"Nuclear power is a potential safety threat, *if* something goes wrong. Coal-fired power is *guaranteed* destruction, filling the atmosphere with planet-heating carbon when it operates the way it's supposed to". (Bill McKibben)
Same for fossil gas, by the way.
@kravietz Nuclear power is guaranteed destruction as well… Creating nuclear waste lasting for centuries and other than CO2, we don't even have a remote idea on how to get rid of it.
And no, hiding it in the ground is not a great answer as all temporary depots have shown.
I think we have to come up with better solutions there.
@sheogorath Then, nuclear *fusion* does not create any radioactive waste and ITER is now scheduled to go first plasma in 2025.
@kravietz Well, fusion is definitely the hope, but looking at its history, I don't think it's on time to save us from climate change.
Given that ITER is successful, we would have left less than 3 years to bring it out of Prototype status, build production halls, and rollout facilities around the world.
But only when scientists didn't get things wrong (which turns out, they might did due to north pole melting) and we produce less or equal CO2 than 2018, which also is not the case.
You're perfectly right in that we need carbon-free economy ASAP. But that's the point of nuclear exactly: it's the *only* carbon free and scalable energy source we have today.
Solar and wind - investment costs are huge due to low efficiency (15-40%), and they can't work alone due to intermittent nature. Technologies to deal with that are at the same stage as ITER - a decade away.
