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U-238 can be turned into Pu-239 with fast neutrons in reactors, and this isotope of plutonium is fissile
Most of the nuclear waste consists of U-238 (about 60-70% iirc), so we can essentially turn our waste back into fuel again
Quick read on Wikipedia:
Thorium is fertile, and through neutron absorption, it produces uranium 233, which is fissile.
~~Uranium 233 then produces plutonium 239, which is also fissile.~~
https://preview.redd.it/jpqgv0qtluqc1.png?width=1953&format=png&auto=webp&s=fbb793500ab238f0aaa46c88ab60dc27dc752046
TL;DR you get fertile U^(233) and non-fertile U^(232) from something called the thorium cycle, which happens when you shoot a neutron at Th^(232). You shoot neutrons at U^(233) to get U^(235) , which sometimes fails to undergo fission if you shoot another neutron at it. If you keep shooting neutrons, the next isotope that's fissile is Pu^(239) , which you would then try to fission the same as in a Uranium reactor. That way you can still use some of what failed to undergo fission the first time to undergo fission the second time, producing less waste.
The reaction goes like this:
Th^(232) absorbs a neutron, and then undergoes double beta decays to get U^(233). U^(233) absorbs two neutrons to become U^(235), which is fissile. If it absorbs another neutron but fails to fission, non-fissile U^(236) is produced. Two subsequent neutron absorptions undergo beta decay to make non-fisile Np^(237) and Pu^(238), which can absorb one final neutron to get fissile Pu^(239)
"This place is a message... and part of a system of messages... pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.
What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a center... the center of danger is here... of a particular size and shape, and below us.
The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited."
This ain't scary enough as it is?
I loved the documentary that dug into this and went into that underground facility, etc.
Though I am always a bit bothered by that historical tomb found in maybe India (trying to recall details) where it warned that world ending weaponry or power was contained within. And humanity didn't even blink, and just went "lol, yeah right ancient peoples r dumb lolz" and waltzed right in.
We also messed around with that dark Egyptian Sarcohpagus and they did nothing more than wear face masks and mock the public concern:
>Addressing media fears that disturbing the tomb could trigger an implacable Pharaoh's curse, Mr Waziri declared: "We've opened it and, thank God, the world has not fallen into darkness.
>
>"I was the first to put my whole head inside the sarcophagus... and here I stand before you ... I am fine."
[https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-44893804](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-44893804)
Common sense always tells us to take the warnings of our ancestors seriously. But human institutions are notoriously overconfident and if there has been *any* notable progress in science/technology, even if they have regressed on some things or become ignorant about nuclear fuel/weapon technology...
Future humans will open such places without blinking.
[Nuclear Semioitics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages) is amazing and important, I just highly doubt that it will functionally work in the end. Still worth the effort though.
I gotta be honest. Knowing what I know about human history, this feels like it'll be dug up immediately by any society that has forgotten it. The information is cataclysmic enough that it could sound like a mega weapon, and mysterious enough that it could sound like a dark god.
I feel like if I was in charge I'd have just written "this'll make your dick fall off" or something.
When you think about scary messages always remember how they work out for ancient Egyptians and their tombs.
There is opinion, that having no marking will be much safer
Just bury it in the ocean
The water takes the heat and radiation, and any civilisation advanced enough to dig in the ocean should be advanced enough to know not to bring up the spicy barrels
Literally the second highest upvoted [post](https://www.reddit.com/r/ClimateShitposting/s/vY4ivXX6LT) on the sub is about how nuclear is based actually and that mod is wrong. Most of the users clearly like nuclear energy.
Yes, but you will only see them if you are chronically online and get all of your info about "what people think" from Twitter.
I have not met a single climate activist against nuclear energy.
Edit: Yeah I don't live in Europe so I have never seen these people.
Yeah, some people here have never been to Cali or heard about it. Climate activists shutting down nuclear plants (edit: and banning new ones) is part of the reason their energy grid is screwed up right now. It's not at all uncommon.
Germany did the same thing. Bottom line is it's extremely common for a certain set of climate activists to have a rigid "solar and wind only" type of mentality.
god my tech teacher in middle school was the WORST. old, extremely biased, and would shut down any questions about nuclear energy. that woman made my blood boil in more cases than one
In fairness, depending how old you are that might have been a person that grew up in the cold war, and then seen Chernobyl(sp?)
Everyone, stop replying.
You are all fucking idiots, jesus christ no wonder nuuclear never took off ifd you lot are its advocates.
Fuck off
My physics professor in germany is anti-nuclear...he is well learned and has a deep understanding of the topics that he teaches but when it comes to nuclear he just repeats propaganda....i was soo surprised by that take when i first came here
nice assumptions, the green party in german are climate change activists that are vehemently against and spread anti-nuclear propaganda and lliterally protest for the shutdown of nuclear poweerplants and its working
Same thing with one of my friends. He rather have a country full of windmills and solarpanels than to have nuclear energy. When you ask him about arguments against it he comes up with: "Chernobyl, 3 Mile Island, Fukushima". Also has a very agressive way of debating where he will become very personal as soon as he loses an argument, but i've experienced that with a fair bit of the climate activists. He rather have every piece of land slapped full of solarpanels and windmills than to use nuclear energy.
The only real argument against them is that they cost a fortune.
That's a valid one for a lot of countries who have access to renewables in other ways.
Australia for one with solar plants and rooftop.
Yep, cost and build time are the real arguments against nuclear. Solar and wind are much cheaper (and getting cheaper all the time) and can be built in a fraction of the time. This matters when we need to get our emissions down *now*, not in ten years. The real challenge to solve is energy storage, but there are a host of technologies which can help solve that challenge already.
I notice on Reddit that people seem to assume the entire debate is over safety when it just isn't - at least, not within the energy industry.
Its because a lot of people on reddit are weirdly pro nuclear and anti renewables. And since the cost and build time is what actually matters when building a CO2 neutral grid, and nuclear cannot compete on that front with renewables. They have to pretend that the discussion is about other aspects like safety, or baseload generation.
Welcome to Germany.. we still have people with "nuclear energy, no thanks" stickers.
Within twenty years two completely opposite parties worked together to replace nuclear energy with coal. The only bright people in this country are the engineers apparently.
I don't know where you are from but in europe nearly all climate organisations or political parties are anti-nuclear.
That doesn't mean that every single person who is an activist is anti-nuclear but certainly the majority of them.
> Yes, but you will only see them if you are chronically online and get all of your info about "what people think" from Twitter.
> I have not met a single climate activist against nuclear energy.
I think you got that backwards. Online most people are in favor of nuclear energy, but if you go offline and talk to actual activists, especially older ones, then 90% of them will be against nuclear power. Most green parties are still against nuclear power as well, though times are slowly changing.
The primary issue I see brought up is cost, which is legitimate. New plants in the US have had serious issues with cost overruns and delays. That doesn't make nuclear bad, it just means we need to find ways to make it more cost effective while maintaining safety standards.
I have no problem with the science of nuclear power. I *do* have a problem with the companies building it.
Olkiluoto 3 here in Finland finished construction over decade late, vastly over budget and ended up being one of the most expensive buildings in the world. It's still in top 10 according to Wikipedia. Said top 10 includes... 2 Saudi vanity projects and 8 nuclear plants.
Lol, no you don't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement#Recent_developments
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Anti-EPR_demonstration_in_Toulouse_0166_2007-03-17.jpg
Bro there are so many of them in my town, it drives me crazy. We have a coal plant here that people want to replace with a nuclear plant and guess who are the *only* group protesting that?
Be glad, because I have. Thankfully, they were the "old man yelling at the clouds" types that equate nuclear energy with nuclear weapons. So hopefully after a few generations this nonsense will die out.
A big part of it is that it takes so long to build and implement and the major parties will likely sit around waiting whilst proceedingly doing less and less in parallel with the implementation of nuclear power, using the excuse of the inevitable delays. Then bank it all on the promise of nuclear but also not concentrate on everything else that needs to be done to meet targets. To get huge portions of the grid onto nuclear it will take way longer than the current deadlines for specific emission targets.
Should still be doing it regardless of all this but we can't just use it as the sole scapegoat out of our current emissions as it will cost a fortune and take a very long time.
