Why are we still relying on coal when nuclear power exists?

Why are we still relying on coal when nuclear power exists?

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository
rosenergoatom.ru/wps/wcm/connect/rosenergoatom_copy/site_en/
simplyjews.blogspot.com/2014/03/russian-culture-minister-extra.html
news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/060418-chernobyl-wildlife-thirty-year-anniversary-science/
youtube.com/watch?v=3cEj8R5m3AI
phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter9.html
youtu.be/00a_bO1G1wQ
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

Nuclear power comes with risks if not properly maintained, and creates physical waste that isn't biodegradable.

I actually don't know 100% if this is true, but I'm pretty sure I've read something like that at some point.

a lot of the waste problems come from the fact that we're still relying on 40 year old plants with 10x obsolete technology

advancements in waste/fuel management are huge in new prototype reactors, and there's always research into fusion

Coal is cheaper, abundant and have far smaller logistic tail than current nuclear mainstream tech.
Economy is a bitch.

Coal/Oil will never run out. It is provided to us by God.

Mankind needs to stop playing with the nuclear Devil.

reminder that the UK has proportionally the most shitposters on earth

I also assume it's a very expensive investment to build new reactors, and it wouldn't be cost efficient within the next 200 years to switch.

People who own coal mines probably lobby the shit out of decisions like that as well.

nuclear reactors are more expensive to build, but they pay for themselves extraordinarily quickly because of their stupendously low cost of operation, and due to the fact that you essentially don't ever have to pay money for fuel relative to how much power you put out

>I actually don't know 100% if this is true
It is.

Spent fuel and other "dirty" items are stored onsite, and at times transferred to an offsite storage.

Anyone with a brain understands that radioactive material is a hazard to health and human wellbeing. We also understand that it will last longer than we will ever live. But we store it in containers that are made by us. It is quite backward thinking IMHO.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository

Use chernobyl as an example of nuclear waste abatement. Waste will last longer than all of recorded history. We will find a way to sequester and remove Co2 before we can handle the waste from a nuke.

It should be gas for now, while it's cheap. Cleaner than coal.

Keep working on other tech to make it cost-competitive though.

>Cleaner than coal.
Global Warming is a myth.

It's a shame we can't dump the spent fuel in the sun. We have the capabilities to do it now.

But one fuck up would have radioactive shit raining from the sky for a long time.

better get working on that space elevator

newer nuclear reactors are a lot better for waste, and the fuel is really abundant.
highest energy density of fuel (ignoring fusion fuel)
there are risks, but if you aren't a decrepit soviet nation and you don't build you plants on fault lines, you should be ok

And a shield to prevent greys from probing my ass for suggesting we make a habit of poluting space.

Scientifically it is viable though, it would have almost zero effect on the sun.

>implying that interstellar civilizations don't dump all their waste in their stars
SOLAR COOLING

What I don't understand is why we can't figure out some kind of use from radioactive waste. If we could just contain it inside a storage area I really don't think that it would be much of an issue until we can find a solution.

I feel that hydro electric is much more destructive to water resources then anything. We have depleted oceans and a fraction of the fish are able to make it back up the rivers where dams are.

People are retarded. That's why.

soon all the oceans will be dead due to a combo of heating/acidifying oceans anyways, who cares at that point

Fukushima has done more damage to the Earth than (((global warming))) ever could.

The main problem people in this thread don't get is that coal is already on its way out. Natural gas is cheaper, easier to procure, and more efficient with energy returns on top of that. Coal will never make a comeback unless we somehow run out of natural gas. Plus, nuclear is far more efficient, and wind / solar energy has already approached coal levels of efficiency or surpassing it.

But in the long run, algae biofuels will make up the majority of energy in the upcoming decades.

tl;dr: Coal will never be a primary energy resource unless you subsidize it and/or ban other sources of energy.

>gave japs cancer
i'm not seeing the problem here

...

thorium reactors functionally eliminate all fallout and meltdown concerns

>california

well that explains everything

so this is their response to hiroshima?

Perhaps because this is dangerous. I don't know enough, but that's what russia get from nuclear power stations rosenergoatom.ru/wps/wcm/connect/rosenergoatom_copy/site_en/

>wind/solar has approached coal levels of efficiency
it only does so with tons of subsidies though

Nuclear power is awesome. As long as you're not located on an earthquake/tsunami prone island like Japan, or run by lazy, corner-cutting bureaucrats like the Soviet Union, it is the best way of producing energy for mass consumption. It does not produce emissions, only nuclear waste, which can be stored underground such as in places in the American Southwest desert.
However, liberals are stupid and once they hear words like "nuclear" they will rise up in arms against it.

>It does not produce emissions, only nuclear waste
Ask yourself this, which is preferable between harmless CO2 emissions and cancer causing radiation?

At one point we were going to take all of America's nuke waste and bury it deep, deep under ground in Arizona desert, but hippies got mad because they remember hearing the word nuclear and Hiroshima and stopped it.

