Isn't your choice of telling them false based purely on political agenda? Same happens on other side of the camp, both believe their science is actual science.
I support nuclear scientifically. I don’t think it has a chance politically.
Scientifically, nuclear waste disposal is very much solvable problem.
Politically, expect to spend billions upon billions and then have things like Yucca Mountain canned after lots of construction.
Both are true and which ones you consider lead to very different conclusions.
No it is not.
There is no place on Earth that we know is geologically stable for the time periods required We have no way of knowing what society will be like ten thousand years from now, let alone 100,000 years. How do we communicate with those people bout the danger of what we left behind?
Greed. Hubris.
And not to mention, how does ground vibration bring sometimes buried under 500 meters of solid rock back onto the surface? Earthquakes shake the ground, they don't dig deep boreholes.
On a geological timescale, tectonic plates occasionally rift down the middle, both successfully (East Africa) and unsuccessfully (a failed plate rift produced the Great Lakes).
With that said, identifying strata that are going to remain seismically stable for a looooong time is a solved problem, and earthquakes generally damage only those things not attached to the (moving) earth.
And we need to remember that some people was poisoned just a few months ago for digging trenches in Chernobyl in the middle of a war. The danger is still there forty years later.
How should we communicate to those people of those dangers?
We simply trust that people in the future check their water for safety, or avoid drinking from water sources that correlate with illness.
We do this now, and humans have done it for millennia.
(Hum, I hope that they will not have tiktok)
Scientifically we already proofed that fusion works, which would be the solution for a lot...
So what does "scientifically...much solavable problem" in practice really mean? Worlds apart..
There is no evidence that fusion is a solution to any energy problems. The central problem of fusion power is that reactions consume more energy than they produce.
Billions upon billions per capita is three-dollar bills upon three-dollar bills.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_re...
Waste disposal is a solved problem: you put the spicy rocks back where they came from.
So-called environmentalists are advocating removing this capacity without accounting for the fact its replacement will be coal, oil and gas.
[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/worlds-safest-source-energy...
[2] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/energy-and...
In the Australian outback those are places people used to live. How are you going to stop people returning for 200,000 years?
Greed. Hubris.
Not necessarily in the Australian outback, Yucca Mountain is a great choice. [2] [edit](That area is adjacent to the Nevada Test Site which is already some of the most radioactive land on earth).
What greed exactly are you talking about? I've no financial interest in the success of nuclear power. I recognize it's more expensive than some competing options but it's a better solution.
As for hubris, again, you're not exactly coming to the table with data on the risks, especially since we've got 80 years of experience with nuclear power.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast-neutron_reactor
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warnin...
Many radioactive products are either very short lived, and will decay down to minimal levels within a few hundred years, or are very long lived, causing very low radioactivity.
The problem are the elements that are in between which is mostly the other actinides. Those are the ones that would require tens of thousands of years or more to reach safe activity levels. Fast reactor designs don't have significant amounts of such elements in the waste. The waste will decay to uranium ore-ore like levels within only hundreds of years.
The biggest issue is that they need relatively enriched uranium to operate at first. After they are started, they can be used as a breeder reactor that can take in natural uranium and convert it to the enriched uranium it needs to continue running.
Hundreds of years is not acceptable. Humanity is not able to handle projects spanning hundreds of years time. Look at the Zaporizhia atomic energy site for an extreme example of what I mean.
The problem is not just the time scale either. There are other areas humanity fails at time and again.
P.S. Thank you nevertheless for pointing out several advantages of fast breeder reactors.
There's plenty of buildings that took centuries to make, this projects are comparatively simple/require less coordination once started.
Edward Teller in 1967 famously expressed his skepticism about fast reactors because of this safety issue.
Chernobyl happened for a very specific reason - you know, the late-night tests and the positive void coefficient. Do you think we haven't learned? Please cite sources. The thing is, we have learned. That's why reactors are so expensive. You're double-dipping by citing the risks and the costs. It's really one or the other if you're not being disingenuous.
