105
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2024
105 points (71.6% liked)
Unpopular Opinion
6216 readers
1 users here now
Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!
How voting works:
Vote the opposite of the norm.
If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.
Guidelines:
Tag your post, if possible (not required)
- If your post is a "General" unpopular opinion, start the subject with [GENERAL].
- If it is a Lemmy-specific unpopular opinion, start it with [LEMMY].
Rules:
1. NO POLITICS
Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.
2. Be civil.
Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...
Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.
5. No trolling.
This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
The US gets 1/5 of its power from nuclear energy, and produces 2,000 metric tons of nuclear waste per year – only enough to fill about half of the volume of an olympic-sized swimming pool (and about the same weight as 10 wind turbines).
Only 3% of all of that waste is actually long-lived and highly radioactive, potentially requiring isolation from the environment. In France, this number goes down to 0.2% due to fuel being reprocessed.
Taking that into consideration, that means it would take about 2/3 of a century for the US to produce enough dangerous nuclear waste to fill this pool completely. And it can still be way more efficient.
Nuclear produces negligible amounts of actual waste for the amount of energy it gives us. The problems with nuclear aren't at all the waste, rather it's the current highly used methods that are used to harvest the fuel (slave labour and unsafe, dirty, destructive drilling). Very similar problems faced with, say, lithium and cobalt.