Pollution? That’s a problem for future Homer.
Fun fact, all the pro-nuclear bullshit you hear is just regurgitated nuclear lobbying propaganda.
The only reason nuclear has such a following is because people (almost always men) think they think they’re in the know. It’s unironically very typical of how the alt-right pipeline starts. People think they’re being given all this “truth” about nuclear and now they’re knowledgeable about stuff that other people aren’t aware of or that other people are believing the “mainstream” thought about. It also helps that nuclear followers see themselves as edgy. It’s a perfect rabbit hole for these people who are easily influenced to fall down.
replace skeleton with cooling rods and this meme gets better tbh 😂
Fantastic!
It’s already got the Cherenkov radiation though.
The nuclear power is in the water because Japan dumped it in there to save a buck.
What do you mean?
Japan is currently dumping contaminated water from the Fukushima reactor into the Pacific and will continue to do so for 30 years.
Because it isn’t radioactive enough to be remotely harmful?
There’s a bit more nuance here. Fron this article, the plan is to treat the water to decontaminate it, then dilute it as much as possible because the treatment cannot remove some isotopes which could cause problems. The 30 year plan is actually a good thing since this would dilute the isotopes further making the risk minimal according to IAEA and the US. There are some independent labs that voice concerns for more data though.
The main issue is that the tanks that are supposed to hold the contaminated cooling seawater are filling up quick, so they need to add some space. Unless there’s a better plan, it’s either that or the tanks overflow.
The counter nuance to that nuance is that:
- You can’t undo years of release if theres problems down the line
- Current science says that this release is probably fine, but as you said independent labs and neighboring countries have posed objections based on insufficiency of evidence
- “Current science” is really key here because it wasn’t so long ago that science was convinced that heroin could be given to babies, smoking was harmless, and leaded gasoline is safe. Our state of the art has a habit of becoming the next generation’s “how could they be so stupid?”
- There have been alternative treatment and disposal options proposed and the Japanese government just happened to chose the cheapest one? That doesn’t pass the sniff test.
- Even if the release turns out to be completely safe in retrospect, all of the factors above will cause a significant amount of people to turn their opinions against nuclear power because it sets a precedent for perceived reckless handling of nuclear waste.
These are valid criticisms and they should be addressed. I think the main issue is that this is urgent and we can’t wait to do the amount of surveying or studying enough to guarantee a safe dumping. I’m just assuming here since no one said anything about that. But I think it’s a valid assumption since the disaster is 12 years old. If they are rushing this after let’s say 8 years of studying it, then whatever time they have left to fill up the tanks is probably not gonna be enough.
Every single decision we make is based on “current science” since we didn’t invent a time machine just yet to look at the future. Just because science has messed up in the past, doesn’t mean we should paralyze ourselves now.
What are these alternative treatments that the government rejected? How much more effective are they vs how much more do they cost? If treatment “A” gives us a 5% chance of a better outcome and costs 80% more, then it makes sense. If it was an 80% better outcome for 80% more cost then yeah they did mess up.
“Current science” is really key here because it wasn’t so long ago that science was convinced that heroin could be given to babies, smoking was harmless, and leaded gasoline is safe.
Science as a whole never was, there was just a shitton of money going to anybody publishing studies saying so. There’s not a cannon of grant money fired at any scientist who says “radiation is good actually”.
The lead gas thing is as you described but heroin and tobacco especially were in wide use for many years without anyone really knowing the full extent of damage they caused. Sometimes it does actually just take science a while to gather the data and catch up.
it is worth pointing out that the Fukishima plant had it’s seawall bellow regulation height and had it’s meltdown after seawater flooded the backup generator. This was an easily preventable disaster if they had just followed the law about nuclear safety
Following the law? When there’s profit to be made?
it wasn’t even a big saving they were cutting cost on a wall
You ever hear of the bikeshed effect? It’s the idea that if you get a committee of laymen to make a decision on something extremely complex, like a nuclear power plant, they’ll hyperfixate in on the one thing that they think they understand - the bike shed. So instead of oversight and planning of the important bits of the plant like the reactor or the safety system, each decision maker will take their turn altering the color and the dimensions and the positioning of the bike shed.
I’m gonna guess that the wall was their bike shed.
We have learned nothing from history.
Fossil fuels have killed orders of magnitude more people and, get this, release more radioactive pollutants into the environment, than nuclear energy.
Yes. But warm metal is scary to the lead poisoned boomers. We can’t have warm metal.
Love me some whataboutism
too bad the average person equates anything with the word ‘nuclear’ in it as atomic bombs
Yes, but the radioactive particles released by fossil fuels are invisible, so I don’t need to worry about it! 🤡
“what I don’t know won’t hurt me”
Literally.
