Your opinion on nuclear power?

[MS-06FZ Zaku II Kai]

Do you think nuclear power has a future despite all the PR dissasters surrounding it (Chernobyl, Fukushima) and do you think there will be some interesting future developments such as fussion reactors and so on?

Personaly, I want reactor in every household entire globe covered in Nuclear powerplants, Nuclear powered house apliances, cars, airplanes, spaceships, cereals.

I WANT TO BASK IN THE HOLY GLOW

 

Just a thought, wanna hear your thoughts

[lazygecko]

Pretty sure the coal and fossil industry in the US has been heavily involved in lobbying against further investment and research in nuclear power. Way, way more people have died and suffered adverse health effects from coal power compared to nuclear.

[Biodegradable]

Given its reputation with being associated with aforementioned disasters and the problem with nuclear waste, I prefer looking towards solar, wind and hydro-powered energy alternatives. They seem like much less of a threat to public health and the environment. That being said, while nuclear power is scary, I'd be happy to hear more arguments in its favour and learn more.

 

I remember a friend arguing about the benefits of Nuclear Fusion compared to Nuclear Fission years ago back in high school, claiming that the former doesn't produce nuclear waste? He might've been wrong, but I've never looked that far into it, honestly.

Edited August 21, 2021 by Biodegradable

[DavitW]

Solar power is useless. Fusion power is the way of the future.

[Charlie Love]

I think there's a lot of potential in thorium as a way to transition to cleaner alternatives. It doesn't melt down and doesn't appear to be possible to be weaponized like the current nuclear implementation. It's still incredibly toxic, but so is coal and fuel.

[Clippy]

We should make special shoes that harness the power of walking so when you come home it plugs into your house to run small appliances. Popcorn would taste better

[Omniarch]

Nuclear all the way, baby. Decades of living with the active threat of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War combined with a small number of high-profile disasters have soured public opinion of Nuclear far beyond the point of reason. Today's reactors are not yesterday's reactors. It is telling that it took a 9 magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami to instigate disaster in a modern facility. And even then, despite the scope and material cost of the Fukushima disaster, there is currently only one death attributed to the incident, and, while more will likely follow, the toll will never match that of the coal-mining industry, for example.

 

Renewables are still worthwhile, afaik, but are not a viable solution in all circumstances. Obviously fusion power would be preferable, but that tech has an annoying habit of remaining just beyond the edge of feasibility.

[Naarok0fkor]

We went to fast with nuclear power. There are too many nuclear power plants & too much nuclear waste. More research is a necessity. I wish that petroleum & other fossil fuels are going to be abandonned...a century ago...

[Gez]

2 hours ago, MS-06FZ Zaku II Kai said:

Do you think nuclear power has a future despite all the PR disasters surrounding it (Chernobyl, Fukushima) and do you think there will be some interesting future developments such as fusion reactors and so on?

There's been a few such disasters, but there's no comparable outcry for the damage caused by coal plants (including, yes, radioactive contamination, actually) when they're operating normally.

 

There's also been disasters involving pesticide plants, like in Seveso or Bhopal, and yet where's the outcry against pesticides?

 

Nuclear power is not optimal, but as far as energy requirements, there aren't any miracle solution. Even renewable energies have their own share of actual environmental problems. All in all, nuclear power is far from being the worst choice available today; it's certainly better than coal or gas.

[omx32x]

nuclear energy is the only thing that can save us from the future oil crisis and it poses no threat to us if we do it right

 

we should have been using it way way more then we do

[CBM]

1 hour ago, Clippy said:

We should make special shoes that harness the power of walking so when you come home it plugs into your house to run small appliances. Popcorn would taste better

like a joke but I will type this anyway...

there are watches and other small devices that do that but the power that can be saved up is very very little

 

7 minutes ago, omalefico32x said:

nuclear energy is the only thing that can save us from the future oil crisis and it poses no threat to us if we do it right

 

we should have been using it way way more then we do

agreed

Edited August 21, 2021 by CBM

[Clippy]

2 minutes ago, CBM said:

like a joke but I will type this anyway...

there are watches and other small devices that do that but the power that can be saved up is very very little

 

agreed

 

I got 14000+ steps today with my Fitbit today I could have ran a microwave with that

[CBM]

Just now, Clippy said:

 

I got 14000+ steps today with my Fitbit today I could have ran a microwave with that

nah, but maybe a toy one with a small red led inside

[magicsofa]

It's easily the most powerful and least impactful way we have to generate large amounts of electricity. France knows what's up.

