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Public trust in governments and the private sector is at an all time low, all around the world. And that’s an earned reputation.
Nuclear energy is a promising solution, but there are risks associated with it that cannot be ignored.
Can you trust a government that can’t even feed it’s poor and house them to properly dispose of all nuclear waste used at scale? I doubt it. Even if it’s done right for a while, that handling will erode because everything in our system does. That’s the problem.
The question isn’t just efficacy of the technology. It’s implementation. Execution. Maintenance. Long term sustainability.
what about a cow shark.
You can say that but I remember Fukushima. The damage causes by the Fukushima meltdown cost more than the power company’s total profits in Japan over the previous 40 years.
So keep telling me that nuclear is safe, and I’ll keep pointing to the damage it is guaranteed to cause. Low risk high consequence situations are the hardest to regulate. And you’re risking your entire city, all at once, everything in it.
But look, the real question is what new sources to build. Current sources will stay online for years or decades. For new production, the cheapest by far is solar, followed by wind, as long as the externalities are dumped back on the utilities. Also, home solar means the utilities can’t price gouge you.
There’s been what, three disasters total similar to the one in Fukushima? And remind me, how many people died from that one? Was it one guy?
it isnt about the total DC its about lasting damage in the affected people and environment
Are you suggesting that Fukushima did more lasting damage to the environment than the fossil fuel industry…?
Yeah nobody ever died here (an uranium mine) and you absolutely don’t need any fossil fuel to make it works.
Nuclear energy is better than fossils, but it’s far from green.
Nuclear causes the fewest deaths out of all available energy sources, except solar, which is a tiny bit lower in that regard. Both wind and hydro have a higher death toll, with wind being just slightly above nuclear, and hydro being a lot higher (about 40x more deaths).
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh
Usually I wouldn’t cite this source, but in this case their data matches other, more trustworthy ones, and is the first that shows up in search engines.
It also have a bit of due to regulations making sure people who work on nuclear are way more compentent, while other green energy infrastructure can be built by rando workers like your roads and such. Kind of similar to how air travels are the safest only because of strict protocols and requirements to work on it.
This is probably true when it comes to wind, but deaths from hydro is all about dams breaking.
Those deaths are counted in my 5 k
You actually don’t need any fossil fuel to make it work. You just have to electrify the mining machinery then you can power it with solar, wind, hydro and nuclear.
“You just have”… that wishful-thinking and technosolutionism.
China is doing that. It does make sense as mining operations tend to also are far out so not needing to send fuel in would allow the less dense battery to pay itself off if the operation goes long enough.
Electrification of the operation also could benefit if we get better technique to process nuclear to convert some of them to energy on site
Thank God. I’ve never even seen a cow, but I swim wish sharks daily. I have a few small cuts that still bleed a bit when I get into the water, and the sharks have been acting a lot more aggressive and bitey than normal.
I was really starting to get worried until I saw this post.
Incidentally, I live in Sacramento, in the California Central Valley, which is desert. Recently, its gotten up to 117° here (which is still low compared to Death Valley).
Solar is awesome.
It is great, I love solar, I just hate when the sun goes down and my rates spike cause my panels are out of the sun.
Battery technology is booming!
Global grid-scale and stationary battery storage capacity *(Most of that is pumped styorage) is roughly 0.45 TWh We need 31,779 TWh to meet global energy demand for a year (2025) so if your running a world wide grid of renewables that means you want enough batteries to cover 25% of that load to cover bad weather events…
Lifepo4 batteries are available at 100$/kWh so… Why waiting for anything global when you can improve your energy bill by yourself?
Got to start somewhere I guess
How many cases of cancer are caused by burning fossil fuels and micro plastics from tires? I bet a fucking dick load.
All the nuclear stuff happens in one place, with a few people minding it. But they do have to be super careful and know what they’re doing.
And if there’s a critical flaw in the reactor design (looking at you Chernobyl) it can go very very wrong.
Renewables are all spread out, and a lot more people manage it for the power output.
That also means a lot more people have power-related jobs.
Fossil Fuels, Methane (Natural Gas) and Coal are just ugly all around. But they have really, really great lobbyists.
The RBMK design was outdated 10 years before construction… but yeah lets unironically compare a model T Ford with no automatic controls slop welded together with shit tolerences and barely any control systems to a modern car with sensors and with safety features because they are both examples of a car.
There’s two problems, and the Kurzgesagt two-parter on nuclear fission power discusses them both.
