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[–] 12 points 2 weeks ago (11 children)

Nuclear power is so cool. After SneakerNet (Sandworm) and Chernobyl Is think a lot of people would be scared of it. I used to think wind power was an awesome source until you look at life expectancy and cost for replacement parts. You can get like 10-15years but a solar farm lasts 25+ before degrading.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    Nuclear is still the most expensive power source, while wind turbines are one of the cheapest per MWH produced.

    Half a decade ago I was fully pro nuclear, but battery technology have developed to a point we're almost capable of using it as a base loader; There's an added power grid capacity requirement for battery farm baseloading, but there's ideas of how to solve this. By having batteries sitting locally at the largest power generating sites, with a switch to determine whether batteries should be filled or power should be pushed to the grid

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  • [–] 8 points 2 weeks ago

    Improved battery tech helps nuclear just as much as it helps solar and wind, as you can design reactors to run peak efficiency at a specific output, allowing you to target a base load where during low demand hours nuclear, wind and solar as available charge batteries or energy storage devices and then during peak hours draw from that reserve without having to increase or decrease the load and allow a much more efficient consumption of fuel.

    As for nuclear being expensive, that entirely comes down to the extremely flawed policy of no radiation exposure, which was put in a place when very little was known about exposure at all, let alone how many natural sources of similar radiation there is. If those policies were relaxed to much more realistic standards, the cost of nuclear would be competitive with solar.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 weeks ago (7 children)

    Praising nuclear and deploring the cost of wind? That's funny, considering the still-unsolved problem of securely storing nuclear waste for thousands of years. It's almost like we have left the factor with the largest potential cost out of our calculation...

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  • [–] 11 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (5 children)

    20 years of nuclear waste vs less than 10 years (2017-2023) of wind turbine blades (dumped illegally no less)

    Which one is the unsolved problem again?

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  • [–] -1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (4 children)

    To help answer your question, could you first

    a) provide information on the total energy generated by the waste materials in pictures 1 and 2, just so we can be sure this is an apples-to-apples comparison and we can be sure that we're looking at roughly the same amount in both pictures?
    b) assess the capacity of the waste materials in pictures 1 and 2 for 1) further damages to the environment and human health, as well as 2) their potential for being recycled?
    c) fast-forward these images about 250-500 years and then reasses which one depicts the greater environmental problem and cost factor?

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  • [–] 7 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

    The Maine Yankee Nuclear Power Plant in Wiscasset, Maine, produced approximately 119 billion kilowatt-hours (119 terawatt-hours) of electricity during its operation from 1972 to 1996.

    The Sweetwater Wind Farm is a 585.3-megawatt (MW) wind farm in Nolan County, Texas. Annual production estimates are 1,700,000 MWh, or approx 1.7 terrawatt hours per year on average

    So giving the Wind farm the most generous output figures, in a ten year span it produces less than 20 Terrawatt hours, almost 1/6th (one sixth) of the power the single reactor nuclear plant produced in it's life time.

    So yeah, balls in your court.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 child)

    That's fair.

    Now let's see which of these waste materials I can recycle, and which of them I could, theoretically, leave untouched in their current state for 250-500 years without investing a single Dollar. (The illegal Sweetwater dump was cleaned up, btw. Picture 1 is supposed to be the clean-up.)

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  • [–] 4 points 2 weeks ago

    From the turbines? Basically nothing. Millions have been spent and best has been figured out is shredding them and using them as filler, which no one is going to use when dirt and sand are cheaper and no risk of break down. All other attempts to recycle turbine blades has resulted in just better ways to crush the down to bury them, which funnily enough is what most of the 'clean up' for Sweetwater was.

    For nuclear? They can be recycled today if the incentive was there, France recycles almost all of it's nuclear waste with something like an 80% recovery rate and predict they could go 95% if that ever became economically viable. Most of the nuclear waste in the above picture will be inert after 100 years, though there is no data publicly available of the make up the waste though it should be fewer than 1% plutonium which could be recovered for use else where, such as if thorium reactors ever become viable or for space probes as NASA loves to use it for.

    The main reason the US doesn't recycle is because US's flawed policy of no radiation exposure means setting up a reprocessing and recycling facility would never become viable for the amount of waste produced annually. And as other posters have pointed out, even stuff that can't be recycled or reprocessed for other uses could still be simply buried and used to boost a geothermal powerplant.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 weeks ago

    Unresolved?

    It's a super simple problem.

    You dig a hole, put the waste in the hole and backfill with clay.

    Done.

    As a Swede, I would love it if we built a huge underground storage site and sold space to other countries needing space for waste. We have a solid bedrock and a generally stable political situation, we also have the skills to build a facility like it and could make bank off of it.

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