What are the toxic byproducts you are talking about specifically?
> The toxic fission byproduct is tiny and goes underground in the middle of the desert and disrupts zero people's lives.
Haha, if it were that easy. Nuclear waste can be radioactive up to 1 million years. Can you give me an example of a successful long-term nuclear storage facility that exists today? All we're doing currently is storing nuclear waste in temporary storage and rolling over the need to deal with this problem to future generations.
Sure. The earth is full of radioactive material (also known as rocks) that have been 'stored' successfully for millions of years.
The article says least-cost, we're fresh out of perfect solutions.
There are natural deposits of radioactive material and there have been natural nuclear reactors on our planet.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
You do understand that "long half-life" = "less radioactive", by definition?
It gradually approaches the ore level over time, which again makes sense, as the fission products are going to build back up.
The point here is that the uranium is going to decay no matter what you do, whether in the controlled environment of a reactor with some attention paid to proper disposal, or in the completely uncontrolled environment of the original ore bed, where it's quite possibly going straight into the water table.
Regardless, both those disasters were more or less man-made. Chernobyl was caused by serious design flaws, and (as far as I know) people who refused to admit something was wrong until it was too late. Fukushima was built below the line indicated by stones setup to warn about tsunamis. I don't think there's any doubt such considerations need to be taken into account when building the next-generation nuclear reactors.
[0]. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
At some point we'll have to chose the lesser evil, and most of the good rivers have already been dammed so more hydro isn't really the solution.
A combination of renewables, nuclear base power, reduced power needs, smart grid load management, and synth fuel production during peak production seems like the best bet for something that might actually work.
I am really tempted to call this one bullshit. I will admit that I just started reading about this topic half an hour ago because of this thread, so I may be wrong and I will happily change my mind if someone makes the case. I just skimmed the first page of search results for toxic solar panel waste. They mostly seemed rather negative, so I don't think I only got to see the white washed numbers. However most numbers seemed a bit dated, 2016 was a year I repeatedly came across. I will not provide sources as I really just skimmed the articles and collected the numbers.
Solar panels are recyclable but the costs of USD 20 to USD 30 per panel are considered prohibitiv. Doesn't seem to bad to me, it's not negligible but also not outrageous. High recycling costs are attributed to low recycling volume while on the other hand the problem is described as a gigantic pile of toxic waste. Europe seems to mandate the recycling because it is not economically attractive.
For 2016 I found a number of 11,000 tons of lead, I am neither sure for what geographical area nor whether it is cumulative or for that one year. On the other hand I found that in the European Union an estimate 100,000 tons of lead are annually introduced into the environment from sport shooting, hunting, and fishing.
Another thing that gets mentioned is silicon dust during production. Seems a manageable problem to me if we think we can manage the handling of radioactive compounds for nuclear plants. There is admittedly probably a difference in scale and volume, so this might have an impact. Nitrogen trifluoride also gets mentioned, especially because of its carbon dioxide equivalent of about 17,000. I did however not notice any numbers about the amounts used or released. But this again seems not like an unmanageable problem.
Cadmium is also usually mentioned, about one percent of the amount of lead, but there is not much more information than that it is carcinogenic. Finally rare earths are often mentioned and their limited supply, the production condition, and so on just as in the discussion of semiconductor and electronics manufacturing in general. If I am not misremembering the easily accessible supply of uranium ores is also quite limited, especially if one considers a substantial expansion of nuclear power production.
Recycling will, of course, bring the levels of waste down from old panels themselves, but we're still looking to replace a lot of fossil fuel-powered plants, and there's no way we'll get around the fact that we need more raw materials than we can obtain from recycling old panels. We'll also still get a lot of waste from the production of the new ones.
For now, we've got very few alternatives when it comes to base power generation. Biogas is probably one of the more interesting renewable power sources for base power (if we can ramp up production), but other than that, and leftovers from the wood industry, we're stuck at hydro and nuclear if we want to avoid fossil fuels. Last time I checked, there's no large-scale rollouts of modern power storage going on.
Renewables fluctuate. Nuclear is not great at scaling, and most reactors cannot be shut down without taking weeks and months for safe re-starting.
Nuclear is good for base load. And countries that have a lot of (really expensive) nuclear to cover their base load, have zero incentive to invest into renewables, since its output would just become surplus.
For broad adoption of renewables, we need to accompany it with (hopefully clean) solutions that can buffer and restore surplus energy efficiently and most importantly scale up and down really fast, to smooth out the fluctuations. Keeping a constant 50 Hz is becoming increasingly difficult with renewables.
In the past Austria used to store (nightly) surpulus energy from german nuclear reactors and (more recent also renewables) and getting paid to do so, to feed it into the own network and also selling abroad during daytime. This was stopped because it was putting a lot of strain on the north-south bottlenecks in the German power network, aggravated by large wind farms in the north, that became capable of covering the whole German power use for short periods of time.
That's a design issue, not an inherent problem. There is no reason (other than cost) why the steam turbine can't be temporarily decoupled from the generator -- instant shutdown.
You could even design a generator where the rotor can be (partially) retracted from the stator coils. Retracting or inserting more of the rotor would give you continuously variable control over the conversion factor from steam pressure to electrical power.
Nuclear energy is green energy:
I won't adopt definitions forced by countries that also want natural gas plants to be categorized as "green" ("who cares what they emit?!")
I didn't say nuclear does generate CO2. I said it produces waste, and that I have a definition of renewable that does not include nuclear.
You first shifted the goalposts and said it is "green" (what is "green"?? who defines "green"?), citing sources. I discredited the sources, since it these are just announcements, made by (political) institutions, where politicians lobby for a re-labeling of certain energy sources, because it suits their agenda.
None of this makes nuclear "renewable" in my book.
IMO the world renewable implies something in the line of "self-regenerating"/"grows naturally"/"replenishes" and producing toxic waste in my world-view is orthogonal to that meaning.
And don't try to explain that nuclear waste is non-toxic, I think my interest in discussing this really ends there.
Finland has one of the most advanced fission byproduct storages in the world and they are so freaking compact. Like, it's nothing like that green glowing substance they show in movies.
Oh, and they will make money on it fast forward few decades, that fission byproduct will be fuel for future generation stations.
If you ask 100 people, 99 will tell you that they rather live next to a solar panel or a silicon extraction mine than next to a nuclear power plant or a uranium mine.
If you ask 100 people, 99 will tell you they would rather buy new electronics every year and throw away the old, and they would rider drive a huge SUV than walk or bike.
That doesn't mean it's a good thing.
I don't think that's true.
Anyways. We are comparing nuclear, radioactive waste that has the potential to make whole areas of land unlivable for decades if it touches them and stays radioactive for a million years to cadmium, which is much less toxic than nuclear waste, has a shorter half life and in doesn't require us to find a solution to an unsovled problem to deal with it.
How can you seriously compare the two on the same level?
I'd guess that most people would rather live near a solar panel or a nuclear plant than a mine. One is potentially dirty and disruptive, the other IS dirty and disruptive.
> we don't want
We very much want (need) constant/on demand/large scale energy sources and renweables aren't up for that