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Young climate activist tells Greenpeace to drop ‘old-fashioned’ anti-nuclear stance
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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Don’t push nuclear power like it’s the only option though.
Where I live we entirely provide energy from hydro power plants and nuclear energy is banned. We use no fossil fuels. We have a 35 year plan for future growth and it doesn’t include any fossil fuels. Nuclear power is just one of the options and it has many hurdles to implement, maintain and decommission.
Honestly, if you can, hydro is brilliant. Not many places can though — both because of geography and politics. Nuclear is better than a lot of the alternatives and shouldn't be discounted.
Which each have their drawbacks. Just as an example, though not representative of the majority, what do you do about months of no sun in the Arctic Circle for solar power? There is no single solution to this problem. Nuclear is better than fossil fuels by far, and we should not just throw it away out of fear.
And yet nuclear has killed less than even wind. Obviously death is not the only factor, which is why it should be a combination of both.
Again, it's just an example. There are loads of situations where solar and wind just don't work — and they are both inconsistent, without battery technology nearly good enough to work on the order of days for an entire national grid, which could be potentially needed in the event of a storm.
Nuclear waste is a problem, but one which is much more easily contained and much less dangerous than the CO2 that's constantly being spewed into our air.
And what do YOU know about radioactive waste disposal?
I know it's a damn lot easier than carbon recapture, if we're talking waste products. It's not ideal, but there is no such thing as perfect, and we shouldn't let that be the enemy of good. Nuclear fission power is part of a large group of methods to help us switch off fossil fuels.
We can bury it in the ground and it will literally turn into lead. How are you doing with carbon emissions? Got a fix?
I think it's photosynthesis. 'Bury in the ground' is an extreme simplification btw. Also, I am finished with this topic scince long anough. It feels politically biased. If you'd like to reply, I'd hear it gladly. But I m not going to be involved into a discussion.
Launch it into the sun or Florida
Launching radioactive waste into space is a terrible idea, because rockets on occasion crash. Once that happens it becomes a nuclear disaster.
Instead we can safely store it in depleted mines.
Mines fill up with water if they're not constantly pumped out. Even the salt mines which seemed like a solution were found to have this issue
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/04/deep-isolation-aims-to-bury-nuclear-waste-using-boreholes.html
Dig a hole, anywhere, there's a chance it'll fill with water. Especially with climate change. We're seeing moisture getting dropped in areas at greater frequencies that didn't happen decades ago. There's no guarantee you can dig a hole anywhere on earth that wouldn't become apart of our aquifers as the water travels back to the ocean.
There is no guarantee of anything.
But if you're storing it hundreds of miles from the ocean, the risk is minimal.
It isn't really minimal since the water cycle on earth is all connected.
Water in the ocean evaporates. It's carries inland by Hadley cells that deposit the moisture inland. It gets dumped on the highest points which all run back the ocean and creating all our aquifers along the way. Those aquifers feed our great lakes and wells.
But you're suggesting we bury toxic material that remains toxic for hundreds or thousands of years somewhere remote that would just be high up in that water cycle. In places where private companies would be out of the eyes of watchdog groups
That is not what I am suggesting.
Sealing a deep narrow borehole isn't a difficult problem. The Earth has contained oil and gas underground for millions of years.
Its contained it using geological features but once exposed how is it possible to recreate that. Its also not like this material is goo
The hole would be 0.5m wide and >1000m deep, backfilled with bentonite clay and concrete. At the bottom, the path curves back upward, so waste is not stored at the bottom.
Even if geology doesn't collapse the hole, it's hard to imagine material climbing up through 1000m of clogged pipe.
Big hole in the side of mountain in a desert, stick the waste in, full it with rubble and concrete, job done. If some primatives in a hundred thousand years stumble across it and dig it out, fuck em, who cares.
Dig a hole, anywhere, now leave. What will the hole eventually fill up with?
The pyramids have chambers that were unopened for over four thousand years, bone dry inside. Pick an area with very little rainfall, surround it with rock and the problem will stop existing on human timescales.
https://www.livescience.com/was-ancient-egypt-a-desert
My country, Sweden, also gets a decent chunk of power from hydro. Back in 2021, about 43% was hydroelectric, and 31% was nuclear.
It would be cool to see huge investments into battery storage. If we could create a battery that doesn't just leak energy from storing, we could generate power in one location and ship it out where it's needed. There could be remote energy production plants using geothermal or hydroelectric power that ship out these charged batteries to locations all over. It would let us better utilize resources instead of having to have cities anchored around these sources.
Or we could generate a ton of power all at once, store it and use it as needed rather having to have on demand energy production
Hell with better batteries even fossil fuels begin to be climate friendly since you could store the massive energy created and know you're using close to 100% of it.
Globally humanity already invests over 10 Billion dollars per year in advancing battery technology.
In order to build what you are talking about will almost certainly require real room temperature super conductors. We can get close, maybe, with the next generation of Aluminum-Air or Iron-Air batteries but this is big pimping. It's incredibly complicated and difficult.
It's like Fusion Power. We can see a future where we have it figured out and working but it's still some years, if not decades, away.
Allow me to share the most frustrating graph I have ever seen
We could just use energy to fill a big hole with water and put plastic wrap over top until we need to get the energy back then we pump it through a dam.
Then profit.
Problem solved
Kind of an unconventional battery, but I've heard of solar and wind being used to pump water uphill into reservoirs and then released through a hydro plant when the sun/wind aren't shining/blowing. I'd be curious to know the amount of production lost from storing it this way.
I heard the loss comes from evaporation. Another cool idea I heard was using a mining cart. So its not practical but I think the idea is cook because I'm pretty science illiterate but it got me thinking about what a battery actually is. So you drag a mine cart up a hill with energy produced using renewable energy and then let it go down the hill and collect the stored energy with its motion. Technically there isn't anything like evaporation so you could store the mine cart up the hill with no energy loss.
Interesting. Didn't consider the evaporation. I imagine friction could effect the minecarts, but no idea to what degree. Some loss is gonna happen so matter what. If I'm understanding correctly, even nuclear, built away from population centers, will lose some power due to transmission distances.
Moving batteries seems like a terribly inefficient way of replacing power lines.
Power lines would still mean we need energy on demand though wouldn't it. And if we can transport energy from an area like a huge solar array in the Sahara to Kazakhstan or China it would be better. I was just raising it as an off thought like maybe theres more ways to think about solving this problem than just building plants. What level of storage ability could we have that would let us build a large solar array in the Sahara to power Africa and Europe vs just building more plants. I think our end goal will be energy storage and like you brought up transport/transmission. I think that because I think we have energy production pretty well solved