Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
Regarding nuclear waste, this is a problem that will dog us for thousands of years, and the materials the waste is encased in cannot survive that long.
Heck, in Gorleben the problem is acute at the moment, canisters used through the 1990s are leaking and they were just thrown in an old mine, literally in some cases, and the nuclear waste is threatening to leak into the ground water…
The problem is, the waste has been handled by a capitalist society - that means it was given to the cheapest bidder, who was only looking at making the most return in the next quarter. They weren’t looking at how the waste would be safely stored for hundreds or thousands of years.
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Yeah this is my problem. Under ideal circumstances nuclear power can be safe and its waste manageable. And it doesn’t pollute the air. But the world is often far from ideal - (see Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine for a worst case scenario. It won’t matter how well designed it is if the Russians decide to blow it up).
We’re so close to meeting our energy needs with renewables - I’d hate to see us throw it all over for nuclear power.
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good points! Nuclear power is likely the safest most nonpolluting energy we can have! Its very easy to handle the waste properly for the next 100 years or so until we have the means to cheaply shoot it into space and then into the sun
The latest SMR reactors, small modular reactors, all fail safe. Even if they are blown up they just stop functioning. You could turn off the power and walk away and they just stop. No way for them to meltdown. Three Mile Island and Fukishima are old technology.
SMR’s are all built in a factory and shipped to the site. Old reactors are custom built on site which is why they take forever to build and certify for operation.
One SMR could power multiple modern data centers.
Here is a perfect example. Www.x-energy.com
Here in Britain we’ve just achieved wind power being our largest source of electricity over 12-months. It’s now bumped fossil off the top spot, which it’s held for over a hundred years.
It was windy last year though 
To be fair, some offshore schemes went live last year too.
Despite this achievement, cancelling net zero seems to be policy for some of the parties in our elections at the moment 
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When I was a youngster growing up in West Oxfordshire (your neck of the woods!!!) almost all of our heat came from coal
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I still have bags of coal, there was a bunker still in use at this house when we moved here. Guess I’ll get round to taking it to landfill one day - return it to the ground where it came from🙂
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hahahaha - I get odd looks when I tell people I had a fireplace in my bedroom (and all rooms) with a coal scuttle standing right beside
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