There’s no waste to get rid of
It just flies up into the atmosphere for free, indeed
Comment on Can somebody please explain why the world hasn't gone nuclear yet?
Eyekaytee@aussie.zone 3 days ago
Well you can simply look at the rollout of renewables vs Nuclear in the UK
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycNqII5HYMI
tldr: Nuclear power plants are expensive to build (complicated to build), expensive to run (need well trained staff to handle the complexities), the stuff that they run on (Uranium) isn’t easy to acquire, and on top of all this the waste product is difficult to dispose of, I believe in Germany for example when the power company shut down its Nuclear power plants it told the Germany government they can deal with the nuclear waste… so basically even though the german people get 0% of their power from nuclear power plants they pay every day to store the nuclear waste from previous ones that are no longer operational…
… and when things go wrong they REALLY go wrong
Coal on the other hand is relatively cheap, the technology is fairly simple, running them is fairly cheap, there’s no waste to get rid of etc
apotheotic@beehaw.org 3 days ago
GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
Yeah, there’s no waste from coal plants…if you don’t count the damage from mining, the storage and spills of fly ash, or the carbon and radioactive material emitted into the atmosphere. Except for those, and the deaths they cause, coal could be the cleanest fuel source out there…instead of one of the most polluting.
halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Well, the waste gets thrown into the atmosphere. And that coal ash contains radioactive waste. Radioactive particulates up to 10x more concentrated than the raw coal fuel are injected directly into the atmosphere and spread by the winds. You know, the actual dangerous part of those nuclear accidents everyone is always thinking about.
scientificamerican.com/…/coal-ash-is-more-radioac…
If a nuclear plant leaked even a fraction of that amount of radiation it would be shut down immediately. But all of that gets to be ignored, because it’s not a nuclear power plant.