Comment on ‘If 1.5m Germans have them there must be something in it’: how balcony solar is taking off
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year agoit literally is clean, the only dirty thing about it is building a nuclear plant, and the mining of uranium, the only unique thing here being the mining of uranium, and technically the scale of construction, but im still not convinced that a nuclear plant produces more CO2 in construction phase, than it will offset in it’s lifetime, maybe solar and wind edge it out, but again, nuclear energy already exists, it’s a heavily established industry and well regulated, so it’s not like it should be the first focus on the chopping block. Especially compared to all the modern problems we have with solar, like the rare earth metals, and mining conditions often experienced. Wind turbines are better, but have issues with scaling, and waste.
WhatYouNeed@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The destructiveness of mining uranium, the toxic cooling water, spend radioactive fuel rods and contaminated machinery.
Real clean…
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
destruction of uranium mining is far less than the mining of rare earth metals, coal, oil, gas, iron, copper, bauxite, can i keep going? You need VASTLY less uranium than ANY of these other materials. It’s quite literally a non concern at scale.
you clearly understand nothing about nuclear power, Do you live next/nearby a nuclear power plant? If so can you tell me what plant it is so i can do some research on it? Even if i grant you this argument, in the BWR design, which is ancient and hasnt been used in 20 years, which is technically going to have radiation products in the primary turbine loop (the cooling loop is mechanically isolated and has ZERO radiation products in it, unless it fails, and even if it DID fail, it would decay so quickly the chance of it causing harm is going to be almost zero, not to mention that the plant would probably shut down very quickly.
If we’re talking modern reactor designs, like the PWR, they have a primary pressurized loop, which is going to have radiation products in it, however this is also a pressurized loop and unsuitable for running a turbine, so it’s going to be coupled to a heat exchanger for the turbine loop, which is then also going to be coupled to another heat exchanger so the chances of BOTH of these loops failing and releasing radiation products is quite literally, impossible. Even TMI had zero known radiation products released, there have been groups and studies claiming that there was, but those were not suitably backed up, and provide no significant proof, there’s also tons of evidence against these claims, notably the reactor PCV wasn’t penetrated, meaning it was entirely contained, so it’s extremely unlikely any amount of radiation got outside of that containment, and if we did, we would know about.
Fukushima is probably the go to point out here, but fukushima was a BWR reactor, and uh, fucking exploded. I only know of three nuclear incidents where reactors exploded, one being chernobyl, an objectively bad reactor core design, SL1 which was user error, and a bad design. And well, fukushima, which was user error, bad design, bad regulation, and bad handling. TMI just melted, so nothing funny happened there.
little bonus tidbit here, if we’re talking modern designs, which are going to be either gas or metal/salt cooling based, where it’s practically impossible to have a significant failure event, especially with designs like the SSR. Even if you did manage to spill metal/salt fuel it’s going to be self contained within the fuel itself. The SSR design takes this one step farther and puts the fuel into fuel rods, which then sit in a salt pool.
these are only a problem for certain reactor designs, designs like the CANDU reactor, and other fast reactor designs (any molten salt/metal reactor is by definition a fast reactor btw) can actually burn the spent waste from PWR designs as fuel, bringing it down to a much safer less significant point in the product chain, by that point encasing them in concrete is going to entirely absorb all of the radiation emitted, and any sort of criticality incident is going to be impossible. And if you’re REALLY concerned about these casks, go put them far underground in a big deep hole.
we’ve literally been working with this shit since nuclear bombs, contamination is quite literally a solved problem, some reactor designs even burn straight unprocessed uranium, though the after products are particularly nasty, those can also be burnt off
compared to something like coal? Absolutely, even when comparing to the fabled wind and solar energy, it’s still right up beside them in terms of the rankings. Nuclear power is only bad if you’re scared of it.