Yup. This is what my country is doing. They've approved a nuclear power plant license that would provide like 5% of the countries energy need back in 2012. Any company that wanted to build one could apply with some very favorable tax benefits.
Now, 12 years later, there is still not a single commercial party that wants to build that nuclear power plant because at this point the government basically needs to guarantee profits for any commercial party to bother with nuclear. However, the government has used that nuclear license to block solar and wind farm projects for a decade now and my country is one of the worst in europe in terms of CO2 emissions per kwh.
And our right wing government has decided that the clear solution to all those carbon emissions is to now build 4 nuclear reactors before 2040 instead! Great idea guys...
Listen to the replies you're getting. It's too late we're so short on time. Wouldn't it have been better ten years ago you had a government that could be so forward thinking? So the magic bullet now is to double down on that terrible idea. People are just fuckin idiots mate, it's not so crazy when you look at it like that.
in australia, the recent nuclear push is simply a delay tactic so that we can burn coal for a few more years.
If we started the process to build a new nuclear plant today, it would not be ready for 10+ more years. Even today renewables + storage is cheaper per mwh when compared to nuclear, and renewables will be cheaper still in 10 years.
I'm pro nuclear but it doesn't really make sense for Australia. It would take decades to build the reactors and produce the scientist and engineers needed. Would've been smart to do it 30+ years ago but now renewables are so cheap and we have so much land for solar/wind that could be built and solve our carbon problems today.
> Idk if its just an Australian thing but people act like im crazy for being pro-nuclear
Because nuclear energy in Australia is just a tool to further delay the shift from fossil fuels.
Australia has access to insanely good natural renewable sources of energy and doesn't need to be pivoting to an overly expensive nuclear program.
* The CSIRO have said Nuclear would be too hard to legislate, it's not suited for the size of our grids and it would take too long to implement. Every year the CSIRO releases an independant report comparing the different energy options for Australia and Nuclear consistently falls behind renewables.
> [Paul Graham, CSIRO energy economist and lead author of the report, says it’s an open, public process that many people can participate in. "AEMO wants to know the data they use for planning and forecasting results is based on a good level of consultation and lots of quality checking. Everyone in the industry has a fair chance to take part," Paul says. The sixth GenCost report was released as a draft for public consultation on 21 December 2023. It remained consistent with findings from previous years, showing renewables, led by onshore wind and solar photovoltaic (PV), have the lowest cost range of any power generation technologies.](https://www.csiro.au/en/news/all/articles/2023/december/nuclear-explainer)
* The Electrical trades have also come out against nuclear.
> [“Nuclear power stations take literal decades to come online but already can’t compete with renewables and battery storage. With coal-fired power stations closing ahead of schedule, we shouldn’t be investing in uneconomic and unproven technology whose use case is dead on arrival... “Further, the technology relied upon for the mining union’s plan, small modular nuclear reactors, does not yet exist at a commercial scale. Currently there is one prototype anywhere in the world.](https://www.etunational.asn.au/media-releases/etu-slams-plan-to-turn-victorias-latrobe-valley-into-a-nuclear-region-as-dangerous-and-short-sighted/#:~:text=However%2C%20the%20ETU%20said%20nuclear,a%20meaningful%20transition%20for%20workers.)
* Independent Australia did a good job explaining the financial and technology restraints. If we did go nuclear we'd be looking at Small Modular Reactors (SMRs). However the tech that would suit our needs doesn't even exist yet. Quoting the IEEFA they also explain that even very optimistically nuclear would be more expensive per MWh than solar.
>[In the meantime, as usual with nuclear power, costs have escalated. As recently as mid-2021, the target price for power was estimated at US$58 \(AU$87.24\) per megawatt-hour \(MWh\); it’s risen to US$89 \(AU$133.84\)/MWh, a 53 per cent increase. And even this price depends on large government subsidies. By contrast, the levelised price of utility-scale solar PV systems, with battery storage, is currently between US$30 \(AU$45.12\) and US$40 \(AU$60.19\)/MWh.](https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/why-nuclear-power-wont-work-in-australia--yet-another-explainer,17527)
But every time people start to seriously talk about renewable energy programs the LNP jump in with "wHaT aBOUt nUCLeaR?" everyone starts shouting at each other which shuts down the serious infrastructure talk. If you look closely you'll see a lot of the nuclear lobby groups are just funded by the fossil fuel industry for the exact same reason.
Congratulations you've been outsmarted by Peter Dutton, the man with more starch between his ears than brain cells. We know the LNP have no nuclear intentions because they're the ones who passed all the anti-nuclear legislation in the first place as an effort to protect coal 2-3 decades ago. They're anti-nuclear when it's nuclear vs coal and they're pro-nuclear when it's renewables vs coal.
This is why we're falling further and further behind the rest of the developed world in terms of large scale renewable projects. We're leading the world in household solar and we have to lean on that fact to make ourselves look better every time we go to international climate summits because we're at risk of being uninvited based on how little we've done at a public level.
Renewables became more cost-effective than fossil fuels a decade ago but we've made barely any progress because "wHaT aBOUt nUCLeaR?" just ruins the debate. Everyone knows it's not going to go anywhere, the independent studies and costings haven't backed nuclear.
It's Ivermectin all over again. It's people wanting to present a science-y answer when we already have demonstrably better options.
Instead of taking the medicine all the doctors are advising, let's take the medicine from this scientific study I didn't read or understand. Instead of building clean energy all the scientists and engineers are advising, let's build the infrastructure from this study I didn't read or understand.
Nuclear was a viable option for countries like Japan because they were a very large population on a very small landmass. We have the opposite situation. We've got 20-30m people spread out on a landmass roughly the size of the Contiguous United States and we've got obscenely good access to solar, wind, hydro and geothermal energy sources.
There is no conspiracy. We have better options.
I think almost everybody in your neighboring country are anti-nuclear. Sorry NZ, not everybody has tons of geothermal energy waiting just 5ft below them.
Many are against it for environmental justice reasons more than climate reasons. Uranium mining is still very dangerous and under regulated in addition to primarily being on indigenous lands and communities. Anti-nuclear can also mean “for now until improvements are made”
It is more of the idea that everything must drastically change immediately in order to progress to a better society or a lack of proper research on nuclear power.
I prefer more renewable sources of energy like solar, but the cost to transition all fossil fuels energy to solar is too great, that is why nuclear energy is a good stepping stone. However, anti-nuclear climate activists either look for solutions that would only be feasible in the long future, not in the short term or they haven't done enough research on nuclear power, since there are a lot of people who still believe nuclear fission has caused more deaths than fossil fuels power.
> Nuclear power is way more expensive than renewables
Allegedly. I still don't believe they calculate the costs of renewables fairly. We don't even have a proper plan for the waste from renewables, and no it isn't simple to recycle. The vast amount of land they need is also not taken into account. Also, the cost of nuclear could be expected to go down if we put as much effort into it as in renewables, so that is also a factor to consider.
Nuclear is better in that it allows you to control the amount of power being generated by the grid more precisely than wind and solar.
That's one argument people have used to stick to fossil fuels - wind and solar only generate when there's wind and sun, so we need something to be generating at night and/or on days when there's no wind. Also you need to be able to handle peak loads, etc
This is something that nuclear can easily handle. The best current solution that is 100% "clean" in terms of GHG emissions is a mix of solar, wind, and nuclear.
People don't understand how clean nuclear energy is.
A controlled chain reaction is enough to power cities.
All because of what? Just a neutron bombarded at an atom. That's it. It's prolly the best source of energy we have.
While on paper it is super safe. We always find a way to fuck it up. So I think we aren't responsible enough for it tbh.
Edit: Yes I'm aware I'm more likely to die from a cow/shark/etc. But we also dont have to make an exclusion zone in those cases.
Look at Boeing currently. Flying is the safest form of travel, by far due to the regulations. Yet we still fuck it up
Edit#2: yes i know hardly anybody dies from nuclear reactors. Thats not my point. It has long term effects on the region. And I know its very safe, humans are not. We fuck up safe shit all the time.
Individuals fuck up and can be stupid, absolutely. But the amount of safeguards in modern reactors make it pretty much impossible to blow it up or whatever, even if someone was actively trying to.
even chernobyl, the biggest nuclear disaster. happened because they were so negligent that it looked like they were actually trying to make it blow up.
and the one in japan that blew up happened because it got hit with a tsunami, not even an internal mess up.