One is that nuclear power plants are long term projects and you’re stuck with what you built, even as improved versions are designed and flaws are discovered with what you have. Yes, sometimes we retrofit our nuclear plants to make them safer (or more efficient, or prettier).
The other is that contractor firms have had a bad habit of just designing the same simple LWRs over and over again, even as engineers have developed designs that are safer, more efficient, more elegant, etc.
But this doesn’t mean either of those can change.
China seems to be leading the way in LSRs. Using water as a modulator is very old tech.
Nuclear is cool. With proper regulation, it’s amazing!
BUT, it’s not what we must be focusing on right now. Renewable sources of energy are safer and much MUCH cheaper to implement than nuclear. Also, renewables don’t require decades to come online.
So, “why renewables? Just go nuclear brooo” is a bad bad argument, likely made in bad faith by OnG companies to delay implementation of renewables.
The goal should be “how do we go from the status quo to a non GHG emitting source of energy generation as fast as possible?”.
Nuclear doesn’t compete with wind and solar. You can put up wind and hydro cheaply and quickly almost anywhere, and that’s great and all and we should honestly subsidize manufacture inside Europe rather than just rely on buying from China.
But you still need base load and nuclear is the only option that makes any sense on scale from an ecological perspective. Hydro is highly situational and almost always a worse option for the environment, as well as for safety. Coal plants should never be an option.
So yeah, just go nuclear bro.
There is no one ideal energy source. The best approach is, as always, to diversify. Relying completely on one source is irresponsible. Nuclear with renewables is a fantastic mix. Especially in countries that can’t reliably generate significant amounts of electricity with hydro.
Renewable sources of energy are safer
They’re actually not, generally speaking. All types of renewable energy, with the exception of solar, cause more deaths than nuclear does.
- https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh
- https://cheatsheets.davidveksler.com/deaths-per-terawatt-hour.html
Some articles report slightly lower death tolls for renewables, but don’t provide any sources for that data. Geothermal energy, which neither of the two sources above includes for some reason, sits right next to wind, so slightly above nuclear in terms of deaths caused per terawatt-hour.
I live by a bunch of nuclear plants. One day, I got a text alert from the government saying something was going on at one of the nuclear plants. I decided I was probably already going to die and the went back to watching porn on the toilet. I will have my dream of being an environmental telling skeleton.
Genuinely curious as to how and where we got the 140k deaths from renewables? It doesn’t appear on the paper you linked but it cites the structural collapse of a Hydroeletric Dam in china which caused 230k deaths.
I’m curious where you got the renewables figure from, is it from dam collapses (which are structural failures rather than a product of the power source) or is there some sort of issue with wind turbines where they magically sprout legs and march into Cities like Godzilla with PMS?
You havent been attacked by a solar panel? Theyre awfully vicious in my area /s
Real answer is probably engineering issues, DIY, and a healthy dose of propaganda-number-fudging
I left solar off cause its the safest only deaths are falls and accidental electrocutions unless you count the odd deaths from being hit in the head or crushed.
So the solar panels do attack people.
Just as often as your roofs attack people
Only if you’re careless and forget their deepest desire is to end you while you’re installing them. Make sure they’re properly secured and they will vent their rage as electricity for your use.
The chinese claim only 26k deaths some estimates place it at 260k deaths i’m not being exact its a ballpark. No one source tracks all deaths from renewables or fossil fuels or nuclear. 52 dams collapsed not one.
structural failures rather than a product of the power source
and what do you think collapsed the dams if not the power source?
Its mismanagement and failure to properly engineer for the situation on hand. Water is heavy the built weak dams to generate hydro power. They had a cascade of containment failure events. likely ~130k people died directly from this event. The other ~10k is a rough estimate on other deaths from similar incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_station_failures
so… hydroelectric power stations collapsed, thus renewable energies like wind turbines and solar power are bad?
Wind and solar aren’t bad, they’re approximately the same as nuclear. You’ll find them at the bottom of this table.
Energy source Deaths/TWh Brown coal 32.72 Coal 24.62 Oil 18.43 Biomass 4.63 Gas 2.82 Hydropower 1.30 Wind 0.04 Nuclear 0.03 Solar 0.02 If nuclear is too scary because it killed ~5k why is hydro considered safe when it has a kill count 100X higher?
that’s not the question here. Why are you throwing unrelated things in with hydro?