>harmless

cause retards

Not fast enough

MUH CHURNOBYL
MUH FUKUSHIMA!!!!!!!!!!!!!

because
>muh nuclear bombs

I live within about ten miles of a nuclear plant that provides the energy for my county. No radiation problems, as our plant is run by responsible, American management and not vodka-soaked Soviet apparatchik. No one gets any sort of radiation from the plant, except maybe some alligators that live a thousand yards away from the thing. Nuclear waste can be safely stored under the ground in the American Southwest desert, far from any human habitation.

The carbon Jew needs replaced a lot more often and is much more expensive which equates more shekels.

The risk is that these plants become decrepit and obsolete because they rarely upgrade or innovate.

We need to address this. Also anti nuclear lobbyists.

example of an old plant

>what is black lung
Coal is just shit for air quality in general.

>example of an old plant
old plant also that was built like garbage and way under safety standard regulations because they bribed the local government to save money

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>clean coal

I really don't understand why more countries don't use nuclear energy. It is clean, powerful and just fun. You can have a real blast in your energetics and ecology.

IIRC, sending the Waste to Jupiter would be cheaper, cause you need less ∆v to get there.

Coal lobbies.
There is no good reason. Nuclear has been safe for decades and coal literally generates MORE nuclear waste than nukes.

You fucking antisemite

> fukushima
> 300 billion rads stuffed in a 5 acre facility
Yeah.
No.

nuclear waste is 1000000 times worse than coal waste.

and some dudes figured out how to turn exhaust from combustion into plastic... it's just expensive.

Because its (((dangerous))) and it might (((meltdown))). Gotta keep energy scarce otherwise no profits.

Literally because muh chernobyl and muh fukishima.

Disregarding that one was literally a tin shed with a nuclear reactor inside and the other was hit by a borderline apocalyptic earthquake and tidal wave one after the other.

>blast in your genetics and ecology

>Nuclear power comes with risks if not properly maintained, and creates physical waste that isn't biodegradable.
All I read was: muh I'm a pussy, atoms are too spooky 4 me and I'm a hippie who fucks dirt all day

>nuclear waste is 1000000 times worse than coal waste.

it isn't, since it can be reprocessed into fuel. get your head out of your ass.

Coal doesn't produce anything as terrifying as this thing.

Because our government and people are terrified of nuclear because of Chernobyl and long island.

So instead of learning from the past and making better safety precautions they ignore it.

>genetics
simplyjews.blogspot.com/2014/03/russian-culture-minister-extra.html
It's real. All of it.

Most of coal waste IS nuclear waste, user. When you're burning 500 million tons of coal, even a .01% worth of thorium and other shit adds up.

I honestly believe that we need to get back to our 2011 ideals of unilateral support for molten salt reactors so we can meme them into masses of R&D funding by governments around the world. For a few years now I have been emailing energy secretaries/heads of policy to many governments in an attempt to inform them of the promises of this proven technology and I've had a few good replies also. Here in my home country our government are looking at it and are interested. Most importantly the Chinese have actually abandoned their MSR program in favor of a solid fueled thorium cycle and they are not aiming to resume a MSR program until 2024 leaving ample time for another country to be at the forefront of this revolutionary groundbreaking technology. Honestly if Trump knew about this there is no way he wouldn't allocate funding for a new modern MSRe at minimum.

You're going to have to try harder than that.

>coal generates more nuclear waste than nuke plants
explain how

but Trump isn't looking into anything but coal and oil, he hates all clean/renewable fuels

>750 rads
how do you spell bullshit again?

>Why are we still relying on coal when nuclear power exists?

Coal needs to be used, but only as a "bridge" to nuclear. Clean coal is a temporarily viable choice until we get nuclear up and running. There is no reason we cannot build nuclear in somewhat the same proximity of coal, and let the mining community know that they need to send their kids to school to because in say 20 years we will switch to nuclear.

This keeps the communities and the country moving along, and gives families hops for the future.

It's cetainlky much better than just building them somewhere else and destroying those towns in 20 years or so.

Uhm,have you never played a fallout game? Do you really want clannfears running around breathing hot fire on everyone?

>hops

*hope

>oil
>not clean

>having to pay for the next 6 gorillion years to keep nuclear waste from poisoning your water

Yeah sounds like a great plan for economical electricity.

you honestly can't build a nuke reactor just anywhere like you can a coal powerplant, you have to make sure that the plant won't be at risk for succumbing to natural disasters like earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, etc. So depending on the geography there won't be a 1:1 replacement of coal plants with nukes

This map is fucking lies.

>nuclear

We could have gone nuclear 50 years ago and then we would not be in this mess .Leftie greenpeace CND types are to blame and because people think the plants become mushroom clouds

>spills
>sulfate emissions
>CO2 emissions
>toxic byproducts from processing and extraction like fracking chemicals
>>>>>not clean
why am I even responding to this bait?

>electricity is a myth
>computers are a myth
>Sup Forums is a myth

I hate how I have to join forces with retarded cuckservatives like you just to fight for the western world to not be overrun by libtards.

