Photovoltaic solar produces lots of waste, more than nuclear. And it requires lots of land.
Solar thermal is much more efficient but it's expensive and no one seems to be doing it in scale. And it too requires lots of land.
And don't say we have lots of land, we do, but it's remote, so you need a lot of infrastructure to make use of it. We can do that (we did for hydrocarbons), but it's not a slam dunk.
Because of that, nuclear produces less waste and is better for the environment.
Photovoltaic solar produces lots of waste, more than nuclear.
It produces treatable wastes, ones that can be allowed to enter the normal economy and processed, rather than wastes we are so scared of that we can't let anybody touch them and so inject them into deep water aquifers instead.
Also, all waste comparisons I have seen people make with nuclear generally seem to only include volume of spent fuel, and not the wastes from the process of making the fuel in the first place, which are several orders of magnitude greater.
I continue to be confused about how nuclear can be considered better / cheaper / cleaner without factoring the cost of storing the waste for 10,000 years. We seem to struggle with unintended consequences of waste management on the decade scale, let alone several millennia.
Plastic bags last longer in landfills than nuclear waste will last in a repository; plastic photodegrades in about 500 years, multiply by a two-hundred-meter-deep landfill and that plastic will finish going away in about a million years [1]. Nuclear waste is fundamentally static; unlike tailings, it pretty much stays where you put it. Coal plants actually produce titanic amounts of radiation, vastly more than nuke plants, thanks to impurities in coal, and that radioactivity is going straight into the atmosphere [2]. Nuke plants don't produce that much waste in the first place; thirty tons a year, compared to millions of tons of radioactive, caustic fly ash [3, 4]. And, finally, the kinds of nuclear reactors we can build these days simply don't produce waste that lasts that long; a good breeder reactor eats anything that's immediately dangerous (short half-life -> lots of radiation) or long-term dangerous (long half-life -> not much radiation) [5].
the kinds of nuclear reactors we can build these days simply don't produce waste that lasts that long; a good breeder reactor eats anything that's immediately dangerous
The UK is currently committing to building a whole new set of boiling water reactors while still having not made up its mind about the location of the UK long term waste store, which is taking a while as for reasons of politics, the government is relying on voluteerism rather than geologic suitability to decide where in the country to put it.
We did have a breeder reactor in Dounreay. It is shut down now and the surrounding beaches are off limits for a while, due to old fuel rod fragments being pumped into the sea. The management were also prosecuted for dumping solid nuclear waste in landfill.
multiply by a two-hundred-meter-deep landfill and that plastic will finish going away in about a million years
You can take a landfill, put dirt over the top, and now you have parkland for people to use. It's happened to two intracity landfills within a couple of kilometers of where I live. The same can't be done with nuclear waste.
But it doesn't matter - you don't need to. Unlike bags, there is so little nuclear waste we can afford to dedicate one tiny area to it.
The entire nuclear waste of the US in the past 40 years can fit in a room 350 feet on each side. (Basically 1 city block.) That's it. That's all the space you need for the entire united states!
Why don't they do that then? Why do I keep seeing news of waste languishing in temporary storage, being "secretly" moved to different temporary storage, drifting in dust form over entire communities, leaking out into groundwater, etc.?
Maybe DOE should hire some HN experts so they'll learn how the job ought to be done? As much money as the nuclear industry has stolen from taxpayers, I think they can afford you.
Because every time they try a bunch of people go 'OMG nuclear waste aaaaah' and object. We could be storing all the waste in a super-secure facility under yucca Mountain in Nevada, but is in limbo because of a few thousand people in Nevada. So we have it stored unsecurely at 131 different sites instead.
But "environmentalists" stepped in and ended funding. Now we are stuck with the current situation of pretty much every power plant for themselves and storage all over the country.
The main problems with Yucca Mountain were that the site wasn't really suitable (permeable geology, nearby water table, seismic activity). Unfortunately, the best sites for such a long term storage facility would be in the northeast under a geologically stable mountain made of impermeable granite, but those sites were removed from consideration by congressional fiat a while back.
This is what I mean. With nuclear, the rabbit hole always goes deeper. We've been working on this for seventy years now, and however much the government subsidizes it, however many disasters we have, however many "new designs" are tried, however many "impermeable" storage depots are built, nuclear power always comes up with more ways to fail.
This is usually because proponents of nuclear energy are not pushing for "traditional" reactors, but for Breeder reactors.
These were the direction we were headed in the 60s, unfortunately, we then discovered that Uranium was not as rare as we thought it was, and in our usual manner, decided to go for the conventional ones we have today.
Whilst breeder reactors produce waste, they can also reuse it, as well as being more efficient. Some proponents say they would allow us to reuse today's nuclear waste.
Additionally, the waste produced has a shorter half life than the waste produced from conventional reactors.
You can factor in cost of storing. It should get exponentially cheaper as we store more and more. And single decent nuclear conflict and the cost of storing nuclear waste drops to zero.
Excuse me? Does one of those plants have to blow up in your neighbourhood until you can relate to the fact that some risks are not worth taking?
These things are dirty bombs, period.
Edit: To clarify, I am not arguing for coal. Just against nuclear power. I live next to a garbage->energy and gas turbine plant. It's not perfect, but I wouldn't want to live near a nuclear plant.
Calculate the chances of that happening and compare it's damage to the thousands of people who die every year from coal usage. Coal is 4000 times deadlier.
And coal power is like a constant never ending fukushima.
It's gut, but un-informed feelings like yours that are the cause of so much environmental destruction.
> I knew people first hand who died from chernobyl's toxic rain.
And I know of people who today are suffering from asthma and lung cancer from coal's toxic exhaust. And newsflash: There are way way way way more of them.
It's irrational confidence like yours that nuclear power is in any way safe, and therefore a good replacement. Coal doesn't need a replacement, we need to start using energy responsibly. That means not using energy when we don't have it. A nuclear plant is not an acceptable way to generate energy.
Arguing against nuclear is de facto arguing for coal. Current options for renewable baseload power generation are limited. This will with any luck change sometime in the future, but in the present less nuclear means more coal.
Using less power is not a realistic proposal. You should not expect that to be taken seriously.
Do you have a source for that? Wolfram Alpha shows a slight dip corresponding with the recession, and the data cuts off at 2010, but the overall trend seems pretty damming: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=us+power+usage
We think you're defending coal because you say things like "Coal doesn't need a replacement [...] a nuclear plant is not an acceptable way to generate energy" despite the fact that the coal plants are way more polluting and radioactive.
"Coal doesn't need a replacement, we need to start using energy responsibly." That means: stop using coal, and don't replace it with anything. Just stop using so much power.
Tricky to do that without a lot of people dying. Also, if you honestly think that, then what are you doing wasting joules chatting idly on the internet?
I'm not against nuclear power, per se, but the way we do it is seriously warped, mostly by its associations with the weaponry.
A uranium mine isn't just a fuel source, it is also part of a military arsenal at the highest level, so really it isn't that surprising to see so little care given to the externalities.
Personally I think that solar/storage is about to outcompete the pants off most everything else anyway, given the ever falling price of modules and the existence of companies like lightsail and gravitypower. http://www.lightsail.com/http://www.gravitypower.net/
I saw my first hybrid solar/natural gas (continually running) power plant commercial on TV the other night from a fossil fuel company (can't remember which one). I think you're right, that solar thermal storage (in hot oil for now and eventually salt) with trough reflectors instead of photovoltaics, will be the eventual winner, even against wind.
My excitement for it is that it relies on 19th century technologies that anyone can implement and doesn't need a fab or another country to provide solid state solar panels.
