this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2024
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We really should be using nuclear. I know people are concerned about the longevity of the waste but it's not much different than any other waste like you'd find with mining. There is enough arsenic trioxide at a mine in the NWT to kill everyone on the face of the planet 7x over. It's all underground. Their plan for it? Keep it frozen in perpetuity.
Waste rock dumps from mining can have tremendous amounts of metal that can easily leach out for a very long time given that these dumps are hundreds of millions of tonnes of rock. They are usually covered and left once monitoring indicates they are stable.
There is tons of modelling and engineering that can go into waste mgt. It shouldn't deter us when we are literally staring down the barrel or extinction
The main reason you don't see a lot of new nuclear power plants going up is that it's more expensive than any other way to generate electricity, and the recent experience in the US has involved massive budget overruns for nuclear.
There's massive budget over-runs for just about every mega project. I concede that nuclear is at the top of the list that I link. I actually heard a good talk about how doing field trials can really help reduce overruns for a major project (e.g. mining). Hard to do with a powerplant, I suppose, but easier to do with nuclear storage.
That's the thing about wind and solar; they look like a series of smaller projects instead of a mega-project. So you don't have that problem in the same way.