Indestructible cask underground is for cowards. In the US we don’t have a long term storage site, so we just ship it around to different temporary sites.
According to Wikipedia the first site goes live somewhen this year running for 70 years and the second one was a major groundwater breach that has been cleaned up and is being monitored.
I’d hardly call these success stories. I love nuclear but it’s hard to sugarcoat the long standing issues.
Yeah, but at least everyone else has long term storage solutions even if it’s not permanent. The US just has short term storage where you can only keep it for a number of years before having to shuffle it to a different short term storage facility via train or semi truck.
Huh. We don’t either in Germany, but I assumed, it was largely because the whole place is inhabitated. Is there not some desert or Alaska or something in the US, where no one minds?
We actually have a perfect place for it in the yucca mountains that was designated in the 1980s, but the actual construction of it has been held up since then thanks to nimby shit.
I would love to see the US head towards nuclear power, but I’m not hopeful it’s ever going to happen. By design the federal government just doesn’t have the power to mandate a state to do anything it doesn’t want too, and a functional electric grid powered by nuclear would require more federal control than what is possible in the foreseeable future.
Our government was designed to grant corporations and the aristocratic class to be able to exert a huge amount of influence over the government. They have decided that it’s a lot more profitable to not progress past fossil fuels.
Well, nuclear power, at least for now, is quite expensive. As long as no new technological breakthrough comes along, it’s simply cheaper to use wind and solar as main power producers. Of course, this has its own problem in the form of power storage, but at least we already have the technology for this.
Power storage is only half of it. Most grids transmit AC power, and in order for that you need SOMETHING in the grid that provides a stable frequency aka a stable prime moves whose speed is unaffected by changes in load. That can be provided by fossil fuel plants, nuclear plants, or hydropower (as long as shifting climate patterns continue to keep reservoirs full).
Wind turbines don’t have a consistent enough prime mover (the wind, so unreliable that it’s a metaphor for constant, rapid change). Solar panels supply DC power, so another option is figuring out long range DC power transmission, which is what China is doing I believe. It’s an incredibly costly and resources intensive solution though.
Power generation is more complicated than just making something spin. You have to consider loading, reactive load, what to do with excess power during off peak hours, balancing load between multiple power sources. Unfortunately, solving the climate crisis is going to take more than “just build renewable sources”.
It also doesn’t help that our infrastructure is out of date due to refusing upgrades because they included green sources (Trump preventing off hore wind farms, for example, also prevents infrastructure upgrades) and/or NIMBYism.
I didn’t want to trivialize the problems with switching to greener alternatives; I just wanted to say that we don’t need some ‘future tech’ to get it done. All we need is what is already known and implemented somewhere in the world.
Also building more nuclear facilities - without any groundbreaking new improvements - is more expensive than the alternative.
Indestructible cask underground is for cowards. In the US we don’t have a long term storage site, so we just ship it around to different temporary sites.
There is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution
As far as I am aware there is no final storage for atomic waste anywhere. France wants to build one in 2030 but we’ll see then I guess.
2 just from tom scott
https://youtu.be/aoy_WJ3mE50
https://youtu.be/PB7HT3BZLzM
According to Wikipedia the first site goes live somewhen this year running for 70 years and the second one was a major groundwater breach that has been cleaned up and is being monitored.
I’d hardly call these success stories. I love nuclear but it’s hard to sugarcoat the long standing issues.
Yeah, but at least everyone else has long term storage solutions even if it’s not permanent. The US just has short term storage where you can only keep it for a number of years before having to shuffle it to a different short term storage facility via train or semi truck.
Huh. We don’t either in Germany, but I assumed, it was largely because the whole place is inhabitated. Is there not some desert or Alaska or something in the US, where no one minds?
We actually have a perfect place for it in the yucca mountains that was designated in the 1980s, but the actual construction of it has been held up since then thanks to nimby shit.
I would love to see the US head towards nuclear power, but I’m not hopeful it’s ever going to happen. By design the federal government just doesn’t have the power to mandate a state to do anything it doesn’t want too, and a functional electric grid powered by nuclear would require more federal control than what is possible in the foreseeable future.
Our government was designed to grant corporations and the aristocratic class to be able to exert a huge amount of influence over the government. They have decided that it’s a lot more profitable to not progress past fossil fuels.
Well, nuclear power, at least for now, is quite expensive. As long as no new technological breakthrough comes along, it’s simply cheaper to use wind and solar as main power producers. Of course, this has its own problem in the form of power storage, but at least we already have the technology for this.
Power storage is only half of it. Most grids transmit AC power, and in order for that you need SOMETHING in the grid that provides a stable frequency aka a stable prime moves whose speed is unaffected by changes in load. That can be provided by fossil fuel plants, nuclear plants, or hydropower (as long as shifting climate patterns continue to keep reservoirs full).
Wind turbines don’t have a consistent enough prime mover (the wind, so unreliable that it’s a metaphor for constant, rapid change). Solar panels supply DC power, so another option is figuring out long range DC power transmission, which is what China is doing I believe. It’s an incredibly costly and resources intensive solution though.
Power generation is more complicated than just making something spin. You have to consider loading, reactive load, what to do with excess power during off peak hours, balancing load between multiple power sources. Unfortunately, solving the climate crisis is going to take more than “just build renewable sources”.
It also doesn’t help that our infrastructure is out of date due to refusing upgrades because they included green sources (Trump preventing off hore wind farms, for example, also prevents infrastructure upgrades) and/or NIMBYism.
Source: I work in nuclear power.
I didn’t want to trivialize the problems with switching to greener alternatives; I just wanted to say that we don’t need some ‘future tech’ to get it done. All we need is what is already known and implemented somewhere in the world.
Also building more nuclear facilities - without any groundbreaking new improvements - is more expensive than the alternative.
Hey I agree with you, but,
The last nuke plant we built in the US was designed in the 1980’s thought, so those ground breaking improvements are here.