One of the cleanest and most sustainable sources of energy in the world is nuclear. Everyone knows this but doesnt acknowledge it. The half life of uranium-235 which is the uranium used in nuclear power plants is over 700 million years. It is a net zero carbon emission source of energy. France is a leading example of what a nuclearized power grid should be. 70% of Frances electricity comes from nuclear and they are a net exporter of electricity and have some of the lowest electric bills in the world (ā¬110 a month on average or about $120 US). The clear and obvious answer for sustainable energy is nuclear. The wind doesnāt always blow and the sun doesnāt always shine. And the process to create batteries for solar panels to charge is far dirtier than that amount of āclean energyā the panels create.
Related proposal
Reduce Nuclear Power Plant Regulations
You would not say nuclear power is clean, cheap and green if you look at the large number of accidents & radiation releases. The REAL cost of nuclear power plants includes all the people that get cancer and die, the land that becomes unusable for any purposes for hundreds? thousands? of years.
List of accidents, deaths, and costs:
September 29, 1957 Mayak Kyshtym, Soviet Union, a radiation contamination accident (after a chemical explosion that occurred within a storage tank - est. 200 cancer fatalities
October 10, 1957 Sellafield, Cumberland, UK, A plutonium-production reactor -the core was damanged and released an estimated 740 terabecquerels of iodine-131 into the environment - est. 240 cancer victims
January 3, 1961 Idaho Falls, US, explosion occurred when a control rod was removed to far killing all 3 operators and costing $22 million.
October 5, 1966 Frenchtown Charter Township, Michigan, US - Meltdown of fuel elements, $132 million in damage.
January 21, 1969 Vaud, Switzerland, Loss of coolant caused meltdown and radioactive contamination.
December 7, 1975 Greifswald, East Germany, electrical error caused destruction of 5 coolant pumps, $443 million to fix.
January 5, 1976 Jaslovske Bohunice, Czechoslovakia, fuel rod ejected from reactor, 2 deaths and $1,700 million cost.
March 28, 1979 Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, US. loss of coolant and partial core meltdown due to operator error, $2,400 million cost.
September 15, 1984 Athens, Alabama, US safety violations and operator error caused 6 yr outage, $110 million to repair.
March 9, 1985 Athens, Alabama, US malfunction during startup caused suspension of all 3 units, $1,830 million cost.
April 11, 1986 Plymouth, Mass., US emergency shutdown of Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant, $1,001 million cost.
April 26, 1986 Chernobyl meltdown, est.4000 cancer deaths, evactuation of 300,000 people, $6,700 million. Radioactive material was dispersed throughout Europe.
May 4, 1986 Hamm-Uentrop, West Germany - experimental reactor released radiation to surrounding area, $267 million.
December 9, 1986 Surry, Va., US Surry Nuclear Power plant feedwater pipe broke, killing 4 workers.
March 31, 1987 Delta, Pa. US cooling malfunctions, $400 million to fix.
December 19, 1987 Lycoming NY, US Nine mile point unit shutdown due to malfunctions, $150 million cost.
March 17, 1989 Lusby, Maryland, US cracks in heater sleeves caused shutdown, $120 million to fix.
October 19, 1989 Vandellos, Spain fire damaged cooling system almost caused a meltdown, $220 million.
March 1992 Leningrad, Russia radioactive iodine leaked into the air via ruptured fuel channel.
February 20, 1996 Waterford, Ct. US Leaking valves caused shutdowns, multiple equipment failures found, $254 million.
September 2, 1996 Crystal River, FL, US Malfunction and repairs caused shutdown, $384 million to fix.
September 30, 1999 Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan Tokaimura nuclear accident killed 2 workers and exposed one more to radiation levels over permissible limits, $54 million.
February 16, 2002 Oak Harbor, OH, US, 24 month outage due to severe corrosion of reactor vessel head, $143 million.
April 10, 2003 Paks, Hungary, collapse of fuel rods, leakage of radioactive gases, shutdown 18 months.
August 9, 2004 Fukui Prefecture, Japan Steam explosion killed 4, injured 7, $9 million.
July 25, 2006 Forsmark, Sweden, multiple failures in critical reactor cooling, $100 million.
March 11, 2011 Fukishima, Japan, Tsunami flooded 3 reactors causing meltdowns, 3+ deaths, est cost between 1,255-2,078 million.
September 12, 2011 Marcoule, France, 1 death and 4 seriously injured in explosion.
Think of you children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, etc. etc.
