Like. Nuclear waste/disasters contaminate areas for thousands of years and cause cancer. Why is that “clean”?
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The volume of nuclear waster per kW hour produced is incredibly small compared to fossil counterparts.
Fearmongering over nuclear energy is the reason we’re dealing with climate change right now. If we had better education and a less reactionary take in the issue of nuclear waste we would have switched over to nuclear power 50 years ago and the 80% of pollution that caused climate change would have never been there.
The issue is what to do with that waste. Which is a real issue, but is one that is MUCH easier addressed than trying to remove ludicrous amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere. New reactor designs dramatically reduce waste. Reprocessing technology has gotten better over time. It’s possible that we could develop new tech that would even further reduce/eliminate radioactive waste, or maybe engineer organisms that eat it, et cetera. But it’s a contained problem solvable by technology, unlike our current one which will require a political solution. (Although I’m still optimistic that renewables will become so overwhelmingly economically superior the issue may just solve itself over time.)
There’s other issues with nuclear power though: proliferation of nuclear weapons and political instability. Allowing any country to build up expertise in designing nuclear reactors and the infrastructure to run them effectively gives them a base level of knowledge and ability to produce nukes. It’s inevitable that they will become widespread at some point, but I’m definitely not complaining about Iran not having nukes or Somalia not having nuclear reactors that aren’t being maintained due to instability.
Listen to last week’s freakonomics. It is actually the safest source of energy in terms of causing death. Radiation and the thought of it is very scary, but injuries from installing solar and wind actually kill more people (though very very few overall). The worst single incident in the history of electricity generation was a hydroelectric dam in China that caused the deaths of 10s of thousands.
There aren’t clean energy sources, there are cleaner energy sources depending on their impact on the environment some more than others
nuclear supporters tend to think that nuclesr is clean enough, detractors believe that we can do better with other sources
A few points:
1)Nuclear energy produces far less dangerous (toxic and/or radioactive) waste than alternatives like coal, in terms of total volume created per kilowatt of energy generated.
Coal releases radioactive and toxic byproducts in far far greater volume and it’s not contained. The toxic and radioactive byproducts wind up in ash slurry holding pools (which often leak into ground water or can flood out the sides) or is released in the air you breath.
2) Nuclear energy does not release carbon dioxide or heavy metals into the air and/or surrounding environment so it has little to no impact on our climate. There is a notion of thermal pollution, however, whereby it can affect nearby streams or rivers by heating them up a bit and changing what lifeforms can grow there. However, that can be managed.
3) Nuclear waste can be safely stored underground, far away from people and there isn’t much of it produced compared to how much energy is generated. It’s also typically wrapped in a sarcophagus which prevents radioactivity from leaking through. You can stand next to these sarcophagi and be totally fine.
4) Newer generation reactors actually can use a lot of the waste from earlier generation reactors as fuel, so that “waste” is actually often effectively stored fuel for future reactor technologies.
5) Newer reactor designs are incredibly safe and have less thermal pollution. They’ve ran many catastrophic failure tests on these designs and the reaction always grinds to a halt, so far anyway.
Every energy source has waste, perr kilowatt nuclear has the cleanest (least waste) energy. Burning coal releases alot more radioactive pollution than nuclear, because coal naturally contains radioactive particles, that are released when burned.
Nuclear releases no carbon dioxide, or other greenhouse gas, the waste is solid and therefore much easier to contain and manage.
Nuclear fuel has around a million times as much energy as chemical fuel, and it mostly stays in solid blocks after we’re done burning it. That means we use a small enough amount that it’s feasible to put all the waste in a sealed box where it’ll never hurt anyone. Coal power plants produce a million times as much waste, and much of it is gases and fine ash dust, so it’s totally impractical to keep coal smoke and ash away from people the way we do with nuclear waste.
You’re comparing a pound of nuclear waste to a pound of coal ash and smoke, when you should be comparing it to five hundred tons of coal ash and smoke.
All types of mines contaminate areas for a long time too. Coal is pretty radioactive in its own right.
Nuclear power is considered clean because it has a small carbon footprint, pretty much comparable to renewable energy.
It’s not waste-free, of course – no energy production is, and generally speaking renewable energy might be the cheaper source for energy nowadays than nuclear is. Building maximally safe and effective nuclear power plants is very expensive.
it is clean. newer reactors produce much much less waste than the older ones. but not many places have built newer reactors. we let the early days dictate policies and let poorly run reactors that had accidents scare us away.
It’s not a clean energy source. Apart from the management of nuclear waste, the mining of uranium is also contaminant. The only ones calling it “clean” are the industry themselves and those who defend it. They know clean energies have better press and they just jumped into their wagon.
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