New technology could reduce radioactivity in nuclear waste by up to 80%
New technology could reduce radioactivity in nuclear waste by up to 80%/Nueva tecnología podría reducir la radiactividad de los desechos nucleares en hasta un 80% (@mauromar)
A lot of comments here are displaying their ignorance of nuclear technology.
Keep eating up the oil company talking points, I guess. "hey guys remember those nuclear meltdowns from outdated reactors that had all kinds of things going wrong because of poor design and decision making, most of which is no longer an issue? Yeah things blow up so better keep chugging away at those fossil fuels while we sabotage any investments into renewables"
I mean goddamn, the "worst" disaster in the USA was a big nothing burger that was sensationalized by newspapers that knew how to sell a headline, and oil companies that knew how to leverage any sort of negative press to their advantage.
When the fallout from nuclear disasters doesn't come close to the amount of radiation out off by burning and refining fossil fuels, there is no argument.
Yeah things blow up
I would stop them right there and ask when the last oil spill was.
It was last month. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_spills
Even without oil spills. The fossil fuel method of dealing with waste is to vent it into the atmosphere. Nuclear only does that when something goes very wrong, and even then it causes significantly fewer fatalities.
You could have a Chernobyl every single day and still kill fewer people than coal and oil.
The safety aspects alone SHOULD be enough to convince people, yet here we are.
The difference between nuclear-power- related disasters and fossil fuel related disasters is astronomical.
And honestly the amount of radioactive isotopes that get spewed out from burning coal day in day out for decades on end absolutely dwarfs the amount of radioactivity released from nuclear disasters.
one dangerous thing being less unsafe than another doesn't make it safe.
And nobody suggested it did.
But the argument of "it's more unsafe" doesn't apply, that was my whole point.
If one thing is less unsafe than another, why the fuck WOULDN'T you want to switch the the DEMONSTRABLY LESS UNSAFE THING
yeah, decentralised photovoltaic- & -thermic cells, wind and river turbines, biomass.
Solar's a little bit less killy than nuclear (people die when mining raw materials and from falling off rooftops when installing panels) and wind turbines are a little more dangerous than nuclear (mining raw materials, falls during installation/maintenance and people burning to death during maintenance), but hydroelectric power is much more dangerous than nuclear (mainly from drownings after dams burst). Until very recently, nuclear was the safest means of power generation by a wide margin, so if safety is the main concern, there should be a lot more of it.
A big reason for this is that a single nuclear power plant can power a city despite having the same footprint as a small village worth of wind turbines or solar panels and running for decades off a wheelbarrow of fuel, so there's much less for construction workers and miners to do and fewer opportunities for them to die. It only kills when there's an accident bad enough to make international news and remain in the public consciousness for decades, and accidents that bad have only happened a handful of times.
Biomass is not sustainable. You'll cut your forests down to sate demand.
it was an intendendly brief answer. and of course the biomass that is a product of other processes is being used. we don't have woods left in europe and forests are needed for wood production.
Why do you think that those against nuclear energy are for fossil fuels? My building has solar panels, and backup power comes from either wind turbines or the hydraulic dam down the river.
The overwhelming resistance to nuclear is pushed by people who want us to stay on fossil fuels, and the number of people suggesting renewables usally state their preferences in the comments alongside their criticism (whether the criticism is valid or not).
the "worst" disaster in the USA
The 3-Mile Island incident hit two weeks after The China Syndrome hit theaters. (A movie about a runaway nuclear meltdown.)
Otherwise the story would have been, "A tiny poof of radioactive steam got loose, everything was handled quickly and perfectly, no big deal, and back to you Tom (Brokaw).
Yep. So much of this shit from "environmental activists" that have no fucking clue how any of this works. It's been shown time and time again that nuclear is the answer for base load energy requirements with minimal environmental impact.
When and where? Nuclear is very very expensive. Nuclear doesn't work well as baseload since while you can turn it off rather quickly you can't turn it back on fast when it's needed again
Isn't that the point of baseload? To cover the non-highs, but provide the stable base?
There is no stable base for renewables.
At noon in summer, renewables can produce >100% of energy consumption. The nuclear reactors would need to be shut off and turned back on a couple hours later, for the months from June to September.
But nuclear cannot reactivate quick enough as solar production is winding down in the evening, nor can it shut down quick enough in the morning.
It's much, much cheaper to massively increase battery storage in order to store excess energy produced by renewables.
In winter as of right now, there is not enough energy from renewables but this is hopefully subject to change over the next decade or so. If energy costs are high enough at night, companies will start building private battery storage to fill them during winter days. That way a large part of energy consumption can adapt to production.
In case of energy droughts, gas power plants can be kept because they can turn on and shut down within minutes, making them the best at providing a varying base load.