They will have the cost and risk of maintaining the nuclear waste that was generated for a few years of your life for your use and enjoyment.
The World Economic Forum stated: "But nuclear power technology has advanced since these incidents. A new breed of small modular reactors (SMRs) is being developed. They are safer and less exposed to dangers like earthquakes and meltdowns than traditional large-scale reactors.
As with all nuclear power plants, they donāt emit greenhouse gases, meaning they support global efforts to reach net-zero emissions.
Importantly, SMRs can also be safely turned off and restarted, unlike conventional plants."
Additionally, in 2023 the NRC certified the first U.S. small nuclear reactor design. In announcing the certification, the Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy Dr. Kathryn Huff said āSMRs are no longer an abstract concept. They are real and they are ready for deployment."
That looks like an impressive list until you understand that the coal industry represents a chernobyl of public health and environmental effects every 9 months.
In isolation, yes all of those incidents are bad, many of them tragedies.
In total you have, with the largest and most pessimistic estimates, 6000-8000 people whose lives were shortened or injured by a nuclear reactor.
Let us compare this to a comparable form of power generation: hydroelectric dams. They are large, concrete construction projects that are expensive to build, but provide clean, carbon free and constant energy for decades once built for essentially no fuel cost.
One dam failure in china, the Bianqiao dam failure, killed at least ~25,000 people at minimum, up to potentially over 200,000 people with massive, catastrophic flooding in 1975.
Granted, that was the most catastrophic dam failure ever recorded, but with the anti-nuclear stance that every modern reactor is compared to the soviet shitbox engineering and horrendous mismanagement of Chernobyl I feel I have the right to point out the catastrophic results of communist shitbox engineering of dams.
If you discount the two worst cases of communist shitbox engineering, then you still get the failure of the dykes in hurricane Katrina, which killed, on its own, just as much and likely far more than all the nuclear accidents outside of chernobyl combined (I havenāt done the precise math there, but the orders of magnitude are correct).
You can also compare the effects of radioactive contamination from nuclear accidents to the ash piles of coal plants getting washed into rivers during floods when retaining walls fail, and subsequently contaminating the entire river with toxic heavy metals that can do a whole lot worse than a small exposure to radioactive contamination will. Hell, some of those toxic heavy metals are uranium and thorium, so coal ash contamination will even give you a radiation dose, no reactor needed.
Also, nuclear technology is advancing. There are reactors that can burn spent fuel rods as fuel and extract a hundred times as much energy from them as the original reactors did. They also turn the long lived waste into short lived fission products that only remain dangerously radioactive for a few centuries.
Those short lived fission products are valuable and useful products on their own, with very lucrative commercial, medical and scientific applications, so you canāt even meaningfully call them waste anymore.
The nuclear waste problem is not a problem in the first place. It is already solved. You are, in fact, representative of the forces that prevented it from being solved 40 years ago.
Nuclear energy is far from being green or cheap.
āThe U.S. produces as much as 160,000 cubic feet (4,530 cubic meters) of radioactive material from its nuclear power plants annuallyāa number that spikes higher dramatically when old nuclear plants are decommissioned ā¦ Ranging from workersā coveralls to water filters, some of this stream of nuclear waste no longer has a place for its disposal eitherāparticularly the highly radioactive materials rated as classes B and C, such as reactor vessel heads. āThat stuff has only one place it can go,ā says Ralph Andersen, chief health physicist at NEI, āa deep geologic repository,ā like Yucca Mountain.ā
Spent Nuclear Fuel: A Trash Heap Deadly for 250,000 Years or a Renewable Energy Source?
Spent Nuclear Fuel: A Trash Heap Deadly for 250,000 Years or a Renewableā¦
Nuclear waste is either a millenniaās worth of lethal garbage or the fuel of future nuclear reactorsāor both
The Staggering Timescales Of Nuclear Waste Disposal
āThis most potent form of nuclear waste, according to some, needs to be safely stored for up to a million years. Yes, 1 million yearsā
How would you feel if you were living in the year 5000 something, and you have to keep maintaining the safety and toxicity of all the radioactive waste dumps from the selfish people who enjoyed ācheap and greenā power for a few years during the 2000s?
