this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2024
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It's unsafe, not renewable, not independent from natural resources (which might not be present in your country, so you need to buy from dictators) and last but not least crazy expensive.
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Where the fuck we gonna put all the waste product? I'm not saying nuclear power is bad, far from it, but we have two problems here:
- Its cost prohibitive to build new Third Generation reactors that are fault tolerant, and moreso to assure that all the Second Generation reactors are fully fault tolerant given how adjacent they are to flood plains and fault lines in the US
- Where the fuck are we gonna put the waste at? Yucca Mountain is off the table for good, WIPP is nearing capacity for a pilot plant, and we have nothing like Onkalo planned out despite the funding being there many times over
All the waste a plant ever produces in its lifetime can be contained with ease on site. Waste certainly isn't the main issue, though it's portrayed to be. Cost of deployment and staffing are more prohibitive issues, and both are surmountable. I don't think it's a bandaid for all power issues, but it's a powerful tool that should be used more often, not phased out.
On site? For 100000 years?
Or much much longer. It's not going anywhere. It can't escape its cask, and outside human intervention the casks won't be breached. It's just locked-up metal that gives off some radiation, fully contained within the cask. It isn't oozing green goo.
Just because it's safe doesn't mean it's the best we have right now.
- It's massively expensive to set up
- It's massively expensive to decommission at end of life
- Almost half of the fuel you need to run them comes from a country dangerously close to Russia. (This one is slightly less of a thing now that Russia has bogged itself down in Ukraine)
- It takes a long time to set up.
- It has an image problem.
A combination of solar, wind, wave, tidal, more traditional hydro and geothermal (most of the cost with this is digging the holes. We've got a lot of deep old mines that can be repurposed) can easily be built to over capacity and or alongside adequate storage is the best solution in the here and now.
The problem with these arguments and the focus of debates is that they are based on nuclear energy from uranium, not thorium. Thorium is ubiquitous in nature, power centers are much easier to set up and can be small and the waste, while initially (a bit) more radioactive than uranium waste, loses it's radiation level much faster
Edit:typo
The abundance of uranium and thorium is of the same magnitude. The thing is economics. Uranium is cheap, and as long it is, we use the sources we have. As the peice of uranium rises other sources get economical including sea water extraction which is effectively renewable.
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Wait, I'm seeing a lot of people being very against nuclear. From what I've gathered, I see no downsides compared to fossil fuels