Wind and solar are also useful though, one reason being that they can scale down to smaller applications, including ones that aren't dependent on a major grid. So really a combination approach is best.

Really though, our dependency on energy should also be reduced a lot. Considering the fact that no nation has an outstanding way to fulfill the demand for endlessly driving around in our cars and staring at screens, that dependency is probably going to be forcibly reduced as our current methods get decimated by changing conditions. Good luck!

[Argent Agent]

Nuclear is far safer, cleaner, and has killed far fewer people than fossil fuels have... plus nuclear waste is fairly low in volume and has multiple purposes (from being reprocessed into plutonium fuel to nuclear medicine and scientific purposes). Just don't cut corners when building plants and build them in smart locations. We'll need every bit of clean technology that we can use to get ourselves out of this big pit that the fossil fuel industry has dug for humanity...

[DuckReconMajor]

I generally assume people have watched these but just in case 

 

 

[Stupid Bunny]

Yeah I'm all for developing renewable sources of energy but seriously anybody who sincerely cares about averting climate crisis is mad if they discount nuclear power as an option.  I mean yes the USSR came dangerously close to poisoning the world that one time but there's ways to scale down individual reactors and also to build them so they, like, don't do that.  I think the drive in a lot of countries to denuclearize their power grids is shortsighted in the extreme and the aversion a lot of people have to it, while understandable, is reactive and based like others have said on a few highly sensationalized disasters that overshadow the actually poor health and safety record of fossil fuel power.

 

@Biodegradable if my understanding of the nuclear fusion process is correct then yes there should ultimately be no radioactive waste produced.  In fact it would produce helium just like in our lovely sun, which could be an added bonus since helium is otherwise rare and nonrenewable on earth what with being inert and super light and all.  Although I was just reading some thing from the bulletin of atomic scientists (the folks who do the Doomsday Clock thing) about how waste is produced, which would as I understand it would not be a byproduct of the fusion reaction but rather would take the form of irradiated assemblage from the reactor itself--bits that get messed up by constant neutron bombardment and become radioactive in the process.  At any rate I'm not an atomic scientist myself believe it or not so I'm taking all of this with a grain of salt

Edited August 21, 2021 by Stupid Bunny

[Urthar]

Decommissioning costs for fisson reactors are substantial even for modern reactors that have been designed to be safely decommissioned. For sites that have suffered a major disaster or were originally built without any plan for decommissioning, the costs far out weight any benefits and will literally take decades to clean up, in some cases as much as 120 years.

 

So a modern reactor typically has a life-span of about 40 years, which means any more reactors we build now will be due for decommissioning in the 2060s. Which is about the time we are due to hit 4 degrees global warming. Now, 4 degrees above pre-industrial levels is the point at which a lot of scientists believe modern technological civilisation will break down or collaspse, so the societies of the latter 21st century may simply not have the capability to deal with this.

 

I think the best thing we can do for future generations is decommision as many sites as we can, and limit the amount of new ones we build.

[SiMpLeToNiUm]

I don't have any strong opinions since I'm not a scientist, but if they can make it scalable and safe at the same level as the energies we currently use, I'm all for it. Research into alternative energy sources sooner rather than later is paramount if sustainability and safeguarding the planet is something we'd like to see.

[ChopBlock223]

Better than wind power and solar power with far less of an environmental effect. Far less environmental effect than coal (which spews out much more radiation), and less accident prone than hydroelectric dams. People's perception of nuclear power comes from The Simpsons.