>meanwhile in Chernobyl...
news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/060418-chernobyl-wildlife-thirty-year-anniversary-science/
t may seem strange that Chernobyl, an area known for the deadliest nuclear accident in history, could become a refuge for all kinds of animals—from moose, deer, beaver, and owls to more exotic species like brown bear, lynx, and wolves—but that is exactly what Shkvyria and some other scientists think has happened. Without people hunting them or ruining their habitat, the thinking goes, wildlife is thriving despite high radiation levels.

>in 100 years ecologists will cream their pants as they discover tons of unique radiation-induced species around the Chernobyl area
neat

1 SHOT
S
H
O
T

Why wait?

youtube.com/watch?v=3cEj8R5m3AI

Trace elements multiplied by burning fucking retarded amounts of coal.
Coal literally has more nuclear potential than coal energy.

>tfw we exported a nuclear reactor to australia

Well it depends on his energy secretary pick (his rumored pick was Harold Hamm for a while of which I sent an email to his secretary/email address however he is very deep in fossil fuels and probably sees fission simply as annoying competition) but yes you are right he is focusing on fossil fuels. If he saw the numbers and potential returns on MSRs he would be open to it, right now its an unknown what his opinion is on atomic energy but guessing from his campaign and how he never mentioned it when discussing energy I suppose he either doesn't want to endorse it publicly, doesn't fully understand it or is not in favor of it (which also means he doesn't fully understand it). I'd like to think his strong stance against regulation and for deregulation would have enough traction to get into the atomic industry which is incredibly ripe for deregulation, throughout the 90s, 80s, 70s there was a lot of harmful regulation which balloon the cost of conventional nuclear by many fold above baseline cost increases. Yes some of those regs are needed but the majority of them were simply responses to accidents to appear as if they were actually doing something as regulators but in reality they were pointless and bloating in nature. Please read the following if you are interested: phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter9.html

A rather old text but it explains in great detail how the industry was put under extreme burden from costs.

>stupendously low cost of operation
uwot? Reactors take maintenance just as much as gas plants. Turbines need maintaining, piping needs inspection and shutdown, etc. Coal takes a bit more due to the effects of coal dust and other particulates on the feed and exhaust path from the boiler, but they're also far cheaper to build and don't require billions of administrative hurdles to be jumped through because muh scary atoms. Also the speed of maintenance work is retarded in nuke plants; I've talked to coworkers who did shutdown gigs in some, and they get about 2 hours of actual work in a 10 hour shift, the rest being taken up with paperwork and training.

All current nuclear that I am aware of also needs water access meaning all reactors are placed next to a sea or river of somesort. Molten salt reactors could be made modular in nature and could be placed anywhere however, they would also be resistant to most natural disasters.

It cheers me up knowing that STALKER will be a reality.

Or just wait for Lockheed-Martin to deliver on their outrageous claims of a commercial pocket fusion reactor in a decade. Apparently they know something ITER and NIJ don't.

yeah that looks capable of containing 50 million C deuterium gas

There's literally no news on it since 2014.

dub^3 checked

The problem is that LM is not some crackpot working in his garage and posting his cold fusion free energy experiments on youtube. It's a massive defense contractor that doesn't normally engage in unprofitable ventures. But at the same time, xdeclaring that you can not only achieve what every other fusion program in existence (and in the past) has been trying to do for ages in a much smaller time frame, AND also in a much smaller package, is an extraordinary claim.

I still don't know what to make of it.

take a good hard look at fukushima, you retards. it's worse than chernobyl. maybe in a perfect world we can do it without killing everything in sight but it's a fountain of incredibly toxic waste that we have NO METHODS of disposing of.

If you trust officials when they say fukushima is all clear you are dumber than i could have ever imagined

...

If its so bad they'd just build a concrete dome around the leak to seal it in.
They didn't.

because the best thing for the planet is to completely exhaust coal so we're forced into cleaner power. The wars will never stop until all the oil/coal is gone.

Because coal miners need jobs.

Do you trust diversity hires to properly run a nuclear plant?

why are we protecting what is historically one of the shittiest jobs humans could do rather than uranium miners and workers in nuclear plants again?

Infrastructure already exists and flue gas can be treated fairly well. After the useful life of power plants is over they will be decommissioned. IMO CHP plants shouldn't even be decommissioned.

>the best thing for the planet is to keep using coal until we provoke a mass extinction event that ends up killing all of us
>that'll stop all the oil wars
well, you're not wrong

>using the radioactive jew

Yees goy yeeeees, it's so much cleaner and better than oil, you don't want those polar caps to melt don't you? Now buy my uranium or I'll scream shoah

This is the shittiest argument in the known universe
We will all die by the time that happens.. and so will the environment

>coal is clean

You do know why the Black Country is called what it is right?

I can understand why people might be against the phenomenon of global warming, but saying that localized air pollution and smog doesn't exist is retarded.

Also nuclear energy upsets green babbies which gets me hard.

>he supports the oil jew
youtu.be/00a_bO1G1wQ