Nuclear power

Hello again

Today I am going to talk about I'm going to talk to you about nuclear power. More specifically, why we should use that for energy.

My main point is this:
Right now humans are pushing 36 billion (metric) tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year, so that they can use the energy that comes from burning fossil fuels.
And that's bad. It's bad for people, and bad for animals, and for plants. Simply said, it's bad for everyone.
(Well, there are species that benefit from the global temperature rising, but since we seem to be in the middle of the sixth mass extinction in the history of history, I'd say handful of creatures doing better is a pretty minor thing.)
So we need to come up with something else to fuel our everything we do. Because with China and India getting more and more advanced every year, that emission rate is just going to keep rising if we keep using fossil fuels.
And I think nuclear energy would be a good help to this. Not a complete solution or a permanent one, but it is much better than what we're doing now.

And yet, people seem to have objections. So I'm gonna go ahead and go through some of what people use when they talk against nuclear power, and try to explain why they're not exactly good arguments.

Nuclear power is dangerous.
Well, yeah, but when you do things right it's not, really.

But Fukushima.
It was an old power plant built in an area where tsunamis and earthquakes are possible. Which sounds like a terrible idea even if you don't understand much about the physics behind nuclear energy. Also the plan of the plant was idiotic. It could have been built in a way that a tsunami wouldn't do all that much damage, but instead it was built in a way that a tsunami did a lot of damage.
So just don't built the power plants in tsunami-risk areas and built them according to the newest knowledge from the last few decades, and you'll be fine.

But Chernobyl. That was even worse than Fukushima.
Yeah. Once again, an old power plant. The generators that are used today are different and way more safe than the once used back then. Also. This is an actual (translated) quote from Finnish Wikipedia about Chernobyl:

During the accident an experiment was being done in Chernobyl. The experiment was not approved by the engineer of the power plant, or even people who understood the engineering well enough, because doing the experiment involved using the reactor in a way that was specifically forbidden in the plant's instructions of use. -- For the experiment the safety systems were shut off, because they would've prevented the wrong use of the reactor.
Excuse me, I have to go bang my head against the wall now.
When experts say something is a bad idea, don't do it. Especially if you're dealing with something that is dangerous when used wrong. Especially if you don't really know what you're doing. Also, if there are security systems that prevent you from doing something, they're probably there for a reason. So if you don't know what you're doing, do not turn them off. Or even if you know what you're doing.
Anyone with any sense in their head should understand that is a terrible idea.
And thus the worst nuclear accident of history.
So as long as you new technology, don't build the power plants in a tsunami risk zone and don't let idiots near the generator, you'll be fine. Because really, the newest technology is good enough that someone has to screw up really badly for an accident to happen.


But nuclear bombs!
Yeah, those are bad. But really. You can use dynamite to blow up people or you can use it to dig a tunnel. The fact that you can use something as warfare, doesn't mean it can't be useful even if you don't want to blow people up.
Again: don't give nuclear technology to idiots.

But what if the nuclear waste leaks into the environment? You can't know what happens in the future.
Well, nuclear waste is packed carefully away, and it will be thousands of years before it's theoretically possible for there to be any leaks. And by then I think human race has advanced enough to know how to stop the leaking. Or destroyed itself. In which case we've taken so much of the rest of the world with us that it won't matter much.
And even if something did leak from the nuclear waste dump sites, it won't be that bad. From the waste site it leaks into the ground and maybe the groundwater and then maybe to the sea or ocean, where there's just so much water it gets mixed in it really just doesn't matter. Of course it harms the environment right around the waste site and where ever  the water flows from there.
But if the choice is between screwing up the whole planet with greenhouse gases and having small spots in the world inhabitable for a while because of nuclear waste.
I mean, it's been thirty years since Chernobyl, and there are already animals living in the area, even though the radiation levels are still so high they don't let people there without proper precautions. Of course it's still a horrible place to live for any creature. But the area that is really bad is some tens of kilometers off from power plant, which is a ridiculously small area compared to like... the planet. And tens or even thousands of years is a ridiculously short time in the scale of the world.
The world will be fine even if some of the nuclear waste sites leaked in the future. The nature adapts. But it's a lot lot easier for it to adapt to small spot in inhabitable areas than the consequences of global warming.

Renewable energy sources don't have any risk of nuclear disasters.
Well, that's true. But they have problems too, because they all require some kind of infrastructure. Water dams make it difficult for salmons to travel up rivers, sun panels block the sun from the things living in the area, and windmills are huge and make a lot of noise that bother everyone trying to live anywhere near them.
And take Finland, for example. All the water power that can be used is already being used, and it's not all that windy. And we need the most energy precisely when the sun doesn't shine, so that's not much help. Though sure, we do have turf in Finland that is kind of renewable, though in a human time scale it takes a long time to regrow turf that has been dug out of a swamp. And it also releases CO2, and if we burn all the turf then there's no more swamps in Finland, and that would suck.

The technology and understanding of nuclear physics is so good today that nuclear power plants are actually really safe. People just have a weird notion that nuclear means inherently bad and dangerous.
Which it isn't.
It's like people in the US seem to be against everything that has the word "socialized" in it. Which is ridiculous.
It's not an ideal way to produce energy, but at least to me it seems like our best choice right now. Because we really need to stop using fossil fuels. Or at least significantly reduce their use.

Anyway, I think that's enough for today.

~matu