Sure, depending on the timing, i.e. administration, geopolitical situation and available technology.
From the mid 1950ies, Adenauer and Strauß massively pushed for German nukes.
In 1958, France, Italy and Germany signed a treaty regarding a joint programme to jointly develop their own nuclear weapons, with France doing the heavy lifting, and including a loophole that would prevent Germany to violate existing treaties.
Seasoned tactician Adenauer let in John Foster Dulles on the deal. Dulles’ reaction was to suggest that Great Britain and the US join the arrangement.
The whole thing was moot anyway shortly after when France dropped out after de Gaulles replaced Gaillard.
Nukes and European politics, never a dull moment.
What are the toxic contaminates from hydro electric, solar, wind, and geothermal? Will any of them kill you 10 million years later?
And what do with do with waste with a toxic half life of 15 million years? Fast reactors don’t solve that problem at all.
This feels like a sunk cost fallacy where we keep pushing nuclear even though we know it’s not at all safe or sustainable.
Nuclear sucks, because:
- of the waste.
- each nuclear plant each year of operation burps out xenon, just because of nuclear fission.
So there’s no way it’s clean energy. - nuclear power is the most expensive way to generate electricity, so you get more bang for your buck putting up windmills & rooftop photo-voltaic panels.
- nuclear plant accidents are expensive & seem to keep on coming (Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima.)
Germans seem to be specifically allergic to nuclear power. In the early 70s, they invaded a proposed nuclear plant site & didn’t leave until it was cancelled.
You’re putting far more thought and effort into this than either Trump or his personality cult have done.
Got a source on teh Xenon thing, I’ve never heard of it being an issue.
Thorium plants have much less waste, use cheaper fuel, and are impossible to melt down. But they haven’t been developed past early prototyping stages. They were shelved in favor of plants that would make materials for bombs (which is one of the reasons for their protests in the 70s, it aided in arms proliferation.)
They are costly, but they are also very consistent in power, which is one of the big factors in maintaining a power grid. And their carbon emmissions are nil or there abouts.
I think ultimately solar may be the savior when the effenciency is high enough one can power most of their house with their own cells. But I don’t think nucleear should be off the table. And we should continue to develope other technologies as we go.
There are some in the manufacture, but no, they won’t be a problem 10 million years into the future.
The manufacture of solar panels contains some toxic chemicals, but that can be treated on site.
Wind turbines use a fair bit of rare earth magnets and the mining of that has caused problems, although the levels needed are going down every year and recycling will mitigate the problems.
Geothermal has the risk of sulfur related chemicals going into ground water or the air, but that’s not a long term danger and can be dealt with.
Do you think the GOP will follow him that far? Exceeding term limits is pretty hard to square with the whole law/order/traditional-values thing. It’s not impossible, but I imagine the backlash will be INTENSE.
Sounds to me like the problems are mostly related to method of manufacture and not intrinsic to the energy source itself. Methods of manufacture can and are always being improved.
The mining element is probably the worst. We just don’t know what the long term impacts will really be given modern mining methods, but they can, theoretically, be cleaned up if enough resources are given to doing so.
It’s no longer about believing what he says now, it’s about not admitting they were suckers for all the stuff that came before. It’s really hard for anyone to admit they’ve been had, especially when the consequences are YUGE.
Agreed.Mining is an issue for many power production methods including nuclear. Mining will effect local environments negatively but that’s another issue. The entire mining industry needs looking at.
It’s just not something that pro-nuclear people can point to as a problem with green energy sources considering that all of their material is mined as well.
My point was nuclear power can’t be considered clean because they emit xenon.
And even worse, xenon isn’t one of the fundamental particles of Xena, or we could at least get a new series out of it.
Hmm, not the ones I know. They’re still all in because anything can be twisted into something that makes Trump seem clever, as in, “Well sure he’s a grifter, but aren’t we all in some ways, with things as screwed up against us as they are? He’s just really good at gaming a scewed-up system! Hell, I’d do the same if I had his kinda money,” etc.
Would it be better or worse if that’s just how they’re covering for it? They might just be trying to convince themselves that the guy who made them look like idiots wasn’t actually an idiot as well.
Maybe, but speaking again of the ones that I know, I just dont think their psyches are that complex.
Yeah, although at that point, you get beyond “asshole” into the territory of “genuine evil.”
The technology you haven’t actually put into practice is always better than the ones you have.
No, but we have plenty of lubricants that if you drop it in one area nothing grows there and can cause cancer and takes years within a human lifespan to degrade without any EPA intervention. So it’s not a simple case of “harmless” vs “harmful” here.
- Transuranics IIRC don’t have half lives in the millions of years. Try thousands at worse.
- Fast Neutron Reactors reduce the majority of the radioactive material down to those transuranics which have half lives closer to a few centuries than thousands of years which we have to deal with now.
- This isn’t a sunk cost, we have material that’s useful now and pretending we shouldn’t use it is just… irrational.
