Costa Rica has run on 100% renewable energy for 300 days

Re:Costa Rica has run on 100% renewable energy for 300 days by throwaway5752 on Friday July 12, 2019 @02:59PM (#20423382)

Nuclear has well known downsides. As I mentioned, it's not renewable so isn't a permanent path forward for human civilization. But additionally it currently has unpriced externalities in long term waste storage, looks less attractive when fuel & plant are full amortized over lifecycle, complex relationship with arms proliferation, limited deployment options because of large cooling requirements, requires permanent and expensive security and expertise over the life of a plant, and others.

It's not the harmless cure-all that it's made out to be here at times.

edit: that said, CO2 levels are an immediate planetary crisis and nuclear is a tool we can and should use to mitigate it.

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Re:Costa Rica has run on 100% renewable energy for 300 days by jki275 on Friday July 12, 2019 @03:04PM (#20423425)

Nuclear isn't renewable precisely, but the amount of fuel available is extremely large and not being decreased by any appreciable amount.

Waste storage can be handled quite easily by reprocessing fuel, the waste is very small in comparison to other types of energy. There's little to no relationship to arms proliferation, that's only a very specific type of reactor and fuel that's not in general use for nuclear power.

And finally there's a lot of water on the planet. Cooling isn't a difficult problem.

The bigger problem is that reactor research has essentially been stopped due to nimby problems, so we don't even know how much better we could make nuclear power.

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