You are thinking in the short term only. There are fossil sea shells at the tops of mountains, there are tropical ferns under all that ice at Antarctica. The earth has gone through major catastrophes at least several times and will again. What will happen to all that nuclear waste when the next one happens? Not only will the catastrophe cause a mass extinction but now anything that manages to survive will have the extra problem of radiation to deal with - for thousands if not millions of years. It would make our planet a dead wasteland. If there is even a tiny percent chance this could happen ITāS NOT WORTH IT. If we could totally recycle/detoxify ALL the nuclear waste we have now - in ALL countries storing it - and not make any more waste EVER. THEN we could look at nuclear power as safe.
Ok, that is an absolutely absurd claim. The āsafeā level of radiation that is considered when you are looking at the 100,000 year or million year numbers for nuclear waste is not what is actually safe for life, it is a measure of at what point the nuclear waste is at the same level of radiocativity as natural uranium ore. This was so that anti-nuclear protesters who didnāt understand anything about radiation beyond āitās dangerous and badā couldnāt screech hysterically about the scientists lying about the timescale on TV and saying that the waste would still be radioactive. So, the scientists gave the most conservative and most pessimistic measure of āsafeā they could possibly imagine because they wanted to keep the hysterical idiots from scaring the public.
Of course, this had the opposite effect, and instead made people who donāt understand nuclear energy and radiation terrified that nuclear waste is horribly dangerous for a hundred thousand years.
The level of āsafeā is far, far below the levels of toxicity that would cause measurable medical effects to life. Natural uranium, in order to eat enough of it to get a fatal radiation dose, you would need essentially a snickers bar of yellowcake uranium. You only need a third to a quarter of that to die from heavy metal poisoning, because uranium is a toxic heavy metal like lead. The chemical toxicity is higher than the radioactive hazard.
You know what else will kill you dead if you eat a snickers bar of it? Lead, cadmium, mercury, arsenic, chromium, cobalt, and so on. Arsenic and chromium and mercury only need small doses of skittle/M&M size or smaller to kill you, and chromium even causes cancer, just like radiation. In fact, Chromium will be a carcinogen with vastly higher potency than nuclear waste will after a few centuries.
After a few thousand years (~5000) the waste will not really be any more poisonous or dangerous than a rich vein of chromium or arsenic ore. Still potentially dangerous if it can leach into the water table, but then you run into the issue (or rather, non-issue) of the state of long term storage of nuclear waste.
Nuclear waste, despite what the Simpsons told you, does not, in fact, exist as a state of ominiously glowing green goop stored in leaky barrels. It exists in a state of chemically inert fused glass bricks stored in a hermetically sealed, reinforced concrete cask.
The waste itself, assuming there was no cask, is a rigid and durable and chemically inert block of glass, specifically formulated to not leach any of its contents into water in contact with even small broken pieces of itself.
So, broken pieces of nuclear waste are chemically safe to have in the water table, which natural patches of chromium or lead or mercury or cadmium or arsenic ore are not.
Then, we can look at how, assuming that the waste did in fact somehow leach out of the chemically inert glass, those actinides would diffuse into the water table.
We have a real-world example of nuclear waste being stored safely in the ground for literally billions of years. How is that possible? Well, we discovered a natural nuclear reactor in a rich vein of uranium ore in africa that achieved criticality and fission over a billion years ago. Water seeped into the ore layer, and moderated enough neutrons to cause fission chain reactions in the ore.
After this was discovered, they did a deep and thorough analysis of how far the fission products and actinides diffused and spread through the surrounding water table and rock, and the answer to that was ābarely any got beyond the uranium ore layer, and what little did only was able to diffuse about 20 meters from their origins at most.ā
This, is without any of the hermetic sealing in concrete barrels, or any of the inert glass fusing processes we use to make the waste unable to leach into water supplies.
That natural reactor was found beneath a bloody jungle, not a lifeless wasteland as you seem to believe it would.
Thatās the thing, WE CAN ALREADY DO THAT! Breeder reactors WORK, we had working models of them connected to the grid and fully operational, the russians still do have them connected to the grid and fully operational, and one of the only reasons why we havenāt closed our nuclear fuel cycle and been well on our way to burning up all of our nuclear waste in breeder reactors is because of the hysterical screeching of greenpeace about breeder reactors being a āproliferation risk.ā
Naturally, we have breeder reactor designs that are extremely proliferation resistant, but good luck explaining that to the public when the hysteria makes all the headlines.
Of course, the meaning of āproliferation riskā is horribly twisted into uselessness, because there are two separate qualities of a reactor design that are both called proliferation risks that have almost nothing to do with each other.
I define them as fissile security and proliferation risk.
