I hate to say it, but regardless of one's stance, on his back should be "Public perception of Fukushima, Chernobyl, and 3-mile Island."
I say regardless of one's stance, because even if the public's perceptions are off...when we remember those incidents but not how much time was in between them or the relative infrequency of disasters, they can have outsized effects on public attitude.
It's not a great idea from the risk. If future governments let the windmills fall into disrepair, all that happens is windmills are useless. They can never accidently summon centuries of nuclear winter.
They can never accidently summon centuries of nuclear winter.
Neither can nuclear power plants, lol. Nuclear power plants are not built in a way that can trigger a nuclear bomb explosion, which is inherent to the theory of nuclear winter of nuclear explosions leaving material in the atmosphere to blot out the sun.
Maintaining a fission reaction is an incredibly complicated process that requires human intervention to sustain. If nuclear plants fell into "disrepair" the would just turn off and be useless, like windmills.
ITT: ignorant people with 20+ years old knowledge.
Nuclear energy has been safe for a long time. Radioactive waste disposal is better than ever now.
I expect debates, hm Interesting this got this much upvotes
But also why no one talked about land usage
No one talks about land usage for solar either. Which is a real shame, because with some relatively minor redesigns solar plants can be integrated into the ecosystem without causing massive damage, instead of what usually happens which is just clear-cutting a huge field and destroying any plant and animal life there.
clean... so many storage pools full of spent fuel, no home for them in sight... hundreds of pools, spread all over the US....
clean?
I mean cleaner than coal, sure. but it's enormous infrastructure and regulatory hurdles aren't worth it.
Nuclear waste is a solved problem, it is contained to a tiny physical object, all we gotta do is dig a hole, put the object into the hole, and cover it up.
We pretend that it is way harder than it is.
I live in a suburb north of Stockholm in Sweden, and I'd support the government building a large underground permanent storage of nuclear waste from all over the world (for a fee) in my suburb, we have the best ground for permanent storage in Scandinavia, we would earn money, create jobs and make the world safer.
Nuclear waste is a solved problem
maybe solved where you live, and only for as long as your containment facility stays in one piece.
earthquakes, meteors, tidal waves - these things do happen, sure, not often on a lifetime scale, but compared to the long half-lives of this stuff? plenty of time for the worst case scenario.
I think you pretend the problem is simpler than it actually is, when considered the time frames involved. It's not your lifetime we're talking, it's the hundreds of generations where this shit remains hot.
AND I'd add your country is at least trying, in the US we've given up and store it in pools local to the reactors, it's ignorant as fuck
Scandinavia is geographically stable and has been politically stable for a long time, I can think of no better place for a global nuclear waste storage facility.
Meteors is just s dumb risk to consider in this case, any meteor capable of breaching an underground nuclear waste will cause far worse problems than the nuclear material will.
The baltic isn't that tidal either, so tidal waves can be disregarded.
Earthquakes have happened here, but they are few and far between.
I recommend that you watch the BBC Horizon Documentary "Nuclear Nightmares" that talks about our fear of radiation.
why bother investing enormous amounts of money into a tech that's already problematic? when there are better solutions at hand?
I'm not anti-nuclear, I just think further investment into it is misguided when there are so many other options that don't create tens of thousands of years of radioisotopes that have to go somewhere.
good on Scandinavia, the rest of the world isn't in such privileged positions. As seen in Fukushima. As seen in the hundreds of cooling ponds all over the US.
Also it's only a problem if we let it be, there's literally centuries for us to figure out a way to make those waste useful for us. Not working towards that would be the only way for the problem to come back to us in the future.
An idea I have thought about, nuclear boosted geothermal power.
Geothermal power normally just use a simple borehole with a hose going down and then up again, coolant goes in the hole, gets heated up a few degrees and the can then be processed to heat a house.
What if we could run tubes near the nuclear waste that will keep producing heat for thousands of years?