Does Nuclear count as Green Energy? I feel like it should, since it doesn’t really pollute and lasts a lot.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Scientists in California shooting nearly 200 lasers at a cylinder holding a fuel capsule the size of a peppercorn have taken another step in the quest for fusion energy, which, if mastered, could provide the world with a near-limitless source of clean power.
This marks another significant step in what could one day be an important solution to the global climate crisis, driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels.
Brian Appelbe, a research fellow from the Centre for Inertial Fusion Studies at Imperial College London, said the ability to replicate demonstrates the “robustness” of the process, showing it can be achieved even when conditions such as the laser or fuel pellet are varied.
As the climate crisis accelerates, and the urgency of ditching planet-heating fossil fuels increases, the prospect of an abundant source of safe, clean energy is tantalizing.
Nuclear fusion, the reaction that powers the sun and other stars, involves smashing two or more atoms together to form a denser one, in a process that releases huge amounts of energy.
In December, the US Department of Energy announced a $42 million investment in a program bringing together multiple institutions, including LLNL, to establish “hubs” focused on advancing fusion.
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Good bot!
Fusion has basically nothing to do with climate change. Even if Fusion were cracked tomorrow, the scale out would be such that you couldn’t meaningfully supply a lot of base load power before you’d need to be net neutral. My take is that fusion, when available, alongside solar, would be used for carbon dioxide removal.
Technically the same goes for fission, as new reactors take well over a decade to build nowadays, which is too late for our climate goals and typically diverts resources away from renewables.
Yeah good point. The numbers are a bit closer for fission though. Like phase one we can do renewables but electrification needs way more power than available currently. E.g. green hydrogen. There are valid scale up scenarios where fission is part of the picture, but almost none of them make sense under capitalism.
You have to differentiate between fusion and fission, the first one is no doubt, while looking at the time spans these projects took previously it will not save the global Energy supply in the short term. Fission is difficult to tell, since the reactors have lots of concrete to build (that creates CO2) and humanity has not found any way to get rid of the waste and contaminated building materials. It might be “greenish” but probably not sustainable (also there is a limited amount of and political problems with digging up the needed radioactive materials)
Good job replicating, now work on getting more energy out than you’re putting in.
They did.
tl; dr ☝️
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They look like a good idea, if done right. They have to be really well isolated and idiot-proof.
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Debating whether or not fission is green has given the fossil fuel industry free rein over energy production for the last 60 years.
We could have a Fukushima every year and a Chernobyl every 5 and it would pale in comparison to the loss of life and habitable land we’d be giving up to climate change.
We could have a Chernobyl every 5 years and losing less lives than we do through the lung diseases caused by the air pollution or oil vehicles. There was a study in France showing that (every 5 years is a low estimate, actual numbers hinted at 2-3 years).
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If you repeat it enough time it will become true…
If we had gone full nuclear and full electric in the 90s (like we could have) we would not have a climate crisis right now (and the Iraq war, and petro-monarchies with an abusive amount of power). Nuclear has its problem, but CO2 is not one of them and the others are much easier to solve.
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Best argument ever.
Thorium-salt breeder reactors have been effectively ignored by most major nuclear energy players for 60 years now, and they solve most of these problems…but nobody is building them. Likely the fossil fuel industry is behind that.
Counterpoint: every nuclear disaster in history, and all the waste nuclear power has ever produced, is absolutely miniscule compared to the damage burning fossil fuels has already done and will continue to do in the coming decades.
Every oil spill, every mountain ripped open to pull out coal, every jet airplane, every bunker-fueled container ship, every single ICE automobile, all combining to make the atmosphere worse and worse…the oceans are rising and getting more acidic. Wild species are going extinct by the thousands. Weather has gotten worse and more extreme. The damage may literally be incalculable. Millions of people have already died from the cancers and natural disasters fossil fuels have caused. The death toll of nuclear energy? Thousands at most.
Nuclear energy may not be perfect but it is a far better alternative.
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Nuclear is absolutely green! The reason that nuclear energy is popular is that it’s remarkably easy to convert an old coal power plant into a nuclear one, all you need to do is strip out the insides, maybe modify some stuff, but the overall structure can remain pretty much the same. Thorium reactors are also much greener than the existing Uranium/Plutonium ones, with Thorium being ~3x as plentiful in earth’s crust compared to uranium. Additionally, it doesn’t require much of the very expensive ventilation equipment for mines as it doesn’t produce radon gas when it decays. And the best part is that Thorium reactors are meltdown-proof. The thorium can’t fission on its own, it needs a helper material like Plutonium, meaning you can basically just flush the thorium away and it immediately stops the reaction.
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If they take ten years to build, start now. Nuclear plants offset 400 million tons of CO2 a year in the US alone. All the waste produced since the 1950’s would fit just over 9 meters deep on a single football field. Yes there’s mining, it’s not great, guess what? Solar panels and wind turbines also require mining. The open pit sort, the sort with wastewater containing the ever-perfidious radioactive elements. All in all, for each ton of rare earth elements extracted, about 2,000 tons of toxic waste is produced, 1-1.4 tons of which are radioactive, usually thorium and uranium funnily enough. A point of interest on the waste, the tailing dam of the Bayan OBO mine in China, responsible for only half the world’s rare earth elements, is around 70 million m3, the nuclear waste I previously mentioned comes in at 49,000 m3, or 0.07% of the volume of a single mine.
All this to say, let’s build solar panels, wind turbines and nuclear reactors, because we’re in the harm reduction phase, and nuclear reactors are a fantastic tool even if they have downsides, just like everything else.
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Oh, apologies, I assumed you could read. Never mind.
Hi! So the other person completely demolished you, which is fine and none of my business, but it’s never a good idea to insult the person you’re debating against if you’re trying to change their opinion.
Maybe you need to calm down.
Nuclear is not the same as fossil fuels but it is, per dollar spent and per megawatt made and by waste produced, the best solution we have right this instant. Nuclear reactors last 30+ years when built and nothing in current green energy technology has that kind of longevity as far as I know. Green energy has peaks and valleys over a given day and current electrical grids are not built for that kind of short-term storage. Nuclear solves that problem. Battery-powered devices like electric cars also depend on mining, you know. Don’t solar panels also have electrical circuits that require mined minerals?
And the thorium bros are in the Fediverse now too… Great…
I know the United States had a working thorium-salt reactor, running inside a flying airplane, back in the 60’s. It was abandoned because uranium was already in steady supply from nuclear weapons development.
What’s the problem? It’s a perfectly viable technology and has been proven to work at least once. I have heard China has been experimenting with them in recent years but haven’t looked into it.
