All plants, worldwide over all human history, for 20% of the power production of the entire planet, 100% green, have produced less than one half of one football field of barrels.
We can stop climate change on one field of barrels every 31 years
Thanks to mining byproducts, nuclear produces less and lower level radioactive waste than solar or wind
Zero humans in history have died from nuclear waste
It's just something scared people say to sound like they know something important
In the meantime, a barebones crew operates Chernobyl infrastructure, while the sacrophagus was shelled by Russian troops.
Europes nuclear power Zaporizhzhia plant is surrounded by Russian troops and sustained damage:
> At 11:28pm local time on the 3 March 2022, a column of 10 Russian armored vehicles and two tanks cautiously approached the Power Plant.[18][19][20] The action commenced at 12:48am on the 4 March when Ukraine forces fired anti tank missiles and Russian forces responded with a variety of weapons, including rocket-propelled grenades.[19] During approximately two hours of heavy fighting a fire broke out in a training facility outside of the main complex, which was extinguished by 6:20am,[21][22] though other sections surrounding the plant sustained damage.
> and even under these conditions, once again, zero deaths
I agree with your point, but for the record there's apparently been one death due to radiation (and possibly more to come): After the fighting was over, the russian soldiers seem to have camped in the Red Forest (absolutely the most contaminated area after the reactor structure itself https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Forest ), dug trenches and eaten local animals. And continued doing so for a month.
Most (if not all) nuclear scientists and radiation experts I've seen tslking about this say this is a wrong assumption. Cheryl Rofer, former nuclear scientist, made a napkin calculation and suggested it would need about 57 years of camping in the hottest (= most irradiated) parts of the red forest to acquire ARS (acute radiation syndrome). Even if the digging and kicking up dust there elevated the radioactivity levels, it would take a hell of a lot to get from 57 years to one month. Keep in mind that the most radioactive snd thus dangerous elements also decay the quickest, because of course both properties stem from the same thing, redioactive decay. The more dangerous the quicker it's gone.
This is not a useful metric, except to impress folks that know almost nothing about the field. Even then it is misleading, because the storage requirements are so strenuous that it cannot be assumed to be done well.
> We can stop climate change on one field of barrels every 31 years
Instead, we will have radioactive children in 50 years.
> Zero humans in history have died from nuclear waste
This red cube is the entire amount of nuclear waste produced by France. And you'll never get in contact with any of it. On the other hand do you know what's filtering coal and gas particulates out of the air ? Your lungs every single day of your life
The point of a graph is to illustrate a number that fluctuate and changes over time. Nuclear waste production does not.
We could graph how much money Germany is funding the Russian military by buying gas, coal and oil. We could also graph how much radioactive particels get released into the environment through fossil fuel combustion. However both would just correlate directly with how much fossil fuel they consume which would then follow the graph of CO2 emissions. One line is plenty enough to describe all those things without having to be too explicit about the trade offs being made in Germany compared to France.
> The point of a graph is to illustrate a number that fluctuate and changes over time. Nuclear waste production does not.
I would expect that more nuclear waste is produced when more nuclear energy is produced and less waste when less energy is produced. Isn't that a fluctuation?
Since nuclear plants generally operate at full capacity all the time you won't get changes in how much energy is produced. The linked graphs above are how much the market price is at specific locations, not how much energy get produced.
The European energy market price is determined by changes in supply (wind and solar being the main contributors for fluctuations, followed by water supplies), demand for energy, and prices for fossil fuel. If gas prices goes up, the price for energy on the market goes up. If cheap wind is flooding the market, prices goes down. As can be read by the graphs, since the European energy market is connected those changes occur simultanious in both Germany and France. However, there is an additional transport cost and thus prices can be a bit different. The negative energy prices also seems to effect those more closely to the plants with excess energy, rather than transporting the excess energy across the European continent.
The actually cost at any specific location is then determined by the energy market price (see above) and transport distance between the energy production point and energy consumption point.
A graph over nuclear waste would have no correlation with the market price. At most one would see a slightly more volatile market price when nuclear energy production is low, and a slightly more stable market price when the production is high, but one would need to have a pretty fancy graphical design in order to confer that knowledge in a graph.
> A graph over nuclear waste would have no correlation with the market price. At most one would see a slightly more volatile market price when nuclear energy production is low, and a slightly more stable market price when the production is high, but one would need to have a pretty fancy graphical design in order to confer that knowledge in a graph.
Does the market price correlate really better with CO2 emissions? Does the price drop between 21 Dec and 31 Dec from ~430/515 €/MWh to ~12/23 €/MWh mean that CO2 emissions of energy production dropped by 95% at the same time?
Does nuclear relieves this pressure?
Doubt so, as France buys a fair part of its uranium to Kazakhstan, which will very probably stop to supply if Putin says just a word.
You are right to a degree. In reality gas and oil get put into reserves which acts as buffers for the actually consumption of the fossil fuels. During periods of good wind/solar weather, the buffers start to fill up, and when demand for fossil fuel energy rises the buffers get emptied.
There is however the ability to increase/decrease imports when needed by adding more transport trucks or reduce the flow in the pipe lines.
A graph over CO2 emissions is thus more useful in this context since they follow the actually consumption of gas/oil/coal, and has a direct connection with the market price for which the above graphs represent.
well germany uses less gas for energy, but more for heating and overall way way more coal. of course france has less co2 emissions. coal is even worse than gas which favors france by a big margin.
in a best of case scenario we would not use either of coal,gas,nuclear oil or any other fossil technology, but we are far from it, but i'm pretty sure europe is closer than most other countries/states/etc.
To put some numbers on the table, in 2018 (I could not find more recent data) the values of CO2 emissions in metric tons per capita were as follows:[1]
France 5.0
Germany 9.1
For comparison:
India 1.9
EU 8.6
China 8.0
Japan 9.4
Russia 12.1
United States 16.1
Canada 16.1
Australia 16.8
Some other fun: Overlay this with a graph of nuclear waste production.