• French minister of ecology resigns, citing incompatibility with neoliberal govt.
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It's not just the reactors, it's the waste, I'm gonna let your fossil fuel comment slide because it's been discussed already and anyone that thinks I'm arguing against that needs to go back to school.
That caution is unfounded if you look at the facts. Humanity can somehow not be trusted with nuclear energy yet somehow we can all come together on building enough solar power plants for everyone?
I would argue you are cherry picking facts and putting anything you don't like down to exceptional human error, what I'm arguing is human error and negligence is THE ISSUE. You seem to be confusing me with someone who has watched an anti nuclear youtube video, I'm pro nuclear power, I'm just not blinding myself to the massive repercussions of mass usage and the likelihood that this will bite us in the ass in future years as the tech becomes more widespread. The reactors are fine, the people have already fucked up majorly twice and the waste disposal thus far has been atrocious. You are not being rational, you are defending Humans to be consistently responsible with this power and I have absolutely no idea where you are getting this idea. We have shown time and time again we are lazy and cut costs at every conceivable corner, we polute our own water supply and fisheries with oil and chemicals from factories already that have caused untold problems yet suddenly this is going to be the time where we up our game and stop making mistakes? Not fucking likely.
Increased efficiency, new types of nuclear materials and new recycling techniques would completely mitigate that.
The US alone can power itself using a small patch of desert of solar panels. It only needs to be, perhaps the security council that does this, it would greatly reduce our carbon emissions to cut down for the leading power consumers.
Renewables are practical? I thought lack of practicality is their #1 downside. Sure, use whatever works but we need something powerful to be able to phase out fossil fuels quick. Since the main reason why people oppose nuclear power seems to be "nukes are scary" I think a positive push for it is in place.
The fact that per kilowatt hour nuclear energy causes the fewest numbers of deaths, directly or indirectly?
I'm certainly not against Nuclear power, it's an amazing source of energy, but a terrible idea to spread this worldwide, that's my point. It's also the point of the politicians in both the UK and France, Saudi Arabia, China, Australia, South Africa and Morocco. Of course these guys have more sun than we do and will be more successful in their transition. Again you seem to believe I have a polarized opinion on the matter, I know some of my alternatives are for far in the future, but it's something we need to be working on NOW while we phase the use of nuclear power out, after fossil fuels of course. The logistics is really the easy part, what's hard is having people let go of the money.
And again, what people are saying is not, to replace or stop renewable energy usage. We're saying solar panels by their very nature, do not and can not work to meet the demands required by our energy infrastructure in their current state. Something that can provide enough power on demand 24/7, that is either going to be coal/gas or nuclear, that's the choice here. There's already been a very lengthy discussion about nuclear waste in a previous thread and there's no point bringing that up. For third world countries, renewable energy is great, especially with help and subsidies from richer countries, but they will also run into the same issues. They need something to fill in the gap, and if industry starts booming, then they're going to exponentially require much MUCH more energy. Obviously the answer is not to start building nuclear power plants everywhere, but what can be done is selling the excess energy generated in richer countries for lower costs. If we're talking benevolent international aid, constructing large reactors which are operated by an international organization would also work. The world needs to act on pollution and emission free energy today, we can't afford to wait 50 or a 100 years.
I'm aware of what you're saying and I haven't disagreed that renewables don't cover the costs right now. I'm just fighting two points. We CANNOT have a renewable majority world in the near future (20 - 30 years for the west, and a gradient of constantly falling emissions as a result) and that Nuclear power is safer than other sources, neither of these are true in ALL cases. Our power stations are secure as fuck and micromanaged into near perfect safety. If we take into account the numbers of jobs, I'd like to see a death count per 10,000 employees in relation to wind and solar or something similar and then we can get a second pair of eyes on the statistics. This should certainly include transport and mining/fabrication. Agreed, we need to fight it today, and plan for the future.
