Some key points:

  • nuclear causes fewer deaths, both animal and human alike
  • nuclear takes up far less space, and therefore destroys far less of the environment compared to solar farms, hydro, or wind farms
  • nuclear is stable and not an intermittent source, no issues with grid storage, unlike renewables, which currently solve this with fossil peaker plants
  • nuclear is hard to turn off so to meet fluctuating demand solely on it, you’d need an excess of nuclear, which is a waste
  • nuclear excess could encourage other use of electricity, such as electric heating or transport, however
  • nuclear when it does go bad, goes really bad, mostly in that a large area has to be abandoned for a long long time (historically still fewer deaths than renewables per unit of energy produced tho)
  • nuclear can cause the proliferation of nuclear weapons
  • nuclear is a lot harder to spin up, requires extensive education and is hard and takes a long time to build a plant, compared to renewables
  • all that nuclear waste and no plan other than shove it in somewhere, in a mountain, and keep it secret, keep it safe.

Yay or Nay?

What say you?

  • tallwookie@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    nuclear is far cleaner than coal, has less impact on the environment than solar or hydroelectric, and newer reactor designs (ie: thorium salt) can even use the waste uranium/plutonium of a traditional reactor, but there are a number of issues with nuclear as you have listed.

    renewable/sustainable power sources have their own issues though - solar is “clean” but basically useless at night or if there is heavy cloud cover (and the manufacturing process requires a lot of chemicals), wind turbines are also “clean” but do nothing if there is no wind, hydroelectric has the same issue and it also requires a reservoir/lake, ruining hundreds/thousands of acres of habitat (some would say changing the habitat, but it’s underwater now), and geothermal is not widely available due to geography - it may have the lowest impact of all of the preceding options.

    ANY and ALL energy generation sources are required though - we’re only 0.6 on the Kardashev scale, after all.