That's one form of waste. The associated and often overlooked other form of waste is the byproducts from first creation, the processing of mined concentrates into useful materials comes with a slew of nasty by products that have yet to be comprehensibly dealt with. These are material forms of renewable debt.
    - pengaru 3y ago
      > > What waste from solar and wind is not recyclable? > Of the top of my head, cadmium and lead, Lead isn't recyclable?
      - defrost 3y ago
        Isn't being recycled ... which is the real issue. Mining waste from copper, rare earth concentrates, minesite rehabilitation, safe tailing dams, etc are all things that in theory can be dealt with. It's not Mission Accomplished!! until they are actually dealt with though .. until then it's just toxic lead free to leach into water.
      - roenxi 3y ago
        https://leadsmart.nsw.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/BHELP-2019-20-Annual-Report_FINAL.pdf https://leadsmart.nsw.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/BHEL... This is 1 lead mining region. This report would be enough to shut down uranium mining across an entire country if it was doing an equivalent amount of damage. And that is just the mining, not the dumping, where there will be further damage done. But fortunately the damage lead does is done by chemical reactions rather than radiation so it is cool and we can handle it rationally. People are crazy if they think any industrial process can be run without damaging the environment. The nuclear production chain may literally be the only place where we try.
- TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  > The waste from solar and wind never decays. It is permanent. That is worse. I’m not so sure I buy this argument. Nuclear waste is effectively permanent as it needs to be safely stored in large containers for as long as civilization has existed. Solar panels are made of what? Silicon and aluminum mostly? The aluminum can be recycled. I wonder if old silicon can be reused somehow. We will certainly find out.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    But, and this is the frustrating part, you're applying a terrible double standard there. With nuclear you're focusing on the tiny part that is hard to deal with. In solar you're ignoring the heavy metals [0]. By mass, there will be at least comparable heavy metals to the amount of dangerous nuclear waste. Probably more, given how fuel-lite nuclear can get. And with nuclear a risk of cancer sees people believing that this stuff needs to be locked in containers for all of time while with solar panels if a few people get silicosis over that time frame you're going to do the rational thing, shrug and say "oh well". Over all of human history, the risk of solar panel waste killing a bunch of people indirectly is basically a certainty. It is a big world and, I repeat, this waste is with us forever. Or if we admit that it will be recycled as an argument ... so will the nuclear waste, in all likelihood. The stuff is an energy source. It'll be like when they figured out that oil was good for fuel back when it used to be a toxic waste product. We don't need to isolate nuclear waste forever. We can cordon off a dump somewhere for the nasty stuff and make plans to deal with it for 300 years. Then move on with life. Odds are good it will be feedstock for a nuclear plant at some point in that timeframe. To be clear, I don't mind that we're ignoring the negligible costs in solar. But they aren't a problem in nuclear either. If we agree to ignore negligible risks (like we do for literally every other industrial process), all of these objections start looking a bit silly. The opponents of nuclear are correct that the risks can't be reduced from where they are, but the risks are already lower than comparable sources of energy. [0] https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2022-01-17/are-some-solar-panels-toxic-/100757108 https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2022-01-17/are-some-solar-...
  - Moldoteck 3y ago
    Nuclear fuel can be reprocessed. Real waste should be stored for merely 300yrs
- Kon5ole 3y ago
  > if we held nuclear to a similar safety standard to the airline, coal or solar industry it'd probably be cheaper No it would be much more expensive. Chernobyl and Fukushima are estimated to cost over 1000 billion usd each, and your suggestion would cause similar accidents every 4-6 years.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    You might have heard the funny story about a nuclear contamination incident where the workers had to dig a big trench to clear out contaminated material, then filled the trench in with local soil ... that was naturally higher in radiation than the stuff removed. I'm not entirely happy with the premise that nobody has learned anything about plant design since 1970 when Fukushima & friends were designed. And it seems quite likely that this 1 trillion figure is not actually an amount of money that got spent. But what I'd really like to know is what exactly were the consequences if we just ignored the situation? Because with coal we more or less ignored the pollution from 1800 -> 2023 and that turned out well [0] for everyone involved for centuries. Is this money actually worth spending? What is it buying? The nuclear debate seems to be largely detached from what actually happens as routine. Lots of people just don't exercise and that is bad for all sorts of health outcomes - there is a level of risk that people ignore in favour of more comfort. These arguments are like 1800s peasants deciding to kill off the industrial revolution because they were worried about global warming. I don't think people are looking at the multiple orders of magnitude improvement in fuel energy density and thinking logically about what the upside is. It might be high enough that a trillion every couple of years is chump change. And, when I hear "trillion", we note that the US wasted that much in Afghanistan. It isn't like these sums are prohibitive - Japan is slowly restarting their nuclear programs as they work out that energy is required to live a comfortable life. [0] Like, really well. As in, any attempt to deal with the pollution would have left the whole world a lot worse off. Our entire lifestyle in the present is built on the back of infrastructure built while ignoring pollution in the industrial revolution and follow up era.
    - Kon5ole 3y ago
      >You might have heard the funny story about a nuclear contamination incident Here is just one of many actually documented stories about nuclear contamination, none of them are particularly funny. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident >I'm not entirely happy with the premise that nobody has learned anything about plant design since 1970 The problem isn't plant design. The problem is that the fuel and waste from any nuclear plant is very dangerous and humans are often very sloppy, ignorant and greedy. This problem remains even if a plant would be entirely fault tolerant. >But what I'd really like to know is what exactly were the consequences if we just ignored the situation? If we ignored Chernobyl and nobody sacrificed their lives to stop the fire, my understanding is that it would still be burning and Europe would be mostly a uninhabitable hellhole today, with millions dead, immense numbers of birth defects and and a large percentage of the population would get cancers before age 30. Since it was stopped relatively quickly we have only had to deal with sanitation for 40+ years, in areas as remote as Lapland and Bavaria. If the fallout areas were untreated, food from those areas would be classified as carcinogenic for decades. Some might think that Wyoming is far away, but a Chernobyl accident in Wyoming could devastate agriculture in Kansas, California, Canada - this can't be ignored. Surely it would be better for Wyoming to build hydrogen plants, photovoltaic panels and such. It will deliver as stable energy as nuclear but cheaper and with comparably no risk.
wortelefant 3y ago
Most common assumptions about nuclear waste don't reflect the data - it is a solved problem in the industry and much less an issue than expected. A good collection of sources in https://zionlights.substack.com/p/everything-i-believed-about-waste-was-wrong https://zionlights.substack.com/p/everything-i-believed-abou... Costs are lower in the long run, especially when considering lower system costs - the power grid has to be much more capable and more complex with variable generation from solar and wind, plus these energy sources always need a stable backup (like nuclear)