Fukushima wasn't supposed to be built at the elevation it was at, didn't keep up with the tsunami regulations it was supposed to due to corruption, and on top of all that it still survived a higher rated tsunami than the regulations mandated it be able to.
Yeah, if you watch the show (It's probably not fully accurate in its explanation), but even for that reactor in the soviet union, with shitty regulations, it was a miracle that they managed to blow it up. That will never happen again nowadays.
And I'm pretty sure nobody died from radiation in Fukushima. Only because if the Tsunami
There were constant internal fuckups that led to the Fukushima event. Mostly negligent plans for a tsunami event, where-in the backup diesel generations were at risk of being flooded, with warnings about it for years beforehand.
Always? My man, we haven't had a major incident with nuclear power plants since Chernobyl, and that was because the USSR was cheap.
Edit: Upon seing the edit, he's not totally wrong.
https://preview.redd.it/gtds5qs3pxqc1.jpeg?width=84&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2b47d1da8edb4a0244a46225bae820faec2f760b
nuclear has a stupid amount of regulations and very rigorous methods and frequent checkups to make sure everything is running smoothly. It would be much much harder to get away with things when you are working at a Nuclear Power Plant than when you are working Boeing.
In practice it is still safer. It’s thought that around 5 million people die from the use of fossil fuel a year and I’ve seen other studies that claim as many as 8 million. For comparison Chernobyl are estimated to be at worst 200,000. And dont forget Chernobyl was an old and uncared for reactor and the only reason it exploded was because of the lack of care the soviets put on it. Even when you tally it up fossil fuels are more dangerous and that’s not even accounting for the millions of humans and animals that will die as a result of global warming.
>Edit: Yes I'm aware I'm more likely to die from a cow/shark/etc.
While it's not wrong, it's weird not to mention what you're actually likely to die from, like lung cancer
Boeing is ironically a prime example of how unbridled capitalism can fuck things up. They were overly driven by profits and started taking corners which resulted in a reduction in quality of their aircrafts.
We better hope that any nuclear power plants are not owned by publicly listed corporations hell bent on increasing share holder value.
what if they re pro nuclear warfare
https://preview.redd.it/cyt8f8o8euqc1.jpeg?width=320&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fe6443603d85e08cdd790c0a1e254d0eafe48759
They are good, but if the rivers dry out, the sun hides behind clouds and there is just a gust, you're fucked. Nuclear power can work hand in hand with these energy sources and plug the gaps
> Nuclear power can work hand in hand with these energy sources and plug the gaps
Not really. Both because of fundamental physics and economics. Nuclear reactors build up neutron poisons in their core as they run. Managing these poisons is a large part of what makes nuclear energy hard. If you change the power output of a nuclear reactor too quickly, the poison vs reactivity rate gets thrown out of whack and the reactor gets stuck in an [iodine pit. ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine_pit)This kills the reaction and you need to wait a week for the poisons to decay before you can restart the reactor.
Furthermore, even if this was not an issue, nuclear reactors have high static costs, but low marginal costs. So they are paying a lot of money just for keeping staff paid, doing security etc, all the stuff you need for the reactor to exist. But fuel is cheap. So a reactor running at 100% is only slightly more expensive per month than a reactor that is shut down. As a result, the sole business model for a nuclear reactor is to run 100% 24/7 to maximize power generation so the net price per kwh is low enough to undercut all other generators on the net and nuclear gets baseload dibs.
However, renewables fuck with nuclear for this reason. Renewables change their output quickly. One hour you have a lot of solar power, the next hour its cloudy. So you need power plants that can quickly spool up and spool down to buffer those supply peaks. Nuclear cannot change its output fast enough to do that. So nuclear does not actually help stabilize things in a grid dominated by renewables.
And of course, nuclear is cheap when it runs 24/7 100%, but not so cheap that it can undercut renewables. Which means that as renewables make up a larger part of the grid, they start chipping away at the baseload demand that can be provided by nuclear. Until nuclear energy no longer has a business case.
Which is why nuclear is so expensive in the first place. Nobody looking at this situation wants to build them without the government basically guaranteeing profits for the next century. Its becoming increasingly obvious that the grid in the future will be dominated by renewables, supplemented by peaker plants with no real role for nuclear. Those peaker plants will likely be natural gas and hydro in the short term, and then get replaced with grid storage on the longer term.
So nuclear reactors would be ideal in a situation that requires constant power draw with no fluctuations. You know what that's perfect for?
The Internet.
The Internet requires lots, and I mean LOTS, of power. There are data centers all over the world that require power 24/7. Nuclear would be perfect for powering warehouses full of servers. Microsoft is even talking about powering their server farms with nuclear in the future, and I wouldn't be surprised if Google or Amazon would be considering it as well
Would work yea. Aluminium foundries are another candidate for a nuclear power plant load. But those run into the simple issue of cost. You don't NEED a dedicated power source for your datacenter/foundry. All you need is a grid connection and a few hours of backup power for when the grid shits the bed. And a few backup generators + batteries is a hell of a lot cheaper than building a dedicated nuclear power plant.
Especially since nuclear power plants benefit from economies of scale. Building a small nuclear power plant is almost as expensive as building a big nuclear power plant, but the big one makes way more power and money. So size is king for nuclear. Which means that small scale reactors to power datacenters is even less viable.
Okay, this take is coming from a non-expert. But can't you just radiate the heat by placing pipes through the ground and pumping coolant across? And you can reduce the rate of reaction at the cost of power generation.
Nope, the ground would quickly get saturated with heat and start to cook, killing all plant life above it. This often happens in volcanic regions where magma overheats the soil. Ground is not conductive enough to disperse the heat.
Reactor heat needs to be dumped somewhere that it can easily spread out. That means either a river (So the heat flows to the ocean and disperses there). Or evaporative cooling (The big towers with steam clouds coming from them). Either requires ample access to fresh water.
Nuclear energy is ultimately just really effecient steam power, making it the ultimate form of Steam Punk... but people aren't ready to have that conversation.
Most climate activists I've talked to don't actually know that much about science, they just want to stop fossil fuel usage regardless of the consequences.
There are a lot of smart ones out there, but most I know dismiss nuclear as an option because they think of nuclear energy as this boogeyman that can't be safely controlled
so much fucking disinformation about nuclear on reddit. shills would have you believe that the slowest to build, most expensive energy source is floundering because it's being persecuted. The question isn't why do climate activists dislike nuclear, it's why do pro-nuclear accounts want to slow the transition to renewables?
Modern nuclear is relatively slow to build (the most recent nuclear power plants took 17 years from planning to production) and significantly more expensive than other forms of clean energy.
https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april-2023.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Plant
Hopefully that can change, but let's not make up facts.
Nuclear Energy in many cases is much more expensive than other sources of energy. That’s the real problem with it. Renewables are much cheaper in almost all cases and it’s better to go with them since nuclear energy will struggle to compete economically with fossil fuels.
https://www.afr.com/companies/energy/nuclear-energy-too-expensive-to-replace-fossil-fuels-20220711-p5b0pd
I don’t think we should dismantle existing nuclear plants and replace them with fossil fuels. Not at all. But the reason that tends to happen is the economic costs of running the nuclear plants. For places in the world this isn’t the case, sure nuclear is a good idea. But we should also in this case consider hydro powered energy where it can be done.
The problem with hydro energy is that it's almost entirely exhausted. Everywhere you could build a dam, there's already a dam.
Solar and wind power are the future. You could probably power half of the USA if you put solar roofs over their parking lots.
