I'm pro nuclear power.

[PamperedBabyBear]

Atom is coming to save the world lol.

I used to be very afraid of nuclear power a decade ago due to propaganda after fukushima nuclear meltdown so much so i bought a geiger counter back then. I still have respect for radiation as it can be unsafe. Later on that geiger counter opened my mind got rid of the paranoia then come to find out there is more radiation around us that many people know about and not from fukushima. For instance did you know that cigarette tobacco has radioactive polonium 210 and the tobacco companies in the united states kept that secret for 40 years (you can see mainstream articles on this, the CDC even says tobacco contains polonium 210) some say that is the primary cause of cancer in the cigarettes. Yearly consumption of tobacco smoke is comparable to a radiation dose at chernobyl. Where did that come from? Well basically the tobacco plant being fed fertilizer that was from rock phosphate that got "contaminated" with radon via radium 226 since radium is naturally in the ground from thorium and uranium. Did you know that oil gas and coal companies produce radioactive waste? fact. Did you know that oil fracking usually is contaminated with radioactive radium 226 the fracking waste tends to be highly radioactive that the fracking workers are essentially radiation workers that sometimes don't even know it? Another fact. Another fact is sometimes the oil fracking water contaminated with radium 226 ends up in the drinking water another fact. Radium looks to the body similar to calcium so if it gets in the body it gets deposited in the bones and causes bone cancer. Sadly some oil companies literally dumped their radioactive waste into the ground it gets into the drinking water.

Coal before the smoke was filtered would basically rain down radioactive isotopes on people as radioactive ash. To this day coal plants still produce radioactive waste. Did you know that tritium water that power plants release into the rivers and the ocean does not bio accumulate. Did you know that there is such a thing as a thorium reactor that doesn't melt down? Did you know that when you fly in an airplane you are getting about the same level of radiation per hour as uranium glass. If not now you know. Why did i mention all that? because there is so much hypocrisy against nuclear energy.

I have some uranium glass , a radioactive crystal stone i keep in a glass jar called blue apatite, and even a tiny rock in a glass jar given to me years ago that was produced by the very first nuke ever (Code Named Trinity) the same Trinity that inspired the movie Oppenheimer ; this rock is called radioactive trinitite. It is authentic i know for a fact it is because i have a gamma ray spectrometer and it contains radioactive cesium 137 which does not appear in nature naturally. Cesium 137 is only produced by nuclear fission such as from a nuclear power plant or a nuke. I mention this because i have "seen" radiation in person with a geiger counter and spectrometer.

This post is pro nuclear; the future of energy.

Photo from the game series Fallout, source of the photo : Google

 

[Nam Repaid]

 

[southeastlittle]

I agree on nuclear power being better than coal-fired plants at the very least. It's also funny that it's basically just a big steam engine.

 

[PamperedBabyBear]

Yea for sure , I’ve been obsessed with steam engines since I was younger so nuclear reactors being a steam engine powered by hot rocks is definitely really cool . I studied alternative energy on my own throughout my life and I realized that the most efficient way of generating electricity in my opinion was steam engines so add nuclear energy and you have nuclear power . Victorian technology mixed with modern technology

 

[PamperedBabyBear]

Source photo : google

 

[jamiejamie]

Clean energy that lasts long time when done properly.

 

[Tigercub59]

Pro nuclear here, too.

 

[ChrisChris]

idk they scare me.

 

[PamperedBabyBear]

idk they scare me.

that is valid , i was scared for a long time.

 

[PamperedBabyBear]

idk they scare me.

i slept with the radioactive crystal stone for days out of a month i dont even know how many days; for psychic reasons before i found out it was radioactive. So i had hours and hours for days exposed to this rock. I'm not as afraid of radiation as i used to be but that was eery. The geiger says "dangerous radiation background" at a couple inches from it and "high radiation background" at a foot when testing that crystal yet it is only as radioactive as a airplane flight per hour due to it being at the very beginning of the danger zone. I ended up testing the rock with a spectrometer and searched my bed for radioactive particles worried that i had radium 226 in my bed . Thankfully i didnt find any radium 226, as the isotope didnt produce 226 but instead a form with a really short half life. I didnt find anything though. I washed my sheets and bedspread and even tested my stuffed animal for radioactive particles incase i needed to clean it.

 

[feetintrouble]

It depends to many people what is the "scare of the day". (Not to me, I'm extremely cynical about scares whipped up by the media: I haven't forgotten how we were told that the Millennium Bug would end the world as we knew it.) Once upon a time, nuclear meltdown was the scare of the day, or the problem of nuclear waste, or nuclear war. The latter might be brought out when it suits the media, like a rabbit out of a hat.

