kalessin

Well, if we extract the energy from the spicy rocks today through fission then on a time scale of over hundreds of millennia you actually end-up with less radioactivity on earth! (After 300 000 years to be accurate, and the figure I have is based on low enriched uranium based fuel as typically used in a light water reactor).

You maybe mixing up danger and risk, those are two different concepts. Nuclear waste is dangerous, but it doesn’t have to be risky. Consider this: where do we have the most unknown (risk): long-term geological storage of nuclear waste, or the consequences of climate change and our ability to adapt?

I really wish I could share the educational resources that I have with you, unfortunately it’s all in French…

That's not true, we know enough about geology to deal with long term waste.

Nuclear waste is great for several reasons:

- the first one is quantity: very small in comparison with how much energy it produced (a nuclear reaction generates one million times more energy than a chemical reaction so less resource usage across the whole lifecycle);

- the second one is that most of it (over 90%) can be recycled and used with gen 4 reactors;

- the third one is that it stays local, i.e. unlike CO2 it doesn't go into the atmosphere (and then the ocean), and since CO2 is inert, from a human time scale how long CO2 can stay in the atmosphere is, I would argue, comparable to nuclear waste decay.

Not a lot is inaccurate given the carbon intensity of coal and its importance in Germany's energy mix. Anyway, I think the nuclear debate is quite off-topic here.

Thanks I hate it, extremely noisy and dirty. I really wish the brand dies with fossil fuels.

Weird, my experience has been that EVs are much quieter and that's a real improvement in densely populated areas. Past a certain speed the main source of noise is the tires and then EVs aren't much better than ICE vehicles (wrt noise).

> The cleanup bill is real

This still feels irrational compared to other dangerous industries.

> The inability to get insurance is real

It's real, but how much of it is rooted in emotional fear or bad industrial policy?

> The precautionary evacuation of entire cities is real.

And that's one of the lessons to learn from the Fukushima accident, that's why Canada changed their evacuation plans to be more granular for example.

> Renewables and storage are the cheapest energy source in human history.

Storage gets very expensive as your share of renewables increases (because the capacity factor of storage goes down then). Having an amount of clean firm generation (nuclear) brings the overall cost of the system down.

edit: capacity factor might be the wrong term for storage, the point is their rate of utilization goes down and so does their profitability.

> There's no point other than basic research and certain niches like submarines to waste opportunity cost and money on new built nuclear power today.

I don't understand what we could effectively do with civil nuclear builds decades ago cannot be replicated today. Let's also talk about the cost of the transition to renewables in Germany please.

The correct unit is GW.

Absolutely, and that's different than saying « they don't really require ongoing fuel shipments ».

When you consider the intermittency of renewables, and you should, fuel suddenly becomes an issue again.

I like the idea of "cognitive debt" vs "technical debt".

Why? I am not sure photosynthesis plays a large role in the lower carbon footprint.

Apple’s support for MacOS can been shorter than their laptops longevity (the longevity of their laptops got quite bad when then tried to make them as thin as an usb-c port). So Linux support is also important there imo, and as the original post pointed out because Apple makes it so hard to for Linux to support their hardware, long-term software support may be something to think about before buying a MacBook.

I don't want to fix it myself either, and I don't see how a repair industry could exist without the right to repair.