Why build nuclear when solar and wind is cheaper and at worst the turbine catches on fire? There’s no waste to worry about for thousands of years. Did I mention it’s cheaper?

roenxi 3y ago

If we held nuclear to a similar safety standard to the airline, coal or solar industry it'd probably be cheaper. > There’s no waste to worry about for thousands of years. The waste from solar and wind never decays. It is permanent. That is worse.

ViewTrick1002 3y ago
Let's phase out the Price-Anderson act as well so we do not socialize the accident insurance for nuclear plants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear... What waste from solar and wind is not recyclable?
- defrost 3y ago
  Of the top of my head, cadmium and lead, low level radioactive waste from associated lithium extraction from spodumene concentrates, pools of acids as a result of rare earth processing, etc. Solar, wind, batteries etc are growing but as yet are only a small percentage of the energy produced by coal - as coal is phased out and replaced the waste from renewables will grow. To be absolutely clear, I am not anti renewable energy .. but there are some serious waste issues associated with all forms of rare earth and other concentrate pocessing. Pretending there isn't would be just head in the sand greenwashing of recycling issues. The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) did a 100 page report 8 years ago on the need to harvest solar panels to recover materials to form a closed cycle. To date we're still dominated by end-of-life e-waste going to landfill to be recoved "later". https://www.irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Publication/2016/IRENA_IEAPVPS_End-of-Life_Solar_PV_Panels_2016.pdf?rev=49a75178e38c46288a18753346fb0b09 https://www.irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Publication... That's one form of waste. The associated and often overlooked other form of waste is the byproducts from first creation, the processing of mined concentrates into useful materials comes with a slew of nasty by products that have yet to be comprehensibly dealt with. These are material forms of renewable debt.
  - pengaru 3y ago
    > > What waste from solar and wind is not recyclable? > Of the top of my head, cadmium and lead, Lead isn't recyclable?
    - defrost 3y ago
      Isn't being recycled ... which is the real issue. Mining waste from copper, rare earth concentrates, minesite rehabilitation, safe tailing dams, etc are all things that in theory can be dealt with. It's not Mission Accomplished!! until they are actually dealt with though .. until then it's just toxic lead free to leach into water.
    - roenxi 3y ago
      https://leadsmart.nsw.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/BHELP-2019-20-Annual-Report_FINAL.pdf https://leadsmart.nsw.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/BHEL... This is 1 lead mining region. This report would be enough to shut down uranium mining across an entire country if it was doing an equivalent amount of damage. And that is just the mining, not the dumping, where there will be further damage done. But fortunately the damage lead does is done by chemical reactions rather than radiation so it is cool and we can handle it rationally. People are crazy if they think any industrial process can be run without damaging the environment. The nuclear production chain may literally be the only place where we try.
TaylorAlexander 3y ago
> The waste from solar and wind never decays. It is permanent. That is worse. I’m not so sure I buy this argument. Nuclear waste is effectively permanent as it needs to be safely stored in large containers for as long as civilization has existed. Solar panels are made of what? Silicon and aluminum mostly? The aluminum can be recycled. I wonder if old silicon can be reused somehow. We will certainly find out.
- roenxi 3y ago
  But, and this is the frustrating part, you're applying a terrible double standard there. With nuclear you're focusing on the tiny part that is hard to deal with. In solar you're ignoring the heavy metals [0]. By mass, there will be at least comparable heavy metals to the amount of dangerous nuclear waste. Probably more, given how fuel-lite nuclear can get. And with nuclear a risk of cancer sees people believing that this stuff needs to be locked in containers for all of time while with solar panels if a few people get silicosis over that time frame you're going to do the rational thing, shrug and say "oh well". Over all of human history, the risk of solar panel waste killing a bunch of people indirectly is basically a certainty. It is a big world and, I repeat, this waste is with us forever. Or if we admit that it will be recycled as an argument ... so will the nuclear waste, in all likelihood. The stuff is an energy source. It'll be like when they figured out that oil was good for fuel back when it used to be a toxic waste product. We don't need to isolate nuclear waste forever. We can cordon off a dump somewhere for the nasty stuff and make plans to deal with it for 300 years. Then move on with life. Odds are good it will be feedstock for a nuclear plant at some point in that timeframe. To be clear, I don't mind that we're ignoring the negligible costs in solar. But they aren't a problem in nuclear either. If we agree to ignore negligible risks (like we do for literally every other industrial process), all of these objections start looking a bit silly. The opponents of nuclear are correct that the risks can't be reduced from where they are, but the risks are already lower than comparable sources of energy. [0] https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2022-01-17/are-some-solar-panels-toxic-/100757108 https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2022-01-17/are-some-solar-...
