this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2024
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Data is Beautiful
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Why does safety only consider air pollution and deaths? The most concerning aspect of nuclear power IMO is the nuclear waste. There is still no safe way to permanently dispose or store it. In Germany we store nuclear waste in salt caves that were meant to be a very stable system. But already after a few decades we find leaking barrels and contamination of groundwater reservoirs.
This contamination will keep getting worse for hundreds of thousands of years and may have negative health impact on humans and animals.
Just because it doesn't pollute the air right now, it doesn't mean it's safe.
Thinking about nuclear waste is good, but in the same process, you should also think about the environmental damage necessary to produce solar panels. A rarely depicted advantage of nuclear is the relative small amount of material needed to produce that amount of power (including the building of the power plant), and that has huge consequences for pollution upstream, and therefore, safety.
Edit: to be clear, I am not against solar panels in any way, but we should be sure to include all the relevant measurements for all technologies
I agree. An open discussion should be as complete as possible and ideally consider all relevant aspects.
From my perspective, the time perspective in context of nuclear waste is really significant. Until we find a clean solution to fully recycle or dispose nuclear waste, there are almost infinite maintenance efforts even ignoring the danger of the waste itself.
If we want to monitor the potential radioactive pollution around where the waste is stored, it means roads, elevators, protective doors, sensors, measuring systems, protective gear etc. have to be constantly maintained and renewed. We must upkeep the monitoring for 1 million years until the waste is no longer dangerous.
How long is the lifetime of this equipment? Even if we assume an unrealistic lifetime of 100 years, it means we have to renovate all storage facilities 10000 times. 10000 new elevators, 10000 new roads etc.
1 million years is just a completely insane period of time and we have no clue if we really ever find a safe way to deal with this stuff. So people in the future will have to do all this maintenance even if hunanity stopped using nuclear power tens of thousands of years ago.
And that's just the pollution directly caused by maintenance. If there's an accident while installing a new elevator and radioactive material is released, we have way bigger issues.
Radioactive waste is obviously dangerous (though to varying degrees, most of it, by volume, is very weakly contaminated if at all), but so are all the chemical wastes from processing ores etc, and for some reason we don't talk about keeping these secured for as long as they're dangerous (and unlike radioactive waste, they don't necessarily become less dangerous over time). And the volume of chemical waste is way higher.