this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2022
4 points (100.0% liked)

Green Energy

2226 readers
82 users here now

Everything about energy production and storage.

Related communities:

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
poVoq
SteveKLord
4
What do you think about the renewables vs nuclear debate? (self.energy)
submitted 2 years ago by zksmk to c/energy
8 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] zksmk 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Seems like a false dichotomy to me.

Oh, agreed, personally. There's room for all these technologies, and sometimes even a necessity for only some of them, due to a lack of proper alternatives in some places. And it's not always the same technology. There's no one size fits all answer, for every place on Earth.

This is a debate worth having only in a specific localized context, and not to find some generalized rule imo. I never understood why it had to be either/or.