I was very pro nuclear until it came out of my mind.
Given its construction, the nuclear plan can have an intensive use of the sulfur hexafluoride ( SF6 Gas) Which according to Wikipedia
"According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, SF 6 is the most potent greenhouse gas that has been evaluated, with a global warming potential of 23,900 times that of CO 2 when compared over a 100-year period"
This puzzled me as pro- nuclear tend not to mention it.
Unless new technology come up addressing this issue, I would not judge nuclear as clean for the time being.
Page Wiki for additional information:
https://www-boursorama-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.bourso...
Based on the ref below (in French) Up to 2000 kg can be released each year.
https://www-boursorama-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.bourso...
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, SF 6 is the most potent greenhouse gas that has been evaluated, with a global warming potential of 23,900 times that of CO 2 when compared over a 100-year period.[37] Sulfur hexafluoride is inert in the troposphere and stratosphere and is extremely long-lived, with an estimated atmospheric lifetime of 800–3,200 years.
The question is whether “doing it wrong” (Fukushima) outweighs the benefits of “doing it right”.
As of 2021, nuclear powerplant accidents killed less than 2 people per year since 1970s. As of 2018, nuclear powerplants produced 10% of energy.
WHO estimates that climate change causes 150000 deaths per year.
Fossil-fuels powerplants produce surprisingly low air pollution due to all required by law filters, technologies etc.
(Source: it's discussed in the book The Uninhabitable Earth, although I don't have a copy to hand so can't find the exact citations.)
Very minor cognitive impairment levels can happen in worst-case scenario in 2100 and assuming current increase of CO2 concentration over time, it shouldn't happen before 2300.
On the other hand, can we afford not doing it? We don't yet have clean and efficient energy storage technologies that would allow us to switch to renewables completely. So if the alternative is to burn coal and worsen our already bad situation, the nuclear risk seems much smaller.
If you tsunami safety plan in a country prone to have tsunamis fits in one page and has not been updated in the last 9 years to include the new scientific data, yes, you are doing it wrong.
If your plans calculate less than 6m high waves as a maximum and there is a 14m high wave event. If your calculus failed for more than 50%, not, this is not a good job. You could have done much more.
Can blame the nature or the bad luck, or the constellations, but you are just lying to yourself.
>The most common criticism of pebble-bed reactors is that encasing the fuel in combustible graphite poses a hazard. When the graphite burns, fuel material could be carried away in smoke from the fire.
These sound like solvable engineering and process challenges, though, so perhaps in the less anti-nuclear climate we’ll have the will to actually make it work.
I actually had this in mind for storage.