No we aren't https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Nuclear-power-in-the-UK.pdf https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/165/0e17285c-19f1-45c8-b3b5-68715ca81b95/image.png
This was posted in 2016, while the Government is still clinging, advisers are increasingly against the idea due to the sharp fall of costs of the renewable sector, and I think we can expect the Government to crumble, simply for the money if anything else. July 2018 https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jul/10/nuclear-renewables-are-better-bet-ministers-told > Government advisers have told ministers to back only a single new nuclear power station after Hinkley Point C in the next few years, because renewable energy sources could prove a safer investment. The National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) said the government should cool down plans for a nuclear new build programme that envisage as many as six plants being built. >“I don’t think anybody’s pretending you can take forward a new nuclear power station without some form of government underwriting or support. Whereas the amount required to subsidise renewables is continually coming down.” > The NIC said that by 2030 a minimum of 50% of power should come from renewables, up from about 30% today. All this still complies with the current plan of cutting carbon emissions to "acceptable" levels on time. By the time the first reactor is built, the renewable sector will have already have made the advances to make that power plant almost irrelevant, it could have been done cheaper, does not require government control to keep safe and constant government funds to keep in good repair. A renewable industry will be for the largest majority, private, and adding to the country instead of taking away. If they do indeed go ahead to build all of these, I would suspect a good case of lobbying, as the Government will be taking considerable costs upon itself instead of outsourcing to a thriving economy both on jobs and on energy.
One event killed a few hundred people, the other killed no one. When you factor in the amount of power generated nuclear comes in at the lowest death rate per unit of energy of any power source. Show me an example of some significant casualties from civilian nuclear waste disposal. Hilarious. You have zero clue what would actually go into such a plan. That's moronic. $9b for 580MW is awful. It's hilarious they claim it will power more than 1m homes. It's almost like they have no clue what they're talking about and don't understand what the words "capacity factor" means.
The radiation didn't directly kill anyone, no. The rescue attempts to get to people were thwarted however as the Nuclear plant prevented rescuers from getting to locations. Due to this report 1,383 of the total deaths were related to the plant, while this was not radiation, it was the hysteria itself surounding the plant going into meltdown that thwarted the rescue attempts of the elderly as the evacuations was maintained far longer than it should been out of a misguided but understandable fear of further deaths resulting from the reactors. Workers at the plant have also received and exceeded their legal lifetime dose of radiation, increasing the risk of cancer. What I'm saying here is when you say it killed no one, you are speaking out of your ass. It has, however indirectly, caused the deaths of over a thousand. Fukushima Accident What kind of loaded question is this? Heavily incentive's the land and finances of tech start up companies to compete with eachother in the region, it's not all that difficult. The problem takes care of itself. Same with what the space industry and many other countries are doing for renewables right now. Download is better than the Moroccan Energy Department, gotcha.
Fucking Christ the Nuclear fearmongering in this thread...
If you could point any out that would be cool.
As a response to costs, you could dramatically decrease costs using LIFTR units which are easy to make, use a very cheap very abundant radioactive mineral(Thorium) and also do not require that much in safety features as compared to uranium because they're easier to maintain, activate in more manageable conditions and also last longer than uranium.
Technically, but in practical terms, nuclear fuel is almost unlimited in quantity.
It's a poor argument though, especially from the perspective we should be recognizing from our predecessors. It's better to focus on the energy that simply cannot go catastrophically wrong, no matter how ridiculous the circumstances may seem to us now. The petroleum industry didn't have much foresight either. Even if we still had an abundance of nuclear power and global warming continued regardless for example, sea levels rising, increasingly hazardous weather. I'd rather we had fields of solar panels instead of a large amount of nuclear reactors to deal with. Now if we had Fusion reactors on the go in a big way, well this is different story.
That actually wouldn't work very well, power actually gets weaker the longer it has to travel. If you're trying to send a charge over 300 miles it's not going to be as strong as when you sent it out.
Discussing fusion is the least productive conversation we can have, energy-wise. I give it a hot 100 years before it's viable.
