If it hasn’t been already said: the issue is public perception. If you ask any American in the street what they relate to nuclear power the majority will tell you: Chorynobyl. Even though anyone that’s looked up anything knows that technology is leaps ahead of that disaster, that’s the fear mongering that everyone jumps to.
i mean… This is how most electricity production works.
hydro works in the exact same way, just with water instead of steam, solar works using PV technology, so it’s fairly novel.
And wind is basically the same thing, just using the air, instead of steam.
It’s all mechanically the same at the end of the day, excluding solar. The primary difference is that we don’t burn fuel for heat to make steam, we use potential, or kinetic energy from our environment instead.
Also to be clear, if we’re being pedantic and nitpicky, when i say most i mean percent of production. The vast majority of production globally is through coal, oil, and natural gas. All using thermal processes. And some nuclear, though not as much as solar/wind though.
Humans only have one good way to turn hot into lightning.
The half life of fall-out from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs was a couple of decades.
The half life of nuclear waste from powerplants is anywhere from thousands of years to millions of years, depending on the mix of isotopes.
anywhere from thousands of years to millions of years
only in a strictly thermal reactor environment, if you’re using a fast reactor, something like the SSR that is currently being worked on in canada, it can both burn waste, and reduce it’s lifespan to a much more reasonable length.
As always, development is the problem, if we had more energy being focused on this, we would be farther along, but such is scientific development.
