A community discussing nuclear power, including fission and fusion. The goal is to talk about generated nuclear power, so avoid simply talking about stars or something unless it is relevant.
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lemmy.ml’s code of conduct
There have been accidents, disasters, and ecological damage with every single energy generation method.
Many countries are using nuclear effectively, especially France, which gets like 70% of its power from nuclear.
France is “effectifly” extracting it’s uranium from countries like Congo, Niger, provoking countless political disasters over time, ruining others countries environments etc. That’s how.
There are zero catastrophes with wind, water or earth energy because when you shut it down, it is off and possess no further potential to harm people. This is the big difference and this is when you are wrong.
Many providers using green energy, and I get my energy from a provider that is 100 percent green since over 20 years now.
France has 23 percent green energy, this is more than in some other countries and plans to push it forward until 2050, like most EU states. The point why I mention it is that those numbers are constantly increasing and that there are plans to go minimum half green by 2050 and that in a country who supports nuclear energy directly.
Turn the hyperbole down a little:
Those linked disasters are not result of the technology. These are natural disasters or human based disasters, possible connected to climate change, caused … guess by what, overall carbon footprint and other things. Incidents for building structures are also not considered catastrophes or a disaster. It should also be mentioned that in your example, in lots of cases no one died the dams just broke without harming someone, of course it is annoying but a constructive or maintenance failure.
If you build something no matter what there can always be human based problems and deaths, this is not the point. The point is that nuclear based things can create disasters over long time period which is not the case with wind or water because if they are turned off they are off and that is it. It is not about controlling nature here or that nature also can destroy a construct you build, it is about that that nuclear causes - over the long run - more problems. Fukushima as example needs to be for cooled down, after 10 years and the compromised water still gets into the ocean, which causes unpredictable and unforeseen problems with the eco-system and even to us humans because we eat the fish. The government also plays this down, claiming that the compromised water here is not much of a harm, which everyone disagrees with.
The attempts here to play everything down only proves me right.
I only mean it’s a false claim to imply that wind/water/solar energy are inherently zero catastrophe risk.
That said, I think coming close to fully understanding and assessing (and mitigating) the risk of wind/water/solar power projects/economies is far more achievable than for nuclear energy projects/economies.
Especially so when considering the unavoidable context of the (un)predictability of both humans and environment over the next 10,000 - 100,000 years.
There are no risks, even if the damn breaks, just do not build you house underneath or near it and water is not the only option, you just took water as an example because this is possible the first thing that comes up if you google it, not telling that in most cases no one died in your examples. Of course, people could and maybe actually died building some damns … e.g. in China or died because of breakages but that was a result of bad maintenance or because people had their house near the damn. If you know it is a risk to live there you do not build your house there this is just common sense, but in lots of cases the govt decided, lets build a damn there without asking for approval or permission. Point here is that its more secure than living next to nuclear power plant which has statistical a history of health problems and cancer risks, a damn can only break and that is it, theoretical chance here is much higher that once you are near a power plant die of cancer than the chance that damn breaks and you die because of that.
These are also not considered a disaster per definition, cause you can rebuild the damn, improve it, get some water back into it. It is cheaper to maintain a damn regularly than spending billions of billions of dollars for storing barrels underground and maintain them.
Build damn, make sure no one lives near by or under it, it is really that easy. In china the deaths are usually because govt decided to build it there and people refused to leave their homes, in lots of cases government gave them a chance to move to another location and people refused because some people are stubborn.
If nuclear power plant explodes and you are not nearby you still be affected one way or another, which is the underlying truth here.
You don’t build a conclusion for a technology based on sweeping aside risks of your favoured solution while emphasising the risks of your favoured solution, which is what you did with your “There are zero catastrophes with[…]” comment.
You lay it all out and compare the whole model.
I think laying it all out for wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear, will raise a whole lot of issues with all the technologies. Some specific models of tech will have unresolvable issues (e.g, megadams, dense solar-farms on arable land, any nuclear tech which can feed proliferation).
I suspect the whole supply/waste-chain for nuclear will have unresolvable issues, and very few of the hydro/solar will have unresolvable issues.
Trouble is getting people to agree on how to compare the risk of a well-engineered dam failing and the risk of your nuclear waste storage leaking into the water table, or a contaminated coolant pipe spraying vapour into the prevailing wind, or radioactive contaminated scrap metal making its way into the commercial steel market, or…
Anyone suggesting the thorium-pebble-bed or similar “holy-grail” 100% safe theoretical tech seems to be living between fantasy and pipe-dream.
I do not expressed any conclusion, I argued on the given example that is not even comparable to the danger of what nuclear energy comes with, we do not even started the topic here, there is the fact that this can be used with some effort to build bombs, that you need to store the waste over so many years that no one … really no one can comprehend this, then there will be climate based disaster, we will run out of uranium, there will be political changes and so many other factors that we have not even talked about and I have absolute no interest because this whole defending of a toxic system leads to nothing and no one can change my mind here.
This is compared against coal and not renewable energy sources. Water, like we talked about produces no air pollution compared to coal. We also did not talked about fossil fuels, the thing is uranium will run out in next 130 years.
Air pollution is in general a human created problem. Most pollution is created in and around bigger cities and industries, this is irrelevant to our discussion here as there is no scientific proof possible when car based pollution and coal based industrial pollution causes what exactly and how many people die since both mixes in the air.
I call BS, cancer statistic are rising since nuclear power plants, there lots of statistics that your chance to get cancer near power plant raises dramatically and and and. We are also not talking here about replacements or fossil fuels, we are talking about green energy. Earth heat for example, which constantly works and there is no limit, of course even the universe has limits but it does not run out in the next 100k years.
I said everything here I had to say and people downplay it, which I expected. Nothing people can bring forward is new to me and nothing will change my mind as some fundamental problems and threats that nuclear energy comes with can be solved and this is the reason I blocked the community, and I am out now here from the discussion, since I cannot extract any useful information that brings us any step forward. People tend to downplay it or find weaknesses in renewable, this is not what I am interested in. I am interested in showing that nuclear energy is not an end-solution and that is has huge dangers, which I did now and no one here claims that we have the perfect alternatives overnight. It is a team-play effort and I am shocked to see that people still supporting nuclear energy. I at least expected that we come to an common ground that nuclear based energy sources are not the answer and that we should go other ways, also to keep peace on earth and maybe even get rid of nuclear weapons but this is me - an idealistic fool, sadly people still think that nuclear is the way to go.
I call it madness and genocide.
Doing the same thing and expect different results - definition of craziness. - A. Einstein.