Know why we quit building plants in the 70s? I wish this was a joke.
The China Syndrome, a movie about a core meltdown at a nuclear power plant, came out about 2 weeks before the Three Mile Island incident.
Comment on AI in Wyoming may soon use more electricity than state’s human residents
halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world 4 days agoModern nuclear fission already solves this issue fairly adequately. We’ve already developed numerous ways to minimize and use nuclear waste, including reusing it in various other forms and even reactor designs. The actual amount of waste that doesn’t have an alternate use is pretty small. We just haven’t really attempted it. Most currently operating nuclear plants date back to designs from the 60s and 70s.
Not to mention things like modern Advanced Geothermal systems. Some of those designs even involve reusing existing old oil drill sites, and the same workers because it’s the same type of drilling. Don’t even need large amounts of retraining.
shalafi@lemmy.world 4 days ago
halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world 3 days ago
The worst part of that is The Mike Island wasn’t so much a nuclear disaster, it was a PR and communications disaster.
shalafi@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Gods yes! A poof a radioactive steam got loose, and we quickly got a handle on it. But Americans at the time were leery of nuclear power, both through ignorance and fear of global thermonuclear war. Then that fucking movie was on our minds. What a disaster.
I was a child and remember Oklahoma shutting down the Black Fox nuclear plant, after years of planning and construction. Hippies were already protesting, The China Syndrome gave them the political power to end it.
Good job on that one environmentalists!
halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Don’t discount the PR from Exelon being complete dogshit. Actively lying to the public instead of actually explaining what was going on and when getting caught by the public and called out by the media trying to double down.
It screwed the entire industry. It proved to the public that they couldn’t trust a company to tell them the truth when the issue wasn’t really bad. There’s no way they’d tell the truth when things were actually bad.
It destroyed the entire industry’s credibility in just a few days.
0x0@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
There’s the red scare, and there’s the nuke scare…
IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
And it’s generated anyways, no matter if we pull some minuscle amount of it out or not. 47 terawatts all the time (according to wikipedia), or all the power we currently consume per year in about 150 days (assuming my quick math is even close). Of course we can’t (and probably shouldn’t) capture 100% of it, but there’s plenty of energy to at least shut down few coal ovens.