You know what, you’re right- I agree.

However our largest energy creation mechanism is absolutely destroying the planet in non-linear and difficult to measure ways. Coal is not a dramatic killer but it kills us in droves, now and long into the future.

Nuclear waste, in comparison, is more of a “known” issue, and were scared of what we know.

I’m talking about coal because Sweden is displacing its nuclear power draw with mostly coal.

Where are Sweden, which does not have any coal plants and is a net exporter of energy replace nuclear with coal?

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...

That claim is simply plain misinformation.

For the import vs export of energy you find that here:

http://media.matochklimat.nu/2021/02/image1.jpg

Sweden import much more coal energy when Barsebäck and Ringhals was up and running.

Source for graph: http://matochklimat.nu/analys-svensk-el-fortsatter-att-trang...

Sweden imports energy from countries which use coal plants.

The Swedish ethos is “we are green. It was the other guys!”

Can you show me a source for your claim that it has increased? Here's another graph for the energy mix over time, with coal not changing at all. This time from the government energy agency. See page 5.

http://energimyndigheten.a-w2m.se/FolderContents.mvc/Downloa...

Unfortunately the Swedish authority wants to look good so their promotional materials show domestic and only pay lip service to imports.

If you follow the flow from: https://www.svk.se/en/national-grid/the-control-room/ you see that most of those countries primarily generate electricity using Oil, Gas and especially coal. (Latvia, Lithuania and to a lesser extent: Estonia)

Page 12, same document. Import, export and net for the year 2019 to all those countries. This isn't some kind of conspiracy.

Some import from Denmark and Norway. Negligible from Poland, Germany, Lithuania. Net is export to all, which means Swedish clean power is actually displacing dirtier sources, except in Norway which is full on hydro.

I haven't read that we can't just recapture the carbon by re-planting a bazzilion trees. I'll do some googling now.

The problem with trees-as-carbon capture is:

1. They are only a net store of carbon while they're alive.

2. Because of that, you need to dedicate land to carbon-capture forest, indefinitely.

3. Burning fossil fuels for energy releases more and more carbon into the atmosphere.

Like, you get N tons of carbon captured out of a given land area. It's constant per area. So you would need to continually grow the amount of forested land just to follow the amount of carbon released by burning fossil fuels.

But: land is finite. The actual worldwide trend has been to deforest land, either for lumber, or slash-and-burn for subsistence farming in poor countries, or just to allow for population growth, or the large land area needed for wind and solar farms. We don't have a huge surplus of not-yet-forest land — can't grow trees in deserts.

> They are only a net store of carbon while they're alive.

Is wood not a carbon store?

When or a tree dies, or burns, during the decomposition process it releases the carbon back to atmosphere. Maybe you could bury them somewhere where decomposition it's slower or more difficult but hard to imagine doing it at scale.

Surely lumber, treated cellulose, contains a high % of the original carbon content (minus water)?

Lumber isn't a permanent removal from the carbon cycle. Wooden structures have a shelf life, and eventually the wood decomposes and re-enters the carbon cycle. The only way to sequester carbon via lumber would be to bury it in a way that prevents decomposition. I don't think this is an especially efficient method of carbon capture.

By the same measure, CO2 is not a permanent state either, but it's an issue because of the imbalance in dynamic processes - The carbon stored by lumber is the amount of lumber in the world minus decaying lumber.

36 billion tons of CO2 came from industry and fossil fuel combustion in 2019. [1] CO2 is about 27% carbon by mass. Cellulose is about 44% carbon by mass [2]. That means about 22 billion tons of cellulose needed to offset one year's worth of CO2 emissions.

In 2014, use of wood products in all notable categories combined was about 1.25 billion tons [3]. Including just sawnwood and wood paneling, it was 0.827 billion tons. Since there's no plausible way to use 2500% as much lumber for structural purposes as we do now, and just harvesting wood and leaving it outdoors will lead to decomposition on short (decades) time scales, people consider charring it and/or burying it underground. Just building more structures out of wood is barely going to put a dent in the problem.

Likewise, dynamically shifting the equilibrium toward wood from CO2 doesn't help much if the wood persists for only decades. The time scale for CO2 to naturally return to its pre-industrial equilibrium is more like 100,000 years [4]. We need sequestration measures that prevent CO2 from returning to the atmosphere over longer time periods than wood takes to decay naturally.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/276629/global-co2-emissi...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulose

[3] https://www.forest2market.com/blog/fao-report-highlights-res...

[4] https://www.amazon.com/Long-Thaw-Changing-Climate-Princeton/...

True, but this proves that wood alone isn't a total solution. Along with reduction in FF dependency and other forms of carbon capture, it could be. "only decades" is enough time to come up with better solutions, including bio masses with a better per $ rate of carbon capture.

Only until it decomposes, which is usually relatively quickly after it dies.

