Some of us believe that if we can't generate power without creating waste for future generations, we should go without the power.
Seriously, we don't need it.
However our largest energy creation mechanism is absolutely destroying the planet in non-linear and difficult to measure ways. Coal is not a dramatic killer but it kills us in droves, now and long into the future.
Nuclear waste, in comparison, is more of a “known” issue, and were scared of what we know.
I’m talking about coal because Sweden is displacing its nuclear power draw with mostly coal.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
That claim is simply plain misinformation.
For the import vs export of energy you find that here:
http://media.matochklimat.nu/2021/02/image1.jpg
Sweden import much more coal energy when Barsebäck and Ringhals was up and running.
Source for graph: http://matochklimat.nu/analys-svensk-el-fortsatter-att-trang...
The Swedish ethos is “we are green. It was the other guys!”
1. They are only a net store of carbon while they're alive.
2. Because of that, you need to dedicate land to carbon-capture forest, indefinitely.
3. Burning fossil fuels for energy releases more and more carbon into the atmosphere.
Like, you get N tons of carbon captured out of a given land area. It's constant per area. So you would need to continually grow the amount of forested land just to follow the amount of carbon released by burning fossil fuels.
But: land is finite. The actual worldwide trend has been to deforest land, either for lumber, or slash-and-burn for subsistence farming in poor countries, or just to allow for population growth, or the large land area needed for wind and solar farms. We don't have a huge surplus of not-yet-forest land — can't grow trees in deserts.
The weird thing is that you're taking a shit in your neighbor's yard. I mean if they do it in their own yard it's weird, but there's nothing wrong with it. I mean this is what we do with dog shit.
The problem is that everyone shits. Sure, nuclear shit smells a lot more than solar shit or coal shit, but there's a hell of a lot less of it. We're talking a cat vs herd of rhinos. If I had to clean up one of the two I honestly don't care how much that cat's shit smells, I'm picking that job every single time. And you know what, the researchers seem to agree
> The analyses did not reveal any science-based evidence that nuclear energy does more harm to human health or to the environment than other electricity production technologies
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagebau_Garzweiler#/media/Date...
and are planned to become lakes (but at least in Germany nobody knows where the water is supposed to come from).
The places where coal is mined under ground need to run pumps forever or the surrounding cities are destroyed. The pumps in Germany's Ruhrgebiet consume about 70MW continuously. In a couple of decades the pumps will have consumed more energy than we got out of the coal.
And, of course, if we continue to burn coal in a couple of decades largeish parts of the globe might become uninhabitable to humans.
Saying we should only use methods that don't provide waste is saying we should reduce energy consumption to 1-5% of current global and ditch all cars, ships and airplanes. Even if you are 100% morally right you're never going to convince humanity of that.
The earth's carrying capacity before fossil fuels was far, far lower than the 7 billion current population, especially with current living standards.
The only reason we can support that many is because of a complex web of economics that causes the earth to produce far more food than it otherwise could, and then enables distribution of that food to where the people are.
Without fossil fuels, we couldn't even produce the fertilizer needed to support the food. You could argue that there is some alternative set of lifestyles that would enable to eliminate fossil fuels without asking 90% of the population to die, but that would similarly require some sort of top-down totalitarian regime in order to get there and keep us there.
At this point, we do need the energy. The only way to maybe not need it would be to somehow put a global version of Stalin in a position of absolute power.
Failing to understand just how critical energy is to any sort of non-apocalyptic future is one of the biggest dangers in our current political debate about what should come next.
I agree that we should have food security for everybody, and I agree that if we don't provide everyday people with power for heating and cooking they will just start burning things again which would create a bigger disaster.
But when I look around me I see massive amounts of waste in every sector because electricity is so cheap.
And nuclear is the safest power source (measured in deaths/twh) which humans have been using for decades.
