With climate change looming, it seems so completely backwards to go back to using it again.

Is it coal miners pushing to keep their jobs? Fear of nuclear power? Is purely politically motivated, or are there genuinely people who believe coal is clean?

Edit, I will admit I was ignorant to the usage of coal nowadays.

Now I’m more depressed than when I posted this

  • Kalash@feddit.ch
    0·
    1 year ago

    In my country, because of a decades long fearmongering and disinfomation campaing that destoyed the nuclear energy industry. So now we’re stucked with coal to keep the power running at night and during winter.

      • Kalash@feddit.ch
        0·
        1 year ago

        But we could have worked on these issues for years by now. Abandoning the entire industry also lead to slowdown in research and inovation in the field. Of course now we’re hopelessly behind.

        • tryptaminev 🇵🇸 🇺🇦 🇪🇺@feddit.de
          0·
          1 year ago

          Oor the ressources could be better spent in renewables, which are available as long as the sun exists, while nuclear will run out of fuel within the 22cnd century.

          Also with nuclear Europe is entirely dependent on imports, primarily from Russia and russia-aligned countries. Being pro nuclear in Europe means being pro Putin.

            • Admetus@sopuli.xyz
              0·
              1 year ago

              They’re not wrong, I think initial estimates was 500 years, but that will change as more reactors get built.

              • Kalash@feddit.ch
                0·
                1 year ago

                That is indeed very wrong. With extracing Uranium from sea water and recycing fuel in breeder reacots, this goes up to like 90.000 years. And that’s just Uranium, other fuels can be explored.

                • zero_iq@lemm.ee
                  0·
                  1 year ago

                  Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as that. Theoretically, if everyone was using state-of-the-art designs of fast-breeder reactors, we could have up to 300,000 years of fuel. However, those designs are complicated and extremely expensive to build and operate. The finances just don’t make it viable with current technology; they would have to run at a huge financial loss.

                  As for Uranium for sea-water – this too is possible, but has rapidly diminishing returns that make it financially unviable quite rapidly. As Uranium is extracted and removed from the oceans, exponentially more sea-water must be processed to continue extracting Uranium at the same rate. This gets infeasible pretty quickly. Estimates are that it would become economically unviable within 30 years.

                  Realistically, with current technology we have about 80-100 years of viable nuclear fuel at current consumption rates. If everyone was using nuclear right now, we would fully deplete all viable uranium reserves in about 5 years. A huge amount of research and development will be required to extend this further, and to make new more efficient reactor designs economically viable. (Or ditch capitalism and do it anyway – good luck with that!)

                  Personally, I would rather this investment (or at least a large chunk of it) be spent on renewables, energy storage and distribution, before fusion, with fission nuclear as a stop-gap until other cleaner, safer technologies can take over. (Current energy usage would require running about 15000 reactors globally, and with historical accident rates, that’s about one major nuclear disaster every month). Renewables are simpler, safer, and proven ,and the technology is more-or-less already here. Solving the storage and distribution problem is simpler than building safe and economical fast-breeder reactors, or viable fusion power. We have almost all the technology we need to make this work right now, we mostly just lack infrastructure and the will to do it.

                  I’m not anti-nuclear, nor am I saying there’s no place for nuclear, and I think there should be more funding for nuclear research, but the boring obvious solution is to invest heavily in renewables, with nuclear as a backup and/or future option. Maybe one day nuclear will progress to the point where it makes more sound sense to go all in on, say fusion, or super-efficient fast-breeders, etc. but at the moment, it’s basically science fiction. I don’t think it’s a sound strategy to bank on nuclear right now, although we should definitely continue to develop it. Maybe if we had continued investing in it at the same rate for the last 50 years it might be more viable – but we didn’t.

                  Source for estimates: “Is Nuclear Power Globally Scalable?”, Prof. D. Abbott, Proceedings of the IEEE. It’s an older article, but nuclear technology has been pretty much stagnant since it was published.

            • tryptaminev 🇵🇸 🇺🇦 🇪🇺@feddit.de
              0·
              1 year ago

              I am quite sure i know a thing or two about politics that happened during my lifetime and i actively followed. Also i used to be a proponent for nuclear power when i was younger. But unlike the nuclear shills i am willing to accept when a technology is inferior and risky.

