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U.S. Pledge To Triple Global Nuclear Energy By 2050
(www.huffpost.com)
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this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023
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Anyone still worried about the safety of the method is an ignoramus. "Dying slowly to lung cancer and the environment cooking me alive is so much better than the one-in-a-billion chance of having to eat some prussian blue"
Waste removal is my biggest concern. Unless the plans to expand also come with ways to recycle the waste, we're just setting ourselves up for giant exclusion zones throughout the globe, most likely in small countries where the plants are imposed on them by foreign economic powerhouses and then they're told to figure the waste out themselves.
Not to mention "just bury it" is neither futureproof nor is it good for the non-human inhabitants of our planet; sure if those concrete containment cysts in the desert ever fail it will "only" be leaking radiation into the desert, but any desert is still home to hundreds of species of living things and its own complex ecosystem. "Desert" doesn't actually mean "devoid of life"; there are no good locations to bury it and forget it.
Let's talk about the absolute devastation mining rare materials does to ecosystems and the exploitation of third world countries that it's led to. We're already implicated in so much violence against the earth itself and colonialist exploitation, and I'm supposed to support gods know how much more of that for Uranium from Kazhakstan (45% of the worlds' production in 2021)? That's basically begging for more forever wars over energy resources in the middle east.
"We'll figure out long term solutions after the infrastructure is put in place" is how we got to where we are with fossil fuels AND landfills.
I'll fully support any plans to make a push toward nuclear, but the foremost concern of that push should be waste recycling. After that's figured out, everything else is small potatoes. It would even make the long-term costs cheaper than fighting for new material and figuring out million-year half-life hazardous waste disposal. A nearly unlimited energy supply that doesn't fuel wars and is safer than the current system? Sign me the fuck up.
Regarding waste; nuclear waste can be turned into diamond batteries.
If they manage to release, the idea is that small cell batteries can self-recharge themselves practically forever (20,000ish years?). Battery dead? Remove it, swap it, wait. Battery dead? Insert the one you removed previously, the Uranium inside replenished the charge.
Neat stuff given that it is made from waste byproduct.
That's cool as fuck! Now, how do we implement it?
I should have been a little more clear: I'm not worried about a lack of ways to properly neutralize and dispose of the waste, I'm concerned that they will not be implemented because they are deemed unprofitable.
Already the U.S. runs nuclear power, and yet we still haven't implemented waste recycling (as of 2022 iirc the article I read); why? Presumably because ultimately it does not serve the interest of capital. So get plans to create that infrastructure into effect, and I'll get on board with any expansion. Until that happens, it's just hopping on the dick of this new tech because it's bleeding edge and assuming the infrastructure to handle it will follow (which has worked so well for e-waste and cars and fossil fuels and plastics and...)
Not that sticking to fossil fuels in the meantime is a better alternative. We should focus on energy production that doesn't have the potential to immediately kill us should the waste-containment fail: solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric. Hell, we already have stockpiles of a majorly combustible fluid that requires an ever-increasing amount of energy to harvest, why not exchange it for one that doesn't also cause biosphere collapse as a side-effect: Hydrogen?
None of these are environmentally friendly either, and so I'd still prefer to see nuclear in the long run instead. Strip-mining Uranium is still better than the massive amount of mining needed to get the rare metals necessary for solar at large scales, wind farms are destructive to local wildlife, hydrogen can explode and needs a constant source of water to produce while requiring a way to dispose of all the sediment generated, dams and massive water reservoirs are a blight on the landscape and disrupt entire ecosystems; I have no clue how geothermal is even harvested, but if the other renewables are anything to go by...