ITT: People regurgitate oil company propaganda verbatim.
Not in France!
What about tidal?
Unfortunately tidal is actually not renewable.
This may sound stupid, but tidal probably destroys the environment faster than fossil power.
Not a good solution for most of the world, but great for where it can be done, same as geothermal.
Tidal, hydroelectric dams, and geothermal should all together be able to cover a pretty significant part of the Earth, shouldn’t they?
Tidal and hydroelectric aren’t great for nature.
Yeah a dam will wreck a valley. But a nuclear station can irradiate a whole region and coal ruins the planet.
A dam wrecking a valley is a best case scenario. Worst case is thousands dead.
The worst case scenario for a nuclear station is a few dozen dead.
coal ruins the planet.
Also runs the air and water, coal residue is dumped in rivers.
I really don’t want to play top trumps over which tragic disaster is worse by measuring bodycounts, as this is all way too grim and I think we can agree that the worst case scenarios for all of these things are awful in their own distinct ways. But that number you put for nuclear is difficult to believe. Where did you find it?
deaths per watt hydroelectric is the worst and nuclear is one of the best
IIRC Chernobyl amounted to about 46 people dead from the disaster itself, (the Fukushima incident did not kill anyone at the time it occurred IIRC, three mile island didn’t kill anyone) and while it did release a lot of radioactive material that did result it more cancers/excess mortality, coal burning releases about ten times more radioactive material than a nuclear reactor (coal has trace amounts of radioactive material in it). So even if we’re just comparing the hazards of radiation nuclear is probably the better/cleaner option if there’s a robust and quick response after incidents.
When it comes to generating electricity, nuclear is hugely more expensive than renewables. Every 1000Wh of nuclear power could be 2000-3000 Wh solar or wind.
If you’ve been told “it’s not possible to have all power from renewable sources”, you have been a victim of disinformation from the fossil fuel industry. The majority of studies show that a global transition to 100% renewable energy across all sectors – power, heat, transport and industry – is feasible and economically viable.
This is all with current, modern day technology, not with some far-off dream or potential future tech such as nuclear fusion, thorium reactors or breeder reactors.
Compared to nuclear, renewables are:
- Cheaper
- Lower emissions
- Faster to provision
- Less environmentally damaging
- Not reliant on continuous consumption of fuel
- Decentralised
- Much, much safer
- Much easier to maintain
- More reliable
- Much more capable of being scaled down on demand to meet changes in energy demands
Nuclear power has promise as a future technology. But at present, while I’m all in favour of keeping the ones we have until the end of their useful life, building new nuclear power stations is a massive waste of money, resources, effort and political capital.
Nuclear energy should be funded only to conduct new research into potential future improvements and to construct experimental power stations. Any money that would be spent on building nuclear power plants should be spent on renewables instead.
Frequently asked questions:
- But it’s not always sunny or windy, how can we deal with that?
While a given spot in your country is going to have periods where it’s not sunny or rainy, with a mixture of energy distribution (modern interconnectors can transmit 800kV or more over 800km or more with less than 3% loss) non-electrical storage such as pumped storage, and diversified renewable sources, this problem is completely mitigated - we can generate wind, solar or hydro power over 2,000km away from where it is consumed for cheaper than we could generate nuclear electricity 20km away.
- Don’t renewables take up too much space?
The United States has enough land paved over for parking spaces to have 8 spaces per car - 5% of the land. If just 10% of that space was used to generate solar electricity - a mere 0.5% - that would generate enough solar power to provide electricity to the entire country. By comparison, around 50% of the land is agricultural. The amount of land used by renewable sources is not a real problem, it’s an argument used by the very wealthy pro-nuclear lobby to justify the huge amounts of funding that they currently receive.
- Isn’t Nuclear power cleaner than renewables?
No, it’s dirtier. You can look up total lifetime emissions for nuclear vs. renewables - this is the aggregated and equalised environmental harm caused per kWh for each energy source. It takes into account the energy used to extract raw materials, build the power plant, operate the plant, maintenance, the fuels needed to sustain it, the transport needed to service it, and so on. These numbers always show nuclear as more environmentally harmful than renewables.
- We need a baseline load, though, and that can only be nuclear or fossil fuels.
Not according to industry experts - the majority of studies show that a 100% renewable source of energy across all industries for all needs - electricity, heating, transport, and industry - is completely possible with current technology and is economically viable. If you disagree, don’t argue with me, take it up with the IEC. Here’s a Wikipedia article that you can use as a baseline for more information: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy
This perfectly sums up the problems with nuclear energy an why renwables are the better option
thanks for writting this comment
Thank you for the kind words! Please feel free to copy and share :)
Excellently written!