Remember also "your mobile phone is giving you cancer"? What happened to that? Nowadays, it's extremely difficult to get by without a smartphone, because big tech have made it that way.

See also "the greenhouse effect", "the hole in the ozone layer", "down with CFCs", as parroted by children's programmes such as Blue Peter (in the UK).

At one point, fossil fuels such as coal and oil were "bad", because they might run out. (It's true this might still be a valid concern.)

Now they are "bad" for a different reason: "climate change", and "carbon emissions".

Spin, spin, spin, whatever flavour has been selected by the media machine.

 

[PamperedBabyBear]

It depends to many people what is the "scare of the day". (Not to me, I'm extremely cynical about scares whipped up by the media: I haven't forgotten how we were told that the Millennium Bug would end the world as we knew it.) Once upon a time, nuclear meltdown was the scare of the day, or the problem of nuclear waste, or nuclear war. The latter might be brought out when it suits the media, like a rabbit out of a hat.

Remember also "your mobile phone is giving you cancer"? What happened to that? Nowadays, it's extremely difficult to get by without a smartphone, because big tech have made it that way.

See also "the greenhouse effect", "the hole in the ozone layer", "down with CFCs", as parroted by children's programmes such as Blue Peter (in the UK).

At one point, fossil fuels such as coal and oil were "bad", because they might run out. (It's true this might still be a valid concern.)

Now they are "bad" for a different reason: "climate change", and "carbon emissions".

Spin, spin, spin, whatever flavour has been selected by the media machine.

I certainly remember 1999 , and yea hearing even 5G will give you cancer lol .... i'm not sure they will run out of oil i think it replenishes itself over time faster than they used to claim. Come to find out those fukushima radiation maps of water flowing to california were just wave height maps not radiation lol

I have a victorian reimagining of an advertising framed for Radium 226 "Liquid Sunshine" at the bottom of it it says "Harmless Every Respect" LOL , its humorous to me and im gothic ; it certainly wasnt harmless at the same time i have a lot of respect for the radium girls. At the same time im not entirely sure in my personal opinion that radon is all that bad but too much certainly is. It is really hard for me to not be fascinated by the subject.

 

[PamperedBabyBear]

It depends to many people what is the "scare of the day". (Not to me, I'm extremely cynical about scares whipped up by the media: I haven't forgotten how we were told that the Millennium Bug would end the world as we knew it.) Once upon a time, nuclear meltdown was the scare of the day, or the problem of nuclear waste, or nuclear war. The latter might be brought out when it suits the media, like a rabbit out of a hat.

Remember also "your mobile phone is giving you cancer"? What happened to that? Nowadays, it's extremely difficult to get by without a smartphone, because big tech have made it that way.

See also "the greenhouse effect", "the hole in the ozone layer", "down with CFCs", as parroted by children's programmes such as Blue Peter (in the UK).

At one point, fossil fuels such as coal and oil were "bad", because they might run out. (It's true this might still be a valid concern.)

Now they are "bad" for a different reason: "climate change", and "carbon emissions".

Spin, spin, spin, whatever flavour has been selected by the media machine.

Did you know that fire alarms usually have radioactive material in them? americium 241 That was the first thing i found out had radiation that was a household item. I was shocked . It is safe as it is shielded and has a tiny field can barely detect it outside the alarm because it is shielded well enough . it is also usually up in the air on the roof so you are not even remotely exposed to it. It is literally how smoke alarms work the smoke gets into the chamber where the radioactive material is and causes a break in the connection causing the alarm to go off. The radioactive material causes the air inside the chamber to be charged and connect a circuit. That was the first fascinating thing i found out was a regular household item that was radioactive. My geiger counter can pick it up if i put it to a firealarm and test it. When i found this out years ago that was what was like a lightbulb in my head that started me down a path of thinking differently about nuclear. For years when i first bought my geiger i never saw it react to anything when i first bought it until i tested that fire alarm. I remember people saying that "microwaves" were radioactive lol , well definitely not ionizing lol the chart would show that anyway lol lower frequency radiation not the same as nuclear radiation.

 

[feetintrouble]

Yes, I knew about smoke alarms containing an alpha source.

My parents told me that things that glowed in the dark (such as alarm clocks) were radioactive, and hence dangerous. It's true that older ones used to contain radium.

Some people thought that televisions gave off gamma rays which rotted your brain, or this was often told to children, along with "TV gives you square eyes".

