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Young climate activist tells Greenpeace to drop ‘old-fashioned’ anti-nuclear stance
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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do not let "perfect" be the enemy of "good enough"
edit: quick addendum, I really cannot stress this enough, everyone who says nuclear is an imperfect solution and just kicks the can down the road -- yes, it does, it kicks it a couple thousand years away as opposed to within the next hundred years. We can use all that time to perfect solar and wind, but unless we get really lucky and get everyone on board with solar and wind right now, the next best thing we can hope for is more time.
I completely agree with everything you said except for ONE little thing:
You are grossly misrepresenting how far that can is kicked down, for the worse. It doesn't kick it down a couple thousand years, it kicks it down for if DOZENS of millennia assuming we stay at the current energy capacity. Even if we doubled or tripled it, it would still be dozens of millennia. First we could use the uranium, then when that is gone, we could use thorium and breed it with plutonium, which would last an incomprehensibly longer time than the uranium did. By that point, we could hopefully have figured out fusion and supplement that with renewable sources of energy.
The only issue that would stem from this would be having TOO much energy, which itself would create a new problem which is heat from electrical usage.
Then you just move the planet slightly further away from the sun! Problem solved!
No man you gotta move the moon closer, since it's cold
I like the cut of your jib, sir.
Some of the biggest blunders of all time come across because too many people let perfect be the Nemesis of good
I really cannot stand that phrase because it’s commonly used as poor rationale for not favoring a superior approach. Both sides of the debate are pushing for what they consider optimum, not “perfection”.
In the case at hand, I’m on the pro-nuclear side of this. But I would hope I could make a better argument than to claim my opponent is advocating an “impossible perfection”.
But that is exactly what's happening. People are pretending like the alternative to investing in nuclear is living off 100% renewables from tomorrow.
Buying time isn't a great argument for nuclear when it takes so much longer than wind or solar to build a plant - median time of 88 months to build a nuclear plant compared to 8-14 for solar.
People will get on board when they see the cost per kwh.
So best time to do it was 88 months ago... What the next best time to do it?
Doing solar that's several times faster to build, cheaper per kwh, and doesn't require digging radioactive bullshit out of the ground seems like a better idea, no?
The answer is actually both. Highly developed nations have huge energy demands and they're probably going to need everything.
Nuclear is most of the time over budget and planning. That's a fact.
Over budget and over planning is bad.
...but also irrelevant - I gave the average real world delivery times.
Which isn't unusual for large construction projects. Nuclear is biggest cost problem is that each power plant is essentially a mega civil engineering project. They require cooling ponds, cooling towers, huge reactors, turbines, and radiation shields.
All of which are fairly large structures that have to be built to pretty high tolerances and have little room for construction defects which are very common in the industry. I work in construction and I can tell you that the majority of construction projects, whether they are an office building, a highway or a bridge run over budget.
There are always going to be factors outside of the control of the design team and the developer. Contractors may run out of labor, supply chains may have many years to complete some of the equipment and these issues compound the schedule which is already very complicated. Do we have an even discussed the expanded and politicized planning and safety rules and certifications that a new nuclear plant is going to need to follow.
I think the solution for micro reactors is pretty intriguing, except we need lots of power not small amounts of power. But a mass-produced reactor that rules off of an assembly line in a factory is likely to be on time and on budget because they can correct for for the problem of building things in the field. It's really hard for people to fabricate complicated machines when they're being rained on in the middle of winter during a storm.
But this is my argument against those who complain about Solar and Wind -- those won't kill you or destroy a location for hundreds of years if they break down and once they're installed they don't have to be fed by more mining, or anything else. Just wind and sun.
And maintenance, it apparently takes quite some effort to keep those running
Funny you say that. Solar and wind each have more human deaths per kWh than nuclear.
Worth mentioning that fossil fuels blow those numbers completely out of the water, though.
Where are you getting that from?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh
I was mistaken. Nuclear lays in between wind and solar.
The death rate for nuclear was mostly from Fukushima, where about 2,300 elderly people died from the stress of moving from their homes. But their houses were also wiped out from a 35 ft tsunami so...
Chernobyl and Fukushima didn't directly kill very many people. Only 1 person died from radiation at Fukushima.
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