          • PowerCrazy@lemmy.ml
            01·
            1 year ago

            Australia and Canada both have very large amounts of nuclear fuel that are currently unused because of short-sighted comments like this.

  • thru_dangers_untold@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    Yes, countries like Germany are turning to coal as a direct result of nuclear-phobia.

    The US, with all its green initiatives and solar/wind incentives, is pumping more oil than Saudi Arabia. The US has been the top oil producer on whole the planet for the last 5-6 years. The problem is getting worse.

    • klisklas@feddit.de
      0·
      1 year ago

      Sorry, this is just false info. Germany is not turning to coal as a result of your called nuclear phobia.

      I will repeat my comment from another thread:

      If you are able to read German or use a translator I can recommend this interview where the expert explains everything and goes into the the details.

      Don’t repeat the stories of the far right and nuclear lobby. Nuclear will always be more expensive than renewables and nobody has solved the waste problem until today. France as a leading nuclear nation had severe problems to cool their plants during the summer due to, guess what, climate change. Building new nuclear power plants takes enormous amounts of money and 10-20years at least. Time that we don’t have at the moment.

      • PowerCrazy@lemmy.ml
        02·
        1 year ago

        There is no “nuclear lobby” stop making shit up. Nuclear isn’t profitable, that is why we don’t have it. If it’s not profitable, there will be no industry lobby pushing for it. The fact that it isn’t profitable shouldn’t matter. I care about the environment and if Capitalism can’t extract profit without destroying the environment (it can’t) then we need to stop evaluating infrastructure through a Capitalist lens.

  • intensely_human@lemm.ee
    0·
    1 year ago

    There are concerns outside of the list you wrote. For example:

    • people need energy and coal is a source of energy
    • intensely_human@lemm.ee
      0·
      1 year ago

      And they’re going for coal in some places because the political situation has made other reliable energy sources unavailable:

      • the Russia-Ukraine war has destroyed natural gas supply lines to Europe
      • anti-nuclear activism has resulted in lack of nuclear investment

      Outside of coal, nuclear, and natural gas, there aren’t many options for reliable sources of electricity.

      • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        the Russia-Ukraine war has destroyed natural gas supply lines to Europe.

        Didn’t the US bomb them, tried to blame Russia at first, and are now trying to blame Ukraine? With friends like that, who needs enemies?

        The big problem with nuclear is scalability and infrastructure. The power plants take long to construct and require huge investment. Even if that’s solved and the whole world goes nuclear tomorrow, there’s huge doubts about there even being enough easily minable Uranium. Honestly solar and wind should be the way to go, but then there’s the intermittency issue. Which is an issue fossil fuels don’t have. At this point degrowth is desperately needed to avert the worst effects of global warming.

        • Zangoose@lemmy.one
          0·
          1 year ago

          Nuclear is probably the safest form of power when proper protocols are put in place but it’s hard to do that when the largest country in Europe (Russia, both by size and population) is currently in a war

          • Jakob :lemmy:@lemmy.schuerz.at
            0·
            1 year ago

            What is safe on Nuckear Power Plants?

            It’s enough for hundredthousand of years, if only one time happens a SuperGAU. Only once is enough.

            And the nuclear waste is dangerous as fuck for also hundredthousand of years.

            And you can produce 30, 40 or maybe 50 years electric energy, and it needs the same time to decontaminate and dismantle a nuclear powerplant. And before it takes 20, 30 or mor years, to build such a plant… This is not cheap, not safe and not sustainable.

            • updawg@lemm.ee
              0·
              1 year ago

              I don’t trust the US Federal government to properly dispose of it. The waste from the Manhattan Project is buried in a landfill, a landfill that’s on fire.

              • BigNote@lemm.ee
                0·
                1 year ago

                The problem isn’t fire, it’s that the waste at Hanford has leached into the soil and a plume of it is headed towards the Hanford Reach on the Columbia River. There’s a mitigation plan in place and it looks like it’s ultimately going to work, but it’s very expensive and not something that anyone wants to see happen again.

                • updawg@lemm.ee
                  0·
                  1 year ago

                  I was referring to the Westlake Superfund site in St Louis right next to the Missouri river