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Once you decide to run nuclear power in a country you have centuries of unavoidable costs no matter what the next government, or next ten generations of citizen
by Kon5ole 2y ago
Once you decide to run nuclear power in a country you have centuries of unavoidable costs no matter what the next government, or next ten generations of citizens decide to do.
This is a unique cost consideration for nuclear power, which IMO is rarely considered by the proponents.
- pyrale 2y agoNegative industrial byproducts creating costs for future generations is an unique challenge? Have you heard of climate change?
- _ph_ 2y agoYour argument would be valid if nuclear power would be the only option to prevent climate change. But there are other options: the various renewables, most importantly solar and wind. So it is not nuclear vs. climate change, but nuclear vs. solar/wind.
- Kon5ole 2y agoAny one power plant has no measurable effect on global climate. (All fossil power plants combined worldwide have about the same emissions as all cars; about 1/6). So, if your fathers started coal plants, you close them, stop paying for them and can forget about them. this is not at all the case if your fathers started nuclear plants, not only do you have to pay, your children have to pay, all their lives, and all your grandchildren, and so on. What bugs me is the tendency of proponents to pretend that the decision is no biggie. It is a biggie. At least understand that, then we can have a rational discussion about it! Energy storage solutions and infrastructure for generating synthesized fuels (hydrogen and others) will require investments, but those investments will be a gift to the future. We will bear the burden of building the infrastructure now, but future generations will benefit from what we have built. Nuclear is the opposite, we get the benefits and the future gets the burden.
- pyrale 2y agoSo basically you’re so caught up in this infighting between two carbon neutral energies that you’d rather spread disinformation about climate change and the negative effects of coal…
- Kon5ole 2y agoI have spread no disinformation. Seems to me you fail to come up with arguments against what I actually said so instead you create a strawman. Nuclear costs are way higher than anyone has ever accounted for and they are kicked to future generations. This is a fact and we can do better. The right thing to do is surely to spend now on tech that continues to pay dividends in the future. Maybe we ourselves won't see the benefits directly in our wallets but the future will.
- pyrale 2y ago> So, if your fathers started coal plants, you close them, stop paying for them and can forget about them. I suspect you don't live in e.g. Tuvalu? Or in a country experiencing desertification like Spain?
- acdha 2y agoYou misunderstood the point: yes, burning coal is bad. The argument is that once you stop doing that, it’s over. I don’t think that’s completely true - the impact of mining and ash won’t instantly disappear - but if the question is whether we should switch from one thing which has significant environmental hazards to another which poses significant risks or alternatives which do not, that past example suggests that we should be having that conversation about how realistic it is to assume that a multi-century mitigation effort will be effective. Coal is especially interesting as an example because we’ve seen how the mining side of it became a powerful political force where even people whose families were negatively impacted by the pollution still lobbied for its preservation. Nuclear would be smaller but still likely to have that factor to account for as we’ve seen with “temporary” storage becoming de facto permanent.
- bell-cot 2y ago> ...centuries of unavoidable costs no matter what... OR, you put the nasty and long-lived radwaste into (say) lead barrels, and bury those below some nice, deep, easily-monitored ocean trench. Absolutely nobody's going to accidentally dig those up. And if the effort needed to intentionally do so would be greater than the effort to brew their own fresh radwaste, then nobody will bother trying that, either.
- wkat4242 2y agoBarrels don't last when filled with nuclear material. The radiation embrittles the materials over time, they wouldn't last 100 years. And then all that crap will be released into the ocean and swerve all over the world.
- bell-cot 2y agoAssume that the folks building the barrels know about the embrittlement, and have both a decent budget and some experienced engineers to mitigate the problem. Also note my phrase "bury them". Radwaste is not some magical Sealed Evil in a Can. If bound in compounds with substantially higher density that the ocean sediments, and emplaced a few tens of meters below the sea floor, then gravity will quite strongly discourage its upward migration.
- Kon5ole 2y agoFour decades of studies by experienced engineers and a very decent budget to figure out how to store US nuclear waste has resulted in 0 solutions so far. I think we can safely assume that dumping it at sea is not an option.
- zdragnar 2y agoWe have solutions in the US, but politicians keep playing games. Yucca mountain has been authorized and de-authorized back and forth for decades. It isn't an engineering problem at all.