@PugJesus Put into perspective — no, I'm not concerned about that. This thing will not harm any human ever.

How can I say that? Because it is tiny. Even if it should somehow (how?) spontaneously and completely dissolve and be washed into some river (to be clear: this doesn't happen), we just get a temporary slightly elevated heavy metal concentration, hard to even detect.

This thing will not “poison India”. That's bullshit.

@Brownboy13 @Emil Not perfect, but definitely better in every way than oil.

@YourNetworkIsHaunted @fullsquare Yes, absolutely, civilization (or whatever word you like better here) will not happen automatically or magically.

And I'm not finding an answer: How do you /properly/ remove an oppressive theocracy, in such a way that the country has good starting conditions to prosper?

Two things seems clear to me: the theocrats will not go by themselves, and the country will not prosper under them.

@cjoll4 Yes, I am sure. The Nagasaki bomb had 6.2 kg of Pu-239. A third of that is about 2 kg.

The (untampered, spherical) critical mass of Pu-239 is about 11 kg. The Nagasaki bomb was just big enough to work using tampers, implosion geometry etc. You cannot make a nuclear bomb from 2 kg.

“Dirty bomb” means just spreading the material, probably as a powder. This is not nice if it happens in a crowded pub, but it's emphatically not “poisoning India”. Coal plants routinely do much worse.

@kuna I like the irony of it being a webp.

@Emil This sounds like a sensible, level-headed approach. #Australia, take note!

#auspol #nuclear

@tomtrottel @Emil @Tylerdurdon No, it is a classification.

It's like saying »human feces is a huge problem« — well, yes, but that's why we have toilets and sewage plants and so on — it's solved.

As is nuclear waste.

@Emil Funny thing, the onboard reactor probably produces more power than the gas it carries could.

But anyway, yes, again, nuclear propulsion for ships is quite obviously a very good match.

@cjoll4 In short, any nefarious use of this material is a LOT of effort for a comparatively minor effect.

And the risk of an accident with it is low-probability × low-damage = low.

@tomtrottel @Emil @Tylerdurdon

Well, there we are at the divide between facts and opinion, and that between a civil discussion and ad hominem attacks.

Fact: nobody was ever harmed by spent nuclear fuel. Really. Look it up wherever you like.

Fact: that is not by chance, but by engineering.

Fact: the total amount of all the world's spent nuclear fuel ever, in the shape of a cube, would have a side length of about 35 m (before recycling).

Fact: I have no money invested in nuclear energy.

@qyron @Emil

To qualify that »none(*)«:

- Nuclear power /is/ sustainable, but I guess you don't mean that

- Physical resources demand (i. e. material) is significantly lower for nuclear power than for e. g. solar or wind plus storage

- Solar and wind often have no output; then you need to get 100% of live demand from other sources, such as storage or backup plants. Batteries don't exist at that scale at all (there is some hope that they might get there in 10 to 20 years, but still R&D).

@Emil This sentence somehow seems wrong: »They are highly radioactive and have long half-lives.«

Halflife and decay rate (and thus radiation intensity) are inversely proportional to each other, and there is the halflife gap in fission products above Strontium-90 and Cesium-137 quite clearly separating »high radioactivity/short halflife« and »low radioactivity/long halflife«.

@Emil OK, it's a start. Once regulatory and economic processes are in place, there will be an option to become much more ambitious here, depending on how other plans turn out. Good.

@circuitfarmer @Emil You are laughing, but that actually seems to be what's in the head of Habeck etc. There is a TV interview from last year where this became explicitly apparent. And it's confirmed in his actions. 🤡

@qyron @Emil

- No. France temporarily reduced some outputs to go easy on water temperatures according to regulations. This affected 0.05% of their annual output (one twentieth of a percent).

- Current median is 7 years (see image), running it is very cheap (most of the costs are in building it), for disposal look at Finland (it's not a real challenge)

- Currently none(*) without fossil backup of the same capacity, unless you have place for pumped hydro (also of the same capacity).

@FarraigePlaisteach @Emil @flossdaily @MotoAsh That is not an explanation, it is an assortment of claims without any attempt to prove them.

The DIW is a pseudo-scientific institution giving out PhDs for anti-nuclear propaganda.

If there are only non-technical, non-engineering obstacles for a solution, then it is our task to remove them, not throw up our hands in fatalism.

@MattMastodon @Edwin085 @Emil

The competition is not between nuclear and volatiles.

The competition is between nuclear and whatever else could provide the remaining 60% of live electricity demand /after/ the volatiles have hit their limit. And heat.

People hope and handwave a lot about storage, but that's a large project for tech that doesn't exist yet.

And then there is the comparison between the lifetime energy output of 1 kg of e. g. a Li battery and 1 kg of U fuel assembly…

@cstross @YourNetworkIsHaunted @fullsquare OK, but I don't see the automatism in that direction either. And just letting them simmer in their own little cosmos doesn't seem very sustainable when they organize and support e. g. Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthi.

Starting a war now is not the answer, I'm pretty sure, but the question remains.

@Emil From a pure technical view, it is almost always more reassuring to use the »original«. And that is all this one argues.

But there are other considerations, such as political security for Europe. And diversification of supply is practically always a win for the consumer.

I think Europe should pay a research grant or something like that to whoever develops replacement fuel units.

@ajsadauskas @australianpolitics

What would »grid scale solar & storage« cost, and how long would it take?

This is the competition:

1. Nuclear power plants
2. Storage of the same scale, filled by solar of the same scale

No one in the whole world has ever built (2). There is no mature industry, and no technology even matching the only grid scale storage we have so far (pumped hydro).

For (1), there are several international players with established designs.

I wouldn't stop either one.