• Fedizen@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    people say “clean” when they mean “doesn’t produce greenhouse gasses”. Nuclear power is absolutely not “clean”. Waste sites will need to be monitored for like a thousand years to prevent everything from natural disaster leakage to terrorist aquisition of nuclear materials. The reality is a new powerplant is just the 5% down payment on a nuclear waste mortgage.

    • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Waste sites will need to be monitored for like a thousand years to prevent everything from natural disaster leakage to terrorist aquisition of nuclear materials

      Or build breeder reactors to convert the waste back into fuel and eliminate it entirely. Building nuclear power would literally reduce the amount of nuclear waste we have versus doing nothing.

      And yet, all these pseudoscience anti nuclear people who talk about nuclear waste all the time don’t seem to be advocating for that. Curious, isn’t it?

      • Fedizen@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Look the psuedoscience anti nuclear people aren’t going to be what kills nuclear power.

        The problem is the option is to “replace pseudo science oil barons with pseudo science nuclear power barons.” Society isn’t largely run by scientists, its run by lawyers and business idiots.

        If you operate under the assumption nuclear will be treated more carefully and delicately than oil, well I too would like to live in that star trek communism universe.

        It will get dumped in water supplies. It will end up in food supplies. The reality is there is a difference between “looks good on paper” and “even some lawyer who doesn’t believe in germ theory won’t fuck it up”.

        • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          That’s a very valid point, but it isn’t unique to nuclear. Solar panel manufacturing produces some nasty chemical waste. Some might be manufactured using hydrofluoric acid even, which scares the living shit out of me.

          There are going to be safety and waste issues with everything, and they’re going to be different types of hazards. I would rather drink water contaminated with some nuclear waste than have contact with hydrofluoric acid. Ideally I’d like neither.

          I’m not entirely sure what the solution is. It’s hardly worse than oil (which also uses HF!), but that’s not adequate. What we need is regulations and regulators that make it cheaper to throw as much safety factors as possible on something vs pay fines for violations. I’m confident we have the technology needed, we just need to make sure it’s actually used.

      • nao@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        If the pro nuclear people managed to build something that actually eliminates nuclear waste, it would take away most arguments of the anti nuclear people.