No, you want the baseload to take over when there isn't enough much cheaper renewable energy.
That's what they just said? Just in different words
Baseload means the consistent day to day requirements a grid always has while up, aka people running their lights, tvs and appliances at regular times throughout the day.
Flex loads are unusual peaks on the grid such as unexpectedly hot days where people run air conditioners or electric heat in the winter time. These are the points where things like wind power is invaluable to the grid.
The idea that Nuclear can't flex though is absurd, it's not as fast as wind, but raising or lowering control rods takes seconds to minutes depending on reactor type, not hours like people seem to think. It just makes more sense to run them at schedule outputs because you need to shut them down entirely to refuel them. But if a nuclear plant was built up enough to handle capacity of a given region, it could realistically move between 50% load and 80% load and back in under ten minutes.
Ecologically, Nuclear is by the far safest route, having the among lowest carbon outputs of all power production AND using less land per kw produced. The only thing that even gets close is rooftop solar, and even if you covered every external surface of every building in a city with solar you'd still not meet base loads.
The price point of nuclear is a two part problem, both of which stem from propaganda leveraged against nuclear. We don't have economies of scale because NIMBY and fear mongering how "dangerous" nuclear is (despite being the safest form of power in human history) preventing new constructions, combined with the second front of overzealous and unrealistic safety standards forced upon the nuclear industry that make it difficult for them to be profitable, it's like requiring people to wear full body kevlar pads while driving or biking. Keeps them safe, maybe, but is that level of protection required? Not even remotely. No other form of power production could survive if strangled the same way nuclear has been for the last 80 years, which speaks volumes to how effective it is where even being kneecapped and held back at every turn it still persists to this day. Because it's that damn effective and energy dense.
Edit: It goes without saying the best possible future we can have is wind and nuclear powered with solar being added where it can be done efficiently, such as rooftop or land which has no other use including ecological reclamation. Wind is better in rural setting such as agriculture, where nuclear is better for denser populations like cities and industrial centers. Solar is best used as rooftop or addition to existing structures where it can generate power without inhibiting other functions. (You can't put solar on a green house, for example.)
It's not the safest, solar is. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Talk about a cherry picked survey. They only include EU deaths but still opted to add Chernobyl and Fukashima deaths to make solar look better.
....that's why it would be used as a baseload. I.E. something that you never really turn off because that amount is always required.
That works against renewable resources, which should provide 100% or more during normal days. Which would mean you have to take off wind turbines from the net to keep nuclear going, that makes investing in wind less attractive.
Then you reduce the output of the nuclear plants. I'm not sure where you are getting that it takes them forever to start up nuclear power. You just raise and lower control rods to increase or decrease the heat they are releasing, which lowers the steam produced, which starts/stops some turbines. It's not like the fastest system out there, but afaik it's easily doable in the span of an hour or two.
Investing in wind doesn't need to be attractive, it needs to be part of a government-owned national energy infrastructure plan that gets it where it needs to be and where it'll serve the needs of the people the best
Nuclear doesn't work well as baseload since while you can turn it off rather quickly you can't turn it back on fast when it's needed again
Nuclear is best used for baseload, since while you can turn it off rather quickly you can't turn it back on fast when it's needed again
You want to turn of your baseload when there is enough cheap wind and solar energy... Like that's the whole point of baseload
Power plants that do not change their power output quickly, such as some large coal or nuclear plants, are generally called baseload power plants.
These are two excellent videos by Kyle Hill, explaining where we are with nuclear power. They're Invidious Links, because I block all trackers from Google, which means youtube doesn't work for me. I put the titles beside the links in-case people want to search them up themselves. The War in Ukraine, The Far-right, the intolerance and the propaganda on social media. It's because they want to push us to war. Electric cars, plus modern nuclear power means the end to the artificial energy crisis. Means the end to Petrostates like Russia, Saudi Arabia and what the US is fast turning into. The fossil fuel industry has suppressed this technology for the last 70 years. That is why they need us at war, because there are no electric tanks. Anyone who is skeptical about nuclear power, I urge you to watch these. I promise you, threatening Denmark over Greenland will make a lot more sense with this context.
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=BcoN2bdACGA Why Isn’t Thorium Changing the World?
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=4aUODXeAM-k We Solved Nuclear Waste Decades Ago
The fossil fuel industry has been suppressing all alternatives to fossil fuels. They have entire research departments that work on inventing green energy solutions and then they patent them and shelve them.
Thank you for the videos. The links didn't work for me, though, so for anyone else for whom it doesn't work, here are the links:
https://youtu.be/4aUODXeAM-k
https://youtu.be/BcoN2bdACGA