The notion of clean in context of energy is environmental in nature. Nuclear is “clean” in context of green house effect and carbon footprint only. It is not clean in the wider scope of Earth’s environment. For it to be truly clean, we need to address operational risk and by product disposal to an extent that damage to the environment, thus “clean”, is effectively impossible.
The ‘substantial’ aspects of nuclear energy place generational demands on humanity and whoever will inherit the earth after humans. No other energy source places this burden on humanity. None.
Not at all true that nuclear puts more generational demand that any of the other energy sources, taking scale into consideration. Just compute how many wind-turbine poles, how many eventually-leaky solar panels, how much surface of land used up, or flooded, for a given MWh of generated power: Nuclear is arguably least impact. And scrubbing CO2 is going to be a massive undertaking, most likely will not be undertaken, again the generational impact is enormous, a lot more than some localized dump with Cesium, even if not buried as it should, and will, be.
Be honest. Are you worried e.g. that some future post Armageddon creatures are going to bring disaster to themselves because of mucking around with some remnants of wind turbines out in the sea? The risks of nuclear fission by products are open ended. The effects you are mentioning are all bounded, and well understood.
“Substantial” aspects mean nuclear fission by products. This matter is just that: matter. It exists regardless of any other consideration. It comes into being because of the fission process. This coming into being creates the “burden” I was talking about.
Until we can safely send them to orbit and then to deep space it will not be “clean”. Of course then we’re polluting deep space.
I am interested in learning more. Can you elaborate on the parameters of the risk models? Is continuity of any technological competencies assumed? Stuff like that. (TIA)
Vitrification(solidification) and store safely underground somewhere with smaller risks of earthquakes. Ideally you would want the fuel to be reprocessed(like France did it) or to be used by a breeding reactor, this way the waste will be more dangerous only for about 300 years(it'll still be radioactive after but much less compared to waste that wasn't reprocessed or used by a breeding reactor.
Why it's not done? It costs more money and most countries decided for now it's ok without these steps and breeding reactors kinda exist but are too few and not very well studied to build more
> The risks of nuclear fission by products are open ended.
This is just FUD.
The orders of magnitude worse CO2 being emitted into the atmosphere where it is in such low concentration that we'll have no chance of ever removing it from there is much worse than nuclear waste for humanity's future. At least nuclear waste is concentrated and there is very little of it, so it can be treated and handled appropriately.
I just wanted to call out this particular statement for being FUD. It's a common "argument" from anti-nuclear folks who are just scared of nuclear waste because "but it's radioactive and I'm scared of it". Really it's just an inability to look at the facts and be rational.
I also remain mildly amazed that the adoption of nuclear is still debate worthy. I suppose there are whole generations scared beyond repair from the Cold War and nuclear weapons, so that they cannot see past that.
Hydro also fits the bill, mostly, and when there's not enough water in your river for hydro, well the nuclear plant's also got to respect heat-emission norms...
Not really, hydro does a lot of damage to ecosystems, blocks fish migration and can be weaponized (like it was in Ukraine during WW2 and earlier this year). And when it comes to greenhouse emissions it takes many years to offset carbon from decaying matter when a new reservoir is built.
The only clean energy that's capable of producing constant power is if we put the power plants on the sun!
There may be minor technical hurdles but only nattering naysayers think they're impossible to overcome.
If we can put people on the moon, we can certainly put them on the sun.
This is, of course, satire. There is every evidence that yes, nuclear energy is a viable base load generator that would be tremendously useful for a wide variety of scenarios (as putting power plants on the sun would also be a tremendously useful technology). It's also clear that there are serious, possibly impossible to overcome technical reasons why these plants haven't really been deployed in great numbers (other than france in the 70s), and haven't been proven to be economically viable. "It would be economically viable if we focused our whole global economic output on developing the technology to make standardized, modular power plants, and then if we eliminate most regulation everywhere except where I and my kids live and go to school" is maybe true, but also probably not realistic.
Fusion power from the sun, though, has proven to be pretty economically viable.
The ‘substantial’ aspects of nuclear energy place generational demands on humanity and whoever will inherit the earth after humans. No other energy source places this burden on humanity. None.