Comment by steeve | Hacker News Reader

Comment by steeve | Hacker News Reader

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A few hints:

- read about CIGEO

- nuclear waste, once it has decayed, becomes metal in glass

- nuclear waste is _small_, see [1], the nuclear fuel waste is the tiny red cube.

- wind turbines have a 20 years lifespan, after which the blades are buried and forgotten, and will stay there forever [2]

- renewables are more CO2 intensive than nuclear, fuel cycle included, see IPCC reports (there is a debate for nuclear vs wind depending on where nuclear is deployed. in France nuclear is 6gCO2eq/kWh, vs 12 for wind)

- mercury however, will be buried in Germany, and will stay there until the end of times (unlike nuclear, which will disapear), and that doesn't seem to bother anybody

1. https://twitter.com/laydgeur/status/1184788641303937025?s=20

2. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb...

Reading the Bloomberg article, it doesn't seem like the blades are a big problem.

> “Wind turbine blades at the end of their operational life are landfill-safe, unlike the waste from some other energy sources, and represent a small fraction of overall U.S. municipal solid waste,” according to an emailed statement from the group. It pointed to an Electric Power Research Institute study that estimates all blade waste through 2050 would equal roughly .015% of all the municipal solid waste going to landfills in 2015 alone.

- wind turbines have a 20 years lifespan, after which the blades are buried and forgotten, and will stay there forever

Nuclear power plants have a lifespan of about 50 years, after which the reactor and other parts will be radioactive. This waste must be buried, will be forgotten and will remain there forever.

Now compare the space taken by the buried reactor facility and produced waste, with equivalent number of buried wind turbine blades for the same amount of energy produced :).

Actually nuclear plant have been designed for a minimal lifespan of 40 years. Most can be run safely 60, 80 or even maybe 100 years.

Renewables don't provide the energy density to power our industrial world. Simple as that.

Fossils emit much more pollution than nuclear in volume, and that will last arguably as long (CO2 we're dumping in the atmosphere will stay up there for millennia; coal ashes will remain toxic forever and we make megatons of them, not mere kilos).

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