Wandering Adventure Party

hot tran*sexual menace On the first two paragraph, I honestly think it’s the better option we have. It’s even better than renewables on a lot of points. For the same quantity of electricity, it create less pollution (even the chemical and radioactive pollution created are created in quantities that are very, very small, and that could be recycled – renewables waste are recyclables too, but in bigger quantities), less mining extraction, less space use (especially useful in Europe, I guess that USA have a lot of space they can use without issue), less storage needed, better lifespan, less grid rework needed, the fact that you only need few big plants make it easier to manage (it’s easier to coordinate 20 plants thant hundred and hundreds of solar and wind farms), etc.

There is downsides, but less than any other technology. It’s just the best we have now, and that’s the only reason why I want it.

About the military use, yeah, some of the rest could be dual use, but even if we stopped using nuclear power for electricity tomorrow, it would be rather naive to think that countries would stop using nuclear power for military purposes. It’s just that they would only use it for military purposes instead. I’m against military use too, but for me convincing coutries to stop military use is separated from the power use, because nothing says that they will stop both at the same time.

Not to mention the medical nuclear sector, which will obviously remain in use and will in any case require part of the civilian chain (including waste treatment) to be maintained. And the nuclear research will probably keep going too (it’s often linked to the medical use, and this research could be useful for treating waste that has already been produced, in addition to simply discovering other interesting uses. And researches about fusion of course).

hot tran*sexual menace Well, that’s not the conclusion of the IPCC, and I trust them more than I trust you. I’ll still argue for the time being, but you don’t have to trust me neither (one of us is lying, since we’re saying the opposite, so… we’ll need to trust someone else to know who is right).

• Uranium isn’t renewable, I’ve already said it, but it will last for centuries in the current use we do, and millenia if we manage it correctly (for example France could last 3000 years on what they already have in stock. Without extracting any more. But we need to build power plant that can use this stock (we already have in the past, but since it was cheaper to extract new ore at that time we stopped. This and politicals chenanigans too). Steam machines aren’t two centuries old, so millenia of energy is a lot of time to find better sources (and it could be renewables, when they will even better than nuclear, or when we will reach the limits of uranium).

• It’s not free to harvest, but neither are the materials for renewables and batteries. Sure, we can recycle, but uranium too (a little bit of extraction will be needed in both case because recycling is never perfect). And uranium have a very high energy density, so a lot of people over-estimate the quantity we need to extract. We are talking about few orders of magnitude here (see also the attached picture :D).

• The operationnal costs aren’t that high when you count it by MWh. It produce a lot, and I mean, A LOT of power during it’s lifetime, so at the end, it’s pretty cheap. Waste storage isn’t that costly too. You can just burry it. It’s no more dangerous than natural ore patches, and way less dangerous than a lot of other pollution we make. A human life worth of nuclear power waste if all the energy we used was nuclear can be stored in a Coke can (without recycling!). The chemical and plastic pollution produced by a human during it’s life are way worse (you see the comparision of landfill for solar panels. It’s the same, but even smaller).

• The technology built for the military use have nothing to do with the one used for power anymore (except maybe nuclear-powered boats and submarines). Well, we even are recycling cold war weapons into nuclear fuel ^^’ It’s still pretty cheap, if done correctly (today what cost more is the way we are financing it. If it was paid directly by the state via taxes, as it should like the power grid, it would be cheaper. But since we take out loans and use private financing, more than half of the produced electricty sale price goes to pay interest… that’s a problem. Especially since we are building for 80 years or more: the people who will benefit the more from it aren’t even born, so it can’t be done by people that want a ROI during their lives. It have to be made by a state for its future citizens).

Technology Connections To talk about the technical part only, I would be curious to hear your position on nuclear power, because when it comes to “building once and then extracting energy at low cost for a long time” that’s where it comes in. It takes up less space (so we might as well use the corn land for forests and nature reserves, it would be better than solar farms, even if solar farms are better than that corn), requires even fewer materials to be extracted, has a much longer lifespan, causes less pollution, fewer direct and indirect deaths, places fewer constraints on the grid (we keep the same format of a few powerful centralized plants that distribute energy to the whole country), no storage problems (batteries are better than burning oil, but not needing them in gigantic quantities at the grid scale is even better, and we can use the materials elsewhere, or extracting even less of them), very small amounts of waste that are relatively easy to manage (much more so than fossil fuels; for renewables, we’ll have to see, but even when it comes to recycling, limiting the amount of things to recycle and the frequency of recycling is still beneficial), allowing for significant fuel recycling (even if this is not done today, it is feasible and would transform a few centuries of reserves into millennia—admittedly, it cannot be said to be renewable, but when we see the progress made in two centuries, it still leaves room to find other solutions, whether it be the improvement of renewables to the point where they catch up with the advantages of actual nuclear power, or nuclear fusion).

In short, superior in almost every respect, except for complexity (but complexity that can be managed, it already is, and in terms of safety, nuclear power is to energy what aviation is to transportation: high dangers, but low risks thanks to controls and quality, and even lower risks than anything else right now).

(and I already agree that solar and wind energy are pretty good replacements for oil and gas, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t use them. Just that they aren’t the best we can do in the 21st century to produce electricity, from what I know, so why not do even better thing when we can)