It's a new cutting edge tech, let's not doubt the scientists unless they decide it's not feasible first shall we? There's nothing to discuss, lets keep our fingers crossed it goes well though, it's likely a final solution should we master it.
Resonant you're blatant fear mongering over nuclear power is ridiculous. We've had 2 serious nuclear incidents in 64 years of continual nuclear power production. Both of these were caused by extreme negligence on the parts of people who were warned what would happen multiple times. No one died as a direct result of either of these incidents, and no one died at all in the second incident. Also to say that the nuclear power industry have no foresight is fucking insulting. A couple of years ago a guy named @Snowmew made a post which basically explained how nuclear power is the safest form of power production there is, I suggest you give it a look. I don't think Snowmew is around any more. Choice quote: If we were to all use nuclear energy, even if Chernobyl happened every 50 years, we would still statistically never kill a single person.
Solar is good for distributed grids and lightening the load on traditional power grid setups but absolutely awful as a primary source of power generation. Ideally in the future all homes have solar + a PowerWall type storage device.
"New cutting edge tech" tends to be unpractical in one way or another. I highly doubt wireless power transfer is anywhere close to being as efficient as wired transfer. What with electric resistance bing a thing.
Implying it's not feasible is funny since you're arguing that France should start relying on stuff like this now. Nuclear Power is the best thing we have now, the future will probably bring better, but it has to actually get here first. Until it gets here, we should invest in Nuclear Power to get ourselves away from Coal.
Orbital microwave beaming is an impressively horrible idea, let's be real Efficiency is absolutely fucked, first of all. Solar panels aren't very efficient to begin with. Then you use the power to run a fuckoff huge magnetron and generate microwaves. Okay, cool, that's not 100% efficient by any means. Then you lose a fuckton of microwave energy through plain old attenuation through the atmosphere, made worse by the fact that the atmosphere's got water in it that'll get heated up. Then you'll presumably let the beam hit some water to heat and run a turbine. That's actually fairly efficient but it's certainly not perfect. I'd be really fuckin surprised if even 20% of the original electricity from the solar cells makes it into the grid. It's also a massive point of failure. If literally anything happens to the satellite, or it just chooses to break down, congrats - we have to launch a rocket to get repair astronauts up there. That's a LOT of downtime for every single failure. If anything happens to its aim that it can't correct for, that's also a big failure as well.
Right, as I've said earlier, I'm not arguing that anyone should start relying on this stuff now, I'm saying we need to invest in this stuff as a human race for the near future to be brighter and less of a struggle than we are having right now. I haven't been shitting on Nuclear in this thread, just arguing the fact that it should take priority as the solution to the issue. For example as I was saying int he UK, these plans to build 6 new reactors is entirely unnecessary and the infrastructure advisers are agreeing. You need to understand that gigantic growth of renewable potential over the last couple of years, it really isn't a pipe dream that the majority of our needs can be met through it. Then Nuclear.
This is going to be less and less of an issue as time goes on, since we'll end up with most of the functions of a nuclear plant run by AI sooner rather than later. Much more cost-effective. We're getting incredibly good at training neural networks for highly complex tasks. An AI doesn't get tired, distracted, or stupid, and if it makes a mistake it will correct for it within milliseconds.
Isn't this the same for any practice though. A car factory in the 1990's had far more deaths than they do today, lessons are learned and safety measures are put into place to mitigate as much risk as possible. This can be applied to the solar and wind industry too, better climbing equipment, better rooftop working standards. Deaths will happen in the construction of nuclear plants, deaths will happen in the construction and maintenance of wind turbines. It should not dictate the practicality of one over the other. Nuclear requires constant transport of materials, waste management, mining and upkeep, anti terrorism safeguards and failsafes. Renewable energy needs fabrication, installation and maintenance, the fuel is not the issue and there is no waste. I agree with everyone when you say it needs to be a gradual process of both, but a dominance of nuclear over renewable isn't sensible, it's over complicated.
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