I am so tired of people who have no idea how good wind and solar are/have gotten smugly declaring that wind and solar will never be good enough to meet energy demands…
Thank you! Please feel free to copy and share. There is so much pro-nuclear rhetoric online, particularly on Reddit, I debate it every time I see it but there’s too much for me to do alone.
In Australia our conservatives run on the promise of nuclear power, but they’ve been in power for 20 of the last 26 years and haven’t ever attempted to implement it, they just use the promise to stymie the development of renewables.
Imo the time to try to use nuclear to suppress oil and gas was 50 years ago.
Correct me if I’m wrong but even though Nuclear sounds cool. In the vast majority of places isn’t it less costly, to go with renewables, instead? And for a greater power output? And also renewables can be created in a fraction of the time without any r&d. That’s not even mentioning the potential hazards and waste management issues with nuclear.
I don’t know about initial costs, but the main problem with wind/solar is they cannot be scaled up/down on-demand. The depend on the weather and that does not align with energy demands throught the day.
As long as we cannot store energy at-scale, we will have to rely in another source of energy we can ramp up/down depending of the energy demands (being fossil fuels or, preferibly, nuclear)
That’s a taking point that wasn’t very true in the 70s and certainly isn’t close to true now, there are endless methods of balancing a renewables grid for constant power involving endless options for continuous generation methods (solar thermal especially) or battery storage (chemical, gravity, etc) and load balancing using at-peek tied industry (especially e-fuel manufacture)
There’s also a lot of stuff like tidal generation which is hugely promising and drastically underfunded, certainly compared to nuclear.
All technologies you’ve mentioned are in R&D, not ready to use as you seem to imply. Great investment is still required to implement them at-scale. What I’d agree on is that It’s in our best interest to invest heavily in them, and they are probably underfunded given their importance in the survival of humanity.
The idea that we can transition from fossil fuels to traditional renewables (solar, wind, etc) while refusing to rely on nuclear power seems wishful thinking to me. In the short and mid-term (10-20 years) we only have nuclear as a realistic alternative for clean energy. In this transition, we can develop those promising methods of energy storage and also build the necessary infrastructure they require.
Just to provide a real case scenario: Germany vs. France.
Both Germany and France want to reach zero emissions by 2050.
We know how Germany opted to phase out nuclear power already in the year 2000 and completed its ‘nuclear exit’ in April 2023. Compare that to France that since 1974 has been heavily investing in nuclear power with the goal of producing most of its energy from it (Messmer Plan (Wikipedia)).
The results for me are apparent:
Greenhouse gas emissions 2021 in Germany: 665.88 megatonnes (8.0 tonnes/capita)
Greenhouse gas emissions 2021 in France: 302.33 megatonnes (4.5 tonnes/capita)
Source: How energy systems and policies of Germany and France compare .
I’d take a real reduction in green house emissions any day before the “wish” of reducing them while refusing to make any compromise.
Without being disrespectful, I think it is a big mistake to refuse prioritize nuclear power to replace fossil fuels in the near future if the goal is to reduce greenhouse emissions.
Wind and solar are (mostly) good from a risk/benefit analysis, and I think further investment in battery tech would make them even better. But the problem with nuclear, other than waste, is the fact that noone has tried building like a bunch of reactors that are basically the same. So the training becomes industrialized, repairs and manufacturing, over time it gets cheaper. In France, correct me if I’m wrong, they did this and it was really successful. In general the main problem with both technologies is lack of public investment, i think due to political consequences from oil companies, general bourgeois resistance to public works and investment, etc.,
If you only use the faceplate capacity of the facilities and include battery storage for free then yes solar and wind looks pretty good. Once you factor in needing 4-5x the capacity for wind and solar to actually produce power regularly, add cost for non existing storage it gets a lot closer to where the difference isn’t significant.
nuclear is on demand though which is it’s great advantage over renewables
Very true.
I would support reactors which aren’t designed to produce enriched uranium, don’t blowup when neglected, and don’t produce as much waste.
There has been some work on molten salt reactors recently, which look promising.
Nuclear would have really worked though, but green advocates just HAD to ruin it. (I’m talking about majority) Wind and solar will never truly take off or be mainstream because everyone rather do coal and gas, including the governments. Congrats people we’re fucked!
green advocates just HAD to ruin it
MRI used to be called NMRI, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging, because it uses the reaction of the nuclei of atoms to create images. Unfortunately people are fucking stupid and freaked out when they heard “nuclear” so they had to drop the N.
The only people who really prefer coal and gas over wind and solar are the fossil fuel industry. They want to keep their place on top of the energy market, and attempt to do so with lobbying and propaganda, . Wind in solar are more than powerful enough to provide for all our energy needs, and either we will eventually switch to them or be replaced by the people who were smart enough to switch to wind and solar.
Fuck nuclear
