Based on safety and carbon emissions, fossil fuels are the dirtiest and most dangerous, while nuclear and modern renewable energy sources are vastly safer and cleaner.

I found this surprising. Even considering the costs of construction and decommissioning, nuclear does not compare too badly to renewables.

This doesn’t seem to be just made up. It cites this which cites this, which cites this. And as far as i’m willing to dig, there’s nothing bogus about it.

I have a few comments though:

  • in the Warner article, do the costs represent proper decommissioning, like making it as safe as a decommissioned solar farm would be? It’s not clear.
  • The OWID article doesn’t distinguish between different types of wind/solar, which the source material does! So maybe that’s how they are fudging the data? Somebody needs to take some time and improve the OWID dataset.
  • It’s really pathetic if renewables still aren’t safer and cheaper than nuclear. Nuclear is so wasteful. If we need a decade or two of research before we can ditch nuclear, then let’s do it.
  • OsrsNeedsF2P
    51·
    3 years ago

    Nuclear energy and clean, they are dreaming. Toxic waste that lasts for millions of years is not clean. Storing the waste under our kids feet and pretend it is secure and clean is ridiculous.

    The rest of your points are fine but here we gotta come full stop. Nuclear power plants don’t create radioactive waste, they transform already radioactive Uranium into a different compound which they go store somewhere else (possibly an even safer place).

    Are there accidents with this? Sure, but to draw an analogy - “We should stay on Windows (coal) for privacy (energy) because Ubuntu (nuclear) has data collection (waste) too!”

    The other options aren’t feasible. My roof growing up was covered in solar panels. The junk was worthless, and who knows what happened to it after we replaced the panels. We need feasible solutions today. Even if Nuclear is 5x worse than I’m selling it (it’s not), it’s still miles ahead of the competition

    • DPUGT2
      31·
      3 years ago

      It’s worse than that. He says “Toxic waste that lasts for millions of years”… but any radioactive waste with such a long half-life is actually only mildly radioactive. The scary stuff, the stuff you don’t want to be within 100 miles of, that stuff burns quickly. Half-lifes measured in hours or even minutes. These two properties are always inversely related. It shows some sort of profound misunderstanding that masquerades as a serious insight and legitimate concern.

      The only true criticism of nuclear at this point is that it takes 40 years to spin one up… you can’t even fabricate the damned pressure vessels but at one or two places in the world. Pretty sure they’re all booked up for the next decade.

      Nuclear’s opponents stalled things long enough that you can’t possibly hope to scale it up to where it could matter on any timescale that your grandchildren might care about. It’s over.

    • CHEF-KOCH
      21·
      3 years ago

      What specifically is cherry picked or misrepresented?

      • You need to put into consideration that creating solar panels also creates a carbon footpint as well as recycling it. It is not about mistakes, it is about the scope, research material often put the scope on other variables. If we swipe under the carpet that solar has flaws, or forget the nuclear waste, well sure than those solutions look - clean. But they are not.