I mean im guessing its because it may not be as profitable, or atleast at first, boycotts or directly just capitalism fucking everything up? i legit always imagine aliens seeing us still use coal while having DISCOVERED IN 1932
I mean im guessing its because it may not be as profitable, or atleast at first, boycotts or directly just capitalism fucking everything up? i legit always imagine aliens seeing us still use coal while having DISCOVERED IN 1932
I guess I have to keep asking every time this shit idea of nuclear as green energy pops up: where to put the waste? Have we figured that out yet? Or will we continue hiding that stuff somewhere and hoping it stays there? 20 years ago I joined the protests in this location, where they were going to store nuclear waste in an abandoned salt mine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorleben_salt_dome
Despite thousands of people blocking roads the train full of nuclear waste arrived anyways. Guess what, briefly after that (or who knows, they probably knew anyways) they found the salt mine wasn’t such a great idea. And now that shit sits there in some storage building waiting for an accident to happen. Maybe Russia wants to drop a drone onto it when they feel like it, or in time the whole thing just gets abandoned because nobody has money to care anymore.
Only way to make energy green is degrowth, so spending less of it. Every single way of producing energy is damaging to the environment, and inventing new stuff or rebranding old stuff as “green” isn’t going to change it. They tear up the country I live in for lithium and the people can’t grow their gardens anymore, common lands are now filled with wind power and the people cannot send their herds onto the mountain anymore, they produce fuel out of maize and large areas of monoculture now grow fuel instead of food, huge areas of agricultural land are being filled with solar panels. It all causes damage, just stop spending so much energy. Don’t produce shit nobody needs, switch the fucking AI off, stay at home and just relax.
If you were to take all of that nuclear waste ever produced in the US, processed and stored inside dry cases, it would fit within an American football field less than 100 ft high. That’s an insanely tiny amount of space for all the waste ever created for an entire type of energy production. For some comparison the amount of coal removed from the ground each year would form a cube over a mile wide.
However, most nuclear waste is low level waste and decays within a decade or less. Some of the medium level waste lasts a few decades. The longer stuff is a small fraction of overall waste. But some of it can be reprocessed and used as fuel again. It is also perfect for the starter fuel for some Thorium-based nuclear breeder reactor designs. Some are useful for various nuclear medicines. Very little of it actually has no use whatsoever.
As others kinda said, it take isn’t that much waste, especially compared to like coal ash. And it’s actually much safer too in dry casks. There are also bigger problems with nuclear than the waste, but thats not your question. The way to solve waste is a combination of:
big ol fuckin hole in the ground (e.g. salt mine or similar, where it will get sealed in)
molten salt reactors and other modern designs, which more completely use up the fuel. Old rod designs are actually like kinda really inefficient.
what are you suggesting tho, fossil is clearly and factually worse for the enviroment compared to nuclear, i mean do you know how big the earth is? sure radiactive waste may seem big and scary to you, but as halcyoncmdr mentioned earlier, it is really not that much of an issue, the earth is really big and we can just hide it really deep below, much better than putting shit in the atmosphere for us to suck into our lungs.