• originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com
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    1 year ago

    imagine how much farther ahead we would be in safety and efficiency if it was made priority 50 years ago.

    we still have whole swathes of people who think that because its not perfect now, it cant be perfected ever.

    • danielbln@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      So uh, turns out the energy companies are not exactly the most moral and rule abiding entities, and they love to pay off politicians and cut corners. How does one prevent that, as in the case of fission it has rather dire consequences?

      • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Since you can apply that logic to everything, how can you ever build anything? Because all consequences are dire on a myopic scale, that is, if your partner dies because a single electrician cheaped out with the wiring in your building and got someone to sign off, “It’s not as bad as a nuclear disaster” isn’t exactly going to console them much.

        At some point, you need to accept that making something illegal and trying to prosecute people has to be enough. For most situations. It’s not perfect. Sure. But nothing ever is. And no solution to energy is ever going to be perfect, either.

        • sederx@programming.dev
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          1 year ago

          a wind mill going down and a nuclear plant blowing up have very different ramifications

          • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Exactly, just like a windmill running and a nuclear power plant running have very different effects on the power grid. Hence why comparing them directly is often such a nonsense act.

        • Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          An electrician installing faulty wiring doesn’t render your home uninhabitable for a few thousand years.

          So there’s one difference.

          • SocialEngineer56@notdigg.com
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            1 year ago

            That’s why there are lots of regulations for things impacting life safety. With a nuclear power plant, you mitigate the disaster potential by having so many more people involved in the design and inspection processes.

            The risk of an electrician installing faulty wiring in your home could be mitigated by having a third party inspector review the work. Now do that 1000x over and your risk of “politicians are paid off” is negligible.

        • cloud@lazysoci.al
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          1 year ago

          Or they could just allow everyone to build nuclear reactors in their backyard, everyone is saying that they are safer than a banana so i don’t see any issue

      • Yaztromo@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Easy. Have nuclear power plants operate as government run and backed corporations (what we’d call a “Crown Corporation” here in Canada).

        That way you can mandate safety and uptime as metrics over profit. It may be less efficient from an economic standpoint (overall cost might be higher), but you also don’t wind up with the nuclear version of Love Canal.

      • Dojan@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I mean it’s not the companies operating the facilities we put our trust in, but the outside regulators whose job it is to ensure these facilities are safe and meet a certain standard. As well as the engineers and scientists that design these systems.

        Nuclear power isn’t 100% safe or risk-free, but it’s hella effective and leaps and bounds better than fossil fuels. We can embrace nuclear, renewables and fossil free methods, or just continue burning the world.

        • umad_cause_ibad@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Don’t push nuclear power like it’s the only option though.

          Where I live we entirely provide energy from hydro power plants and nuclear energy is banned. We use no fossil fuels. We have a 35 year plan for future growth and it doesn’t include any fossil fuels. Nuclear power is just one of the options and it has many hurdles to implement, maintain and decommission.

          • Astrealix@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Honestly, if you can, hydro is brilliant. Not many places can though — both because of geography and politics. Nuclear is better than a lot of the alternatives and shouldn’t be discounted.

              • Astrealix@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                I know it’s a damn lot easier than carbon recapture, if we’re talking waste products. It’s not ideal, but there is no such thing as perfect, and we shouldn’t let that be the enemy of good. Nuclear fission power is part of a large group of methods to help us switch off fossil fuels.

                • EMPig@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  “Easier”? Are you aware of the fact that radioactive waste tombs are meant to stand for millions of years? It requres a lot of territory, construction and servance charges, and lots of prays for nothing destructive happens with it in its “infinite” lifetime.

                  • Astrealix@lemmy.world
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                    1 year ago

                    Have you tried capturing gas? As difficult as radioactive waste tombs are, they’re easier than containing a specific type of air lol.

                • Olgratin_Magmatoe@startrek.website
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                  1 year ago

                  Launching radioactive waste into space is a terrible idea, because rockets on occasion crash. Once that happens it becomes a nuclear disaster.

                  Instead we can safely store it in depleted mines.

                  • Touching_Grass@lemmy.world
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                    1 year ago

                    Mines fill up with water if they’re not constantly pumped out. Even the salt mines which seemed like a solution were found to have this issue

              • radiosimian@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                We can bury it in the ground and it will literally turn into lead. How are you doing with carbon emissions? Got a fix?