- Moldoteck 3y ago
  Nuclear fuel can be reprocessed. Real waste should be stored for merely 300yrs
Kon5ole 3y ago
> if we held nuclear to a similar safety standard to the airline, coal or solar industry it'd probably be cheaper No it would be much more expensive. Chernobyl and Fukushima are estimated to cost over 1000 billion usd each, and your suggestion would cause similar accidents every 4-6 years.
- roenxi 3y ago
  You might have heard the funny story about a nuclear contamination incident where the workers had to dig a big trench to clear out contaminated material, then filled the trench in with local soil ... that was naturally higher in radiation than the stuff removed. I'm not entirely happy with the premise that nobody has learned anything about plant design since 1970 when Fukushima & friends were designed. And it seems quite likely that this 1 trillion figure is not actually an amount of money that got spent. But what I'd really like to know is what exactly were the consequences if we just ignored the situation? Because with coal we more or less ignored the pollution from 1800 -> 2023 and that turned out well [0] for everyone involved for centuries. Is this money actually worth spending? What is it buying? The nuclear debate seems to be largely detached from what actually happens as routine. Lots of people just don't exercise and that is bad for all sorts of health outcomes - there is a level of risk that people ignore in favour of more comfort. These arguments are like 1800s peasants deciding to kill off the industrial revolution because they were worried about global warming. I don't think people are looking at the multiple orders of magnitude improvement in fuel energy density and thinking logically about what the upside is. It might be high enough that a trillion every couple of years is chump change. And, when I hear "trillion", we note that the US wasted that much in Afghanistan. It isn't like these sums are prohibitive - Japan is slowly restarting their nuclear programs as they work out that energy is required to live a comfortable life. [0] Like, really well. As in, any attempt to deal with the pollution would have left the whole world a lot worse off. Our entire lifestyle in the present is built on the back of infrastructure built while ignoring pollution in the industrial revolution and follow up era.
  - Kon5ole 3y ago
    >You might have heard the funny story about a nuclear contamination incident Here is just one of many actually documented stories about nuclear contamination, none of them are particularly funny. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident >I'm not entirely happy with the premise that nobody has learned anything about plant design since 1970 The problem isn't plant design. The problem is that the fuel and waste from any nuclear plant is very dangerous and humans are often very sloppy, ignorant and greedy. This problem remains even if a plant would be entirely fault tolerant. >But what I'd really like to know is what exactly were the consequences if we just ignored the situation? If we ignored Chernobyl and nobody sacrificed their lives to stop the fire, my understanding is that it would still be burning and Europe would be mostly a uninhabitable hellhole today, with millions dead, immense numbers of birth defects and and a large percentage of the population would get cancers before age 30. Since it was stopped relatively quickly we have only had to deal with sanitation for 40+ years, in areas as remote as Lapland and Bavaria. If the fallout areas were untreated, food from those areas would be classified as carcinogenic for decades. Some might think that Wyoming is far away, but a Chernobyl accident in Wyoming could devastate agriculture in Kansas, California, Canada - this can't be ignored. Surely it would be better for Wyoming to build hydrogen plants, photovoltaic panels and such. It will deliver as stable energy as nuclear but cheaper and with comparably no risk.

wortelefant 3y ago

Most common assumptions about nuclear waste don't reflect the data - it is a solved problem in the industry and much less an issue than expected. A good collection of sources in https://zionlights.substack.com/p/everything-i-believed-about-waste-was-wrong https://zionlights.substack.com/p/everything-i-believed-abou... Costs are lower in the long run, especially when considering lower system costs - the power grid has to be much more capable and more complex with variable generation from solar and wind, plus these energy sources always need a stable backup (like nuclear)