> Saying Nuclear waste is not a problem is like saying taking a shit in your neighbors yard is not a problem.

The weird thing is that you're taking a shit in your neighbor's yard. I mean if they do it in their own yard it's weird, but there's nothing wrong with it. I mean this is what we do with dog shit.

The problem is that everyone shits. Sure, nuclear shit smells a lot more than solar shit or coal shit, but there's a hell of a lot less of it. We're talking a cat vs herd of rhinos. If I had to clean up one of the two I honestly don't care how much that cat's shit smells, I'm picking that job every single time. And you know what, the researchers seem to agree

> The analyses did not reveal any science-based evidence that nuclear energy does more harm to human health or to the environment than other electricity production technologies

The places where uranium is mined is uninhabitable afterwards :(

Yeah, but because there is a giant hole in the ground, but that's not specific to uranium mining. Luckily 1) uranium is extremely energy dense so we don't have to mine as much of it and 2) people usually don't live where mines open up in the first place. If we're talking about uranium mining you may notice that Canada isn't particularly habitable to begin with. Though in situ mining is pretty popular with uranium because it is cheap and results in less contaminants.

Just because it's energy dense after enrichment, doesn't mean it has high concentrations within mined ore. Most mines operate with only a fraction of a percentage of the ore being uranium, and only a fraction of a percentage of that is U-235, and viable for a nuclear reactor.

Some mines use ISL techniques which is similar to fracking. Canada does have Cigar Lake, the highest grade uranium mine in the world (15%), but due to the dangers of high uranium concentrations and the challenging geology, it has not been the easiest to extract.

This is to say, you don't just dig up some ore and stuff it in a reactor(it takes a lot of ore to power a reactor), nor is uranium mining a clean process.

The places where lignite is mined look like this afterwards:

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagebau_Garzweiler#/media/Date...

and are planned to become lakes (but at least in Germany nobody knows where the water is supposed to come from).

The places where coal is mined under ground need to run pumps forever or the surrounding cities are destroyed. The pumps in Germany's Ruhrgebiet consume about 70MW continuously. In a couple of decades the pumps will have consumed more energy than we got out of the coal.

And, of course, if we continue to burn coal in a couple of decades largeish parts of the globe might become uninhabitable to humans.

There is almost no way to generate energy without waste for future generations, CO2 for fossil fuels, nuclear waste, electronic and heavy-metal waste for solar and batteries.

Saying we should only use methods that don't provide waste is saying we should reduce energy consumption to 1-5% of current global and ditch all cars, ships and airplanes. Even if you are 100% morally right you're never going to convince humanity of that.

I'm sorry to say, but the idea that "we don't need energy" is both false and dangerous.

The earth's carrying capacity before fossil fuels was far, far lower than the 7 billion current population, especially with current living standards.

The only reason we can support that many is because of a complex web of economics that causes the earth to produce far more food than it otherwise could, and then enables distribution of that food to where the people are.

Without fossil fuels, we couldn't even produce the fertilizer needed to support the food. You could argue that there is some alternative set of lifestyles that would enable to eliminate fossil fuels without asking 90% of the population to die, but that would similarly require some sort of top-down totalitarian regime in order to get there and keep us there.

At this point, we do need the energy. The only way to maybe not need it would be to somehow put a global version of Stalin in a position of absolute power.

Failing to understand just how critical energy is to any sort of non-apocalyptic future is one of the biggest dangers in our current political debate about what should come next.

I would like to do some more reading about this, do you have any links? The wikipedia page is a little light on detail.

I agree that we should have food security for everybody, and I agree that if we don't provide everyday people with power for heating and cooking they will just start burning things again which would create a bigger disaster.

But when I look around me I see massive amounts of waste in every sector because electricity is so cheap.

The world population at the beginning of the 20th c (i.e. before the oil age) was ~1B, which was the highest in all of history. We are currently ~8B, on our way to 10-14 by the end of this century.

Absolutely agree that arresting population growth should be a number one priority.

Update: Thankfully, it looks like it has started to slow. https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/

The best resource I can think of offhand is the book "Overshoot" by William catton. It has a pretty strong political bent to it that I don't agreed with. But despite that, it frames up the problem of energy quite well.

Look at your own body. Half of the nitrogen in your body tissue - in particular, in protein - was clawed from the atmosphere by the Haber process. There is simply no replacement for industrial society.

yes, nuclear waste is like taking a 10x smaller than the grain of rise shit in your neighbor’s yard.

Sure, but even a grain of sand that I can't build on or walk over is still going to be annoying. It's still just rude no matter how small you think the problem is.

we are in a climate crisis and wind/solar alone are just not going to cut it.

And nuclear is the safest power source (measured in deaths/twh) which humans have been using for decades.

I'm pretty sure you also can't build on or walk over a large pile of garbage. At least with the grain of sand there's not much area displaced.