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by shorttime
3411 days ago
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You raise some decent points and I'm not going to reply to them all, however, consider that there is also medical radioactive waste. Should we abandoned all of our imaging equipment and radio-medical treatments because we can't handle the waste? CO2 is a poison, in a way. Excessive CO2 has lead to increasing acidification in the oceans, which has resulted in death of coral and fish. There have been other costs but I am not up to snuff on climate change as some. I do know it is a negative-feedback processes, as these events occur the rate only increases. It will increase even more once methane has been released from the frozen ground and from beneath ice sheets. I don't think we'll solve it any time soon. I see us driving straight into that brick wall. It's the way the majority of us operate, there's not enough people wanting to change our outcome. |
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Even solar and wind are not entirely "clean".
There are initial capitalization and resource consumption to construct them. There are noise and other disturbances that cause some near wind farms considerable stress and ill health. Wind farms disturb the lower level atmosphere and there are questions about what effects this creates. There are open questions about how "clean" necessary storage technologies will be.
These should be known and discussed.
One frustration after Chernobyl, was that the (Western European, not to mention Eastern and Soviet) public became concerned whether they were being told the truth by their own governments. In some cases, governments were apparently at least hedging in public communications -- afraid of panic as well as backlash against their own energy programs.
Anyway, I don't entirely know why I originally commented. I didn't bring up a particularly novel counter-argument nor set of facts.
But that "clean" moniker that gets attached to (extant) nuclear (fission) power. It gets under my skin. Because even before you talk about accidents or attacks, there's a lot about it that's not clean. From the mining to the processing (they still don't know how they are going to manager the Hanford complexes in Washington State; to the best of my recollection, the now "cleaned" Rocky Flats in Colorado still poses considerable challenges; etc.) to the whole issue of waste...
I also have another argument. The actual supplies of accessible and extractable ores are limited (though less so for thorium, another possible source). If and as we have alternative energy sources for everyday life and economy, perhaps we should be husbanding those limited and extraordinary resources for potential future use. What if they do become the one viable route / power source for larger scale space travel? Maybe we will need them -- at least until and to jump-start off-planet mining to obtain other sources.
And, nascent large-scale solar and wind production are and can be made more decentralized. This even has security implications; I keep running across arguments in favor of a distributed, decentralized, hard-to-knock-out energy/power network. (Something that can also pertain to self-servicing/autonomous smaller scale local nuclear reactors, once they are in place and running.)
And yeah, I did skip going into what CO2 becomes, once it starts reacting with the environment. Fair point.
I think we are going to keep some nuclear fission power production, but that economics are already pushing us away from large expansion of it.
I hope that will also reduce incentives and the effectiveness of efforts to "cleanse" its image and externalize significant aspects/costs of its use.