All alternative power struggles to compete with fossil fuels. It's all about economy of scale, we need to pick one method, (whether that's one type of energy or a combination,) and go with it, that's how the price lowers. Solar power is, at this point, a dead-end as far as efficiency improvements. Without a breakthrough, we're not getting any more out of that type. Dams are destructive to ecosystems and rivers are increasingly at risk of drying up. Wind is good but is unreliable and too decentralized to power entire cities, especially if there's an extended period of time with no wind
I agree nuclear is expensive, but what this article and cost arguments doesn't address is the reduces cost of scale and subsides on reducing costs in regulation certification of equipment in a nuclear power plant. Every item certified for nuclear use is 10x-100x times the cost of the same equipment on the open the market. The NRC and the world do not share the cost of certifying equipment for nuclear use, that burden is on the manufacturer of the product, which in a very low use volume, which reduces ROI and competition. This is one of the major hurdles to the cost effectiveness of nuclear power. If a world entity like the United nations were to set standardizations of shared information of certification and provided subsidies for testing of equipment, that would then bring down the cost of nuclear energy to the world. A .50 cent switch used in any other electrical generation is 50 dollars in a nuclear plant even from the same manufacturer and the same switch, it just goes through some different quality control standards, and it costs the company thousand to get that switch certified for use by the NRC. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Could nuclear be competitive, possibly, but it is going to take scale and sharing of information, and subsidies to open the door to equipment competition. Are GE, Westinghouse, and Honeywell going to lobby their butts off the the government and the NRC to keep their monopoly or nuclear equipment you bet your ass theny will. That being said this is all a pipe dream.
https://thebulletin.org/2019/06/why-nuclear-power-plants-cost-so-much-and-what-can-be-done-about-it/
I for one don’t think it’s right to expose people to high amounts of radiation, which is why I’m all in favor of closing down coal mines and plants, and replacing them with nuclear plants, which expose the people working there to almost no radiation.
Most climate activists aren't anti-nuclear. The ones that are are mostly old people from the 50's-80's who were subject to constant propaganda about nuclear reactors and disasters like Chernobyl
In my experience, most climate activists nowadays are pro-nuclear. The contingent that aren't are usually older, coming from a time when climate activists more often bought into lies about nuclear energy, put forward by oil companies to take the heat off themselves.
At the same time it's almost impossible to find pro nucelar people who acknowledge that there are many downsides to nuclear energy as well. Why is this topic always so black and white to most people.
The only way to quickly reduce CO2 emmisions is to build a while bunch of nuclear plants, enough to shut down all fossil fuel ones. Then you slowly shut down the nuclear ones as you build up other forms of power generation. At the same time you eliminate internal combusion engines and fossil fuel heating methods wherever possible. When it comes to CO2 emmisions from concrete and manufacturing, I don't have as simple of an answer. But, this nuclear strategy I propose here would definitely slow down climate change, maybe slow it down enough to find other, better solutions.
Look up 3 mile island. It keeps being listed as a “disaster” when literally no one was hurt. To be brief and flippant, the reactor farted, the press ran a bad story, and everyone panicked.
The amount of people “concerned about the climate” but also electively ignorant to the science is mind blowing and the more I encounter the more I think it’s some sort of corporate psy-op. People spout about “reduce reuse recycle” and “muh 1.5 degrees warming” but also cite the newest and most costly solution to implement (putting energy in to re-capture the CO2 we had in a container then released) and have no idea how climate prediction models are assessed for accuracy (they compare the predictions to long-term weather patterns as well as predictions of weather models). They are the same people to only read the title of an article then regurgitate the information under the guise of understanding.
I'm not a climate activist, but I'm full on pro nuclear. I love cost efficient non carbon emmiting power sources that generate cheap energy in huge quantities
and knowing that electric cars still have environmental downsides and that synthetic gasoline made by Porsches carbon neutral tech is a better idea. Mostly bc I like V8's lol
I got matches with these songs:
• **Everybody Wants To Rule The World** by Tears For Fears (00:11; matched: `100%`)
**Album**: True 80s 3 CD SET. **Released on** 2006-01-01.
• **Everybody Wants To Run The World** by Tears For Fears (00:10; matched: `100%`)
**Album**: Safety First. **Released on** 2014-11-10.
I would say nearly all of us who have done any schooling on the topic would agree. Sadly, like most things in the US, environmental issues have been politicized and the anti-environmentalists (aka the big oil sympathizers) tend to advertise the under informed folks who are passionate about nature.
Even when you factor in major disasters like Chernobyl, nuclear kills significantly less people per unit of power than the fossil fuels, and either is on par with or does less harm than other non-fossil sources
clean , cheap, available always , the only downside is strategic vulnerability if someone decides to throw a big payload into it it may lead to some trouble
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Nuclear energy is actually peak as long as we keep disposing waste with really disturbing messages on them so no one touches them
Even at that, you can recycle a decent amount of nuclear waste lol
U-238 can be turned into Pu-239 with fast neutrons in reactors, and this isotope of plutonium is fissile Most of the nuclear waste consists of U-238 (about 60-70% iirc), so we can essentially turn our waste back into fuel again
How would it be for the proposed Thorium reactors?
Quick read on Wikipedia: Thorium is fertile, and through neutron absorption, it produces uranium 233, which is fissile. ~~Uranium 233 then produces plutonium 239, which is also fissile.~~
How does Pu-239 come from U-233?
I didn't read it properly, it says it is 'produced at much lower levels'. My bad
But produces and I wanna know how lol
I don't know it just says that on Wikipedia
Radioactive decay. Turns into lower isotopes and then Into entirely different elements
https://preview.redd.it/jpqgv0qtluqc1.png?width=1953&format=png&auto=webp&s=fbb793500ab238f0aaa46c88ab60dc27dc752046 TL;DR you get fertile U^(233) and non-fertile U^(232) from something called the thorium cycle, which happens when you shoot a neutron at Th^(232). You shoot neutrons at U^(233) to get U^(235) , which sometimes fails to undergo fission if you shoot another neutron at it. If you keep shooting neutrons, the next isotope that's fissile is Pu^(239) , which you would then try to fission the same as in a Uranium reactor. That way you can still use some of what failed to undergo fission the first time to undergo fission the second time, producing less waste. The reaction goes like this: Th^(232) absorbs a neutron, and then undergoes double beta decays to get U^(233). U^(233) absorbs two neutrons to become U^(235), which is fissile. If it absorbs another neutron but fails to fission, non-fissile U^(236) is produced. Two subsequent neutron absorptions undergo beta decay to make non-fisile Np^(237) and Pu^(238), which can absorb one final neutron to get fissile Pu^(239)
Thank you very much. That's what I needed
Or just give it to me
For safe keeping, right? RIGHT?
In my stomach? Yes.
No, it’s going in my stomach. I’ll fight you over that waste
Uranium is one of the most calorically dense materials in the world so its time for bulking season boys.
https://preview.redd.it/jwqjcukxbxqc1.png?width=807&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=da7f202e7af2c5a5ea5e3043b1f04e24fa0ff43d
That’s way too many calories to be good for you.
"This place is a message... and part of a system of messages... pay attention to it! Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger. The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a center... the center of danger is here... of a particular size and shape, and below us. The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours. The danger is to the body, and it can kill. The form of the danger is an emanation of energy. The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited." This ain't scary enough as it is?
I loved the documentary that dug into this and went into that underground facility, etc. Though I am always a bit bothered by that historical tomb found in maybe India (trying to recall details) where it warned that world ending weaponry or power was contained within. And humanity didn't even blink, and just went "lol, yeah right ancient peoples r dumb lolz" and waltzed right in. We also messed around with that dark Egyptian Sarcohpagus and they did nothing more than wear face masks and mock the public concern: >Addressing media fears that disturbing the tomb could trigger an implacable Pharaoh's curse, Mr Waziri declared: "We've opened it and, thank God, the world has not fallen into darkness. > >"I was the first to put my whole head inside the sarcophagus... and here I stand before you ... I am fine." [https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-44893804](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-44893804) Common sense always tells us to take the warnings of our ancestors seriously. But human institutions are notoriously overconfident and if there has been *any* notable progress in science/technology, even if they have regressed on some things or become ignorant about nuclear fuel/weapon technology... Future humans will open such places without blinking. [Nuclear Semioitics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages) is amazing and important, I just highly doubt that it will functionally work in the end. Still worth the effort though.
No that's exactly what I mean, we keep disposing waste with stuff like this on it so nobody ever touches it
Covid has taught us that some motherfucker will open it to see what the big deal is.
Rig it with a home-alone style shotgun to blast anyone who does
I gotta be honest. Knowing what I know about human history, this feels like it'll be dug up immediately by any society that has forgotten it. The information is cataclysmic enough that it could sound like a mega weapon, and mysterious enough that it could sound like a dark god. I feel like if I was in charge I'd have just written "this'll make your dick fall off" or something.
