The head of the Australian energy market operator AEMO, Daniel Westerman, has rejected nuclear power as a way to replace Australia’s ageing coal-fired power stations, arguing that it is too slow and too expensive. In addition, baseload power sources are not competitive in a grid dominated by wind and solar energy anyway.
Nuclear waste is incredibly safe and disasters simply don’t happen anymore because of how strict safety protocols are
It’s all very well claiming that nuclear waste storage is safe but you can’t guarantee anything can be kept safe for 10000 years. Humans haven’t managed that for anything, ever.
You can’t really guarantee anything. What we do is play the odds. And the odds are pretty good.
Except you have no emperical basis for judging the accuracy of those odds.
Actually I do. Simply look at injured people because of nuclear power and compare them to injured people because of any alternative.
Irrelevant to storing nuclear waste for 10000 years, which was what I was talking avout
well we’ve been storing nuclear waste for decades so we can extrapolate
That’s like saying we don’t know if the sun will come up tomorrow, because we can’t see in the future.
Yes, you can.
It’s been stored in the ground since the earth was formed.
Not in a highly refined form
It’s been stored in the ground since the earth was formed.
“not in a highly refined form”
I certainly agree that we’ve gotten much better at safely producing and storing. However, with climate change worsening, we continue to have unprecedented natural disasters in unexpected areas which concerns me the most.
What kind of climate change disaster do you think would cause problems with nuclear waste storage?
This getting heavily downvoted with no replies shows just how much of anti-nuclear is simply based on propaganda and fearmongering, not science. Nuclear is the second safest energy source in the world, nearly tied with solar for first, and actually was the first until not too long ago. And that is despite the heavy investment into renewables and disinvestment into nuclear. If anyone is that worried about the dangers of nuclear to people and the environment, they should turn their attention to hydro-energy (not to speak of fossil fuels, obviously).
What are even the major disasters regarding nuclear? One, Chernobyl, was in the USSR in the 80s; does anyone remember what phones looked like in the 80s? The other was in Fukushima, which is located in a country known for earthquakes and tsunamis, and it was not build to handle such events; and it still was nowhere near as bad as Chernobyl. I think I’ve also heard about one in the UK, but that was in the fucking 50s, and even smaller than Fukushima.
The US had the 3 mile island disaster in the 70s. But I think the actual radioactive release was negligible.
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Fukushima was not a nuclear waste storage site