This article is such a piece of trash.
“We have this amazing new technology that we could use to fix all these problems but we don’t actually have it deployed because of government regulation stopping the deployment. I guess it’s a waste of time and development and we should abandoned it because we don’t have any deployed commercially. Real shame though because all of the ones we have in labs for the last 30 years have worked pretty much flawlessly…”
Here’s a fucking idea. Maybe we should deploy some of these small modular reactors instead of red taping every municipality that tries to use them.
I’m so tired of decades of nuclear misinformation and nimbys
Statistically speaking, nuclear energy is relatively safe per kilowatt-hour. But it’s also the only energy source with a non-zero risk of catastrophic failure and waste that stays toxic for thousands of years.
Thanks. I’ll take wind and solar instead. Wake me up when all this is somehow cleaned up.
As of December 2024, there were over 315,000 bundles of spent nuclear fuel rods in the U.S., and over 3,800 dry storage casks in concrete vaults above ground, located at current and former power plants across the country.
Even reactors that have been decommissioned and demolished still have concrete vaults storing radioactive waste, which must be secured and maintained by the power company that owned the nuclear plant.
It would be cool if you cared that much about the yearly waste produced by every other means of energy production
For comparison, the global nuclear waste produced in the last hundred years could be easily containerized and put into solid geological storage. It’s just nimbies like you stop that from happening.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-all-the-nuclear-waste-in-the-world/
I actually care about all the waste generated by all industries. I’m just particulary concerned with waste that will remain toxic for 1,000s of years. As for storing it all in “solid geological storage”, yeah, good luck with that. That’s been the dream since 1982 when Yucca mountain was chosen as the site for the nation’s nuclear waste. But that wasn’t stopped by nimbies, it was stopped by the state of Utah and many other states. Nobody wants train or truck loads of toxic nuclear waste shipped across their state for some reason. I can’t imagine why…
You may be in luck though. A private company in West Texas, Interim Storage Partners, has agreed to start taking in that waste. Except that the state of Texas has said fuck no to that. Luckily for you, SCOTUS will be hearing the case in October according to this article. Knowing the current SCOTUS, I’m sure that we will all be wondering when and the first train or truck load of nuclear waste will get dumped, because it’s not a matter of if.
I’m glad you took the time to not read the article I put your way. Because if you had you’d realize that it’s only a couple hundred cubic meters of long-term waste that will be needing to be sent to deep geological storage. It’s not some endless amount.
95% of all nuclear waste is low-level or medium contamination that will be inert within 200 years.
Furthermore, you cannot pass off responsibility to the government for blocking access. If you’re actively campaigning that you don’t want those materials in your state, you are the NIMBY that’s making your state legislators. Choose those decisions
And really trains trains is your argument. How uninitiated are you in nuclear contamination? Like of all the examples you could have given, did you really have no clue that we specifically engineered those solid casks to be moved on rail lines and made them impossible to break and have purposely slammed locomotives head on into them and broke the locomotive not the cast. https://youtu.be/Bu1YFshFuI4
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Big coal/oil - Don’t produce nuclear energy, it is unproven and unreliable. Small reactors have been heralded as the solution to big nuclear. We can’t have that!
Don’t you understand 60 plus years of safe operation is not okay. How can you profit if you’re not killing anybody? /S
The first smrs were developed by the US Navy in the 1960s… Yes, 60 years
