World's largest offshore wind farm
One rotation produces enough electricity to power a home for 24 hours.
Posted 5 years ago by metollous in category: technology

Comments (12)
(guest) - 5 years ago [ Reply ]
Nuclear (fission) is becoming more popular again, but there are four main drawbacks. (1) While newest generation power plants are safer by design they are not very safe in practice. The main threats in ascending order are (a) terrorist attacks (it is just a matter of time until some fanatic flies a plane not into a tall building in Manhatten but into a nuclear plant), (b) earthquakes and natural desasters (Fukoshima) and (c) regular humans with their greed/negligeance followed-up by the desire to cover-up their greed/negligeance (missed maintance to save money or because of lazyness; there are many examples of near catastrophies). (2) Uranium will run out in 200 years at most. To produce low enriched unranium (the kind you need for light water reactors) you need about 10 times as much natural unranium. About 5 millionn tons of unranium have been discovered. Lets be optimistic and assume that 10 more million tons can be discovered if we try hard. Currently the 450 reactors reactors use roughly 75k tons of uranium per year (7.5k tons low enriched). 15 million tons at a rate of 75k will last us 200 years. With China and India (each with a population of 1400 million) building lots of reactors right now, we could end up with a total of lets say 2500 reactors worldwide in a few decades if China/India take clues from France (population 60 million, 45 reactors, roughly 1 per million). 2500 reactors use 375k tons of uranium. We would use up all uranium in 40 years. Uranium can be recyled to a degree, therefore realistically maybe 80 years. (c) Nuclear waste. That shit is nasty, lasts for thousands of years, destroys the ground water and will kill your grandchildren because we humans (cf. greed/negligeance) are shit at keeping stuff safe for 1000s of years. Actually, based on prior examples [Hanford site and Maxey flat, USA (who would have thought that rain is a thing?); Majak, Russia (radioactive storm anyone?); Tricastin, France (should we have build the container to last more than 10 years?); Goiana, Brasil (Who would have thought that people steal that shit?),...] I don't believe we can keep the stuff safe more more than two generations, at most. (4) Nuclear ist expensive. With costs for renewables (photvoltaic, wind is a form of solar energy) going down ineffficiant storage (e.g. converting water to hydrogen) will become economically viable despite their inefficency. Even if you lose 80 %, you still get 20 for nearly free. That is the worst case if we don't invent better battery technology, which may speed up the eventual W for renewables.

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