And X-rays. My dad recalls machines (in the 1960s) in shoe shops that X-rayed your feet to check if a shoe was a good fit; then X-rays were discovered to be possibly dangerous, and the machines vanished overnight.

 

[PamperedBabyBear]

Ive seen a few radium clocks in person, one of which actually made me nervous as that one didnt have a glass face. I had a geiger with me at the time so i knew i was fine on the radiation level even though it was higher from no shielding. I heard about the shoe shop xrays those were way too much radiation. Yea old clocks before 1970 that glowed in the dark were usually radium from what i understand. I forgot about the tvs the warning of being too close to them. I grew up in the 1990s. Understanding what causes gamma radiation makes a lot more sense of that now that was when they still used the cathode ray tube for tv where as now everything is pretty much LCD. What fascinated me about radium at the time was being able to detect it at like 5 feet away from the source through glass and was going through metal on some level as well. I sometimes miss the cathode ray tube screens to be honest compared to LCD. I try to stay away from radium now. The crystal i have is producing radium though but 228 so it doesnt last very long at all compared to the radium 226 of the clocks; i still keep that crystal in a jar though.

"televisions gave off gamma rays which rotted your brain" LOL

 

[PamperedBabyBear]

I dont usually like to pick up uranium glass with my bare hands even though they say it is "safe" so i wasn't expecting to sleep next to a radioactive crystal stone lol.... who would expect it to be radioactive though. It was kind of ironic because of my fascination with nuclear. It was a very interesting stone though the metaphysical properties it has. Had i of not had a geiger counter i would not of known for sure that it was radioactive because i just happened to come across an article about it while i was researching about the rock at the time.

 

[Fiammaverde]

Aerospace industry became safer through a trial & error process. Now it's much safer to travel by plane than by car, while instead at the beginning of commercial flights history it was the opposite.
It's still true that single fails for aircrafts do generally cause way more harm than single fails of automotive products, but the frequency ratio is so low that planes are overall safer than cars.

I believe the same is true for nuclear plants vs. traditional fuel plants: occurrence of nuclear plants accidents is nowadays so low that they can overall be considered safer than other sources of energy.

And renovable energy is not truly renovable nor fully safe. Someday, they will tell us that the materials used to produce solar panels are carcinogenic and need to be handled like asbestos. Sooner or later, those eolic turbines do crash and hit stuff in their vicinity and overall dam crashes have produced more fatalities than nuclear plants crashes.

 

[foxkits]

I'm pro hydrogen go thermal .

 

[Pelusos]

I think we cannot skip the nuclear energy if we don't want to reduce the standard of living. All technologies have risk. Alternative power points like solar pannels, wind turbines can help but are not able to make enough energy, they make elecric power when the weather is adequate not when we need it and electrical network can not integrate this.
Biggest source of radioactivity is radon, izotop of radium, we get it from the rocks and soil everywhere, highest level in the buildings from brics and cement so the best you can do it is change the air in your house everyday. It's alpha radioactivity, we have been liveing with it for houndred thousend years, we tolerate it, breath in and out, but when aerosol drops stick in the lungs because of smoking or smog with this radon than we live with high risk of canser.
Old buildind industry made special risks. When the river gravel was expensive but slag of smelter was chip they made 60-80 centimeters wide ceiling from slag, and this can couse radioactivity.
Geiger-Müller instrument detect all the ionizing radiation. There are everywhere around us, from UV-B light to your mikrowave oven.

 

[CuriousFabio]

Another thing that is interesing is that there is a company that made a commercially avalaible movable nuclear reactor.
The nuclear reactor uses the same system as the nuclear submarines does , the water that spins the turbine (and generate energy) instead of leaving the system in the form of steam (like with traditional nuclear power plants) it gets recycled back into the system , it becomes water again , cools down the reactor , becomes steam , rinse and repeat . Due to the size and the cooling method, the energy output is way lower than normal nuclear power plants , the fuel also last less (8 years before it needs refueling).

But that is the thing , is a small nuclear reactor that can be moved via trucks , will provide energy at max efficiency 24/7 regardless of the climate , and since the water it uses is self-contained , it doesn't needs to be near bodies of water , so You can use it pretty much everywhere you want . It is really effective as that when there is a natural disaster , the electric infrstructure gets damaged and so does whatever thing that produces electricity, so you can put the mini nuclear reactor there until things gets fixed , in cold places per example, not having electricity vs having it can be the difference between life and death . Also it can be that the climate conditions or the space you have makes the implementation of other means of producing electricity difficult, so just throw the nuclear reactor in the middle of a desert and call it a day lol