Ah yes the unrelated renewable sources that doesn’t make up 1/2 of all renewables production.
https://ourworldindata.org/renewable-energyyour post wasn’t about percentage of generation, it was about quantity of deaths
Here it is ladies and Gents the magic commenter will now read my mind and tell you what I the OP intended when I the same OP made the post. It definitely wasn’t to point out how uninformed people like skullgrid@lemmy.world pretend nuclear will kill them and their families instantly and ruin the planet for all time because they were raised on and force fed anti nuclear propaganda. It definitely was not to point out that humans are terrible at assessing danger and risks on a large scale. I’m sure you are one of the people who thinks its safer to drive coast to coast than fly.
Flood control is often the goal of dams.
At the time, Chinese construction workers had no experience with building major reservoirs and, as a result, the design and construction was completely under the guidance of experts from the Soviet Union. The design of the dams overly focused on the purpose of water storage (for hydro electric power generation and farming) while overlooking the capacities of preventing floods.
When you burn the remains of these ancient life forms it releases their ghosts and that’s what kills so many when they breathe haunted air
Is the implication that NIMBYs are generally speaking pro-renewables? Because my experience is that they fucking hate wind power because they think they look ugly.
If anything, nuclear is more popular with the NIMBY crowd around here since you need fewer of them, and the chances of them happening to be in your backyard is hence way lower.
Read the thread and tell me most the people here are not in my back yards
Yeah there’s a reason I’m leaving the energy sector. The choice to use fossil fuels for grid in the last 50yrs has been and will continue to be a purely political one.
Absolute numbers are meaningless. It needs to be weighted against how much electricity was produced with each.
(And why is solar not mentioned? Plenty of solar installers die from falling off of roofs and whatnot.)
On the site there is also a direct comparison: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh
Grouping Hydro with other renewables is not very nice for wind and solar, which are pretty safe - with the added benefit of being cheaper than nuclear power.
And Nuclear is on par with the safety of solar and wind but you seem prompt to forget that. Your also not counting the cost incurred by renewables being non continuous sources of power. So yes it is cheaper to run a wind or solar farm untill you have to kick on the peaker plant cause the wind died and teh sun went down unless your in one of the super rare places that has pumped storage.
That is outdated information, renewables + battery storage have become cheaper than nuclear power.
Side note, not relevant to discussion:
And Nuclear is on par with the safety of solar and wind but you seem prompt to forget that.
This feels rude. Your post already mentions safety of nuclear power as does the link I posted. Just from the fact that I did not reiterate that information you insinuate an opinion on my side that I did neither write nor imply.
why is solar not mentioned >Because when a accident happens on a solar farm its one guy eating a few KW or falling not entire towns worth of people being erased.
Because when a accident happens on a solar farm its one guy eating a few KW or falling not entire towns worth of people being erased.
So, killing people one by one doesn’t matter – only matters if a lot of people die at once?
im not here to play the trolley problem with you. Solar is the safest. It just doesn’t run all day so to compensate we need something that does like nuclear.
DEATHS per TWH
Nuclear is actually a very poor fit for baseline power because of the high costs involved and the problem of it being expensive and slow to turn on or off. Kept turned off, nuclear is a massive money bleeder which is why investment companies rarely touch them.
Because solar and wind are variable, you need a baseline that’s also variable to be able to quickly compensate. The only real viable options are battery power (harder to scale), hydro (geographically limited) and unfortunately gas power plants (polluting, but cheap). Nuclear is excellent stable power, good if solar/wind are never able to reach 100% of needs, but multiple countries have now shown that that is very much within the realm of possibilities.
Biggest issue with nuclear remains cost, excessively long time to build and if there’s a drought you don’t get enough water to cool with so you need to switch it off (see Hungary and France these days to see the very expensive consequences of that).
Biggest issue with nuclear remains cost, excessively long time to build and if there’s a drought you don’t get enough water to cool with so you need to switch it off (see Hungary and France these days to see the very expensive consequences of that).
Sigh, thats not how any of that works. The plants can run fine in an environment that is much hotter than current the issue is the water they would release back into the river would be hotter than the fish like and cause lower oxygen concentrations as the water temp rises. Its an enviromental protection law and could easily be solved by just not dumping the water directly into the river and instead using it for other industrial and utility purposes till it cools. You should read into this.
im not here to play the trolley problem with you.
No, no – I’m here for the trolley problems!
Let’s fucking go!
You are the conductor of the train the switch track is ahead there are two lines of equal length between you and your destination both 1000km long. one is clear 999km and has one guy on the last km of track before your station. The other line has 83 guys tied up over the next 1000km basically one per 120km.
I’d be willing to put money on the amount of deaths from fossil fuel power generation related accidents (mining coal isn’t exactly the safest job) is higher than the rest on its own. Even before the millions who’ve had their lives shortened by the pollution.
