this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2024
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Science Memes

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nuclear (mander.xyz)
submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 days ago (4 children)

Nuclear plant accidents have happened tho. Remember Fukushima? It was 13 years ago, not that long. It didn't strait up explode like a nuclear bomb, and neither did Chernobyl, but still; contamination is a pretty big deal. You can argue that the risk isn't that bad or that fossil energy plants also have risks; but you can't just dismiss it as a superstition.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 days ago (1 children)

You get much more radiation and excess deaths from Coal and Natural gas plants than Fukushima and Chernobyl, it's just that it's not as obvious as it happens slowly over time.

In fact there are more deaths caused by wind energy sources than nuclear energy sources.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 days ago (3 children)

There was still 164,000 people who needed to evacuate 230 square miles. The land is contaminated and cleanup is proving difficult. Japan will be dealing with the environmental impact for a century I'd wager.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

This one says, now it's only 27 square kilometers ( fuck your stupid ass miles) https://edition.cnn.com/2022/06/14/asia/japan-fukushima-katsurao-village-return-intl-hnk/index.html

And this is from 2022

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I think you misunderstood what was written:

The Katsurao village official said about 337 square kilometers of land in seven Fukushima municipalities are deemed “difficult-to-return” zones. Of those, just 27 square kilometers in six of the same municipalities are specified reconstruction zones.

27 km² are the worst areas. The other 310km² are still "difficult-to-return".

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

You should read more of the article it's difficult to return to because even though it's save ( the radiation level is less than 2 CT scans a year ) people worry about the radiation, have built lives elsewhere.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Look up fly ash storage ponds. That's just normal coal usage. Then look up fly ash spills. Then look up how much radioactive material is released into the atmosphere each year from burning coal. Compare that to the estimated amounts of radioactive material released into the environment from all the nuclear plant accidents, and tell me we still wouldn't be better off switching all coal off and using nuclear.

Now, we don't really have to do that, because we have other options now. But we definitely should have used more nuclear 50 years ago, just for the reduced cost of human lives.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

At what point am I supporting coal? Totally irrelevant

I'm saying Fukushima was an ecological disaster. Thankfully very few people died, but to only focus on that minimises the impact of the event. If you're going to say Fukushima wasn't that bad, you can't just cherry pick at the impacts.

Is nuclear better than fossil fuels? Yes. But that was an argument for the 80s. The time for nuclear was 50 years ago. It didn't happen.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

what do they call all the waste mining material? The kind of shit that they leave in huge piles, to get rained on, which leeches all kinds of fun shit into the ground?

oh right, they call them tailings. Surely we've never seen mass ecological fallout from tailings getting into, let's say, a river.

[–] LandedGentry 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Put them in more appropriate places (not like everything has to be nuclear) and don’t act like the USSR.

Nuclear is a very valuable component of a mixed energy structure. There are absolutely use cases for it and we should not avoid it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

They need cooling water, so "on the coast" is a reasonable location. Or do you mean "not in Japan"? A country without many great options for clean energy generation. Frankly Japan is one of the places nuclear makes sense to me. There's not many options.

It doesn't make sense to me in the US where there's a sunshine belt across the country 5 timezones long, large windswept plains and shallow coastlines. The US is rich in options and nuclear falls down the list.

[–] LandedGentry 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

You know, the world is larger than Japan and the US

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Fukushima? It was 13 years ago, not that long. It didn’t strait up explode like a nuclear bomb, and neither did Chernobyl, but still;

fukushima was a BWR design, put on the coast of a place known for having tsunamis, and wasn't properly equipped with emergency generators (they flooded, oopsies) which they couldn't get to, in order to service the reactor, due to the roads being fucking yeeted.

Literally any other plant on earth is going to have a better outcome.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

Modern reactor designs have no such problem, hence the reference to ancient science.

[–] Cethin 3 points 2 days ago

The idea of an explosion is. That's what this thread is about. It's not just about meltdowns, which, like you said, is very low risk, and lower than ever from what we've learned in the past.