Soo, nuclear fussion is yet again 10 years away...

Oadzhk

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Its been like this for 50 YEARS and it was always "around the corner" but we are yet to find a way to harvest its energy and keep it stable for long periods of time, I say we shoild return to nuklear energy, its clean, its efficient and lasts forever
 
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Eycon

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"its clean, its efficient and lasts forever"
Have you been living under a rock or something?
It's clean... yeah, no. Ever heard of Nuclear Waste? Fukushima? Chernobyl? Three Mile Island?
It's efficient. Well, if you compare it to gas or coal power plants the power output per used unit of "fuel" is way higher. And they don't produce CO2 during their runs. Have to give you that. BUT the cleanup costs are way higher. 1. You need to produce the fuel rods 2. You have to store the used up fuel rods somewhere 3. You can't just demolish a NPP like a gas or coal Power Plant. EVERYTHING in there is highly contaminated with radioactivity and needs to be treated as such. All of this is fucking EXPENSIVE. And take a guess who is going to pay for everything. Let me give you a hint: It is NOT the power company. They rake in the profits. The one who foots the bill is you. The taxpayer.
It lasts forever... also no. And yes. But not in the way you think. The average NPP has a runtime of about 50 to 60 years, conventional plants about 20 to 30. So while their lifetime is significantly longer it is not forever. The Nuclear Waste however is. Because it loses half its killing potential every 10k years.
People a) can't think that much ahead and b) don't understand logarithmic sequences. Let me explain. When thinking in sequences people think linear. Imagine a chessboard. You put one grain of rice on square 1, two grains on square 2, three grains on 3 and so forth. So in the end you have 64 grains of rice on Square 64. But that's not how logarithmic sequences work. You put 1 grain of rice on square 1, then you double it for square 2 making it two grains of rice, then you double that for square 3 making it four grains of rice. Then you have 8, 16, 32, 64... you get the picture. If you were to go to square 64 you would have to fill it with the mass of multiple planet earths.
So to get the killing potential of say a metric ton of Plutonium to harmless levels you'd have to wait Billions (with a b) of years. So in that regard it does last forever...
 
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Eyzop

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really not sure if OP wants to work forward to nuclear fusion and keep that as the nuclear energy or if he wants to use nuclear fission, which would be kinda stupid as Eugs just said.
 
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Drqotc

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not sure about clean, the residues are always a problem. maybe we can send them to space lol
 
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Eycon

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Sending the waste to space is a good idea. In theory. Unfortunately we do have that much waste already that it is just not feasible to do so. The costs are one factor, but the logistics are another. we would have to build hundreds of single use rockets. that would be a giant waste of resources. and god forbid one of them had an accident... remember the space Shuttle Challenger? Would you want that with a payload of 10 tons of ultra-high radioactive waste? We wouldn't need to wait for that asteroid, that accident alone would wipe us from the face of the earth.
 
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