[worik]

I will bite.

There are any problems with fission that are all related to the extraordinary danger of handling the fuel, byproducts, and the sites themselves.

The cost of them is huge, some people are hoping that modularity will help with construction, but it is still astonishingly expensive.

The problems of handling the fuel has been solved, in theory and practise. Except when commerce is involved. When the money people get involved corners will get cut, and we are back to incredible danger. Technically solvable, but I would not go near it. I have known too many business people.

The problem of the long-term waste is entirely beyond us. There has been no practical progress on this front. Long term waste (including some parts of the assemblies themselves) are very dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years.

This is, with current technology that can be bought to bear, unsolvable.

The only thing we can do is put it in a stable site, be ready to move it when the site becomes unstable (nowhere on Earth is known to be stable on such time scales), and find a way of communication, across thousands of generations, just how poisonous this stuff is.

Maybe our ancestors will get lucky and find a way to safely dispose of it....

So fission power is making future generations pay for today's consumption.

Fortunately for us it is moot. The costs of renewables is dropped to the point that the only reason for fission is to build the capacity for nuclear weapons.

[actinium226]

What exactly is the danger though? I'm imagining that another Chernobyl-level reactor breach is unlikely (not least since the other 3 reactors at Chernobyl of the same type kept running until 2000, and several more reactors of the same type are still operating today in various post Soviet countries). And while reactivity release is unfortunate, the effects tend to be localized (excepting Chernobyl), and let's not pretend that other modalities have 0 environment impact or risk factors.

If fact more people die from falling off wind turbines during maintenance than have died from nuclear accidents on a per-TWh basis [1].

And there were greater health effects in Fukushima due to panic and unnecessary evacuation than from radiation [2].

Again I agree radioactivity = bad, but I think it needs to be put in context.

And as for the disposal of nuclear waste, yes it's a problem for thousands of years, but we don't need a thousand year solution, it's not like we're leaving the planet. One possible outcome there is that eventually we develop cheap enough neutron sources that we can bombard the waste with neutrons until the various atoms capture enough neutrons to become stable isotopes. Considering the technological progress over the last 300 years, maybe in another 300 such a feat will be economically feasible.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8208296/

[UltraSane]

I am so tired of this lie being repeated endlessly. We have a perfectly safe way to handle nuclear "waste":

reprocess the dirty fuel and bury the actual waste deep underground like Finland is doing at the Onkalo spent nuclear fuel repository.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

And there is still very much a need for zero-carbon DISPATCHABLE electricity of witch nuclear is the ONLY choice. You simply cannot have 100% of your electricity from only solar and wind because it is far too variable and we simply don't have the technology to store electricity cheaply enough.

Your attitude towards nuclear energy is as irrational as the average antivaxer towards vaccines.

[worik]

> bury the actual waste deep underground

How deep, to stay put thousands of generations?

[UltraSane]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

[worik]

No answer to the problems that:

A) The area is not known to be geologically stable over the extraordinarily long time periods necessary. (Nowhere is....)

B) There is no containment vessel that can last that long

I get tired of the wishful thinking. Being charitable as describing it as that.

In the future, 600 generations from now, when the poisons we lay down now are bubbling up, perhaps people then will have forgotten us. If not, they will not forgive us

And so unnecessary

[UltraSane]

" the extraordinarily long time periods necessary. (Nowhere is....)"

This is the the lie that I'm really tired of people repeating. Nuclear waste isn't THAT dangerous and doesn't have to be kept perfectly isolated for THAT long.

"In the future, 600 generations from now, when the poisons we lay down now are bubbling up,"

You should really be more worried about the 36 billion tons of CO2 we are spewing into the atmosphere every year instead of a TINY amount of nuclear waste many thousands of years in the future.

You are like someone with a malignant tumor worrying about the risks of radiation therapy.

[worik]

The vast majority of nuclear waste needs to be stored only hundreds of years.

But there is still plenty that needs to be stored for hundreds of millennium

There is no answer to that, and no amount of arguing by analogy, argumentum ad hominem nor wishful thinking can make that go away

It is a very good thing we do not need nuclear power

[adgjlsfhk1]

hydro is also a 0 carbon dispatchable choice (which is much cheaper)

[worik]

Geothermal

[Kubuxu]

Majority of good spots for hydro were already built up, and if they weren’t, good luck with NIMBY.

[adgjlsfhk1]

meant of the good spots are already used, but we can change how they are used to greatly increase their usefulness to a 0 carbon grid. we can make them all pumped hydro, and start treating hydro as a battery rather than a generation source.