Discussion question- do folkx here consider nuclear clean and/or green?
Discussion question- do folkx here consider nuclear clean and/or green?
As the title says, I'm interested in this community's perceptions on nuclear energy.
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I see nuclear as a transitory source of energy. It doesn't emit any greenhouse gases and FAR better than fossil fuels. We could easily transition to it faster and more cheaply than solar, wind, etc currently. Deaths associated with fossil fuel energy greatly exceed those associate with nuclear energy.
Burning fossil fuels needs to stop and we need to bring down carbon levels to what they were 20+ years ago. Ideally, transitioning to nuclear would be cheap/fast while we build out solar and wind infrastructure, and research how to make these sources of energy more effective.
However, I'm not a policy nor energy expert by any means. I'm just some random person on the internet.
Practical experience shows that nuclear is neither cheap or fast, with ongoing constructions being massively delayed and way over budget.
I would have agreed with you 20 years ago, but now we have way better alternatives and nuclear is too slow to make a difference.
NIMBY is also another factor that delays new nuclear plants. That said, safety is another big concern here. Although not at an nuclear energy facility, there was that incident recently at Los Alamos National Laboratory researching nuclear weapons where they placed 8 rods of plutonium next to each other that could have triggered a disaster. Very high safety standards are required, and humans are known for making stupid decisions.
Well there is a very good reason why modern nuclear reactors have a negative void coefficient (you just turn off the neutron source and the reactor naturally turns itself off
Or if really paranoid have a supply of Xenon-135 handy and that reactor will be shutdown in microseconds (which by the way is naturally produced by the reactor itself and why early prototype rectors kept turning themself off after running for a bit)
Ugh, that picture makes me shudder. All it would take is a rod rolling to set off a terrible explosion.
It's interesting to me that the conversation has shifted so far from ecological footprinting to carbon footprinting. I don't think the Navajo Nation would agree that nuclear energy creates less emissions that coal. The mining and end life of nuclear energy is just too toxic for me to ever consider it clean or green.
Of course, I also have an issue with hydropower, so 🤷🏻
The question was whether or not nuclear is clean or green. To which my answer is "no", but "better than fossil fuels". If we were to shut down all the nuclear power plants in the world today, much of the world would switch to burning more fossil fuels because in much of the world it's still the most cheapest form of energy. Someone else in this thread already mentioned it, but fossil fuel energy facilities/sources should be decommissioned first before nuclear.
I have some friends in Germany and it's really wacky how many people there straight up hate nuclear, they're cheering on coal n stuff and destroying land for it