[raytube]

Ukraine shows how fragile and dangerous the reliance on reactors is. If the world can't behave responsibility.

The long term costs of nuclear are just crap. You would be better investing in battery tech to store renewable energy.

[sschueller]

The likelihood of a meltdown that causes contamination into the atmosphere at that facility is extremely unlikely even if the reactor is bombed.

If power is disrupted, there is 2 weeks of fuel to power the cooling mechanism. If that fails there will be a meltdown inside the reactor but unlike Fukushima there is no possibility of a hydrogen explosion in this type or reactor. The meltdown will be contained in the reactor. If now the reactor is bombed there is a possibility of radiation escaping but it takes a lot. Additionally the winds blow towards Russia so this would be a very foolish endeavor and everyone knows it.

The Ukrainians are bombing it because Russia is using it as a launch pad but they also know that a Fukushima or Chernobyl is almost impossible.

[NoPie]

Thanks to nuclear Ukraine was (is?) selling electricity to the EU even during this war. Their nuclear power-stations has shown surprising resilience.

Long term is exactly where nuclear rules.

[BoardsOfCanada]

It'd better be, since the radioactive waste will have to be stored for a million years, which is many times the age of homo sapiens.

Of course we have to hope for technical advances to convert it to a more manageable form.

[ehvatum]

> millions of years

Ridiculous. From NRC:

“ Strontium-90 and cesium-137 have half-lives of about 30 years (half the radioactivity will decay in 30 years). Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years. High-level wastes are hazardous because they produce fatal radiation doses during short periods of direct exposure.”

Go to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. You see people. WEIRD!!!!

[BoardsOfCanada]

You quoted me and changed the text in the quote.

Have a look here for a source for a million years:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinero/2019/11/26/the-stag...

[Genbox]

> Of course we have to hope for technical advances to convert it to a more manageable form

What do you mean by that? Dry-cask storage is very manageable and have been used for decades.

> radioactive waste will have to be stored for a million years

Uranium-235 is a naturally formed isotope of uranium, and it has a half-life of 703 million years. In a nuclear reactor, U-235 is split into many different fission products such as Caesium-137, Caesium-135, Zirconium-93 and many others. The longest living fission product is Iodine-129, which has a half-life of about 1.57 million years.

In essence, we have high-radiation and high half-life isotopes naturally formed everywhere on earth. Once they are mined and burnt in a fission reactor, these stable isotopes are split them into many different isotopes, which last for a shorter amount of time. It is a little bit nonsense to say we need to store it for a million years. It would be the same as saying we currently need to store U-235 for 703 million years.

It is all about concentrations and the type of radiation that is emitted. Nuclear waste is not "a problem" - it is a process. Right not it is safe, relatively cheap and somewhat efficient.

[NoPie]

The earth has stored nuclear elements for millions and billions of years. It is thought that in some places naturally occurring nuclear reactors have happened.

Of course, the civilization needs more orderly storage and disposal, and nuclear waste can be polluting but it is also the thing that is produced by completely natural processes. Some places have higher levels of radioactive radon gas produced by radioactive decay of elements deeper underground.

[realusername]

Ukraine showed that renewable policies are non functional since everybody was using gas as a backup source...

The whole war itself is partially due to Germany's dependency to gas