In 2021, the Grohnde nuclear power plant in Lower Saxony on the Weser River was shut down. Now, immediately next to it, the Emmerthal energy cluster is growing with three very large battery storage systems, ground-mounted photovoltaic systems, and a new substation for several 380-kilovolt high-voltage lines.
It’s not. The amount of waste is extremely small. The amount of power your household uses in 100 years results in roughly a 1 inch cube of spent fuel. Including heating, cooking and an electric car. There’s a frankly absurd amount of energy in uranium.
Yes, it will stay radioactive for a long time, but you know what’s the also radioactive? The uranium we dug up to make reactor fuel. We could literally grind up the spent fuel and mix with the mining debris and toss it back into the hole to end up with a less radioactive area now, except that flies in the face of every method of dealing with hazardous materials.
The idea that nuclear power leaves “super dangerous waste forever” is basically just fossil fuel propaganda. We know perfectly well how to deal with it…
Source: I do hazardous materials handling regulations for a living, am also PhD chemist. Ama, i guess.
The amount of highly dangerous waste (e.g. fuel rods) may be small, but, well, it’s highly dangerous and not only because of the immediate danger from radiation, but because it can be weaponized.
I agree and understand that converting mass to energy makes absurd amounts of energy available.
Aren’t especially the fuel rods more dangerous than the uranium, that has been dug from the earth, because it’s a mix of radionuclides with in parts complex decay chains?
Doesn’t almost all uranium that has been dug up (according to wikipedia 99.3%) have a half-life of 4.463×109 years (before being used as fuel rod)?
Which made the level of radiation smaller than for radionuclides with shorter half-life that are in the used fuel rods, right?
The propaganda from fossil against the dangers of radiation doesn’t work well as long as especially coal plants emit vast amounts of dangerous radionuclides through their chimneys.
To be fair I could stomach continuing to use nuclear plants for some more time until the transformation to way more renawables and storage for electric energy has come a longer way.
After all it’s no big difference, if you add some more nuclear waste to the already quite big pile.
I’d be adamant if we were talking about starting the first nuclear reactor ever, though.
Building new nuclear reactors now seems like the wrong way given how dirt-cheap solar has become.
This is exactly my point.
If you line up all the fossil fuel powerplants, then nuclear should be the very last one to be closed in favour of renewables, and lignite is in the top 3.
Germany did the reverse, and even built more gas plants when the first phaseout of nuclear happened.
Apparently lobbying is running deep in Germany…
We’ll get to a cleaner world - hopefully, eventually.