Nuclear is the best btw.
Why not neither?
this post was submitted on 04 May 2026
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Nuclear is best.
The problem is, that unless you cut corners somewhere between mining uranium and electricity comes out, it's also the most expensive way to make electricity known to mankind.
Most expensive upfront cost, but doesn't that get balanced by how much you get out of it?
Solar, wind and hydro power is faster and cheaper to build and operate. The only advantage of nuclear is the constant power output. However, we are constantly getting better at efficiently storing energy.
Trees clean the air
Algae does that better than trees.
Trees, on the other hand, are natural climate control. They break up wind, cool the immediate air, and if enough of them are around, augment the local weather.
Nuclear waste sounds scary because you can point to it. Fossil fuel waste is just everywhere, quietly speedrunning the atmosphere.
Just the lead in gasoline kills around 5 million people a year. That is just scratching the surface of the problems oil and gas cause.
Hasn't gasoline been leadfree for quite a while now?
It was supposed to be phased out of regular gasoline in 2021. It will still be used in airplane fuel. It will take decades before it isn't present in large quantities though. That much lead in the environment doesn't just disappear.
A poisonous and heavy metal just spewing everywhere in the sky. And the conspiracy theorists ignore that and fall for fake bullshit.
For sure, not that I doubt things like global warming. The reality is oil and gas kill many millions every year. The focused only on global warming is almost a red hearing when it already causes so much death.
I think the problem is, or at least one I see a lot, is that climate change is already happening, but because it's gradual and there's already so much unpredictability you can rarely just point at something specific and say "that's because of climate change." And the constant naming of it as "global warming" has done so much damage too, because now when the new weather is cold you still have skeptical conservatives saying things like "global warming my ass!"
Plus the millions of people that coal plant's smoke kill…with radiation. Coal has killed more people by radiation in the US alone than nuclear accidents all over the world, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings combined.
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The biggest issue is that people don't understand that the shit that will kill you Chornobyl dead burns itself out relatively fast. Sushi grade polonium is only spicy for a couple of weeks.
The "it's radioactive for zillions of years" stuff is typically a heavy metal hazard far more than a radiation hazard.
If it's decaying for a zillion years a gram might be popping off a few sextillion gamma rays a second, insignificant.
Jimmy Carter, by shutting down the reprocessing industry, fucked the whole thing sideways.
You're right, and it's even less dangerous than you're saying.
If each gram was emitting a few sextillion gamma rays per second you'd be able to harness it as a power source, it would be producing megawatts per gram (I did do the math!). The rate of decay is years /decades per atom. One gram of Plutonium 239 would only give off a few hundred thousand gamma particles per second near the start of its decay.
Sorry if this comes off as me correcting you, I just read your comment and got curious so I did some calculations and wanted to share. If anything, I'm extra-agreeing with you.
🤗 check me, love it
Thanks🤗.
I don't usually get the chance to do interesting maths anymore. As soon as you're done with uni it's just Excel innit.
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As a Geologist the idea that there are seismically inactive magic rocks that will sit there and not change shape or be affected by anything for eternity and that we can assume placing radioactive waste in them will be fine for an indefinite amount of time is honestly hilarious.
Radioactive materials come from the earth. It's only reasonable that they can be put back there.
Then why do they have to be enriched after we take them out of the earth in order for us to draw power from them?
Good fucking lord. I'm tired of seeing your pro oil propaganda. You're arguing that it's bad to be able to control where hazardous materials are stored. I mean here's a fucking crazy question I'm sure you won't even respond to, but why don't we just utilize more of the damn "spent fuel"? It's possible, there's been research on the topic. Big oil stopped that development. Go ahead what else is there to say?
Nope I am not advocating for the use of fossil fuels.
I'm kind of concerned that somebody who calls himself a geologist doesn't understand radiation. The time scales involved are just not compatible. The rock is geologically inactive over the time scales that you need to store radioactive material which is at most maybe a few thousand years.
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Nuclear isn't the best anymore. Batteries, solar and wind are cheaper and take way less time to build
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