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This is the reason why France has the nuclear system it does- it was de Gaulle's baby precisely because the US doesn't have French (or European) interests at heart. France was under [his] military dictatorship at the time, which helped get things moving.
He was right, of course; both in 1973 with the US-caused oil shortage and then in 2022 with the US-caused LNG shortage.
It's not so much that as it is completely obviating the need to resupply with fuel. And, especially relevant for submarines, nuclear power functions even with a complete lack of oxygen, so doing that is a no-brainer.
It's the only alternative that can work anywhere on the Earth's surface on a calm, cold night. Lighting a fire is the classic method to get energy at that time, but "magic hot rock" is fine too.
I once heard stated that the reason it's difficult to get good output from nuclear is because they simply can't run the reaction hot enough- hence the emphasis on exotic coolants (molten salt, etc.)- whereas with LNG the exhaust heat is sufficiently hot that you can heat the steam driving a secondary turbine to the point where it's very, very efficient. Of course, because we want to reserve the right to quench the reactor if it gets too hot for... certain reasons, we'd like a coolant that doesn't make the problem worse if we do that. At least with LNG you can turn the gas off and the reaction will stop.
"Work" is the key sticking point here - does it provide enough energy to pay for itself? To pay for the extraction of the raw material from the ground, refinement into usable fuel pellets, transportation to the plant, the construction of the plant, the lives of the people who run it and then on top of that provide usable power for the rest of the society that sustains it? The answer is, at present, "No."
That's the entire basis of my objection - even if you just handwave away the problem of storing dangerous radioactive waste that lasts for millenia and hope it doesn't leak into the rest of the environment, nuclear just can't pay for itself. Every single existing nuclear program I'm aware of is made viable on the basis of government subsidies or exploitation (i.e. the hilarious prices France paid for Nigerian uranium). Every single proposed nuclear program that doesn't have these problems (fusion, molten salt, thorium, etc) is 20 years in the future, and has been 20 years in the future for the past 60 years.
The whole nuclear waste discussion is immensely frustrating to me. Yes, depleted fuel remains dangerous for a long time, but the implication that we therefore need to also develop containment solutions that last for millennia is completely and utterly bonkers. The part that most scares people about radioactive substances is that they can cause injury and death by just being present in their vicinity. However, spent fuel is dangerous to the touch for a few decades at best, after that, the health and containment concerns are identical to those of any other chemical waste (basically, making sure it does not come into contact with the food supply and drinking water). Except, there is a universal method to detect radioactive contamination. Compare this to detecting chemical contamination, where one could run hundreds of tests and still miss the presence of a lethally toxic substance. Some toxic waste, particularly heavy metals, remains dangerous indefinitely. However, you never see any heated political debate about ways to permanently isolate entire waterways. The only reason we even have this discussion with nuclear power is because the physical amount of high level waste is tiny and because it's one of the only energy sources where most of the waste it produces stays neatly contained in a single building.
I don't want to be needlessly antagonistic, but the nuclear waste argument needs to die and whenever anyone brings it up in a discussion I also die a little inside.
I mean sure I'll be dead by the time that problem shows up, but I do actually care about the world that we will bequeath to our descendants.
Yes, that is the entire problem! And sure, we can detect it - but that doesn't stop the river that could have supplied entire communities with life turning into a source of cancer instead.
I am an environmentalist who does actually care about this issue. You're right, that is a big problem - but I'm not particularly moved by claims of hypocrisy when I have actively protested against this kind of thing in the past.
I'm not accusing you of any personal ideological hypocrisy of not being against mining pollution enough. It's just that the theoretical possibility of some post-civilizational-collapse humans being poisoned two hundred years from now, because the concrete box, that we store spent fuel in, eroded away is a laughably insignificant concern. Where are the policy initiatives for deep geological storage of solar panels and solar panel production waste that guarantees no environmental damage for the next X thousand years? Why is nuclear power singled out as the one human activity where we have to spend billions to make sure that no living being in any possible future timeline thousands of years in the future is harmed by some byproduct? Why do we not simply accept that in every country there is one warehouse that requires some minimal continued maintenance effort to remain safe to people in the immediate surroundings? Remember, numerous other such buildings exist right now. Would it be safe to be in the vicinity of the chemical storage area of the Rotterdam port if civilization collapses tomorrow?