Proliferation risk is a measure of how easily the reactor design could be used to produce fissile material for a working nuclear bomb if a rogue state like Iran had a working reactor under their control.
Fissile security is a measure of how easily could terrorists steal fissile material from a reactor site if they managed to beat security and get inside.
Those are two completely different design criteria with completely different engineering solutions.
Proliferation risk of breeder reactors used domestically in the United States is a completely absurd argument. You are 80 years too late to stop the US from gaining the capacity to produce nuclear bombs. The argument here is ridiculous.
Granted this was somewhat less ridiculous in the 70s and 80s when people wanted the US government to stop mass producing tens of thousands of nuclear bombs and didnāt have any practical candidate to vote for at the time that would actually stop that policy, so they protested the construction of whatever production facilities of potential weapons material they could.
Now, that is not a real concern. The US government is currently trying to find ways to safely dispose of its large stockpiles of weapons grade fissile material, not make more of it.
Fissile security is an actual argument for domestic US reactors, but is essentially a solved problem at this point. All currently operating reactors in the US are extremely resistant to this kind of attack, and the contents of the available material are almost impossible to turn into a nuclear bomb without a multibillion dollar enrichment and specialized chemical processing facility. Which, of course, if the terrorists had access to that, they wouldnāt bother stealing anything from a nuclear reactor in the first place.
Almost every anti-nuclear argument is ultimately baseless fearmongering by people who do not understand nuclear power and radiation, or have an agenda with other reasons why they donāt like nuclear energy that they are hiding behind the fearmongering.
The only vaguely reasonable one is economics of traditional nuclear power plants not being competetive in the electricity market, and only of you look at the economics through a narrow perspective, but that is swiftly becoming baseless with the development of advanced reactors that are cheaper and faster to build and deploy and operate.
Primarily we just need to unfuck the regulatory enviroment in the US. This also solves the economics argument, because the majority of the cost of nuclear at the moment is the absurdly and unnecessarily onerous licensing and regulatory process we have in the US for reactor construction and operation.
Here are some comments from Wikipedia on SMRs:
"Proponents claim that SMRs would be less expensive due to the application of standardized modules that could be industrially produced off-site in a dedicated factory. SMRs do, however, also have economic disadvantages. Several studies suggest that the overall costs of SMRs are comparable with those of conventional large reactors. Moreover, extremely limited information about SMR modules transportation has been published. Critics say that modular building will only be cost-effective for a high number of the same SMR type, given the still remaining high costs for each SMR. A high market share is thus needed to obtain sufficient orders ā¦
To produce the same electrical power as the ~ 400 large nuclear power reactors in the world today, BASE, the German Federal Office for the Safety of Nuclear Waste Management, warns that it would be necessary to build several thousands to tens of thousands of SMRs ā¦
Critics say that many more small nuclear reactors pose a higher risk, requiring more transportation of nuclear fuel, also increasing the production of radioactive waste ā¦
SMRs require new designs with new technology, the safety of which has yet to be proven ā¦ based on the current state of knowledge it is not possible to state, that a higher safety level is achieved by SMR concepts in principle ā¦
Another issue pinpointed by Krall et al. (2022) related to the higher neutron leakage in SMR is that a lower fraction of their nuclear fuel is consumed, leading to a lower burnup and to more fissile materials left over in their spent fuel, therefore increasing the waste volume ā¦
If higher concentrations of fissile materials subsist in the spent fuel, the critical mass needed to sustain a nuclear chain reaction is also lower. As a direct consequence, the number of spent fuels present in a waste canister will also be lower and a larger number of canisters and overpacks will be necessary to avoid criticality accidents and to guarantee nuclear criticality safety in a deep geological repository. This also contributes to increase the total waste volume and the number of disposal galleries in a geological repository ā¦
Some types of SMR spent fuels, or coolants, (highly reactive and corrosive uranium fluoride (UF4) from molten salt reactors, or pyrophoric sodium from liquid metal cooled fast breeders) cannot be directly disposed of in a deep geologic repository because of their chemical reactivity in the underground environment (deep clay) formations, crystalline rocks, or rock salt. To avoid to exacerbate spent fuel storage and disposal issues it will be mandatory to reprocess and to condition them in an appropriate and safe way before final geological disposal ā¦
Nuclear_proliferation, or the use of nuclear materials to create weapons, is a concern for small modular reactors. As SMRs have lower generation capacity and are physically smaller, they are intended to be deployed in many more locations than conventional plants ā¦"