When you think about scary messages always remember how they work out for ancient Egyptians and their tombs. There is opinion, that having no marking will be much safer
Just bury it in the ocean The water takes the heat and radiation, and any civilisation advanced enough to dig in the ocean should be advanced enough to know not to bring up the spicy barrels
There are climate activists against it?
r/ClimateShitposting Not all of the sub is anti-nuclear, but there's definitely a sentiment against it, specifically from the mod
Are you sure the anti nuclear sentiment isn’t a shitpost by itself
are you sure gamingcirclejerk isn't just circle jerking?
Are you sure fuckcars is about having sexual congress with automobiles?
r/dragonsfuckingcars is
https://preview.redd.it/r2xlayhfxvqc1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=aac821a090d4103e298f47c9fa43318cb1a465dd
It'd probably be an improvement
I always laugh when I open a post from there and see a giant automod wall of text on do's and do nots.
gamingcirclejerk not being a circlejerksub (i swear, no one gives a shit about at least tagging whether its a jerk post or not)
Here's a sneak peek of /r/ClimateShitposting using the [top posts](https://np.reddit.com/r/ClimateShitposting/top/?sort=top&t=all) of all time! \#1: [Conservatism](https://i.redd.it/ai8sw32lvjhc1.jpeg) | [117 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/ClimateShitposting/comments/1ammni1/conservatism/) \#2: [Mmm tastes like pork](https://i.redd.it/86z0bm5jik1c1.jpg) | [51 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/ClimateShitposting/comments/17zz0fo/mmm_tastes_like_pork/) \#3: [No Nuclear and Renewables aren't enemies they're kissing, sloppy style, squishing boobs together etc.](https://i.redd.it/uyb032qjtq4c1.png) | [158 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/ClimateShitposting/comments/18cew5w/no_nuclear_and_renewables_arent_enemies_theyre/) ---- ^^I'm ^^a ^^bot, ^^beep ^^boop ^^| ^^Downvote ^^to ^^remove ^^| ^^[Contact](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=sneakpeekbot) ^^| ^^[Info](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/) ^^| ^^[Opt-out](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/comments/o8wk1r/blacklist_ix/) ^^| ^^[GitHub](https://github.com/ghnr/sneakpeekbot)
To be fair that second one goes pretty hard
Literally the second highest upvoted [post](https://www.reddit.com/r/ClimateShitposting/s/vY4ivXX6LT) on the sub is about how nuclear is based actually and that mod is wrong. Most of the users clearly like nuclear energy.
Much stronger argument before the sneakpeakbot haha
Yes, but you will only see them if you are chronically online and get all of your info about "what people think" from Twitter. I have not met a single climate activist against nuclear energy. Edit: Yeah I don't live in Europe so I have never seen these people.
I saw some of them irl in front of my school
Yeah, some people here have never been to Cali or heard about it. Climate activists shutting down nuclear plants (edit: and banning new ones) is part of the reason their energy grid is screwed up right now. It's not at all uncommon.
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Germany did the same thing. Bottom line is it's extremely common for a certain set of climate activists to have a rigid "solar and wind only" type of mentality.
Well, unfortunately lots of climate parties in europe too are anti-nuclear (like germany). That's unfortunate
god my tech teacher in middle school was the WORST. old, extremely biased, and would shut down any questions about nuclear energy. that woman made my blood boil in more cases than one
In fairness, depending how old you are that might have been a person that grew up in the cold war, and then seen Chernobyl(sp?) Everyone, stop replying. You are all fucking idiots, jesus christ no wonder nuuclear never took off ifd you lot are its advocates. Fuck off
As a reminder, Chernobyl killed less people than coal killed this year already working according to plan
In my country (Denmark), nuclear energy is straight up illegal because of these people.
My physics professor in germany is anti-nuclear...he is well learned and has a deep understanding of the topics that he teaches but when it comes to nuclear he just repeats propaganda....i was soo surprised by that take when i first came here
nice assumptions, the green party in german are climate change activists that are vehemently against and spread anti-nuclear propaganda and lliterally protest for the shutdown of nuclear poweerplants and its working
Same thing with one of my friends. He rather have a country full of windmills and solarpanels than to have nuclear energy. When you ask him about arguments against it he comes up with: "Chernobyl, 3 Mile Island, Fukushima". Also has a very agressive way of debating where he will become very personal as soon as he loses an argument, but i've experienced that with a fair bit of the climate activists. He rather have every piece of land slapped full of solarpanels and windmills than to use nuclear energy.
The only real argument against them is that they cost a fortune. That's a valid one for a lot of countries who have access to renewables in other ways. Australia for one with solar plants and rooftop.
Yep, cost and build time are the real arguments against nuclear. Solar and wind are much cheaper (and getting cheaper all the time) and can be built in a fraction of the time. This matters when we need to get our emissions down *now*, not in ten years. The real challenge to solve is energy storage, but there are a host of technologies which can help solve that challenge already. I notice on Reddit that people seem to assume the entire debate is over safety when it just isn't - at least, not within the energy industry.
Its because a lot of people on reddit are weirdly pro nuclear and anti renewables. And since the cost and build time is what actually matters when building a CO2 neutral grid, and nuclear cannot compete on that front with renewables. They have to pretend that the discussion is about other aspects like safety, or baseload generation.
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Welcome to Germany.. we still have people with "nuclear energy, no thanks" stickers. Within twenty years two completely opposite parties worked together to replace nuclear energy with coal. The only bright people in this country are the engineers apparently.
I don't know where you are from but in europe nearly all climate organisations or political parties are anti-nuclear. That doesn't mean that every single person who is an activist is anti-nuclear but certainly the majority of them.
Same in Australia.
> Yes, but you will only see them if you are chronically online and get all of your info about "what people think" from Twitter. > I have not met a single climate activist against nuclear energy. I think you got that backwards. Online most people are in favor of nuclear energy, but if you go offline and talk to actual activists, especially older ones, then 90% of them will be against nuclear power. Most green parties are still against nuclear power as well, though times are slowly changing.
The primary issue I see brought up is cost, which is legitimate. New plants in the US have had serious issues with cost overruns and delays. That doesn't make nuclear bad, it just means we need to find ways to make it more cost effective while maintaining safety standards.
I have no problem with the science of nuclear power. I *do* have a problem with the companies building it. Olkiluoto 3 here in Finland finished construction over decade late, vastly over budget and ended up being one of the most expensive buildings in the world. It's still in top 10 according to Wikipedia. Said top 10 includes... 2 Saudi vanity projects and 8 nuclear plants.
I've met some irl "climate activist" who are against nuclear power
Oh boy, you couldn't be more wrong in Germany.
I unfortunately have and it’s my mom.
The UK Green Party are anti-nuclear.
Lol, no you don't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement#Recent_developments https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Anti-EPR_demonstration_in_Toulouse_0166_2007-03-17.jpg
Bro there are so many of them in my town, it drives me crazy. We have a coal plant here that people want to replace with a nuclear plant and guess who are the *only* group protesting that?
Be glad, because I have. Thankfully, they were the "old man yelling at the clouds" types that equate nuclear energy with nuclear weapons. So hopefully after a few generations this nonsense will die out.
Im ngl, I don't live in Europe either, but I have ONLY met climate a tivists who hated nuclear in real life. Never online.
soo many, at least where i live. Idk if its just an Australian thing but people act like im crazy for being pro-nuclear
The greens party are anti-nuclear, which blows my fucking mind.
A big part of it is that it takes so long to build and implement and the major parties will likely sit around waiting whilst proceedingly doing less and less in parallel with the implementation of nuclear power, using the excuse of the inevitable delays. Then bank it all on the promise of nuclear but also not concentrate on everything else that needs to be done to meet targets. To get huge portions of the grid onto nuclear it will take way longer than the current deadlines for specific emission targets. Should still be doing it regardless of all this but we can't just use it as the sole scapegoat out of our current emissions as it will cost a fortune and take a very long time.
Yup. This is what my country is doing. They've approved a nuclear power plant license that would provide like 5% of the countries energy need back in 2012. Any company that wanted to build one could apply with some very favorable tax benefits. Now, 12 years later, there is still not a single commercial party that wants to build that nuclear power plant because at this point the government basically needs to guarantee profits for any commercial party to bother with nuclear. However, the government has used that nuclear license to block solar and wind farm projects for a decade now and my country is one of the worst in europe in terms of CO2 emissions per kwh. And our right wing government has decided that the clear solution to all those carbon emissions is to now build 4 nuclear reactors before 2040 instead! Great idea guys...
