• Krono@lemmy.today
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      1 year ago

      Is price the only concern? Seems like too narrow of a focus.

      Maybe try sorting by “lifespan”, as nuclear facilities last 3-4x longer.

      You could try sorting by “crude oil usage”, as each turbine needs 60 gallons of high synthetic oil to function, each needs an oil change every 6 months.

      Would be interesting to sort by “birds killed” or “acres of habitat destroyed”

      I’m not saying nuclear is necessarily better, that is a difficult calculation. But we got ourselves into this climate change disaster by short-sightedly “sorting by price”. Perhaps spending more money for a long term investment would be more wise than always going with the cheapest option.

      • Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        You could try sorting by “crude oil usage”, as each turbine needs 60 gallons of high synthetic oil to function, each needs an oil change every 6 months.

        Oil is usually recycled after it’s changed.

        • TheBaldFox@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          Yeah, since there is no combustion there is no carbon deposition and thus the oil basically lasts forever. We just filter it and add occasionally to make up for leaks.

          • Zron@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            There’s no combustion in a wind turbine either, so why do they need changes more frequently?

            • marcos@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Because of higher efficiency requirements and because the wind turbines have a much larger number of smaller moving parts.

              The oil requirements of nuclear are all on the first construction, mining, and refining of the fuel. Very little is required at the operation of the reactor.

      • marcos@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Try price/year instead of lifespan.

        But yeah, you can go with crud oil usage, birds killed and acres of habitat destroyed too. Those won’t give you the result you are wanting to see.

        It’s not that nuclear is useless. But it’s worse on almost every way. Yeah, that “almost” is important, but the meme is way out of line.

        • theneverfox@pawb.social
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          1 year ago

          It’s not useless, and it’s most certainly not worse in almost all ways - enriching the fuel and construction time/costs are all that make it fall apart.

          Nuclear can be built near pretty much any water source without tainting it at all, it generates a huge amount of power with very little land usage, it lasts for a long time.

          If we had time, I’d be all in on nuclear - but it takes almost a decade of build time… We need solutions a hell of a lot faster than that or we’re all screwed anyways

    • LEX@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Or by the amount of waste that takes thousands of years to decay that we have no real way of dealing with except to bury it in some hole with a warning written in pictographs we can only hope future humans understand.

      • echo64@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        The waste is worth the carbon emissions reduction.

        If we could replace all our carbon emitting power with wind and solar today I would be in full support. But we can’t. Especially in parts of the world where solar doesn’t work half the year.

        So I’ll take the waste surrounded by warnings burried in a hole over carbon emissions. Carbon emissions are much worse.