And seawater extraction is as renewable as CO2-scrubbing the atmosphere would allow us to go on with burnign coal - both would equally not scale to needs with current technology, so what?
Of course use of breeder reactors could extend this, but with breeders terrestrial U resources are adequate for a very long time.
Breeders, as I said, would greatly extend the terrestrial U resource, both by getting 100x as much energy per unit of natural uranium, and by allowing resources 100x as dilute to be economically exploited.
Defeatism never solved everything, and China building hundreds of reactors might just be the shot in the arm to get things back on track. The big loss will be that it's these Chinese designs the world will use instead of Western designs.
Could you identify any broadly accepted environmental analysis that says this? It's easy to make accusaiont
> Waste disposal is a solved problem: you put the spicy rocks back where they came from.
The waste rocks are not at all like the ones removed from the ground, in critical ways (radioactivity). Who says anything about putting them back in the original mines? Why would the original mines happen to be suitable for nuclear waste storage?
When Starship is fully operational the expected cost to launch payload will be $20 / kg
IE you can have a 30x margin of error and still just launch the nuclear waste into space.
Again, selecting a geographic area away from humans and providing sufficient demarcation is dramatically safer than putting it into a rocket and flying it up into orbit over humans. If you disagree, cite a source on its feasibility - and one on the lack of feasibility of deep geological sequestration. Let's not shoot from the hip on this one. I know I haven't found any.
Despite his Twitter account, Musk is not the savior for everything. However, maybe he would like to be blasted into space on the first journey to Proxima Centuri? If anyone can do it, he can!
Also, at the low deaths/TWh of renewables and nuclear w.o. accidents, the "cost of deaths" (at the $9M/statistical life that the NRC uses) is swamped by the direct cost of the produced energy. So renewables continue to beat new nuclear on the cost front, w. cost of deaths added in.
If your objection is that storage would not be rolled out instantaneously, I will ask you to try to be more serious. Nuclear isn't rolled out even that fast.
If intermittency issues caused storage to be quite attractive, why hasn't storage already been rolled out across Germany and California?
Neither if these claims agrees with what happened in these two cases. Any electrical engineer could have told you storage is needed before decommissioning nuclear in favour of renewables.
The direct cost of produced energy is very low with nuclear - super low. Just ask Ontario. [1] There is a large cap ex cost at the start, but you can amortize it over 80 years - whereas solar and wind has to be replaced every 20-30.
Nuclear prices in all externalities in its cost assessments due to the onslaught of attacks whereas other energy prices in almost nothing. Coal kills about 100 people per TWh, and at the same $9M NRC cost, coal should cost about $1/kWh.
[1] https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/pr...
Only if you ignore the amortization of the cost of financing and building the nuclear power plant. That's fine if the plant is provided by the Nuclear Fairy; not so fine in the real world if we're talking about building new nuclear plants that have to be paid for.
It's hard to see how wasting resources and, all else being equal, doing something the much more expensive way would be "the right thing to do". If nuclear is too expensive than a renewable solution, too bad so sad.
No, I'm not.
A role of government in my opinion is to facilitate providing services and creating infrastructure in the public interest which might not make market economic sense at the time we need it - if it is a better outcome for the citizenry. You're welcome to disagree but there's no fallacy there. I never said it was free, I said it was more expensive - but the government should do it anyways because it will make us better off. Like the post office and the EPA.
There's a reason in going to the moon, JFK never said that “we choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not just because they are easy, but because they are the cheapest thing we can possibly do, and if it starts to look like it's cheaper or easier to be sitting on the couch then too bad so sad, to the couch we shall return!"
He said it was "because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”
> If nuclear is too expensive than a renewable solution, too bad so sad.
Right no. I don't believe in that. Again, nuclear is renewable, this much is basically indisputable. I believe that a better solution can be government funded in line with the charter of any world government, be it a western democracy or the PRC. I do not believe market viability is the be all and end all in this here world. I believe that attitude would have left us living as hunter-gatherers. I do not believe the cheapest solution is the only solution we should advocate for or pursue, period.
We deserve better and should demand better than your position.