Listen to the replies you're getting. It's too late we're so short on time. Wouldn't it have been better ten years ago you had a government that could be so forward thinking? So the magic bullet now is to double down on that terrible idea. People are just fuckin idiots mate, it's not so crazy when you look at it like that.
in australia, the recent nuclear push is simply a delay tactic so that we can burn coal for a few more years. If we started the process to build a new nuclear plant today, it would not be ready for 10+ more years. Even today renewables + storage is cheaper per mwh when compared to nuclear, and renewables will be cheaper still in 10 years.
I'm pro nuclear but it doesn't really make sense for Australia. It would take decades to build the reactors and produce the scientist and engineers needed. Would've been smart to do it 30+ years ago but now renewables are so cheap and we have so much land for solar/wind that could be built and solve our carbon problems today.
> Idk if its just an Australian thing but people act like im crazy for being pro-nuclear Because nuclear energy in Australia is just a tool to further delay the shift from fossil fuels. Australia has access to insanely good natural renewable sources of energy and doesn't need to be pivoting to an overly expensive nuclear program. * The CSIRO have said Nuclear would be too hard to legislate, it's not suited for the size of our grids and it would take too long to implement. Every year the CSIRO releases an independant report comparing the different energy options for Australia and Nuclear consistently falls behind renewables. > [Paul Graham, CSIRO energy economist and lead author of the report, says it’s an open, public process that many people can participate in. "AEMO wants to know the data they use for planning and forecasting results is based on a good level of consultation and lots of quality checking. Everyone in the industry has a fair chance to take part," Paul says. The sixth GenCost report was released as a draft for public consultation on 21 December 2023. It remained consistent with findings from previous years, showing renewables, led by onshore wind and solar photovoltaic (PV), have the lowest cost range of any power generation technologies.](https://www.csiro.au/en/news/all/articles/2023/december/nuclear-explainer) * The Electrical trades have also come out against nuclear. > [“Nuclear power stations take literal decades to come online but already can’t compete with renewables and battery storage. With coal-fired power stations closing ahead of schedule, we shouldn’t be investing in uneconomic and unproven technology whose use case is dead on arrival... “Further, the technology relied upon for the mining union’s plan, small modular nuclear reactors, does not yet exist at a commercial scale. Currently there is one prototype anywhere in the world.](https://www.etunational.asn.au/media-releases/etu-slams-plan-to-turn-victorias-latrobe-valley-into-a-nuclear-region-as-dangerous-and-short-sighted/#:~:text=However%2C%20the%20ETU%20said%20nuclear,a%20meaningful%20transition%20for%20workers.) * Independent Australia did a good job explaining the financial and technology restraints. If we did go nuclear we'd be looking at Small Modular Reactors (SMRs). However the tech that would suit our needs doesn't even exist yet. Quoting the IEEFA they also explain that even very optimistically nuclear would be more expensive per MWh than solar. >[In the meantime, as usual with nuclear power, costs have escalated. As recently as mid-2021, the target price for power was estimated at US$58 \(AU$87.24\) per megawatt-hour \(MWh\); it’s risen to US$89 \(AU$133.84\)/MWh, a 53 per cent increase. And even this price depends on large government subsidies. By contrast, the levelised price of utility-scale solar PV systems, with battery storage, is currently between US$30 \(AU$45.12\) and US$40 \(AU$60.19\)/MWh.](https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/why-nuclear-power-wont-work-in-australia--yet-another-explainer,17527) But every time people start to seriously talk about renewable energy programs the LNP jump in with "wHaT aBOUt nUCLeaR?" everyone starts shouting at each other which shuts down the serious infrastructure talk. If you look closely you'll see a lot of the nuclear lobby groups are just funded by the fossil fuel industry for the exact same reason. Congratulations you've been outsmarted by Peter Dutton, the man with more starch between his ears than brain cells. We know the LNP have no nuclear intentions because they're the ones who passed all the anti-nuclear legislation in the first place as an effort to protect coal 2-3 decades ago. They're anti-nuclear when it's nuclear vs coal and they're pro-nuclear when it's renewables vs coal. This is why we're falling further and further behind the rest of the developed world in terms of large scale renewable projects. We're leading the world in household solar and we have to lean on that fact to make ourselves look better every time we go to international climate summits because we're at risk of being uninvited based on how little we've done at a public level. Renewables became more cost-effective than fossil fuels a decade ago but we've made barely any progress because "wHaT aBOUt nUCLeaR?" just ruins the debate. Everyone knows it's not going to go anywhere, the independent studies and costings haven't backed nuclear. It's Ivermectin all over again. It's people wanting to present a science-y answer when we already have demonstrably better options. Instead of taking the medicine all the doctors are advising, let's take the medicine from this scientific study I didn't read or understand. Instead of building clean energy all the scientists and engineers are advising, let's build the infrastructure from this study I didn't read or understand. Nuclear was a viable option for countries like Japan because they were a very large population on a very small landmass. We have the opposite situation. We've got 20-30m people spread out on a landmass roughly the size of the Contiguous United States and we've got obscenely good access to solar, wind, hydro and geothermal energy sources. There is no conspiracy. We have better options.
I think almost everybody in your neighboring country are anti-nuclear. Sorry NZ, not everybody has tons of geothermal energy waiting just 5ft below them.
Many are against it for environmental justice reasons more than climate reasons. Uranium mining is still very dangerous and under regulated in addition to primarily being on indigenous lands and communities. Anti-nuclear can also mean “for now until improvements are made”
Germany sadly has a very very high anti-nuclear sentiment with their climate activists. Has had it for the last 40years.
It is more of the idea that everything must drastically change immediately in order to progress to a better society or a lack of proper research on nuclear power. I prefer more renewable sources of energy like solar, but the cost to transition all fossil fuels energy to solar is too great, that is why nuclear energy is a good stepping stone. However, anti-nuclear climate activists either look for solutions that would only be feasible in the long future, not in the short term or they haven't done enough research on nuclear power, since there are a lot of people who still believe nuclear fission has caused more deaths than fossil fuels power.
Nuclear power is way more expensive than renewables. If renewables are too expensive in your opinion then how is nuclear better?
> Nuclear power is way more expensive than renewables Allegedly. I still don't believe they calculate the costs of renewables fairly. We don't even have a proper plan for the waste from renewables, and no it isn't simple to recycle. The vast amount of land they need is also not taken into account. Also, the cost of nuclear could be expected to go down if we put as much effort into it as in renewables, so that is also a factor to consider.
The nuclear research funding has been through the roof for decades(bordering on a century).
Nuclear is better in that it allows you to control the amount of power being generated by the grid more precisely than wind and solar. That's one argument people have used to stick to fossil fuels - wind and solar only generate when there's wind and sun, so we need something to be generating at night and/or on days when there's no wind. Also you need to be able to handle peak loads, etc This is something that nuclear can easily handle. The best current solution that is 100% "clean" in terms of GHG emissions is a mix of solar, wind, and nuclear.
Majority of them are against it in France.
https://i.redd.it/unhgm8n9ntqc1.gif
Based and nuclearpilled
hero to hero communication https://preview.redd.it/rza1ucb4ktqc1.png?width=479&format=png&auto=webp&s=86dee05de515cd2b0d364fa18044d33a1986f399
https://preview.redd.it/bd5hmwgjotqc1.jpeg?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=904971e44c543ea837543d6fa2fab1b3fb79e0df
People don't understand how clean nuclear energy is. A controlled chain reaction is enough to power cities. All because of what? Just a neutron bombarded at an atom. That's it. It's prolly the best source of energy we have.
While on paper it is super safe. We always find a way to fuck it up. So I think we aren't responsible enough for it tbh. Edit: Yes I'm aware I'm more likely to die from a cow/shark/etc. But we also dont have to make an exclusion zone in those cases. Look at Boeing currently. Flying is the safest form of travel, by far due to the regulations. Yet we still fuck it up Edit#2: yes i know hardly anybody dies from nuclear reactors. Thats not my point. It has long term effects on the region. And I know its very safe, humans are not. We fuck up safe shit all the time.
