Like. Nuclear waste/disasters contaminate areas for thousands of years and cause cancer. Why is that “clean”?
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Just because historically we’ve made poor decisions with where to store nuclear waste, doesn’t mean it HAS to be dangerous. We need to store it safely.
Whereas, there is no reasonable way to burn gasoline without necessarily releasing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. No policy, no place, no thing can filter or prevent this from happening. Irreversible damage is an intrinsic part of burning fossil fuels. The same cannot be said for nuclear energy.
Nuclear, if well managed and not allowed to be built by the cheaper and worse contractor, is reliable. Accidents are few, and contained – except chernobyl which was a series of errors. Fukuyama is a case of bad safety and security, cheaper construction.
There might be a problem? Yes. But even an irradiated area will have a thriving ecology, even if humans must leave.
Carbon-based energy results in unavoidable global warming, and the effects actually last much longer and are inescapable. The disaster is not local, it is global.
The brainless short-sighted sheep who feared the possible nuclear wolf guaranteed the arrival of the true predator, global warming.
I would like to add this. I have been in the containment building at Zimmer power plant. There is an inner concrete wall around the core that is about 8 foot thick. then there is a six foot space and a second concrete containment wall about six foot thick. It is my understanding that no American containment building has ever been breached.
It’s an overall net evaluation. Nuclear disaster is bad, but overall day to day issues are fairly neutral.
The conservatives just really don’t want to cave in to actual clean energy because it would hurt their egos
You’re asking that question in a pretty loaded way. The answer is that your estimation of the risk of nuclear waste is not in tune with the reality of the risk.
I’m assuming you’re looking for a comparison to other “clean” energy sources like hydro-electric, solar and wind.
Hydro comes with all kinds of significant environmental impacts. Dams are far more ecologically destructive than we realized 100 years ago when we were putting them up everywhere. You end up with things like the Salton Sea, with an estimated impact of about $70B (compared to say, the famous Exxon-Valdez spill at a cost of $7B). Or the destruction of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands, primarily from effects of levies on the Mississippi. You don’t get any more “meddling with forces we don’t understand” than dams.
Solar runs into similar issues. It’s only viable on a large scale in certain areas and in those areas, it completely destroys the natural habitat, threatening endangered species in a variety of ways. Since solar is unreliable in terms of timing (i.e. you don’t just increase and decrease the power levels based on end usage), it requires a LOT of battery storage, and those batteries involve toxic heavy metals and the safety risks there can be just as problematic as with nuclear. It’s an acceptable backup, but it sucks as a primary source of electricity.
Wind turbines likewise are destructive to natural habitats, also take massive footprints to produce reasonable amounts of energy, and require all the batteries that solar does, with the accompanying metals mining, disposal and safety risks.
There is no such thing as energy production that has no environmental impact. There are just relative levels of impact, and relatively speaking, nuclear is low impact. The waste is compact and the energy density is through the roof. Unlike other methods of energy generation which are guaranteed to come with significant deleterious effects on the environment, negative effects only occur when someone screws up. That means that theoretically, nuclear is the cleanest form of energy that we can harness.
Coal, oil, and gas comes out of the ground, but the waste goed into the air. Nuclear fuel comes out of the ground and we put the waste back into the ground.
It’s carbon zero output. Meaning no carbon dioxide. No global warming. Just steam. And newest designs can use spent radioactive waste from current nuclear plants as fuel and it converts it into a different type of nuclear waste that becomes non radioactive in 500 years instead of 5000 years. So all around it’s better. Plus I unlike renewable energy, it’ll work whether it’s not or dark with the wind’s blowing or not or regardless of how far away you are from active geological events.
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