Meanwhile “environmental” groups are suing to stop Nuclear power.
Because of those nasty issues like safety and waste. Other than that current fission reactors are no problem at all.
Have we? A meltdown at a nuclear plant is something that might be acceptable were it to happen once in a hundred years, maybe. Once in a thousand would be better.
In my mere 50ish years on this planet we’ve seen Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima.
And there has never been a consensus about where to store the waste of a successful plant. Not In My Backyard is the selfish American answer.
The US Navy has demonstrated that nuclear power can be safe long term. But that would require taking nuclear power away from civilian power companies and putting it under a program led pretty much by the US Navy.
Even then, there is still the waste issue. The big glaring waste issue.
So currently nuclear power is a bad bet until those new plants start proving out.
A meltdown is flashy and makes the news, but in terms of harmful impacts on humans, coal power plants and the pollution they put out are far worse.
You mean the waste that remains contained in barrels where it is never anything but a local spill risk, rather than being blown into the air for the world to enjoy as we do with the power sources that will be used in lieu of nuclear?
Do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Nuclear power has risks, like any power source does, but it has been shown again and again that nuclear is the safest, cleanest power source we have. Fewer people die per megawatt of power from nuclear than from any other power generation method, including wind and solar. That was even true before we knew the risks of global warming.
Let’s be clear - the alternative to nuclear is not wind and solar. Those are not baseload sources of energy. The alternative to nuclear power is natural gas and coal. And in fact, we are increasing our natural gas consumption and will continue to do so as long as we keep chasing wind and solar as the answer to our energy needs.
Natural gas demand is expected to peak in 2037 - but that expectation assumes more nuclear power. Keep shutting down nuclear plants, and we’ll be burning natural gas forever.
Or, we could build clean nuclear plants and never put another awful chemical in the air again from a power plant, and have abundant power for the future instead of a future of rationing and high energy prices and pollution and low economic growth, which is the path we are on.
What’s the solution to coal power plant waste? We can’t point at a few truckloads of radioactive material and shut down all development because of them, while at the same time tossing many thousands of metric tons of known carcinogens and greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere willy-nilly.
Chernobyl wasn’t just flashy and came all to close to being epically the worst thing in the human history.
Coal plants need to be phased out and as fast as possible. We’re in a horrible situation and as a world aren’t mature enough to deal with all the issues.
And I not only didn’t say this but said the opposite.
To make it clear: the current plants are not acceptable, especially under civilian control. But the hopefully near future plants need to be worked on.
Meanwhile, increase efficiency and make it mandatory. Vehicles, housing etc.
Keep working on the cleaner forms of cement also. That is a big contributor to global climate change.
Chernobyl is about the worst thing that can happen to a nuclear plant, and even there it had to be a stunningly bad Soviet design that didn’t even have a containment dome to do the damage it did.
And yet, it wasn’t even close to being the worst thing to happen in human history. Probably not in the top 1,000 bad things in human history. It doesn’t even make the list of the top 10 industrial accidents in the past century. You have an extremely distorted view of what happened and the aftermath, apparently.
Let’s look at some disasters just in the energy industry alone during the nuclear era::
For example, did you know that in 1962 a coal seam in Pennsylvania caught fire, and it’s still burning? Centralia PA had to be evacuated, and is now a ghost town because the coal is still burning underneath it, and emitting CO2 and other pollutants.
In 1963 the Vajmont Dam in Italy failed, killing 1917 people.
In 1975, the Bangio dam in China failed, killing over 100,000 people (another 150,000 died of famine and disease afterwards) and destroying thousands of homes and farms.
In 1979, The Whiddy island disaster happened when an oil tanker crashed at an oil terminal, killing 50 people.
In 1980 a Norwegian drilling platform capsized, killing 123 people.
In 1982 another oil rig sank off Newfoundland, killing 84 people.
In 1984 a refinery explosion in Illinois killed 19 people.