[Snark]

The best thing with nuclear power is that it gave us S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

[Jello]

Nuclear power is the cleanest, safest, most productive energy source available to humans. The only issues we've had with it are from human failures like Three Mile Island, or Chernobyl. Fukushima was a natural disaster that could not be controlled.

 

If you factor in the hundreds of deaths per year in coal mining, natural gas, and oil industries, nuclear power is one of the safest energy sources ever created. If it goes wrong, it goes wrong in a big way.

 

But Chernobyl was an aberration. It was a bunch of second shift Ukrainians trying to follow Russian instructions to do a test shutdown on a plant that wasn't using the correct dampening rods in the first place. It was literally a disaster waiting to happen.

 

The French have shown clearly what can be done in modern Nuclear facilities with competent workers when proper procedure are in place, and workers are trained correctly.

[MortarCasualty]

It's expensive to manufacture and run the machines for any energy source, ironically, even clean ones like windpower, those turbines take oil to build!

So the goal is to go with something stable that eats resources slowly and lasts. Geothermal energy is okay at this but nuclear is hands-down winner.

The best thing would be to build plants in fairly isolated areas, the distance cost is worth the risk mitigation.

[RDETalus]

I think if you worry about climate change, then nuclear reactors should be an obvious solution because nuclear disasters and waste management are localized problems whereas the climate affects the entire world.

[RDETalus]

6 hours ago, Urthar said:

Now, 4 degrees above pre-industrial levels is the point at which a lot of scientists believe modern technological civilisation will break down or collaspse

What is the mechanism that would cause this collapse exactly? I don’t think there is any reason a technological civilization cannot survive in a +4 C warmer world, so my assumption is that we’re talking about sudden social upheaval or sudden biosphere collapse.

[Mr. Freeze]

Overrated. It's stupidly expensive, and the cost is always lied about by the nuclear lobby so people think it's cheaper than renewables (it is not.) It's also much slower than alternative/renewable energy as far as environmental impact is concerned- most nuclear plants take ten years to build! 

[Jello]

All power plants follow the same design. You boil water to turn a large magnet/turbine, which generates electric current through induction. Nuclear reactors are more efficient at generating heat than coal fired power plants because they require less material to generate heat, and less cost to reduce their emissions.

 

You would have an extremely hard time getting enough power from solar panels to supply even a town of 10,000 with electricity. It needs to come from combustible or fissile materials, and nuclear reactors seem to be the cleanest, most sustainable sources of heat production available. Those and hydroelectric dams, but people seem to hate damming waterways as well. But we all want electricity. It's a bit of a conundrum.

Edited August 22, 2021 by Jello

[RDETalus]

There are also several billion tons of uranium dissolved in the sea water which would provide quite a lot of fuel IF extraction methods are developed.

[Gez]

2 hours ago, Jello said:

Those and hydroelectric dams, but people seem to hate damming waterways as well.

The problem with dams is that you need a lot of concrete to build them. Like, really a fucking lot. And to make concrete, you need sand -- itself not an infinite resource because only certain types of sands are usable, you cannot use desert sand for example, that's why countries like Saudi Arabia actually import sand even if it seems like a joke -- and you need cement which is made by cooking up limestone to over a thousand degrees in giant kilns. Guess what the carbon footprint of all that ends up being.

 

You have to factor in the construction cost, not just the use cost, and that's where renewables suffer. All those rare earths going into solar panels and wind turbines? Yeah, you can look up at the environmental impact of that.

 

1 hour ago, RDETalus said:

There are also several billion tons of uranium dissolved in the sea water which would provide quite a lot of fuel IF extraction methods are developed. 

It's quite unlikely you'd get more energy out of that than it would take to extract it.

 

Which is the problem with fusion power by the way. Given that the conditions for fusion to be self-sustaining is "be a star-sized mass of hydrogen" and this is... difficult... to replicate on Earth, your average Tokamak consumes several orders of magnitude more energy than they generate.

[Jacek Bourne]

Nuclear power is far better than probably every other source if they can find something to do with the radioactive waste other than burying it in the desert.