this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2023
1140 points (97.5% liked)
Technology
59287 readers
5229 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
There are a lot of good arguments for wind, and I'm not arguing against it, but density and consistency are well known issues. You absolutely cannot replace a nuclear plant with a wind farm of the same size and get the same output. That's not necessarily a bad thing, wind farms can often coexist with other land uses, but that's still a disruptive environment.
It's good to put pressure on nuclear, the reason it's so incredibly safe is because it's highly regulated, but to completely ignore it is throwing the baby out with the bath water.
The question isn't "are nuclear plants perfectly safe", the question is "will adding nuclear plants to our energy portfolio reduce the risks from climate change enough to offset the risks they introduce."
I think, in that framework, replacing existing coal power plants with modern nuclear reactors is a huge overall benefit.
Wind and solar are great but there's still a lot of work needed on storage and transmission before they can be viable grid scale. Realistically, saying no to nuclear doesn't mean more wind, it means more natural gas. And those LNG tankers really are floating bombs.