Since you’re going to go there, let’s add in the damage from all the iron, that limestone and uranian required to build the nuclear plant? Also quite damaging.
Photovoltaics, not the best. Now what about mirrors pointing at concrete towers moving liquid sodium around, like in Spain, or pointed at steel pipes filled with water.
The pro-nuclear crowd have two things in common:
1. They have more faith in humanity than we have shown is warranted
2. They won’t accept that Nuclear has failed to achieve the promised widescale adoption and economic benefits.
I’m for a full accounting of all of it. Maybe we can agree all power generation for an industrialized world comes with enormous cost and trade-offs.
Where does that leave us? You need to supplement renewables with something. Your options seem like fossil fuels or nuclear right now. That’s what this all comes down to - the load factor of renewables sucks for most of the world, storage tech isn’t suitable for the demand that would be placed on it, nor will it be for the foreseeable future barring a miracle. So one either ends up saying that we’ll hold out using fossil fuels to augment the <20% load factor of solar, or we think about embracing nuclear with an assumption that it can be done safely. Point #2 that you bring up is an outcome skewed by many roadblocks of our own making, so people open to nuclear tend to reject the assumption that this is a quality inherent to the technology.
I literally just don’t see any options with a lower carbon footprint to meet demand in a highly reliable manner, though I would love a miracle energy generating technology to magically appear that could let us avoid nuclear.
Photovoltaics, not the best. Now what about mirrors pointing at concrete towers moving liquid sodium around, like in Spain, or pointed at steel pipes filled with water.
The pro-nuclear crowd have two things in common:
1. They have more faith in humanity than we have shown is warranted 2. They won’t accept that Nuclear has failed to achieve the promised widescale adoption and economic benefits.
We can’t even contain plastic bags.