My understanding is that every other form of energy production has similar or worse concerns, including renewables due to the materials used to build and operate and decommission solar panels and windmills.

The argument you're making about waste has even led to the decommissioning of nuclear in Germany to be replaced with coal... burning coal also produces radioactive fly ash. Everything has tradeoffs!

I guess we could just give up on electricity entirely! That might save the planet

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Kon5ole a day ago | parent | next [-]

>My understanding is that every other form of energy production has similar or worse concerns

You are suffering from a misunderstanding then. Maybe several, since Germany has cut their coal use by more than half since Fukushima. (262 TWh from coal in 2011, 108 in 2024).

Nuclear waste and the efforts it requires to manage is really orders of magnitude worse than other kinds of waste produced in energy production. Even if it can be argued that coal is second, it's a distant second, and nobody replaces nuclear with coal.

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rini17 a day ago | parent [-]

That is purely psychological perception. Noone seriously calculated that nuclear waste would be orders of magnitude worse than coal per TWh. Neither safety, expense to manage nor other externalities.

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Kon5ole a day ago | parent | next [-]

>Noone seriously calculated that nuclear waste would be orders of magnitude worse than coal per TWh

Not sure what you mean here but I agree that nobody was able to predict what the cost of nuclear would actually end up being when they first started with it in the 50s.

EDF was bailed out for 50 bn despite having neglected maintenance so badly that half their plants were offline in 2022, and the first thing France did when they took over was to double the purchase price. If that's enough remains to be seen.

If you mean that you disagree that nuclear is an order of magnitude worse per TWh, then perhaps you don't know how much more energy we get from coal, or how much money, time and effort is spent on nuclear?

Just as an illustration, during the 40 years it was active, Fukushima generated as much electricity in total as the world gets from coal in one week.

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rini17 19 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't understand what are you trying to say, coal plants always have proper maintenance and never caused price hikes, outages and fatal accidents?

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Kon5ole 18 hours ago | parent [-]

>I don't understand what are you trying to say, coal plants always have proper maintenance and never caused price hikes, outages and fatal accidents?

No no - I'm saying nobody pays 8 billion per year 14 years after a coal plant accident, no matter what coal plant accident it was. But Japan pays that for Fukushima.

	▲	rini17 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Because nobody (at least in the US and China) takes heavy metals in groundwater as a serious problem. If they did, that would cost much more than Fukushima. It eventually will. https://insideclimatenews.org/news/04032019/coal-ash-groundw...

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atoav a day ago | parent | prev [-]

No it isn't. All current nuclear waste models purely rely on geology and perfect engineering and assume that 100 to 300 years in the future those sites need zero staff, zero maintenance and zero monitoring.

Which is of course a "cool" assumption to make if you're profiting from this being the conclusion today. Critics of these models (like me) are sceptical of that overly opportunistic conclusion, especially since the timeframes involved are so long and the storage still needs to be maintained long after the profits stopped for one reason or another. I am not saying that this can't be done, I say the current models are insufficient and rely on future generations "dealing with it" somehow.

If you can convince me my worry is unfounded, I'd be happy to hear why I am worrying too much or why we can be certain that this works out as we wish it would.

	▲	rini17 19 hours ago \| parent [-]
		So what if it's not perfect? Worst case of nuclear waste mishandling would still have milder repercussions compared to doubled, or tripled or worse CO2 levels we are subjecting future generations to. That will persist too long after profits from fossils stop. Hard to discuss or persuade when you are comparing everything to some ideal, and one-sidedly moreover. Can we talk about real world alternatives. Hypothetically even doubling natural radioactivity background (and that would require total recklessness) would be better option if we could have avoided large part of CO2 output. Now nuclear is becoming moot as we have cheap renewables and batteries anyway.

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hardolaf 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Renewables outside of solar farms where solar is installed at ground level, also have a significantly higher death and serious injury rate than nuclear does per GWH produced even after including the use of nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons testing in the numbers to make nuclear look worse.