|
| ▲ | amarant 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Your not wrong, but you seem to be missing one significant detail: we have altered the biosphere even more by not engaging in nuclear activity, instead opting for less-scary-but-worse alternatives like coal, oil and gas. |
| |
| ▲ | Kon5ole an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | >we have altered the biosphere even more by not engaging in nuclear activity You imply that we could have made enough nuclear plants to replace coal, oil and gas and that would have prevented the effects of fossil fuel consumption. That's not the case. It would have been entirely impossible to make enough plants to even replace coal and oil fast enough, and even if we did, electricity is only 25% of emissions. | |
| ▲ | kmoser 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You're not wrong, but you seem to be missing one significant detail: if we had invested in renewable energy resources like solar and wind to begin with, we wouldn't have needed (as much) assistance from nuclear, coal, oil, and gas. | |
| ▲ | antonvs 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Historically, yes. We have good alternatives now, though. What’s stopping us moving off carbon fuel is not the viability of alternatives. | | |
| ▲ | loeg 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Unless by "viability" you're completely ignoring price, I disagree (I would argue that excessively expensive solutions aren't viable). We don't have good alternatives to gas (carbon fuel) peakers yet. Nor is winter generation a solved problem. Non-nuclear carbon-free generation needs a tremendous amount of battery storage to get to 0% carbon-emitting. | | | |
| ▲ | UltraSane 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | a 100% wind solar storage grid really isn't viable. |
| |
| ▲ | microgpt 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This could be a convincing argument 70 years ago but we have other options now - mostly batteries and renewables. "But what about the cobalt mines?" - that damage is limited in both space and time |
|
|
| ▲ | lisper 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The problem is that stopping nuclear activity has ancillary effects -- like increased carbon emissions -- that are potentially much more harmful than the radiation. The results of technological decisions are never independent of one another. |
| |
| ▲ | PaulHoule 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Don't forget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturally_occurring_radioactiv... considerable amounts of low-level radiation is emitted by fossil fuel production and use as well as and construction materials. | |
| ▲ | Zigurd 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | In theory. But in fact, attempting to build nuclear power plants results in big increases in electric rates, and the supposed benefits of nuclear power end up being delayed by many years and in many cases decades. The effect of trying and failing to build nuclear power plants on time and on budget uses up many billions in capital that could've been applied to reliable delivery of renewables. Even the supposedly efficient French nuclear power program vastly underestimated decommissioning costs. In other words project risk for nuclear is hideously expensive, even when you think you've dodged project risk problems, there's another whole very expensive project in decommissioning that has its own set of project risks. | | |
| ▲ | lisper 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > attempting to build nuclear power plants results in big increases in electric rates Largely due to the costs of complying with draconian regulatory regimes. |
|
|
|
| ▲ | UltraSane 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Global CO2 emissions would be drastically lower if people hadn't opposed nuclear energy so irrationally. No other technology can produce 1.2GW of zero CO2 electricity anywhere you want. |
