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What do you think about the renewables vs nuclear debate? (self.energy)

submitted 2 years ago by zksmk to c/energy

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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?

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[–] zksmk 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

nuclear safety requires something very near to 0 corruption

Oh definitely, I'd never want my country to build a nuclear fission plant, due to how incompetent and corrupt both the system and mentality around doing these kind of things is around here. I'd be way too worried the thing would explode (despite all the safety measures) because somebody washed some money through the project, the funding got cut beyond safety limits or somebody simply got lazy and didn't do proper maintenance, alas. Ty, but no ty, at least for another half a century, we're not mature enough. I'm sure this applies to many poorer and smaller countries across the globe.

Fusion I'd feel safe with, but that's a dream within a dream.

Said that, I never support the ‘‘renewables are intermittent’’ point

I do wish we had better developed and more universal grid storage tech than just pumped hydro. A large/continental-sized grid is cool and all, but energy independence is still important in geopolitics unfortunately, and simply in practical terms in general too.