this post was submitted on 05 May 2024
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So to make nuclear sound better it's compared against the most polluting source?
I can't say I've seen much push for more coal power plants.
The fact the nobody on any side likes to bring up (and most aren't aware of tbh) is that using large amounts of energy that isn't part of the natural cycle of the planet (i.e. current solar energy), whether that's fossil energy (solar energy the the past), nuclear fission or fusion, it means the population of our species can grow beyond the carrying capacity (and I'm not speaking of simply making enough food, there are many other limits) and puts us into a race condition where we have to figure out how to colonize space before destroying the planet.
Nothing more nuclear than the sun.
That said, the primary appeal of uranium/thorium fuel is in energy density. Its a cheap way to localize consumption and distribution of electric energy, which has its own ecological costs. Nuclear can and should be comparably efficient to solar and wind. Radioactive decay is as much a part of the natural cycle as solar radiation or lunar tidal force and there's no shame in harnessing it, so long as we manage the waste efficiently (a thing that molten salt thorium reactors do exceptionally well).
Some states are trailblazing a path towards functional reactor design faster than others
It's not about shame, it's about too much energy added to a system causing imbalance. Large scale use of nuclear or fossil energy does the same thing as adding tons of nitrogen to a lake (eutrophication). It's temporarily great for the few nitrogen lovers but otherwise destroys the ecosystem.
By using nuclear or fossil energy, humans are causing the equivalent of eutrophication of our own environment.
To my knowledge, electric energy generated by heated water is not producing any kind of effect comparable to nitrogen dumped into a lake or CO2 into the atmosphere. If there's some source suggesting otherwise, I'd be curious to read it.
I think you're confusing fossil fuels with fossil fertilizers. And eutrophication just isn't a major concern in a planet that's losing biodiversity and biomass to excess heat.
You're not understanding my analogy.
Eutrophication is the addition of too much food for one type of living thing in an environment, allowing it's population to grow too large for the ecosystem to support. This is exactly what the Green Revolution was for humanity.
I'm talking about fossil energy in general, all forms of it. Fossil fertilizers are one form of fossil energy.
I haven't seen any evidence of this. At best, you could argue its been wheat, rice, and corn undergoing eutrophication. Perhaps pigs, chickens, and cattle. But outside a few exceptionally well-fed western enclaves, we're operating below the standard intake of our hunter-gatherer predecessors. Blame our sedentary lifestyle or our aging population, but most humans consume below the 2750-3000 calorie diet of our ancestors.
Then you're talking more on the industrial scale than the physical. And that's got far more to do with our tolerance for waste than our appetite for raw inputs. For basic needs like light and heat and travel, we're significantly more efficient thanks to a host of modernizations like insulation and mass transit.
Still not quite getting my analogy. I'm not merely speaking of calories, or how we decide to dispose of waste.
--> I've never seen anyone use this terminology before about "human eutrophication", I made it up. But if you want more info on this topic, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVjhb8Nu1Sk
The evidence is the apparent non-sustainable lifestyle that is only possible by the addition of energy not part of the natural short-term energy cycle of the planet. We are making species go extinct and destroying this planet.
By using fossil/nuclear energy we are able to produce enough food to quadruple the population this planet could sustain without that extra energy. All those extra people need more than food, and in producing all the other needs for this expanded population, we damage the ecosystem. The planet is not ours to use, we are
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=mVjhb8Nu1Sk
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
What?
Do you have any idea how many things we can do with basically free energy? Like for instance, desalinate and clean sea water and pump it back into our exhausted aquifers. Or use electrolysis to split some of that water and oxygen and hydrogen. Or scrub carbon from the atmosphere with gigantic manual filter aways. Or just store excess power in grid scale batteries and cycle plants on and off as needed.
Yes, all of those things make it more likely for human numbers to grow even more, and in the process making more species extinct, and habitats destroyed.
Physics and biology tell us we are living unsustainably. Free energy just makes exploitation of the planet more efficient, wipe out nature even faster with more humans.
If we expect to exist in 100 years, degrowth is the only answer, green energy is a scam.
There is an intrinsic micro-mort rate for working on a roof. If you take this number and the number of hours that are spent working at height fitting solar panels (I got this from industry data a few years ago) its then fairly easy to put the annual deaths from fitting solar panels far above that of nuclear. These deaths are a 'tragic accident', rather than systemic so...
[edit: I can't find a value for professionals anymore. This link mentions 1micromort per person on a ladder at home] [edit: clarity]
If you do that then count the deaths finding and acquiring nuclear materials, the political tensions nuclear materials cause and any related deaths, the deaths of people building the plant, the engineers that died in car accidents in the decade going back and forth to the office in their gas car in the plant planning stages, etc.
There is no perfect energy source, we should stop looking for "the one", use the nuclear plants we have as we degrow and use more green energy (which is a scam if sold as a solution for eco problems on it's own).
natural gas is only 40% cleaner than coal. Petroleum is probably about the same, if not worse, due to all the dirty oil we refine on a daily basis.
The fact that nuclear is still significantly better than coal, and it's comparatively "clean" alternatives, should be a fucking telling statement.
Oh and on the fact of coal power plants, i would recommend you look into australia, clean coal, china, germany (post gas export shenanigans) and steel manufacturing (though that's not a power plant)
If you ignore that near everlasting radioactive waste problem we have yet to come with a solution for.
if you ignore the near permanent impact on the human civilization and history that climate change will have on humanity, yeah nuclear power is definitely worse than coal.
Oh and just for the record, we do have a solution for it, you should read up on modern fast reactor designs, they burn significantly more waste, bringing down the waste time to about a thousand years, potentially even lower, while also producing significantly less waste.
me when I am malthusian: