Musk redpilling the world on radiation scams and how politics is in the way of nuclear power
(media.communities.win)
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Radiation doesnt just 'leak out into the vegetables' - that is a gaslighting take. but the fuel, and wastewater used to cool it is radioactive, and stays lethal for thousands of years
They store it, mostly on site because no mass storage sites are being approved or are viable. As the concentrated toxicity of waste eats through everything within decades or even years and spills out.
Uranium has a massive half live. Tailing ponds from mining are estimated to be lethal for 100,000 years or more.
Many lung cancers are actually from breathing Radon gas - odorless and colorless, one of the decay chains from uranium (it decays through like 8 different elements including Polonium 210 and Radon gas, before settling on radioactive lead which has a half life in its own of 22 years)
Nuclear power is reliable and doesnt emit greenhouse gas sure - but since we now know that climate fear has been lied about and is pushed by evil people who also commit evil in 100 other ways - no one should be giving a fuck about GHG anymore. The whole 'green' movement is a money grab from taxpayers to rich scumbags (who then fly around in their 5 private jets and drive 18 Hummers everywhere laughing about the idiots falling for the Green new Grift)
Nuclear power however results in a large scale buildup of radioactive waste, that is deadly for again, 10s to 100s of thousands of years. One leak, one accident - and large areas are toxic essentially forever (or until maybe bacteria that evolve to convert it slowly chew away at it) - and currently there is around 100 or so plants in North America - and all of them are storing waste on site because every attempt at mass storage has failed or been rejected. Each one is a disaster waiting to happen.
In Manitoba by Pinawa nuclear research plant they had a mostly secret underground storage pit. Because it was on the Canadian Shield bedrock and thought they could contain it for long period of time. It is roughly 400 feet deep and many side tunnels - it went up with little news in the late 80s and some local groups tried to fight it. But research after showed even bedrock was leaky enough that water would get into the tunnels and leak through into water tables etc. It leads to a river that leads to lake Winnipeg and then up to Hudson Bay and then the ocean. it was shut down after 20-30 years of importing in waste from Ontario and the US. has many tons of waste in the tunnels.
The facility was shut down, and slated to be 'decommissioned' - except because it is by lakes and many waterways, the ground has become unstable, and with the radioactive leaking inside it is not safe for people to just go digging around - so nothing is being done. Eventually the walls are going to collapse and ALL of that shit is going to start spilling into the water table, the lake, and then the ocean. And no one will be able to stop it (because they still have no where else to put it, and will no longer be able to be transported safely)
Nuclear power is NOT CLEAN FUCKING ENERGY. You get around 40 years of 'reliable green' energy - and then generations of nightmare and cancer and impossible cleanup after. As it is untold numbers of cancers are already caused by decades of bomb testing, wastewater, spills, etc - and gets into the water and air all over the planet and doesnt fucking go away for a very long time.
Just pump more oil and natural gas already.
you can reuse "spent" fuel in other reactors e.g. thorium molten salt reactors....."burn" cleaner and less hot than your uranium reactors and don't run as high of a risk of meltdown the Thorium tech wasn't pursued in the 60s because you can't weaponize the the byproducts.
That is PR stuff from an industry that doesnt actually do it. Including Bill Gates pushing for 'clean' nukes.
What is theoretically possible (and debatable as the people pushing it are also evil) - it doesnt change the massive amount of infrastructure already installed all over the world, and already a massive storage problem. Even past the fuel - the water used to cool it becomes radioactive and has to also be stored. Fukushima had so much water on site they started just dumping it into the ocean after a few years - fisheries complained etc but didnt change the fact that 100 tons a day of radiactive water was being dumped into the ocean. Estimates were it will take 40 years just to be able to plug the site up because it is too hot to even get robots in there.
The robots they were sending in would be fried within 30 seconds from the massive radiation being emitted from the piles even years later.
Elon Musk claiming he will go eat food off of that shit is pure twitter theater, or if he did he would be faking it.
Also as someone else posted in here - nuclear plants only exist due to massive, massive government subsidies, they are not economical at all. And when they reach end of life, the costs to either extend or decommission plants runs into the billions again.
Just burn coal - its dirty, but the pollution from that is far easier to manage than radioactive waste - but still better in every way than nukes, and massively cheaper too.
Thorium is a waste byproduct of mining (especially coal) and we produce a metric butt-ton of this stuff. It's like the 41th most abundant material on earth so there's a lot of it around. From a "radioactive materials handling perspective" it's already regularly dealt with in abundance so safe transport and movement of this material is already established.
I'm not suggesting that we switch to thorium exclusively as I love my gasoline and hot-rods, but the powergrid infrastructure of the USA is one of the most vulnerable targets here. The 2003 power outage on the east coast shows what could happen if there were problems with the transfer stations....those transfer stations are "protected" with what? a chain link fence and no one talking about their locations. you can google maps them and and see their locations.
In my opinion, the infrastructure should be switched to community based LFTR microreactors maybe on the county level or something... small reactors, really efficient and essentially removing the risk of large scale destruction from a single point like in 2003. this would produce real cheap energy and provide a lot of jobs as well.
There are ways to handle this material safely and this type of reactor is much safer than the RBMK, PWR, BWR, AGR, LWGR, FNR, etc. reactors. What's really neat about these is that the water would not be in direct contact with the radioactive material which greatly reduces the risk of ionizing or contaminating water.
As with anything, if these are built properly they'll be a wonderful alternative to what we are currently utilizing.
If you're bored and want to read more, this website is a pretty good start: https://www.thmsr.com/en/
100 Gazillion Up Keks!!!!