In 1986 Chernobyl happened. Thousands of deaths were predicted over time, but that was based on models that have proved to be wrong. The total death count from Chernobyl remains at approximately 50.
In 1987 the Piper Alpha disaster resulted from an explosion on an oil rig, killing 167 people.
In 1992, gasoline leaked into the Guadelajara sewer system. Subsequent explosions killed 250 peoole and injured 1800.
I could go on for pages, listing industrial accidents that were worse than Chernobyl.
You can read about them here:
This might also be interesting to you:
You won’t find a blue bar beside nuclear, as its death rate is so low it doesn’t show up.
Coal plants are being phased out - and replaced with natural gas. Except in China, where they are furiously building new coal plants, because when we stop using it the price of coal drops and stimulates demand in countries that don’t care.
Canada shut down coal plants and bragged about it, then sold the excess coal to China. We brag about our global warming bona fides, but in the meantime coal export to China is now our #1 export, up 84%. Go us.
I forgot to mention all the deaths from coal mining. Close to my heart, since I come from a family of coal miners on my father’s side. All of whom died young from cancers, emphysema, black lung, etc. After my dad left, my mom took up with another coal miner, who she was planning to marry but who subsequently died of brain cancer - as did her best friend’s husband. There are a lot of widows in coal country.
The nuclear waste issue is small potatoes compared to the problems from coal and natural gas (environmental and otherwise). It’s a political problem, not a scientific or technical problem. The US Navy shows we can do it safely long term, with hundreds of nuclear power plants.
Batteries are already excellent for peaker plant replacement–I expect they’ll displace gas completely here in a fairly short time.
The next step after that is to solve the “duck curve” problem–that is, the gap between peak solar generation and peak air conditioning use, which amounts to a few hours. The cost threshold where this makes sense depends on factors like the local mix of solar vs. wind/hydro/etc.
And after this, completely smoothing out the day/night cycle. Again, the threshold where this makes sense depends on the area, but it will start to make sense as battery costs come down further.
Batteries+nuclear makes a great deal of sense. It’s silly to run a nuclear plant at anything less than 100% load. But with batteries, you can smooth out a day’s worth of usage into whatever the plant can produce on average. Some of this will be accounted for with EVs, which can set their charging hours to whatever makes sense.
Sure, the waste is an issue, but thousands die each year from coal.
Every source of power has side issues.
Note that an Environmental group fought building a solar power generators also. They fight dams.
The big issue is global warming and air pollution, which are connected. We have to stop the CO2.
How many died at Three Mile island? We dont do power plants like Chernobyl. Fukushima? One confirmed death. Thousands die from coal- each year. In one day, more die from coal that died at Fukushima or Three Mile Island.
Exactly. Sierra club estimated 3800/ year in the USA alone.
Right, It is not perfect, but it is the best.
And we’re gonna do what, now, with the waste? Your back yard?
Just grind it up and blast it into the atmosphere. It would still be better than coal.
Alternatively, you could do some reading:
https://www.nrc.gov/waste/spent-fuel-storage.html
Waste storage isn’t nearly the problem as it’s made out to be. Store it in pools, encase it in casks, etc. are viable solutions for the medium term (say, for the next century).
Bury it in an underground chamber in a part of the country that’s geologically stable.
But note that the reason that nuclear waste is problematic is that it puts out energy. That means that nuclear waste can actually be useful - energy is exactly what we want from the nuclear material in the first place.
More than 90% of the energy is still available in a spent rod. Other countries (especially France) recycle spent rods. We should be doing that, too - it greatly reduces the waste issue.
So… your backyard.
Checking @Dr.Strangelove’s profile, he is in the California Bay Area, which is not exactly a geologically stable area, so I would recommend a different backyard.
Of course. That’s how NIMBY goes. Volunteering yours, I would suppose.
Diablo Canyon is already in “my backyard”, storing waste on-site, and I’m perfectly happy with it staying open for the foreseeable future.