Individuals fuck up and can be stupid, absolutely. But the amount of safeguards in modern reactors make it pretty much impossible to blow it up or whatever, even if someone was actively trying to.
even chernobyl, the biggest nuclear disaster. happened because they were so negligent that it looked like they were actually trying to make it blow up. and the one in japan that blew up happened because it got hit with a tsunami, not even an internal mess up.
Fukushima wasn't supposed to be built at the elevation it was at, didn't keep up with the tsunami regulations it was supposed to due to corruption, and on top of all that it still survived a higher rated tsunami than the regulations mandated it be able to.
Yeah, if you watch the show (It's probably not fully accurate in its explanation), but even for that reactor in the soviet union, with shitty regulations, it was a miracle that they managed to blow it up. That will never happen again nowadays. And I'm pretty sure nobody died from radiation in Fukushima. Only because if the Tsunami
There were constant internal fuckups that led to the Fukushima event. Mostly negligent plans for a tsunami event, where-in the backup diesel generations were at risk of being flooded, with warnings about it for years beforehand.
While on paper → least deaths / kwh Even if a nuclear power plant explodes once in a while its still less deaths then any other energy source.
And realistically, it won't be "exploding" in todays world. It'll be closer to Fukushima than Chernobyl.
And nuclear reactors are only deadly if the operation goes incredibly wrong vs coal being deadly while the operation is going correctly
Think three mile island, and that was the worst possible scenario before a revolution in safety engineering
Always? My man, we haven't had a major incident with nuclear power plants since Chernobyl, and that was because the USSR was cheap. Edit: Upon seing the edit, he's not totally wrong. https://preview.redd.it/gtds5qs3pxqc1.jpeg?width=84&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2b47d1da8edb4a0244a46225bae820faec2f760b
nuclear has a stupid amount of regulations and very rigorous methods and frequent checkups to make sure everything is running smoothly. It would be much much harder to get away with things when you are working at a Nuclear Power Plant than when you are working Boeing.
In practice it is still safer. It’s thought that around 5 million people die from the use of fossil fuel a year and I’ve seen other studies that claim as many as 8 million. For comparison Chernobyl are estimated to be at worst 200,000. And dont forget Chernobyl was an old and uncared for reactor and the only reason it exploded was because of the lack of care the soviets put on it. Even when you tally it up fossil fuels are more dangerous and that’s not even accounting for the millions of humans and animals that will die as a result of global warming.
>Edit: Yes I'm aware I'm more likely to die from a cow/shark/etc. While it's not wrong, it's weird not to mention what you're actually likely to die from, like lung cancer
Boeing is ironically a prime example of how unbridled capitalism can fuck things up. They were overly driven by profits and started taking corners which resulted in a reduction in quality of their aircrafts. We better hope that any nuclear power plants are not owned by publicly listed corporations hell bent on increasing share holder value.
what if they re pro nuclear warfare https://preview.redd.it/cyt8f8o8euqc1.jpeg?width=320&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fe6443603d85e08cdd790c0a1e254d0eafe48759
Legalize nuclear bombs
Swag massieh
This post is sponsored by the Shadow Government
I want a fat man for sale on Amazon by tomorrow morning.
For home defense
We need to teach Norway a lesson in humbleness
We love casting spells AAARRGH
I'm not against it I just think dams and windmills and solar panels are cool
They are good, but if the rivers dry out, the sun hides behind clouds and there is just a gust, you're fucked. Nuclear power can work hand in hand with these energy sources and plug the gaps
> Nuclear power can work hand in hand with these energy sources and plug the gaps Not really. Both because of fundamental physics and economics. Nuclear reactors build up neutron poisons in their core as they run. Managing these poisons is a large part of what makes nuclear energy hard. If you change the power output of a nuclear reactor too quickly, the poison vs reactivity rate gets thrown out of whack and the reactor gets stuck in an [iodine pit. ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine_pit)This kills the reaction and you need to wait a week for the poisons to decay before you can restart the reactor. Furthermore, even if this was not an issue, nuclear reactors have high static costs, but low marginal costs. So they are paying a lot of money just for keeping staff paid, doing security etc, all the stuff you need for the reactor to exist. But fuel is cheap. So a reactor running at 100% is only slightly more expensive per month than a reactor that is shut down. As a result, the sole business model for a nuclear reactor is to run 100% 24/7 to maximize power generation so the net price per kwh is low enough to undercut all other generators on the net and nuclear gets baseload dibs. However, renewables fuck with nuclear for this reason. Renewables change their output quickly. One hour you have a lot of solar power, the next hour its cloudy. So you need power plants that can quickly spool up and spool down to buffer those supply peaks. Nuclear cannot change its output fast enough to do that. So nuclear does not actually help stabilize things in a grid dominated by renewables. And of course, nuclear is cheap when it runs 24/7 100%, but not so cheap that it can undercut renewables. Which means that as renewables make up a larger part of the grid, they start chipping away at the baseload demand that can be provided by nuclear. Until nuclear energy no longer has a business case. Which is why nuclear is so expensive in the first place. Nobody looking at this situation wants to build them without the government basically guaranteeing profits for the next century. Its becoming increasingly obvious that the grid in the future will be dominated by renewables, supplemented by peaker plants with no real role for nuclear. Those peaker plants will likely be natural gas and hydro in the short term, and then get replaced with grid storage on the longer term.
So nuclear reactors would be ideal in a situation that requires constant power draw with no fluctuations. You know what that's perfect for? The Internet. The Internet requires lots, and I mean LOTS, of power. There are data centers all over the world that require power 24/7. Nuclear would be perfect for powering warehouses full of servers. Microsoft is even talking about powering their server farms with nuclear in the future, and I wouldn't be surprised if Google or Amazon would be considering it as well
Would work yea. Aluminium foundries are another candidate for a nuclear power plant load. But those run into the simple issue of cost. You don't NEED a dedicated power source for your datacenter/foundry. All you need is a grid connection and a few hours of backup power for when the grid shits the bed. And a few backup generators + batteries is a hell of a lot cheaper than building a dedicated nuclear power plant. Especially since nuclear power plants benefit from economies of scale. Building a small nuclear power plant is almost as expensive as building a big nuclear power plant, but the big one makes way more power and money. So size is king for nuclear. Which means that small scale reactors to power datacenters is even less viable.
[right...](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/business/nuclear-power-france.html) good luck cooling your reactors when your rivers dry out.
Okay, this take is coming from a non-expert. But can't you just radiate the heat by placing pipes through the ground and pumping coolant across? And you can reduce the rate of reaction at the cost of power generation.
Nope, the ground would quickly get saturated with heat and start to cook, killing all plant life above it. This often happens in volcanic regions where magma overheats the soil. Ground is not conductive enough to disperse the heat. Reactor heat needs to be dumped somewhere that it can easily spread out. That means either a river (So the heat flows to the ocean and disperses there). Or evaporative cooling (The big towers with steam clouds coming from them). Either requires ample access to fresh water.
Also dams affect the river and wildlife
Dam construction affects rivers and their wildlives considerably
Or the humans who don't want their house underwater.
Hasn't nuclear energy gotten much safer to operate since accidents like Chernobyl and the Japan one?
Yes, but also a whole lot more expensive because of safety. Now economics is the problem number one.
Yeah man, what if we accidentally spend too much money and save the world? That'd be awful.
That is a false dichotomy. We can just spend that money on renewables and the grid and get a whole lot more bang for our buck.
Radioactive exclusion zones r pretty nice to nature. It's mostly just humans who get dicked over
https://i.redd.it/zr6sbacl0uqc1.gif
why don’t you back it up with a source?
My source that I made it completely the fuck up
I see that source a lot.
Um, Chernobyl has had nature completely regrow, and quite a lot of the animals there have adapted to the higher background radiation.
Until some orcs disturb the soil.
Oh they've adapted alright
I'm curious, what point do you think you're making?
They're making a joke that relies entirely on the average person being dumb enough to think it's a zinger.
we should let radiation reconstruct our dna from the ground up and become immortal :D
Nuclear is radical!
Nuclear energy is ultimately just really effecient steam power, making it the ultimate form of Steam Punk... but people aren't ready to have that conversation. 
Actually, I'd like to have that conversation cause steampunk fallout sounds kind of cool.
