- Joined
- Jun 20, 2024
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Hey, I'm not arguing against it - I'm not debating what is / isn't better - everything has pro's and con's and there's no such thing as real clean energy yet when you include full lifetime environmental impact.It actually has better green credentials. Solar parks reflect more light than they absorb those also warming up the planet nor is production of the solar cells green for that regard. The same goes for the amount of birds that die by windmill farms. Nuclear is in fact greener than solar. Hydro is the cleanest of them all, but pretty limited in usage and has it's own environmental impacts.
Then you still have the problem of scaling your energy up or down. which is far more difficult with both options than with a nuclear plant. If you want the world to really go green then nuclear is an unavoidable power source at this time unless fusion power makes a breakthrough.
The problem with nuclear plants is that all people see is Chernobyl. A badly designed nuclear plant from the start and then they forget it happened because of bad management/operational error. At the same time it was somewhat a blessing in disguise because the world learned so enormously much from what not to do and it's implications of when it goes horribly wrong.
What this originally stems from was the whole nuclear being lumped into the same bracket as renewables, primarily because it's 'carbon neutral' - that's really a mistake and I'm unsure if it's deliberate by the energy industry to try and lift it's PR rep with the public.
Chernobyl is an outlier - the Fukushima problems are actually more worrying; a supposedly well designed facility in a well off first world country having multiple containment failures. Yeah for sure, a natural disaster started the sequence of events, but it's a reminder that even after a shutdown / scram there is still quite an immediate problem of maintaining control for cooling everything down.