Young climate activist tells Greenpeace to drop ‘old-fashioned’ anti-nuclear stance

sv1sjp@lemmy.world to World News@lemmy.world – 2176 points –
Young climate activist tells Greenpeace to drop ‘old-fashioned’ anti-nuclear stance
theguardian.com
1068

You are viewing a single comment

Bullshit. Nuclear waste (more precisely, spent fuel that can be reprocessed for new fuel or other useful radionuclids) is the only waste we have actual good solutions for. It's not an engineering problem, we know very well how to safely dispose of the small amount of ultimate nuclear waste.

All the other waste, including waste from producing new and retiring old solar panels and wind turbines, basically just gets thrown into the landscape with no containment whatsoever. And some of that stuff is toxic, some will never degrade (plastics used in composite materials the wind turbine blades and towers are made of).

Plus, if you only used nuclear energy throughout you life, the amount of ultimate waste can literally fit into a coke can. That's how efficient and energy dense it is.

We already have more nuclear waste than we have capacity to store. And we arent reusing that nuclear waste. If you wanna become a nuclear engineer and get them to start using it please do, but right now the nuclear waste plan is to bury it for many millenia

Out of sight out of mind, right? Great solution. Coke can? Ummmmmmmmmmm nope.

Where do you think the discarded blade of wind turbine go? 🤔

Not into underground storage for tens of thousands of years

That's precisely where they go—landfills. They're made of non-recyclable glass fiber-plastic composites that won't degrade for millions of years.

Landfills arent underground, and theyll break down within a millenia. Well the plastic anyway. Then youre left with recyclable glass if it isnt crushed into sand first

Landfills not being underground is even worse (but normally they are buried under soil when they go unused).

While the plastics degrade mechanically, being reduced into small particles, chemically they are not. They just turn into microplastics which I'm sure you're aware is a huge problem.

With the small amount of ultimate nuclear waste that cannot be reprocessed further, the solution is simple: drill a km deep shaft into the bedrock, place them at the bottom, fill the shaft with rubble and cement. Done. No-one's going to accidentally dig them up and they pose absolutely no threat to anyone. The finns are doing something like this as we speak.

10 more...