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this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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All of that is great, and I'm all for it. Can't wait for the first grids with no fossils whatsoever, once energy storage improves enough that it can take all the balancing load. When we reach that, it will mark the start of the era where nuclear is actually being replaced by renewables rather than fossils.
My point here is that switching off nuclear is premature for now. It's a very clean source of energy once you look at the per kWh numbers and nuclear waste management solutions are actually extremely safe. (The videos where they test the containers by smashing actual trains into them are kinda fun -- and those tests are done with liquid water, which is far more susceptible to leaking than solid ceramics.) Of course, if we reach a point where wind, solar, and hydro can fully replace fossils and start eating into nuclear's share then that's gonna be a very different conversation, and I'm fully with renewables in that situation, but we should always keep the alternatives in mind when we shut something off.
That's why we're not just shutting down coal plants altogether, because there's just nothing to replace them. Although an energy policy where you just flat out ban ~~renewables~~ fossils and tell the market that that's the supply, now go figure it out would certainly be interesting. Very expensive and terrible for the economy, but interesting nonetheless. (Definitely the based kind of chaos if you ask me.)
edit: okay, that was a weird word to accidentally replace, lol
There are more problems with nuclear energy, though. The biggest being that we burden future generations for literally thousands of years with a growing amount of waste. I am not sure why this is always missing from the discussions of people who are pro nuclear power.
It is making the same mistake again as we did before: creating a problem for future generations to solve. And in this case the problem is dire and, because of the immensely long timespan, we have no way to reliably plan ahead for so long.
Spent fuel can be reprocessed in a modern reactor. Even if that wasn’t possible the storage is extremely safe.
Because the actual amount of waste that has to be stored for that long is minimal and can be shoved kilometers down into the earth's crust with the same tech that's used to extract oil. Nuclear waste storage is a great headline topic but there have been a lot of innovations in the past ~50 years.
As for lower tiers of waste (as in, less dangerous, more numerous, mostly consisting of stuff like tools used to work on the power plants, which is what actually goes in the yellow barrels usually depicted with grey goo), several reactor projects existed that actively used that radioactive waste for even more energy generation, usually targeted extremely hard by anti-nuclear activists because it would take away their talking points. The science exists, the opposition is usually political and driven by fear tactics. But this is why we store those lower tiers of nuclear waste on the surface, not because it's the best place to put it but because it's where we can retrieve it once we find a use for it.
And again, consider the alternative. Fossils also fuck up the environment and it's not a good thing that they do it faster. The only way their effect would go away that fast is mass genocide of the ecoterrorist flavor, and exactly what future generations are we talking about in that case?