• umad_cause_ibad@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Astrealix@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

        • Astrealix@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

            • Astrealix@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              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.

        • Astrealix@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • EMPig@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            “Easier”? Are you aware of the fact that radioactive waste tombs are meant to stand for millions of years? It requres a lot of territory, construction and servance charges, and lots of prays for nothing destructive happens with it in its “infinite” lifetime.

            • Astrealix@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Have you tried capturing gas? As difficult as radioactive waste tombs are, they’re easier than containing a specific type of air lol.

              • EMPig@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                Read about breathing if you want to know how to capture gas. Also, about photosynthesis.

                • Astrealix@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  If you want to buy the land to plant a second Amazon, be my guest. And breathing does the exact opposite of what we want.

        • radiosimian@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          We can bury it in the ground and it will literally turn into lead. How are you doing with carbon emissions? Got a fix?

          • EMPig@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            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.

          • Olgratin_Magmatoe@startrek.website
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            1 year ago

            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.

    • Touching_Grass@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Buelldozer@lemmy.today
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        1 year ago

        It would be cool to see huge investments into battery storage.

        Globally humanity already invests over 10 Billion dollars per year in advancing battery technology.

        If we could create a battery that doesn’t just leak energy from storing…

        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.

        • Touching_Grass@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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

      • njordomir@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • Touching_Grass@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • njordomir@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            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.

      • Astrealix@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        How many 9.1 magnitude earthquakes do you think there are? And the reports following the disaster showed that there were definitely ways to prevent it from happening, like, for example, not building it so close to the sea.

          • Astrealix@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            I mean, if we want to go down that path, there’s no reason to think that governments won’t just stick to fossil fuels and fuck us all.

            Even so, it took a literal once-in-a-century earthquake in the right place to send a tsunami to the perfectly misplaced reactor to actually make just one person die. One. And two died from the aforementioned massive tsunami caused by an earthquake that occurs around once a century.

      • Harrison [He/Him]@ttrpg.network
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        1 year ago

        The nuclear power plant decades older than Chernobyl that got hit by an earthquake and a tsunami and resulted in a only single death and some expensive clean up?

      • radiosimian@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        You know there’s a crapload more reactors than Fukukishima, right? Like over 70% of France’s energy demands are met with nuclear power.

        The issue here is that you are parroting the devisive argument that investors in oil have been putting out for decades. You are also ignoring the harm that outputting millions of tonnes of carbon-based effluent has on the world’s population as a whole.

        Gram for gram nuclear is safer and your horror stories should be discounted. Retort:

        2023 Marco Pol…Sweden, Karlsh…22 October 2023Lennard en z’n …United Kingdo…26 March 20232023 Princess …Philippines, Pol…28 February 20232022 Keystone …United States, …7 December 2022

        Cool, keep on with your ‘nuclear bad’ narrative. It does objectively less harm than carbon-based energy.