Why has the world started to mine coal again?
With climate change looming, it seems so completely backwards to go back to using it again.
Is it coal miners pushing to keep their jobs? Fear of nuclear power? Is purely politically motivated, or are there genuinely people who believe coal is clean?
Edit, I will admit I was ignorant to the usage of coal nowadays.
Now I'm more depressed than when I posted this
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Oil propaganda convinced millions of people that renewable energy sources like nuclear power or wind turbine were dangerous/ineffective.
Basically humans are stupid and don't like change and rich people know and took advantage of it.
How is nuclear renewable?
It's renewable the same way as the sun is: Not, but it will last for a really, really long time.
Because the amount of fuel used in a nuclear reactor is exponentially less than fossil fuels.
There's enough nuclear material on this planet to power nuclear reactors for tens of thousands of years.
Nuclear power is clean, efficient, and lasts for essentially ever
It's close to 'renewable' but technically it should be called 'low carbon fuel'.
That's like saying air isn't renewable..
There are processes on our planet renewing air. I'm not aware of similar processes for fission materials.
It's renewable in the same way that solar is. Eventually the sun will die and solar won't work just like we'll eventually run out of fissible material.
where's the carbon in nuclear?
The graphite neutron moderator.
The carbon expended in producing the fuel is a good example.
As with all power plants, wind turbines, solar panels, etc. there are carbon costs associated with the manufacturing, construction and transport. Remember that there's a lot of steel involved.
It's an interesting take. I guess the sun is not renewable either.
Is any practically infinite (in human scales) source of energy called renewable? I am hearing this for the first time.
You are asking The Last Question It's one of those short stories that you'll read once and think about it occasionally for the next 20 years
I don't understand this comment.
How is the sun not renewable?
Renewable energy means using renewable resources. Meaning things that either replenish themselves within a short enough period or things that produce massive amounts of energy over long periods of time.
Because the sun is also a depleting source of energy. I question the definition of renewable that's all.
I would have never considered nuclear energy being renewable, but I guess a similar argument could be made.
The sun will exist for hundreds of thousands of years after humanity has gone extinct. The sun will exist for millions of years before it burns out. Humanity will thrive diminish and die before the sun dies.
It is by all intents and purposes an infinite resource for a finite species.
Your timescales are off. Even if humanity lasts a very long time, which seems unlikely, the sun will last for billions of years after humanity is gone. In one billion years the sun will have become hotter so that life becomes impossible on Earth. There will be four billion years of a lifeless Earth before the sun expands into a red giant and either swallows up or cooks the Earth. One billion years after that the sun will kick off its outer layers into a nebula and become a white dwarf. At that point it's not reacting any more so it just gradually cools down over billions more years until it's just a cool lump.
Technically speaking, it does not renew itself. It is being slowly depleted. You are right in saying that we can treat it as a renewable source as far as us and our technologies are concerned.
Which is similar to the reasoning for calling fissile material renewable.
The sun will eventually explode.
Long after humanity has ceased to exist.
I'm quite certain we can manage to stop existing before nuclear fuel runs out as well.
Is lemmy just stupid?
Like seriously?
The sun is an infinite resource to humanity. This isn't a debatable fact. Yet I seem to be receiving downvotes despite this.
The sun will outlive humanity a million times.
We can either harness it's energy and other sources like it or run out of energy.
It seems people just don't like the word "renewable"
That just makes those people stupid.
Lemmy at this point is the same as Reddit for quality of discussion.
The sad part is it seems like this has become a recent problem. As in the past few days.
I deliberately switched from sh.itjust.works to lemmy.world because I was sick of hexbear users starting fights and just being disingenuous with their arguments.
Now it seems that's normal everywhere..
It’s not big enough to explode, it’ll have a heat death
We all drank the
oilkoolaidNuclear just leads to more war and destruction.
You…can’t be serious right now…can you? Or are you conflating nuclear power with nuclear bombs? Because the two are very different things.
As climate change leads to non-traditional weather, people won’t be able to farm in the same places. People will be displaced, famine will hit. Droughts will clear up water sources and fights over water rights will happen.
The only way to reduce the impact is big, non-emitting power that can run 24/7/365 and the only contender for that is hydro and nuclear. And we’ve already built hydro just about everywhere that’s feasible to do so. With a surplus of cheap energy, we can improve hydroponics/vertical farming, reduce transportation needs for food (by growing it closer to population centers), and develop a means of scalable desalination.
Nah. Nuclear will prevent far more war.
nuclear power and nuclear bombs are the same.
As long as nuclear power exists, it will be used to pursue bombs.
Not to mention that nuclear power is incredibly unsafe and damaging
Coal mining kills more people per year than nuclear does. Pollution kills more people by several magnitudes than nuclear ever could. When proper safety measures are put in place it's by far the safest form of energy. And regardless of whether people make nuclear power plants, the technology exists, so it will be used to make bombs regardless
You can make an explosive out of a pressure cooker, therefore everyone that buys a pressure cooker is a domestic terrorist! You're welcome FBI
Even if you get rid of every nuclear power plant, governments will still pursue bombs.
You've bought the misinformation.
By your logic we should stop using wind power because more people have died per kWh produced than nuclear https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/
There are newer models of plants that dont produce the byproducts needed for nuclear armaments. The problem is that our governments want those byproducts for nuclear armaments so the safer reactors were never built.
Nuclear power plants used to be built from repurchased nuclear weapon factories so if anything it leads to less war and destruction