Worked tech support for an ISP. The tech side was well managed and smart. (Left when that changed.)
The customer service side fielded TV and account related calls. They were driven by average calls times. What a cluster. Guess who straight hung up on customers when the call went too long? Some people would call be 4-5 times.
Meanwhile, we could take all the time it took to resolve. A 1-hour call is way cheaper than rolling a truck. Yet some assholes would roll trucks for nothing, then bitch there were no trucks left.
Heh, yeah but my metrics don’t care about how many trucks I roll! Just how long my calls are! “Modem restart didn’t work? Truck will be on its way.” “Modem restart didn’t work? Truck will be on its way.” X100
I hate to say it, but regardless of one’s stance, on his back should be “Public perception of Fukushima, Chernobyl, and 3-mile Island.”
I say regardless of one’s stance, because even if the public’s perceptions are off…when we remember those incidents but not how much time was in between them or the relative infrequency of disasters, they can have outsized effects on public attitude.
It’s not a great idea from the risk. If future governments let the windmills fall into disrepair, all that happens is windmills are useless. They can never accidently summon centuries of nuclear winter.
They can never accidently summon centuries of nuclear winter.
Neither can nuclear power plants, lol. Nuclear power plants are not built in a way that can trigger a nuclear bomb explosion, which is inherent to the theory of nuclear winter of nuclear explosions leaving material in the atmosphere to blot out the sun.
Maintaining a fission reaction is an incredibly complicated process that requires human intervention to sustain. If nuclear plants fell into “disrepair” the would just turn off and be useless, like windmills.
Dude, you realize a nuclear meltdown releases far more nuclear poison than a nuclear bomb. It’s not about the immediate destructive potential.
A nuclear winter would last at most a decade or two due to the dust thrown into the atmosphere by the explosions. A disaster like Chernobyl, while not even close in terms of destructive power, had the potential to release enough radiation to leave half of Europe uninhabitable for centuries, maybe even millenia. Chernobyl is still dangerous to this day while cities like Hiroshima and Nagasaki are thriving.
And to think you could just abandon a nuclear power plant safely…
You realize used nuclear fuel is extremely hot and still radiating heat and has to be cooled for a long time. You abandoned one without safety measures and the pools cooling the used fuel would just boil and evaporate. The water gone would no longer shield the radiation and you’d have a ton of radioactive material shitting poison into the atmosphere and meltdown.
Some people don’t know shit about nuclear power and like to act condescending “it’s not like a nuclear bomb”. No, it’s far more dangerous. And all it takes is a couple of really bad accidents to ruin the planet. And Murphy’s law tells us those improbable accidents will happen eventually. That means with nuclear power, quick or slowly we are walking towards the abyss. When we reach it we fall and there’s no way out.
It’s not clear what your trying to stay, but if you’re saying that coal is very bad and nuclear power is better, that’s not untrue, but it’s important to remember that the economic pressure right now is against coal and for renewable energy, even in coal country businesses won’t build in a state that won’t explicitly commit to only building renewable energy exclusively for all new ot replacement energy sources. The situation isn’t perfect, there should be more aggressive removal of dirty energy, granted, but nuclear power isn’t the only clean option, and it comes with a lot of risks.
No one talks about land usage for solar either. Which is a real shame, because with some relatively minor redesigns solar plants can be integrated into the ecosystem without causing massive damage, instead of what usually happens which is just clear-cutting a huge field and destroying any plant and animal life there.
Nuclear plants also have to built adjacent to reliable water supply. I’ll bet the land is more expensive and a bigger environmental impact whereas the location for solar is more flexible
The USA specifically has so much useless land with minimal ecological value, that if an energy project could actually be done at a federal level we could probably not have to worry about it.
There is a whole bunch of land in central USA that is not especially unique or teaming with life, slap down a big renewable energy farm.
Nuclear waste is a solved problem, it is contained to a tiny physical object, all we gotta do is dig a hole, put the object into the hole, and cover it up.
We pretend that it is way harder than it is.
I live in a suburb north of Stockholm in Sweden, and I’d support the government building a large underground permanent storage of nuclear waste from all over the world (for a fee) in my suburb, we have the best ground for permanent storage in Scandinavia, we would earn money, create jobs and make the world safer.
Also it’s only a problem if we let it be, there’s literally centuries for us to figure out a way to make those waste useful for us. Not working towards that would be the only way for the problem to come back to us in the future.
An idea I have thought about, nuclear boosted geothermal power.
Geothermal power normally just use a simple borehole with a hose going down and then up again, coolant goes in the hole, gets heated up a few degrees and the can then be processed to heat a house.
What if we could run tubes near the nuclear waste that will keep producing heat for thousands of years?
maybe solved where you live, and only for as long as your containment facility stays in one piece.
earthquakes, meteors, tidal waves - these things do happen, sure, not often on a lifetime scale, but compared to the long half-lives of this stuff? plenty of time for the worst case scenario.
I think you pretend the problem is simpler than it actually is, when considered the time frames involved. It’s not your lifetime we’re talking, it’s the hundreds of generations where this shit remains hot.
AND I’d add your country is at least trying, in the US we’ve given up and store it in pools local to the reactors, it’s ignorant as fuck
Scandinavia is geographically stable and has been politically stable for a long time, I can think of no better place for a global nuclear waste storage facility.
Meteors is just s dumb risk to consider in this case, any meteor capable of breaching an underground nuclear waste will cause far worse problems than the nuclear material will.
The baltic isn’t that tidal either, so tidal waves can be disregarded.
Earthquakes have happened here, but they are few and far between.
I recommend that you watch the BBC Horizon Documentary “Nuclear Nightmares” that talks about our fear of radiation.
why bother investing enormous amounts of money into a tech that’s already problematic? when there are better solutions at hand?