The environmental damage from the creation of solar panels comes from the mining of the components used to create them as well as their manufacture. They are mostly made out of glass and aluminum which doesn't actually cause any serious environmental damage, though there are some trace amounts of nasty chemicals. If every single solar panel in use today was abandoned after humanity got wiped out in a second, the environmental damage would be minimal. The two problems just aren't really that comparable.
Because nuclear waste remains dangerous for that long. But moreover, it isn't - if we were actually being rational, global warming and the flooding of the atmosphere with the byproducts of fossil fuels would demand even more attention. But we're not going to care until it is too late, because the consequences of global warming will come after the people currently making decisions are long dead - you, me and our descendants will have to deal with those problems but the people in power right now won't.
Let's go with these numbers: https://www.freeingenergy.com/are-solar-panels-really-full-of-toxic-materials-like-cadmium-and-lead/
this says 4400 tons of lead are contained in 92GW of solar panels. So that is roughly 4400 tons of lead for 30*years*92GW of energy. I assume this is peak capacity, so at a capacity factor of around 20% we get 4400 tons of lead for 0.6TWy.
Wikipedia says:
Which gives 15000-18000 tons of HLW for 0.6TWy or about 4x the amount. The numbers are very much comparable, and I think I was pretty fair to either technology. Presumably, PV has more production waste due to the much larger volume of stuff and I don't care enough to research things like the impact of mining waste for things like the copper content in PV modules vs. Uranium mining. If we also, say, limit the analysis to Germany where the PV capacity factor is 10% or bias our valuation of baseload energy production more highly, or we include battery waste it's not too hard to get numbers where Nuclear comes out on top.
I feel like you're refusing to engage with the argument. Lead and spent nuclear fuel have pretty much identical environmental risk profiles after a few decades. It's just that the other energy technologies are much better at diluting their waste throughout the environment.
Would it be safe to be in the vicinity of the chemical storage area of the Rotterdam port if civilization collapses tomorrow?
Terribly sorry for the delay - I've been busy over the holiday period with family.
Lead is actually substantially easier to safely re-use than spent nuclear fuel - to the best of my knowledge, solar panels don't actually do anything to the lead which renders it irreversibly unusable. If you have evidence that you can't actually reuse the components or materials placed into solar panels I'd love to see it.
Except nuclear waste is more dangerous for far longer and less re-usable, which makes the comparison pointless.
What argument? I'm unfamiliar with any scientific literature that makes the case spent solar panels are as environmentally damaging as nuclear waste. Nuclear waste continues to irradiate anything around it for an incredibly long time, while lead...well, I wouldn't want to drink it or use it in my pipes, but lead is actually a useful metal that can be repurposed safely.
Collapse doesn't actually take place overnight - the US and Europe are collapsing right now, and the collapse of the Roman empire took hundreds of years to play out fully. But this question doesn't mean terribly much because you wouldn't be safe anywhere if civilisation collapsed overnight. If you want to talk specifically about the dangers of chemical storage, then it depends on exactly what's stored there and how. I personally wouldn't want to start growing crops on a chemical storage facility, but I think the bigger danger from a chemical storage area at a port would be that it gets into the ocean after sea levels rise... but that's going to be significantly delayed if civilisation collapses and we stop burning fossil fuels anyway.
This is meaningless without quantities though. Everything is irradiated at all times from ordinary nuclear decay, cosmic rays, and solar radiation. It is a manageable hazard. After a long time, the quantity of radiation emitted is going to flatten out to a hazard lower than the chemical toxicity you dismiss.
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