Green Energy

I hear and understand this perspective. For me, the overwhelming focus on carbon emissions misses the point that the planet and our relationship to it is sick. We have to consider the overall health of the planet and future generations when we make our decisions.

I'm by no means advocating for increasing the utilization of coal, oil, and gas, but just wanting to challenge my own feelings around nuclear energy.

Some how I feel like the fact that nuclear is also reliant on extraction gets lost in the focus on decarbonization.

Notwithstanding the fact that “big water pools” would not be an extremely high tech solution and could be a long term solution, you should look into geological storage. Enclosure in glass and concrete, storage deep enough to be below aquifers, do look like they can last millions of years (which, personally I think is a waste: a radioactive material is something that radiates energy. I am sure that within a century or two we will dig up these “wastes” to generate energy, I hope we make their enclosure easily openable)

Current nuclear technology was developed for nuclear weapons

True, and internet was developed by the DARPA. That’s largely irrelevant. The effort to make weapon-grade uranium (90%) is an order of magnitude above the effort to make power plants-grade uranium (20%)

Has anywhere actually solved the issue of waste handling?

All power generation benefits a centralized grid structure most by definition. There are scaling laws involved and humans tend not to use power at 100% all of the time, so by centralizing production and storage reductions in cost and efficiency increases in production become possible.

Completely fair.

An EROI of about 7 is considered break-even economically for developed countries and the US average EROI across all generating technologies is about 40 (and going down as the EROI of coal and oil is going down due to increasing energy requirements). The current estimated EROI for current generation nuclear reactors (that have huge rooms for improvement thanks to nuclear recycling being currently banned) is 80 for their operational lifetime (Which is actually a fraction of its estimated safe lifetime which further reduces the net EROI artificially to increase safety margins).

It was created to subsidize the production of nuclear weapons during the cold war and ensure a massive stockpile for future use in the event of nuclear war.

There are readily available chemical processes for separating out the waste from the pure fuel (we use them for processing the mined ore already)

I also have such an issue with just looking at carbon footprinting.

I don't agree. Even the industrial military complex is more prone to diversity in terms of incentives, centralisation and consequences.

The nuclear energy industry is:

Very dependent on investment costs. More than everyday costs. So public funding is frequently demanded, with contracting being a politically toxic environment. The taxpayer pays today without knowing with clarity what he will have to pay on the future.

The risk management brings about a lot of low probability X high consequence cases. So, for safety keeping we need regulations and oversight, lots of it.

Everyday costs thus are heavily dependent on regulations. With a massive difference in operating costs between 99.999 Vs 99.9999% safety levels. Thus lobbying politicians, regulator/overseer capture, and plain old corruption have big relevance to everyday costs

Security issues also demand that inicial clearance as to who can enter the industry, and does not allow having so many players that the probability of losing track of them becomes higher. Thus a massive big incentive for centralisation, on top of the 'every-other-industry wants it's own monopoly' incentive.

Thus, for me, the slippery slope is so slanted that the risks outweigh the benefits, even for a very good democracy.

EDIT: beyond the issues I was talking about, nuclear energy production, as we can build now, has lot of practicality issues. And a lot of people don't have/take time to explore those issues. Like, the power output is not flexible, as required by consumption

because of that it has only been useful to have nuclear for baseline consumption, and that only represents about 6% of total electricity needs, 94% of the electricity has to come from other sources.

Current fusion (thermonuclear bombs) require a fission bomb trigger to start fusion in a lithium deuteride body, but reactors - absolutely not.

Fusion reactors do one of the following:

• use magnetic fields and electrical current to contain + heat a ring tritium (hydrogen isotope) plasma to extreme temperatures
• use a laser pulse to compress + heat a capsule of tritium to extreme temperatures
• use a magnetic field and electrical current to collide two rings of helion (helium isotope) plasma at extreme velocities

Short version: fusion needs fission only in warfare.

Interesting read about Jevons paradox, thanks for the link.

I know that we don't want to reduce our comfort, but there are ways to keep it and reduce energy demand, or reduce comfort just a little but (ex. using small cars).