I’m not anti-nuclear, I just think further investment into it is misguided when there are so many other options that don’t create tens of thousands of years of radioisotopes that have to go somewhere.
good on Scandinavia, the rest of the world isn’t in such privileged positions. As seen in Fukushima. As seen in the hundreds of cooling ponds all over the US.
nothing, not a single thing you’ve argued, will in any way reduce the radioactive leftovers nuclear reactors produce and most of the world is putting off for the next generation to fix.
Like climate change.
How many crises do you think those poor kids are going to be able to manage at once?
Which crisis is the most important to manage in the short term.
Climate change, nuclear power gives us a huge tool to deal with it by shutting down fossil furl plants.
If we fail the climate change, the nuclear waste will be a tiny problem to deal with.
With nuclear power we at least give people a problem they can deal with, climate change is far, far worse.
The ammount of radioactive waste is tiny relative to normal dumps, and as described before, it is easy to deal with, dig a deep hole, put the waste in it, refill it.
Boom problem solved.
CO2 from fossil plats will keep up climate change for centuries.
The ammount of radioactive waste is tiny relative to normal dumps, and as described before, it is easy to deal with, dig a deep hole, put the waste in it, refill it.
Boom problem solved.
I wish it were that simple. Meanwhile, in reality:
I am very confused now, you link to articles talking about storage pool issues, but I never mentioned storage pools.
I am talking about what they are doing in Finland.
They have drilled a very deep hole in the bedrock, built vaults where they will put cey casks of nuclear waste, then they will backfill the hole and tunnels with clay.
This is how you do it.
No one considers a storage pool as permanent storage.
There are functioning Thorium based Molten Salt Breeder reactors, which for ~50MW can be built in a shipping container size - they are small, so can be deployed at local sites, thus reducing transmission losses, much harder to use for weapons (thats why the world tilted towards the use of uranium reactors in the first place), dont need prior enrichment, and can use much higher percentage of the fuel - so much less waste product. Also since the whole stuff is a molten salt, you just drain it from the reactor core and the reaction simply comes to halt.
The technology works, as it was tested when they were deciding if the industry goes with uranium or thorium, but the war lobby win out unfortunately, as they wanted a source for their nuclear weapons, at which the Thorium reactors are not great.
And yes, nuclear is super clean even if we compare it with solar+wind batteries not even counted in to the equation. BTW you can use “spent” fuel rods from conventional nuclear plants in a breeder reactor, to further diminish waste and use them up. en.wikipedia.org/…/Thorium-based_nuclear_power
yep, they’re awesome, and may sidestep some of the HUGE investments in gigantic infrastructure - one day. What you conveniently leave out is no one is doing this yet at scale; china’s got one test reactor going last time I looked.
I personally love the idea, but the nuclear industry here in the US is obsessed with large steam turbine setups in the multiple megawatt scale; even small modular reactors are getting side eyes.
So yeah, it exists, but it’s not going to displace the current tech (which is really 60’s tech with better electronics).
There’s always next weeks call deflection meeting for me to try again!
I haven’t been uninvited from it yet! But yeah gotta love these “problem solving” meetings from management, where they don’t actually want to give any resources or allow any policy changes to come from them.
While I agree that getting rid of coal first would have been the better strategy, I don’t get this nuclear power fetish and constant bashing of Germany on this while most countries are doing worse than Germany. Nuclear power is extremely expensive, we have as of now no storage solution for nuclear waste in Germany and Germany has no source of nuclear material itself. There are quite a few drawbacks
Nothing generates more than nuclear (like it’s not even comparable), it has basically zero emissions and there are countries like Finland who’ll happily let you burry it there, tho you ofc don’t need to go that far away. You don’t need to dispose it nearly as often as coal ash, so it being in another country ain’t really that big of a deal.
Ofc solar is also a great option, because of the versatility, sadly German seems to really fucking love wind.
I didn’t say nuclear was ever big in Germany. The whole point is about Germany being against it. If you mean the part where I said it was half their energy production, I meant coal+lignite.
In Australia the coal and gas industries appear to be pushing nuclear quite hard, mainly because they distract from the renewable options preferred by the market. They know that while we’re arguing over literally every other power source, they can just keep burning holes in the ground.
im fact they’re closing one of the last scaled down power plant simulator, where scientists and students could have a hands down experience in learning about It
im not german, but its so sad, the thing was even made of glass so you could literally see the process
Oh thank god… Apparently they aren’t destroying it YET. There is hope. Personally, I’d feel a lot safer if it went into more nuclear loving hands, like the French or Czech, actually, most of Germany’s neighbors would do.
Yes but the grid doesn’t carry power efficiently over extremely long distances. You’re putting undue load on the grid if you expect wind blowing 500 miles away to cover all the power needs of the area it’s supposed to supply as well as every neighboring area where there’s not enough power.
This isn’t just an efficiency issue you can solve by throwing more windmills at the issue. If there’s too much power flowing through the lines we have currently, things break. Usually with fires and exploding transformers. Our power grid is designed for distributed production, but with on-demand generation as a backup for when intermittent generation is underperforming. Batteries are one option to achieve this, but they’re expensive to build in the scale we need them. Hydrogen fuel production is an interesting candidate to fill this niche and for all-renewable power, but the efficiency is quite low so you’re basically tripling the cost per unit energy produced.
But one way or another, you need additional infrastructure to power the grid with zero fossil fuels. Nuclear, batteries, hydrogen fuel, or a total revamp of transmission infrastructure all require expensive construction projects. Nuclear is the only one that’s been done at scale, that’s why I want to see it given a fair chance again. But I also think plenty of other options are promising BECAUSE they are novel, and I’d love to see a future where a combination is used to make a carbon-free, brownout-free power grid
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