Ukraine shows how fragile and dangerous the reliance on reactors is. If the world can't behave responsibility.
The long term costs of nuclear are just crap. You would be better investing in battery tech to store renewable energy.
The long term costs of nuclear are just crap. You would be better investing in battery tech to store renewable energy.
If power is disrupted, there is 2 weeks of fuel to power the cooling mechanism. If that fails there will be a meltdown inside the reactor but unlike Fukushima there is no possibility of a hydrogen explosion in this type or reactor. The meltdown will be contained in the reactor. If now the reactor is bombed there is a possibility of radiation escaping but it takes a lot. Additionally the winds blow towards Russia so this would be a very foolish endeavor and everyone knows it.
The Ukrainians are bombing it because Russia is using it as a launch pad but they also know that a Fukushima or Chernobyl is almost impossible.
Long term is exactly where nuclear rules.
Of course we have to hope for technical advances to convert it to a more manageable form.
Ridiculous. From NRC:
“ Strontium-90 and cesium-137 have half-lives of about 30 years (half the radioactivity will decay in 30 years). Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years. High-level wastes are hazardous because they produce fatal radiation doses during short periods of direct exposure.”
Go to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. You see people. WEIRD!!!!
Have a look here for a source for a million years:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinero/2019/11/26/the-stag...
Of course, the civilization needs more orderly storage and disposal, and nuclear waste can be polluting but it is also the thing that is produced by completely natural processes. Some places have higher levels of radioactive radon gas produced by radioactive decay of elements deeper underground.
What do you mean by that? Dry-cask storage is very manageable and have been used for decades.
> radioactive waste will have to be stored for a million years
Uranium-235 is a naturally formed isotope of uranium, and it has a half-life of 703 million years. In a nuclear reactor, U-235 is split into many different fission products such as Caesium-137, Caesium-135, Zirconium-93 and many others. The longest living fission product is Iodine-129, which has a half-life of about 1.57 million years.
In essence, we have high-radiation and high half-life isotopes naturally formed everywhere on earth. Once they are mined and burnt in a fission reactor, these stable isotopes are split them into many different isotopes, which last for a shorter amount of time. It is a little bit nonsense to say we need to store it for a million years. It would be the same as saying we currently need to store U-235 for 703 million years.
It is all about concentrations and the type of radiation that is emitted. Nuclear waste is not "a problem" - it is a process. Right not it is safe, relatively cheap and somewhat efficient.
The whole war itself is partially due to Germany's dependency to gas