                • EMPig@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  I think it’s photosynthesis. ‘Bury in the ground’ is an extreme simplification btw. Also, I am finished with this topic scince long anough. It feels politically biased. If you’d like to reply, I’d hear it gladly. But I m not going to be involved into a discussion.

        • Touching_Grass@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          The problem is its potential for harm. And I don’t mean meltdown. Storage is the problem that doesn’t seem to have strong solutions right now. And the potential for them to make a mistake and store the waste improperly is pretty catastrophic.

          • Dojan@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            “Nuclear waste” sounds super scary, but most of it are things like tools and clothing, that have comparatively tiny amount of radioactivity. Sure it still needs to be stored properly, very little high level waste is actually generated.

            You know what else is catastrophic? Fossil fuels and the impact they have on the climate. I’m not arguing that we should put all our eggs in one basket, but getting started and doing something to move away from the BS that is coal, gas, and oil is really something we should’ve prioritised fifty years ago. Instead they have us arguing whether we should go with hydroelectric, or put up with “ugly windmills” or “solar farms” or “dangerous nuclear plants.”

            It’s all bullshit. Our world is literally on fire and no one seems to actually give a fuck. We have fantastic tools that could’ve halted the progress had we used them in time, but fifty years later we’re still arguing about this.

            At this point I honestly hope we do burn. This is a filter mankind does not deserve to pass. We’re too evil to survive.

            • Touching_Grass@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Yea both are horrible. But we can get off fossil fuels and walk away. We can’t with nuclear. It’ll always be with us and doesn’t solve that we need fossil fuel for other things.

              Jets and ships are still going to need fossil fuels.

              Which is why I think the best thing we could be doing right now is focusing on improving how energy is store. With the right advancement we could solve a lot of these problems with the right battery.

                • Touching_Grass@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  Sure, but doesn’t that just increase the nuclear waste storage issue if we turn all these vehicles nuclear powered

                  • Harrison [He/Him]@ttrpg.network
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                    1 year ago

                    Not hugely. Actual nuclear waste, not just mildly radioactive uniforms and similar material, is extremely small and compact for the amount of energy generated.

        • The_v@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          The worst nuclear disaster has led to 1,000sq miles of land being unsafe for human inhabitants.

          Using fossil fuels for power is destroying of the entire planet.

          It’s really not that complicated.

          • abraxas@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            Except that nuclear isn’t the only, or even the cheapest, alternative to fossil fuels.

          • pedroapero@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            Except that powering the world with nuclear would require thousands of reactors and so much more disasters. This doesn’t even factor the space abandonned to store «normal» toxic materials.

            • uis@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              This doesn’t even factor the space abandonned to store «normal» toxic materials.

              You mean under ground from where it was dug out?

              • pedroapero@lemmy.ml
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                1 year ago

                The plant itself, water inevitably getting in contact with wastes and leaking also.

                • uis@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  You mean water under ground? It was in contact million years before any of us was born.

                  • pedroapero@lemmy.ml
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                    1 year ago

                    Million years were sufficient for the radioactivity to decay before life started to evolve on earth.

          • umad_cause_ibad@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            Both sound terrible.

            I don’t really want to pick the lessor of two evils when it comes to the energy.

              • umad_cause_ibad@lemm.ee
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                1 year ago

                The option proposed is that making a small area of the planet inhabitable or worsening climate change. Sorry but that’s a shitty comparison.

                • Norah - She/They@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                  1 year ago

                  Bet you’d feel* differently if you were a resident of one of the island nations that’s going to drown in the next decade or two. That part of the world’s definitely going to be uninhabitable if we continue to do nothing.

            • Astrealix@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              By not picking, you are picking fossil fuels. Because we can’t fully replace everything with solar/wind yet, and fossil fuels are already being burned as we speak.

              • umad_cause_ibad@lemm.ee
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                1 year ago

                No, give me an option that doesn’t make a part of the world uninhabitable or increases climate change.

                That just a stupid comparison and is there any reason why we can’t also do wind solar thermal hydro also? It’s fossil fuels or nuclear and that’s it?

              • umad_cause_ibad@lemm.ee
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                1 year ago

                No, give me an option that doesn’t make a part of the world uninhabitable or increases climate change.

                That just a stupid comparison and is there any reason why we can’t also do wind solar thermal hydro also? It’s fossil fuels or nuclear and that’s it huh?

    • Yaztromo@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      If the Soviets hadn’t cut corners and Chernobyl hadn’t happened in this first place, this is likely where we would already be.