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Comment by rukittenme | Hacker News Reader

Can you help? I read the wiki[0] but I don't understand the concern.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tihange_Nuclear_Power_Station#...

Have a look here: https://www.diggitmagazine.com/papers/stop-tihange-and-doel-...

To expand on my previous point. A nuclear power plant has to be maintained by humans. Humans make mistakes. Accidents will happen. Also, these plants at some point will get old. What can they be replaced with? This is exactly why Belgium can’t shut Tihange down. What is the alternative for them, coal from Hambacher Forst?

Shutting down a nuclear plant "to protect the environment" is like clubbing baby seals to protect the animals. Doesn't make any sense. A properly functional nuclear power plant _does not produce any emissions_, produces electricity 24x7x365, lots of it, and does so for decades on end.

The best alternative for them is a modern nuclear plant, built right next to the old one. Which the "activists" won't let them build.

Last time I checked the final storage of nuclear waste is not solved yet. In Germany they store it in old salt mines that are in a very bad state for years already.

Is final storage problem for semiconductor waste solved yet? Solar panels are semiconductors with a rather limited lifespan that require massive quantities of some truly horrible chemicals to manufacture them.

Is the problem of greenhouse gases "solved"? Last I checked, 31% of Germany's considerable energy appetite is filled by burning hydrocarbons. If we are to believe climate change alarmists, this is destroying the planet to a far greater and more permanent extent than some leaky barrels in some German salt mine.

Activists must have some terrible cognitive dissonance in their heads. On the one hand we keep hearing that "we're all gonna die" if something is not done within the next decade. On the other hand, the only thing that can realistically be done in the next decade to combat climate change _for real_ is building a ton of new nuclear power plants and shutting down the coal and natural gas ones. No, solar and wind aren't going to cut it, it's readily apparent if you run some basic back of the envelope, and solar creates an environmental disaster of its own, both now (in China mostly) and in the future, due to the limited lifespan of the panels.

> Is final storage problem for semiconductor waste solved yet?

I don't know much about semiconductor but I guess you can store them in a relatively normal warehouse until you figure out a way to do that and recycle the materials without running into problems like converting bigger parts of land into a radioactive wasteland?

I don't think that's a very good comparison.

it's actually beacuse storing nuclear waste doesn't create ''radioactive wasteland''

And it goes up in flames like Thiange did.

Even if it does, it's still vastly less environmental damage than a comparable fossil fuel plant.

Yes, unless is goes bang. Like Fukushima and Chernobyl did.

People are going to be living next to Fukushima in the next few years. IIRC the vast majority of the waste was cleaned up in the first year or so and the rest has been contained to a small area.

Yes, I am aware of the very small number of significant disasters that have occurred. I also contend, however, that as bad as those disasters are they are still nowhere near as bad as 35 billion metric tons of CO2 that's being vented into the atmosphere every year.

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