Fukushima is going to release the waste water into the sea [2]
[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2277195-nuclear-reactio...
> Fukushima is going to release the waste water into the sea
Why are you even bringing that up? They're going to filter out basically everything, and the released water will be completely safe.
Anyone that complains about the trace amounts of tritium had better be thousands of times more upset at coal power. Even more, they should see intentional radiation release numbers as a motivator to use tons of nuclear in the short to medium term just to get off coal faster. Coal releases so much radioactive material into the air.
> Anyone that complains about the trace amounts of tritium had better be thousands of times more upset at coal power.
It's possible to be upset by both.
If there isn't another nuclear accident in my lifetime, I'll be happy to say my concerns were unwarranted.
The opinions of a couple politicians are not reliably based on reality.
The fishing association is not worried about danger, but about sales.
And greenpeace is not going to give an unbiased answer on anything nuclear.
Taken together, that gives me extremely little worry about danger. The fishermen might be right, I guess.
> It's possible to be upset by both.
It is! But if you're not MUCH more upset about coal's radiation release, something has gone wrong.
If we keep running very old reactors, I'm less confident. And I have not done sufficient research on "II+"
That might feel to you like a concession, point of compromise, but for us that's still a dangerously too high bar that puts the environment at risk.
So a bunch of nuclear scientists did a calculation and the results sound scary. And Korea is using it as a political tool. Japan and Korea are at each other all the time, though this may not be common knowledge to Westerners. But if you need a sniff test for this to pass, remember that you can go swimming in a nuclear reactor and people actually do, as many may have learned from the XKCD What If[0]. So just take that story and add a ton more water and add convection so the distribution becomes far less homogeneous. It should pass your sniff test now.
Even supposed small changes are being seen to have an effect on ecologies and food chains [1]
[1] https://e360.yale.edu/features/radioactivity_in_the_ocean_di...
> Why is nuclear the silver bullet that will save us?
Not supposed to be that, as others said.
> The waste will be around for longer than we are. We have no solution other than 'lock it up'.
If we sacrifice a Cubic mile to save the planet that's a god trade. Paul is a lot bigger than Peter here.
> Accidents do — and most like will — happen. How will increasing the volume of reactors not increase this risk?
The Tsunami was far worse than the meltdown; I am afraid people's fear-memory often conflates the two. I'm willing to admit the official stats with Chernobyl might be a coverup, but still, tons of poor people around the globe get sick or die from perhaps-illegal fossil fuel pollution. It's not a worse coverup than environment justice issues in the US.
The annoyance here among pro-nuclear people is that other thing's problems get to slip underneath the radar, but nuclear's don't.
> storage
Consider storage will require tons of lithium. The ecological damage from that mining will also be catastrophic, and the ecosystems might take as long to recover.
I'm not saying we shouldn't do lithium-ion batteries. We have little choice we're going to need more. Same thing with nuclear. Same thing with not decommissioning dams as soon as we like.
The fact is with all routes, avoiding ecological collapse will cause local environmental issues. What irks people is the singling out of nuclear, as if other things didn't have issues too, and other essential systems (like top soil) repair as slowly as some radioactive isotopes degrade.