This is a (slightly older) article about Nuclear Energy and climate change. It’s a hottly debated topic in climate communities, so I thought some of you would enjoy to read it.
Another article that brings up some more points against nuclear power can be found here.
I’d be interested what you ppl think of the matter.
Article is wrong in the opening paragraph: “[Nuclear has] mining lung cancer, and waste risks. Clean, renewables avoid all such risks.” As well all know, There is no mining involved in the manufacturing of solar panels or wind turbines, and certainly not in batteries.
Any anti-nuclear piece that mentions mining as a downside of nuclear power is being intentionally dishonest (Spoiler alert human activity in a non-agrarian society requires mining.)
The next issue is the cost argument. We need to get over this idea that cost matters if our goal is environmentalism. No matter what we do, it will cost money and it will cost more money then what we are currently doing. If it didn’t cost more money, (and people weren’t currently profiting off the status quo so that they can push articles like this), we would already be doing the things described in the article. But instead we have Germany that used to meet something like 28% of it’s national energy needs with nuclear, now building coal plants and strip mining old growth forest.
If the choice is between nuclear and coal, and you pull a Germany, you are 100% wrong. For non-germans, the choice is never between nuclear and wind/solar, it’s between Nuclear and Fossil Fuels. And nuclear will always be the greener technology and should always be preferred by environmentalists.
I suggest you read the article, before you make a point that if addresses just a few paragraphs in.
Uranium mining causes lung cancer in large numbers of miners because uranium mines contain natural radon gas, some of whose decay products are carcinogenic. A study of 4,000 uranium miners between 1950 and 2000 found that 405 (10 percent) died of lung cancer, a rate six times that expected based on smoking rates alone. 61 others died of mining related lung diseases. Clean, renewable energy does not have this risk because (a) it does not require the continuous mining of any material, only one-time mining to produce the energy generators; and (b) the mining does not carry the same lung cancer risk that uranium mining does.
I absolutely read the article. However it does a sleight of hand that you either agree with or fell for. It doesn’t compare uranium mining to other mining activities, it compares uranium mining to smoking. Radon gas is a naturally occurring gas from granite, not uranium ore per se, though I’d forgive you if you thought Radon had something to do with uranium specifically, that is what the article implies. Yes Radon gas exists when you mine uranium but it also exist when you mine cobalt, coal, gold, or salt.
Building coal power plants is so much better.
Best and most obvious reason: nuclear waste.
We have technologies for getting more than enough power. It’s just not as profitable as the old technologies.
Thing is we need to find a place where you safely can storage the waste but for how long?
IIRC, there is also concern about warning generations in the distant future.
How might language evolve over only another thousand years? How much would symbolism change between now and then? Would a future society still recognise the current symbols as nuclear waste, or will we eventually forget about it, like many of human histories mysteries?
Is it actually safe storage overall, or is it only safe storage for half a century? Saving it for future generations to deal with would be wrong, imo. Will the the structure around the radioactive materials hold up to time, and is it safe from rising water levels? Are they prone to hurricaines or tornados, and will they be in the future?
So many things to find an answer to. I hope that we find solutions or a new method of power generation soon.
All of these issues can be mitigated to the point where they’re unproblematic, they just generally won’t be or are skipped because it’s deemed unprofitable. It’s also funny seeing yet another sad nuclear hit piece from a gas lobbyist.
I am not an expert, nor do I love nuclear power. But as I understand it with renewables we need to solve the storage problem. Wind and solar intermittent, and battery options are terrible in efficacy, cost, and environmental impact. Plus the north american grid is old and built around power being always-on - there isn’t (yet) the ability to shuffle power from areas with to areas without to the scale we’d need.
So I have a feeling that despite all these issues nuclear will be part of the solution. Lucikly it’s so expensive and has such low public opinion that I doubt governments will go “all-in” on nuclear any time soon.