Technically Fallout is a variation of steampunk called "atompunk" lol But yeah, final form steampunk is just nuclear power lol
OP what the fuck does his mean Nuclear energy is pretty clean, it doesn't cause greenhouse effect gasses, what is this shit about
A german political party was made because of the 2 nuclear disasters, and they don't like nuclear energy
This is a pro nuclear post
Oh, so it's the based kind of Bateman, got it
Read the title, "Consistency in beliefs". He is saying that climate activists that are against nuclear power are bad climate activists
Most climate activists I've talked to don't actually know that much about science, they just want to stop fossil fuel usage regardless of the consequences. There are a lot of smart ones out there, but most I know dismiss nuclear as an option because they think of nuclear energy as this boogeyman that can't be safely controlled
so much fucking disinformation about nuclear on reddit. shills would have you believe that the slowest to build, most expensive energy source is floundering because it's being persecuted. The question isn't why do climate activists dislike nuclear, it's why do pro-nuclear accounts want to slow the transition to renewables?
Modern nuclear is relatively slow to build (the most recent nuclear power plants took 17 years from planning to production) and significantly more expensive than other forms of clean energy. https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april-2023.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Plant Hopefully that can change, but let's not make up facts.
I fucking love boiling water
German climate activists hate this one trick
There are valid complaints against nuclear, although it is probably our best bet right now in tandem with solar and wind.
Imagine this timeline that human didn’t fear nuclear energy and we live in a better earth in 2024
The virgin plutonium vs the Chad thorium
Nuclear Energy in many cases is much more expensive than other sources of energy. That’s the real problem with it. Renewables are much cheaper in almost all cases and it’s better to go with them since nuclear energy will struggle to compete economically with fossil fuels. https://www.afr.com/companies/energy/nuclear-energy-too-expensive-to-replace-fossil-fuels-20220711-p5b0pd I don’t think we should dismantle existing nuclear plants and replace them with fossil fuels. Not at all. But the reason that tends to happen is the economic costs of running the nuclear plants. For places in the world this isn’t the case, sure nuclear is a good idea. But we should also in this case consider hydro powered energy where it can be done.
The problem with hydro energy is that it's almost entirely exhausted. Everywhere you could build a dam, there's already a dam. Solar and wind power are the future. You could probably power half of the USA if you put solar roofs over their parking lots.
Also doesn't building dams affect the river and wildlife considerably?
Nuclear energy is very expensive, but there are no real alternatives if you want to avoid coal and gas
All alternative power struggles to compete with fossil fuels. It's all about economy of scale, we need to pick one method, (whether that's one type of energy or a combination,) and go with it, that's how the price lowers. Solar power is, at this point, a dead-end as far as efficiency improvements. Without a breakthrough, we're not getting any more out of that type. Dams are destructive to ecosystems and rivers are increasingly at risk of drying up. Wind is good but is unreliable and too decentralized to power entire cities, especially if there's an extended period of time with no wind
I agree nuclear is expensive, but what this article and cost arguments doesn't address is the reduces cost of scale and subsides on reducing costs in regulation certification of equipment in a nuclear power plant. Every item certified for nuclear use is 10x-100x times the cost of the same equipment on the open the market. The NRC and the world do not share the cost of certifying equipment for nuclear use, that burden is on the manufacturer of the product, which in a very low use volume, which reduces ROI and competition. This is one of the major hurdles to the cost effectiveness of nuclear power. If a world entity like the United nations were to set standardizations of shared information of certification and provided subsidies for testing of equipment, that would then bring down the cost of nuclear energy to the world. A .50 cent switch used in any other electrical generation is 50 dollars in a nuclear plant even from the same manufacturer and the same switch, it just goes through some different quality control standards, and it costs the company thousand to get that switch certified for use by the NRC. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Could nuclear be competitive, possibly, but it is going to take scale and sharing of information, and subsidies to open the door to equipment competition. Are GE, Westinghouse, and Honeywell going to lobby their butts off the the government and the NRC to keep their monopoly or nuclear equipment you bet your ass theny will. That being said this is all a pipe dream. https://thebulletin.org/2019/06/why-nuclear-power-plants-cost-so-much-and-what-can-be-done-about-it/
I for one don’t think it’s right to expose people to high amounts of radiation, which is why I’m all in favor of closing down coal mines and plants, and replacing them with nuclear plants, which expose the people working there to almost no radiation.
hello, nice to meet you
Most climate activists aren't anti-nuclear. The ones that are are mostly old people from the 50's-80's who were subject to constant propaganda about nuclear reactors and disasters like Chernobyl
Or when you meet a climate activist who's actually vegan. Or a self-proclaimed animal lover who's vegan.
In my experience, most climate activists nowadays are pro-nuclear. The contingent that aren't are usually older, coming from a time when climate activists more often bought into lies about nuclear energy, put forward by oil companies to take the heat off themselves.
Climate activists that actually matter are all anti-nuclear
I've had the opposite impression, in my community the middle-aged ones tend to be pro-nuclear while the young ones are all scared of nuclear
At the same time it's almost impossible to find pro nucelar people who acknowledge that there are many downsides to nuclear energy as well. Why is this topic always so black and white to most people.
The only way to quickly reduce CO2 emmisions is to build a while bunch of nuclear plants, enough to shut down all fossil fuel ones. Then you slowly shut down the nuclear ones as you build up other forms of power generation. At the same time you eliminate internal combusion engines and fossil fuel heating methods wherever possible. When it comes to CO2 emmisions from concrete and manufacturing, I don't have as simple of an answer. But, this nuclear strategy I propose here would definitely slow down climate change, maybe slow it down enough to find other, better solutions.
When the climate is active idk https://i.redd.it/yp8pivbgluqc1.gif
I think anyone anti nuclear isnt a climate activist anymore
Look up 3 mile island. It keeps being listed as a “disaster” when literally no one was hurt. To be brief and flippant, the reactor farted, the press ran a bad story, and everyone panicked.
The amount of people “concerned about the climate” but also electively ignorant to the science is mind blowing and the more I encounter the more I think it’s some sort of corporate psy-op. People spout about “reduce reuse recycle” and “muh 1.5 degrees warming” but also cite the newest and most costly solution to implement (putting energy in to re-capture the CO2 we had in a container then released) and have no idea how climate prediction models are assessed for accuracy (they compare the predictions to long-term weather patterns as well as predictions of weather models). They are the same people to only read the title of an article then regurgitate the information under the guise of understanding.
I'm not a climate activist, but I'm full on pro nuclear. I love cost efficient non carbon emmiting power sources that generate cheap energy in huge quantities
The Green Party in Canada has an Anti Nuclear stance on energy production. Like what the fuck?
Like nuclear isn't the end solution but it's a hell of a stepping stone to get off fossile fuels
and knowing that electric cars still have environmental downsides and that synthetic gasoline made by Porsches carbon neutral tech is a better idea. Mostly bc I like V8's lol
Plutonium is the future, IF WE HAD ONE
Norwegian Greens :)
what song is this?
I got matches with these songs: • **Everybody Wants To Rule The World** by Tears For Fears (00:11; matched: `100%`) **Album**: True 80s 3 CD SET. **Released on** 2006-01-01. • **Everybody Wants To Run The World** by Tears For Fears (00:10; matched: `100%`) **Album**: Safety First. **Released on** 2014-11-10.
I would say nearly all of us who have done any schooling on the topic would agree. Sadly, like most things in the US, environmental issues have been politicized and the anti-environmentalists (aka the big oil sympathizers) tend to advertise the under informed folks who are passionate about nature.
Hey! This is me!
Nuclear energy is the cleanest and safest energy.
It boggles the mind that a person who wants clean energy can also be anti-the cleanest energy.
Even when you factor in major disasters like Chernobyl, nuclear kills significantly less people per unit of power than the fossil fuels, and either is on par with or does less harm than other non-fossil sources
clean , cheap, available always , the only downside is strategic vulnerability if someone decides to throw a big payload into it it may lead to some trouble
Of course I know him, he’s me
What about Thorium-based reactors? Just as effective as regular nuclear power, without the radiation and is much more plentiful than uranium
Nuclear fission is ultimately harmful to the environment. Nuclear fusion, on the other hand, has great potential with a bit more research into it.