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HIDEOUS (europe.pub)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/politicalmemes@lemmy.world
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[–] 12 points 8 months ago (14 children)

Nuclear fission is not renewable. It relies on mined uranium, which is rather limited.

Also, cooling towers are not seen exclusively with nuclear power plants. Many chemical refineries need lots of process heat and need to get rid of that as well. Evaporating water to steam is a great way to disperse excess heat.

Any kind of heat power plant also needs some way to expel excess steam, so oil and gas plants have them as well, just usually different designs.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (9 children)

    Nuclear fission is not renewable. It relies on mined uranium, which is rather limited.

    The uranium is gonna continue to undergo fission, whether we mine it or not, whether we enrich/refine it or not. At that point it's like collecting energy from our surroundings, really functionally no different than harvesting geothermal, wind, solar, hydro, etc.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago* (6 children)

    Exactly, nuclear is no less renewable than solar. Where does everyone think solar energy comes from? Nuclear.

    We might as well capture the uranium decay, as you said, it will release the energy whether we collect it or not.

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  • [–] 9 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    That's such a disingenuous presentation of the facts. Of course there is no such thing as truly renewable energy, but there is a difference in kind between a supply of energy that is practically inexhaustible on the timescale of human civilisation (what people mean when they say renewable) and energy produced from a limited fuel supply on earth (non renewable).

    Solar (and its byproduct energies wind, hydro, biomass), tidal, geothermal are not in the same category as fission of rare heavy metals.

    I say all this as someone pro-nuclear who agrees that we should use it while it is still fissionable.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 child)

    We are talking about dozens of millennia of uranium supply on Earth. Other fuel types and nuclear technologies look to extend that into billions of years. For all functional purposes, it's infinite. Just as solar energy is functionally infinite.

    a supply of energy that is practically inexhaustible on the timescale of human civilisation (what people mean when they say renewable)

    As I said: Nuclear is Renewable, in the exact same way everyone uses the term.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Has anyone ever tried using the heat from those chemical refineries to supplement a power grid? We convert fossil fuels into electricity by boiling water to turn turbines, so pretty much anything that creates adequate heat could be a potential energy source, right?

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    And if you have to always evaporate a lot of water to cool your power station you will have a problem in a drought, you will either have to turn off the power station or use a lot of water for it when you already don't have enough.

    It's another advantage of wind turbines and solar panels since they don't need to be cooled like that.

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