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by shawnz 1839 days ago
The waste is the biggest advantage of nuclear. Consider that when you burn hydrocarbons, you produce waste, too. And much of that waste is simply dumped into the air where we all breathe it.

You might say, well, hydrocarbon waste is much less dangerous. But that's negated by the fact that you need about 1,000,000x as much coal to replace the energy provided by nuclear. And in fact, the total amount of radioactive contaminants in that quantity of coal is roughly equal to the amount of nuclear fuel you would have required in the first place had you just used nuclear alone!
1 comments
alexgmcm 1839 days ago
Also with burner reactors you can use the "waste" as fuel.

The problem is largely a political one.

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mschuster91 1839 days ago
> Also with burner reactors you can use the "waste" as fuel.

As far as I know using the waste as fuel is only possible in new reactor types, which are still under development - and in the case of molten salt reactors, it's not even sure yet if these actually can be built because of material science issues (aka, how to construct piping that stays durable for decades when exposed to hot, aggressive molten salt).

It is simply not fair towards future generations to literally dump even more waste to them and hope they manage to figure it out, when we could alternatively also build out the European power grid and go fully renewable using wind, solar and ocean/rivers for generation, batteries and hydro for storage and natural gas/hydrogen for peak demand.

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kaesar14 1839 days ago
Counterpoint: If we cannot switch to those other kinds of renewables in a reasonable amount of time compared to Nuclear, we're leaving them with a way bigger clusterfuck in the form of runaway greenhouse gas driven global warming.
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mschuster91 1839 days ago
Germany managed to get from 6% renewables in the energy mix in 2000 to 46% in 2020.

It is not impossible to get even faster buildout in the next ten years, all we need is politicians deciding to do so instead of giving billion dollar handouts to fossil fuel companies and actively impeding buildout!

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kaesar14 1839 days ago
Doesn't look like based on the graph in the top level comment of this post that made much of a difference at all.
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