Being anti-nuclear does
not make sense if you are an environmentalist.
"But we could generate the same amount of power with wind and solar!"
Not really, no. A solar panel generates about 400kWh. A 1gW nuclear plant generates 8tWh — about the same amount as 20 million solar panels. Ivanpah, one of the largest solar facilities in the world, has 173,500 panels. To not only produce, but also install, maintain, and continually replace so many solar panels would be prohibitive — which is part of why the whole
"cover the Sahara in solar panels" project never worked out. (The linked article also contains information on the broader environmental implications of a full transition to solar.)
And with, unfortunately, data centers and other industries ensuring our energy needs are only growing exponentially, without a firm policy to shut down this waste, solar panel production is simply unable to keep up.
"Nuclear power produces a ton of awful radioactive waste that needs to be stored for thousands of years!"
This isn't the 1980s anymore. Modern thorium reactors produce much less, and much shorter-lived waste materials. More crucially, in my mind, the fast breeder reactors that I talk about (the ones that can't melt down, and ended experimentally in the 90s because they were deemed too expensive when the public was already against nuclear energy) can recycle their fissile material over and over again until the resulting product is the size of a grain of sand, and is safe enough to swallow. Even without using this technology, nuclear reprocessing is very much a thing — as always, it's just a matter of whether we see it as cost-effective or not. (See the documentary
"Pandora's Promise" on the history of these experiments.)
"Nuclear power is dangerous!"
The main two incidents people look at are Chernobyl and Fukushima, and both of these were already known to be unsafe before their respective accidents occurred. Both respective accidents were also far less destructive than initially suggested (and the media still likes to suggest): People still live, in fact never left, the exclusion zone of Chernobyl, and the background radiation there is lower than many tourist beaches. Both incidents are generally acknowledged by global health authorities to have had
minimal long-term impacts on resident health (despite propagandists continuing to claim that Chernobyl must have caused thousands of deaths,
without any real evidence.)
Furthermore, modern reactors are essentially impossible to melt down. China's thorium reactors literally cannot melt down, because, well, their fertile material is already molten. Experimental reactors in similar technology in the 90s were also impossible, before the government shut them down due to public outcry over nuclear power.
"The mining is bad for the environment!"
Yes, it is. But so is mining for the necessary materials to build (and replace, and replace again)
solar panels. Uranium mining and processing is destructive, but much, if not most of the fissile material used in American power plants comes not from new rare metals being mined, but rather are extracted from purchased
depurposed Russian nukes. Like with solar panels, technologies exist to make the process cleaner, and make the product more efficient and recyclable; it's just a matter of whether we actually decide to implement them despite costs.
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I'm not remotely saying that we shouldn't be using solar panels; in fact, I think they are crucial. I'm just using them as a comparison here, since we both know that a comparison to fossil fuels would be an obvious loss for the latter. If we want to entirely defeat fossil fuels, we cannot rely entirely on renewables, for both economic and ironically environmental reasons; nuclear has to be a part of that equation, and countries like China who are at the forefront of fighting climate change are recognizing that.
Happy to open up a dialogue on this, as I know that no one who is against nuclear power is against it for the wrong reasons. I'm also not an engineer of any kind and happy to learn more myself.
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