Discussion question- do folkx here consider nuclear clean and/or green?
Discussion question- do folkx here consider nuclear clean and/or green?
As the title says, I'm interested in this community's perceptions on nuclear energy.
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My biggest issue with nuclear is that as an industry it is lobby-promoting, politically-toxic, corruption promoting and thus anti-democratic in a fundamental way.
Just because of that we should not pursue nuclear.
Name an industry that isn't.
I don't agree. Even the industrial military complex is more prone to diversity in terms of incentives, centralisation and consequences.
The nuclear energy industry is:
Very dependent on investment costs. More than everyday costs. So public funding is frequently demanded, with contracting being a politically toxic environment. The taxpayer pays today without knowing with clarity what he will have to pay on the future.
The risk management brings about a lot of low probability X high consequence cases. So, for safety keeping we need regulations and oversight, lots of it.
Everyday costs thus are heavily dependent on regulations. With a massive difference in operating costs between 99.999 Vs 99.9999% safety levels. Thus lobbying politicians, regulator/overseer capture, and plain old corruption have big relevance to everyday costs
Security issues also demand that inicial clearance as to who can enter the industry, and does not allow having so many players that the probability of losing track of them becomes higher. Thus a massive big incentive for centralisation, on top of the 'every-other-industry wants it's own monopoly' incentive.
Thus, for me, the slippery slope is so slanted that the risks outweigh the benefits, even for a very good democracy.
EDIT: beyond the issues I was talking about, nuclear energy production, as we can build now, has lot of practicality issues. And a lot of people don't have/take time to explore those issues. Like, the power output is not flexible, as required by consumption --- because of that it has only been useful to have nuclear for baseline consumption, and that only represents about 6% of total electricity needs, 94% of the electricity has to come from other sources.
My objectionsn to nuclear are also similarly moral. I just have such a huge issue with an energy source that creates a waste that will be around for generations.
Uranium mining has also created so many environmental disasters and is a risk to human health on that end.
That being said, I also understand that batteries and solar require rare earth minerals which causes more mining and human rights violations.
Yes.
Even when taking waste and sourcing as not a big issue, if we take then out of the discussion, nuclear is not that great option.