And in “tell Us Something we Didn’t Already Know” news.
Additional comment against nuclear: water cooling, which is a real problem in a warming climate. Rivers will dry up or flood. And near the coast with rising sea levels is also difficult, using salt water. Besides, there are plenty of sustainable alternatives with a cheaper price tag, so why bother?
Energy is energy. It doesn’t matter what it comes from. It comes from an exchange of entropy. It all must create heat. Arguably solar only takes the heat that would be hitting the earth anyway, but it creates more electricity the more it absorbs, so having a lower albedo is better, which will be higher than what the ground would have been.
Also, yeah obviously some places aren’t ideal for a nuclear plant. That’s not an argument against it. That true for literally every energy source. You can’t build a solar plant in the shade. You can’t build a wind farm where there isn’t wind. Etc.
Which ones are sustainable and cheaper? They cost similar amounts per twh, and most cause more deaths. Nuclear creates, by far, the least pollution, including wind, solar, and hydro. Wind and solar also require something to provide baseline power, which is probably batteries. That requires mining lithium, which is very limited, or using some other battery technology which also have issue.
Nuclear is baseline power, clean, sustainable, cheap, and safe. The waste is easy to deal with and only exists in small amounts, most of which will be neutral in a very short period. The only reason not to like it is because we’ve passed laws to make it expensive and take a long time to build, but that’s artifical and promoted by dirty energy. The whole anti-nuke movement is paid for by dirty energy, which should tell you something.
