A fair dialectical starting point for a four-year-old.
this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2024
105 points (71.6% liked)
Unpopular Opinion
6303 readers
278 users here now
Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!
How voting works:
Vote the opposite of the norm.
If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.
Guidelines:
Tag your post, if possible (not required)
- If your post is a "General" unpopular opinion, start the subject with [GENERAL].
- If it is a Lemmy-specific unpopular opinion, start it with [LEMMY].
Rules:
1. NO POLITICS
Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.
2. Be civil.
Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...
Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.
5. No trolling.
This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I don't know enough about the technology to have strong opinions on this. I was opposed to nuclear because I thought, what would we do with all the nuclear waste?
And then somebody pointed out to me that apparently all the nuclear waste product in the world could fit into the area the size of one football field. Okay, I thought, that doesn't seem too hard to keep contained.
But then I got to thinking about it and that can't possibly make any sense. It's not just the spent nuclear material, it's miles of radioactive plumbing, tons of hardware, sheet metal, asbestos (still?), etc., all irradiated, all toxic to life. So now I'm on the fence again.
could fit into the area the size of one football field.
The problem with that is that they haven't even managed to responsibly handle even that.
All of the irradiated equipment can't leach into groundwater though, and it's never as radioactive as the fuel itself. It's not safe to dump in a normal landfill obviously, but simply burying it usually fine.
Here, let the german Deputy of the Federal Chancellor and Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection shut you up. Starts at 24:56.
I don't speak German. What's he saying there?
My English isn't good enough to translate it all in detail, but these are the basics:
Germany shut down all nuclear power plants but 3, which will shut down soon. So we will be nuclear free in the future, no going back from there. Then he talks about the nuclear power plants in France, which are all ailing and will be extremely expensive to repair (at least 1 billion euros per power plant). They are only still working because they belong to the state, otherwise they would have been insolvent long ago. A newly planned nuclear power plant is already so expensive to plan that most investors have backed out. If this power plant is ever built, it will supply the most expensive electricity ever produced in Europe.
But to catch some downvotes as well:
You can't claim to be an environmentalist and not be vegan at the same time
Thats still unpopular but at least it's true. :)
So have a few hens out back eating all the ticks in the yard and supplying me with eggs is hurting the environment in a way that is terrible? I'd have to look more into that, but really they surely can't be as gaseous as cows.
I used to have them when I lived in an area that didn't care. Was hoping to go back to having them when I retire one day. Didn't expect to hear they were a bad choice. Thanks for the response
I've heard of a spherical cow, but a gaseous cow is new to me :)
It's not that this is an unpopular opinion, but rather that it's a dumb opinion. You're defining things one way and someone else can define them a different way. You can both define what an environmentalist is differently and that will affect the result of your question. If you're insisting that you own the definition of an "environmentalist" then you're being dumb.
In fact, I agree with the unstated premise of your statement. I think the risks of nuclear waste and a nuclear meltdown are much less than the risks of global warming and therefore nuclear power is good for the environment. However it is also a perfectly valid opinion that we should just reduce our energy usage and reduce global warming in that manner. I think it's unrealistic, but it's possible if we had the desire to do that as a collective. It is a valid opinion to be on that side of the fence. I think it's the less pragmatic approach, but I've known many people who are hippy environmentalists and it's still a valid position.
I didn’t realize nuclear waste was so great for the environment! I’ll be sure to tell that to the fish in Fukushima.
The US gets 1/5 of its power from nuclear energy, and produces 2,000 metric tons of nuclear waste per year – only enough to fill about half of the volume of an olympic-sized swimming pool (and about the same weight as 10 wind turbines).
Only 3% of all of that waste is actually long-lived and highly radioactive, potentially requiring isolation from the environment. In France, this number goes down to 0.2% due to fuel being reprocessed.
Taking that into consideration, that means it would take about 2/3 of a century for the US to produce enough dangerous nuclear waste to fill this pool completely. And it can still be way more efficient.
Nuclear produces negligible amounts of actual waste for the amount of energy it gives us. The problems with nuclear aren't at all the waste, rather it's the current highly used methods that are used to harvest the fuel (slave labour and unsafe, dirty, destructive drilling). Very similar problems faced with, say, lithium and cobalt.
view more: next ›