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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Improved battery tech helps nuclear just as much as it helps solar and wind, as you can design reactors to run peak efficiency at a specific output, allowing you to target a base load where during low demand hours nuclear, wind and solar as available charge batteries or energy storage devices and then during peak hours draw from that reserve without having to increase or decrease the load and allow a much more efficient consumption of fuel.

    As for nuclear being expensive, that entirely comes down to the extremely flawed policy of no radiation exposure, which was put in a place when very little was known about exposure at all, let alone how many natural sources of similar radiation there is. If those policies were relaxed to much more realistic standards, the cost of nuclear would be competitive with solar.


  • From the turbines? Basically nothing. Millions have been spent and best has been figured out is shredding them and using them as filler, which no one is going to use when dirt and sand are cheaper and no risk of break down. All other attempts to recycle turbine blades has resulted in just better ways to crush the down to bury them, which funnily enough is what most of the ‘clean up’ for Sweetwater was.

    For nuclear? They can be recycled today if the incentive was there, France recycles almost all of it’s nuclear waste with something like an 80% recovery rate and predict they could go 95% if that ever became economically viable. Most of the nuclear waste in the above picture will be inert after 100 years, though there is no data publicly available of the make up the waste though it should be fewer than 1% plutonium which could be recovered for use else where, such as if thorium reactors ever become viable or for space probes as NASA loves to use it for.

    The main reason the US doesn’t recycle is because US’s flawed policy of no radiation exposure means setting up a reprocessing and recycling facility would never become viable for the amount of waste produced annually. And as other posters have pointed out, even stuff that can’t be recycled or reprocessed for other uses could still be simply buried and used to boost a geothermal powerplant.


  • Most nuclear waste is below background radiation in ten years. High level nuclear waste, when taking the mean by volume, is 100 years. The stuff that lasts ‘thousands and thousands of years’ is plutonium which is the primary thing that can be recycled and reprocessed into fuel and neutron sources, to say nothing of all the ways nuclear waste has been used over the last half century in medical research and technology to save lives.

    So no, this theoretical situations where we have mountains of nuclear waste sitting around killing anyone that gets close is not realistic and just a strawman.


  • The Maine Yankee Nuclear Power Plant in Wiscasset, Maine, produced approximately 119 billion kilowatt-hours (119 terawatt-hours) of electricity during its operation from 1972 to 1996.

    The Sweetwater Wind Farm is a 585.3-megawatt (MW) wind farm in Nolan County, Texas. Annual production estimates are 1,700,000 MWh, or approx 1.7 terrawatt hours per year on average

    So giving the Wind farm the most generous output figures, in a ten year span it produces less than 20 Terrawatt hours, almost 1/6th (one sixth) of the power the single reactor nuclear plant produced in it’s life time.

    So yeah, balls in your court.



  • 100%, there re natural rock formations that emit more radiation than nuclear power plants, hell if the US Capitol building was rezoned as a nuclear power plant, half of DC would need to be evacuated and an exclusion zone setup without any change to the building or fuel brought to the site. The granite used in it’s construction emits more radiation naturally that exceeds the legal limit that nuclear power plants are allowed.

    Meanwhile self professed environmentalists are anti-nuclear energy despite it having the least impact environmentally per kw produced.