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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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Wind and solar > nuclear > fossil fuels
Nothing really against nuclear except how it is being weilded as a distraction from better, cleaner, energy. We need to be going all in on converting everything to wind and solar, with batteries and other power storage like water pumping facilities filling the gaps.
Nuclear needs a few more issues figured out, like how to actually cheaply build and get power from all those touted newer cleaner reactor styles.
The only real problem I have with new nuclear plants is that we have to build them with the current government and regulatory environment.
The current government in the United States is so terrible at its job it cannot even agree to pay its debt bills for things it already agreed to buy in a currency that it issues itself without a never ending series of debates.
The current regulatory structure allows all kinds of environmental criminality and corners to be cut by the corporations who will ultimately build, staff, and run these power plants.
I don't trust these "public/private partnerships" to result in well-designed, adequately planned, correctly maintained nuclear plants. I expect corners will be cut all over the place, and that maintenance and upkeep that is supposed to occur regularly according to anyone with any sense during the design process will be deferred in order to generate more upfront profit. I also suspect that rampant NIMBYism will result in any new ones being placed in areas that are already largely impacted by other terrible societal aspects: inequality, racism, gerrymandering, other industry, etc.
Not sure why you people think it's one or the other.
We can't meet our energy needs with just wind and solar.
This isn't true. We very much can.
Have you considered that the sun is a gigantic self sustaining ball of fusion that bathes our entire planet in an amount of power you cannot comprehend in its scale, every single day? Because that is a big part of it.
Maybe I'm wrong.
That would be nice, but I don't think it's the case.
There's more toxic waste from solar panels each year than nuclear waste from all nuclear history. And this solar waste keeps snowballing at an insane rate. Because right now we're dealing with waste from 20-30 years ago, when the amount of deployed solar panels was low. 20-30 years from now there will be no place to bury all that shit.
Please don't repeat industry propaganda talking points. That "fact" is made up. It's like the "Prius uses more energy than an F100" one - it comes from a company PR department, not reality.
That's a fact. Propaganda is "green renewable" bullshit.
Citation needed.
As an example https://hbr.org/2021/06/the-dark-side-of-solar-power
Where does it say it produces more waste than nuclear power?
That article doesn't seem to mention nuclear waste.
Sorry to burst your bubble on wind and solar... The amount of fiberglass and resin waste of astounding. The concrete trashes that particular spot for many hundreds of years. There are piles of birds in many areas with wind. And then solar... Oof... Most of the chemicals come from China. The slave labor, child labor, and toxic waste at the mines and refineries is just mind boggling. There's a huge amount of work to do before wind and solar can be good options for humanity and the environment.
Nuclear has made great strides. We just don't see those advances in the US unless you're on a modern nuclear ship in the engine room. Europe has amazing modern designs. So does japan.
Wow. What's toxic here is your made up industry propaganda.
A lot of what you just said is not true, fully bullshit, so I'll just ignore all that. Dead birds? Cmon. Are we going to tear down all the skyscrapers in the world because birds run into them? Are we going to stop the entire logging industry because it takes away bird's nesting space? Don't spout anti-green energy propaganda like you are worried about the birds, if you were really worried about them, you would be pro green energy
If you consider the peripheral waste involved in their production it is only fair to do the same for everything else, and when you do, solar and wind still win. And it's only going to get better, we are refining and recycling the rare materials involved better and better every year. We are kindof in the golden age of solar power improvements.
I don't think any of us should be making assumptions about how many birds/bats are being killed without looking up the numbers. At least back when I was in school and learning about windmills (a decade ago) there were concerns because wind farms were often located along migratory pathways for birds. And it's not just 'birds' that die, it can be an important species within the trophic level that gets decimated, and then there are consequences of that felt within the food web. It's not as bad as a city, but we're talking about introducing something new into the environment, and people should talk about the potential issues. We should be able to have both sides arguments about this stuff, since we're still likely to agree it's the right choice to replace carbon plants.
If you were an ecologist it wouldn't be so easy to claim others are ignorant when they bring up concerns about renewable energy harming the natural spaces they are introduced into.
This is an argument for differently designed windfarms, at best, and you are defending propaganda.
My opinion about this comes entirely from a course I took in school a long time ago so you're making the claim that science is propaganda here and I'm not going to agree with that.
Not all propaganda is untrue. Sometimes it is more tactical. In this case, implying one true thing is more important than it is.
All construction projects of all types have been having impacts on the animals that are displaced or effected for a while, and we do need to have concern for it and change many things, from infrastructure designs to materials used and how they are manufactured.
But inflating this concern over these birds related to windmills is intended to bring hesitation to people who are concerned about the environment that would otherwise support these necessary changes to our power grid.
There will always always always be less damage to environments from windmills than there is from equivalent power fossil fuel use. Implying otherwise is dishonest. Look at any image of a strip mine and tell me that causes less damage than windmills
I guess I had considered propaganda to emanate from dishonest sources and took my cooky professor quoting legit sources as not being part of that group, but even facts can be misrepresented. I don't think the intention of my comments were to elevate coal or any other dirty energy source.
The point of those studies wasn't to disrupt development of renewables but to prompt engineers and planners to design systems which limit the harmful effects observed in the first generation of windmills. They are good things to review and know about.
It's hard to bring up complex topics on the internet because we can't all be experts at everything and it's easier to lump people into for/against camps. That's not at all where I'm coming from, but that's how I've been assigned by mentioning "the other side" of a complex topic.
That's a fantasy. Building a yesterday reactor takes decades and longer if the demand picks up. Which doesn't look is the case.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1943815X.2012.746993
"It estimates that wind farms are responsible for roughly 0.27 avian fatalities per gigawatt-hour (GWh) of electricity while nuclear power plants involve 0.6 fatalities per GWh and fossil-fueled power stations are responsible for about 9.4 fatalities per GWh."