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88-2: Only Markey, Sanders Oppose 'Expensive, Risky' Nuclear Power Expansion
(www.commondreams.org)
this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2024
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politics
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I'm usually against Sanders on this, but I very much respect the risky part of that sentence. Because I just don't have a lot of faith in the future right now, and I don't know if I trust any nuclear options going forward. I mean after Trump wins the election and implements his project f, or whatever it was called, who's going to be the head of the nuclear regulatory agency? One of his shitty kids friends? Maybe Sanders is right and it's a bad time.
Would you be surprised that we have dozens of nuclear plants all over the United States? Modern reactors that can withstand the mistakes of the past without the disaster? Media makes the public think the risk is higher than it is when in reality, more people have died per year installing renewables than all the nuclear disasters combined (per GW/H).
Nuclear is simply too energy dense to ignore.
Where do you put the waste? For how long and at what cost?
What about the cost of decommissioning nuclear sites at the end of their life?
Right now the volume of waste is low enough that they store it on-site. Coal ash disposal is far more of a problem, and has led to major contamination incidents.
What figures do you have on decomissioning? How much does a coal or natural gas plant or oil refinery cost to decommission? Do plants need to be decommissioned or can they be incrementally upgraded?
Have you done any background on this or are you sealioning?
I wish it was more widely known by the average person that coal ash is radioactive and contains heavy metals like lead and arsenic due to concentration of elements that were found in trace amounts in the coal and remain once the coal is burnt. It's horrible how poorly coal ash was handled (or purposefully used in construction) in the past and how contamination events still happen with little meaningful consequence to energy companies.
In the UK, the decommissioning plan is to take at least 120 years, at an estimated cost of £126 billion pounds.
£126B would buy a lot of renewable sources... (fuck coal, gas or oil)
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nuclear-provision-explaining-the-cost-of-cleaning-up-britains-nuclear-legacy/nuclear-provision-explaining-the-cost-of-cleaning-up-britains-nuclear-legacy
That’s for one plant?
Edit: Oh. 17 of the earliest plants starting from the 50s. This has nothing to do with the construction and maintenance of modern nuclear power infrastructure.
There are 2-3 million abandoned oil and gas wells in the US. https://www.nrdc.org/stories/millions-leaky-and-abandoned-oil-and-gas-wells-are-threatening-lives-and-climate
Solar and wind are cheaper, but are variable, and have geographic limitations or high land use (45,000 acres of solar to equal the output of a modern nuclear plant). There is a place for nuclear, along with other carbon-free generation sources.
In the ground, very deep, forever, for not nearly as much money as you might think. It takes up very, very little space. It's not green liquid that can spill, it's pieces of glass.
We did that in Germany, and it's now contaminating groundwater, as the very deep hole is flooding with water.
You put things around the glass so that groundwater never touches the 'glass'. Again, very different now from the days we started.