this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
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Thoughts on nuclear? Sounds good to me but I'm so somewhat ignorant.
Cleanest energy generation around. It produces a handful of waste per year (the whole US generates around half a Olympic pool per year), which could be further reduced by using some of that waste too in newer generation plants, like in European countries.
The traditional nuclear plant has a design that (on purpose perhaps) produces plutonium, which the government like as they can build nukes with it.
And of course there have been accidents, but mostly due to incompetence or negligence. And don't forget coal plants produce a huge amount of nuclear radiation too and they just expel it from their chimneys.
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-nuclear-fuel
https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-essentials/what-is-nuclear-waste-and-what-do-we-do-with-it.aspx
The worst part of renewable energies now is the waste. Wind power blades are not recyclable and literally just get buried in big fields (a problem for the next generation I guess..) and solar panels are "not commerically interesting" to recycle, so around 90% of them too just get dumped.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turbine-blades-can-t-be-recycled-so-they-re-piling-up-in-landfills
https://e360.yale.edu/features/solar-energy-panels-recycling
To put down the bad site of things:
Important to mention the downsides as well, so I thought I help out a bit.