this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
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The memes of the climate
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Also nuclear. Nuclear is the way of the future.
Clean Fukushima corium first.
Pretty telling that the main counterpoint is referencing the second biggest nuclear disaster in history that made a staggering zero deaths.
Evacuation did almost 2500 deaths.
Evacuation was due to unwarranted panic as clearly stated by the Japanese government itself and the UN. People with your same mentality and irrational fear caused those deaths.
Tepco didn't told the true so even a model had failed. You cannot rewrite the story it is done. Check the recent studies and numbers about rising cancers.
Cite these studies. Spoiler: they do not exist.
Your statement about zero death was false. Even the last UNSEAR report is in total contradiction with that (248 occurrences with the word "cancer" in the last one). EU large scale studies about nuclear workers can be found here : https://www.bmj.com/content/382/bmj-2022-074520 I can also provide studies specifically for Fukushima concerning thyroides, lung cancer and diabetic links.
There was lemmy in the 60s? /s
But I do agree if we find some way to deal with the nuclear waste nuclear energy would be perfect. I'm really hopeful for fusion research lately.
Nuclear waste is a largely solved issue. The volume of very radioactive waste is quite small, and safely contained with a variety of solutions.
It's solved if your government gets off its ass about it. Reprocessing waste for reactors is one of the few places where nuclear makes sense. Way better than burying it for thousands of years.
Otherwise, the economics have ran past it. We have solutions without it; we just need to scale the up. There are a few other niches, like cargo ships, where they make sense. For general power use, no.
The issue is not the volume it is the duration.
TBH, nuclear waste is a political problem, not an engineering one. Finns figured it out, no reason other countries couldn't.
Fusion of course is better (though some small amount of radioactive waste will still be produced due to neutron activation of the materials used in the equipment), but it seems like it's been 10 years away for the past 60 years. And we really shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of good—we need to phase out fossil fuels yesterday and fission is good enough for answering the needs of the industry; solar and wind is good enough for distributed residential power and also a good choice for poorer countries who lack the knowhow or even stability for safe operation of nuclear.
fusion isn't gonna happen, how did Finland 'solve' nuclear waste?
Apparently 'solved' means 'bury it in an underground vault'. Finland buries their nuclear waste. The U.S. had planned to do the same at Yucca Mountain, but political infighting canceled that plan, IIRC.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230613-onkalo-has-finland-found-the-answer-to-spent-nuclear-fuel-waste-by-burying-it
Fusion is all but guaranteed to work eventually. If a breakthrough was made today that makes it commercialy viable, it would be ten years before we see a reactor putting power on the grid.
It's not something we want to hang our hopes on. ITER will probably work if nothing else gets there first, but we need to look at other things long before that comes online. There's no reason to wait and every reason to go full speed on what we have.
ITER that thing is dead already. 1st estimation : 5 billions. Now : 19 billions. And Russians are involved. Delays are so huge that it will be over before to be born.