this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (14 children)

Downvote me all you want but nuclear is not a long term solution. Short term at best.

It's relatively clean compared to fossil fuels but it has several critical flaws on the long term.

For starters, it produces extremely toxic waste which we have no idea how to get rid of besides burying it and forget about it. Everytime someone mentions this all we hear is "we can create x method to dispose of it cleanly". Right, but while we develop X method that shit keeps piling up. And when X method fails to work as we intended "oh, well, just keep bury it and lets start thinking about Y".

And the biggest problem is this. Nuclear is actually relatively safe since the security regulations are (or should) be very strict. But all it takes is one bad enough disaster. Disasters like Chernobyl had the potential to leave half of Europe inhabitable for centuries. But, hey, as long as the regulations are strict and we have equipment and procedures that manage the human error we would be fine, right? Not really. Murphy's law. The worst scenario will happen eventually. A obscure bug in the security systems, an unexpected natural disaster, war or terrorism. There's always a failure point. In other energy types, we can manage that risk. One very rare disaster is not enough to make it not worth it if the good outweights the bad. Not in nuclear energy. Only one disaster can be potentially catastrophic and outweight all the good it made for decades or even centuries.

On the long term it is just not worth it. On the short term...it's a gamble.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

It is probably the only thing that can really buy us time. Sure we cannot dispose of its waste currently, but it buys us time to find a way. We will find a way to solve the waste issue. Besides, the waste produced is actually quite little, and we do have great solutions for storage. As for your second point, Chernobyl could have been an even worse disaster indeed, but it is a plant built in a time when it was fashionable to built bigger and larger plants. Today, the strategy is to built the plants smaller, making the impact of such disaster also smaller.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For those advocating an all renewable energy grid. You cannot reliably power big industrial factories and infrastructure with renewables only. The answer NEEDS to be: nuclear as a base, and a heavy push towards decentralized renewable grid on top.

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[–] CookieJarObserver 5 points 1 year ago

Fucking idiots.

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