and with solar, most of the hardware can be recycled now into new units; with a 20 year lifespan, that’s going to pull thousands of kilowatts out of the sky, that’ll do just fine.
My main thing with solar is I wish they’d put panels over existing parking lots or large buildings. This is a thing that is already done in some places, this is a solved engineering problem, but in my area anywhere a solar farm has sprung up it’s been a field that previously either grew crops or was undeveloped woods. And I know the reason someone’s going to come back with: To install solar awnings over an existing Wal Mart parking lot, you need to tear up the asphalt to install power lines, build the actual structure, permitting is probably more expensive, and you have to have some or all of the parking lot down for awhile during construction restricting the use of the store. Meanwhile, clear cut 10 acres of forest and you get lumber to sell to a paper mill.
I disagree, only thinking we should cover EVERYTHING - any human building / structure etc should have solar all over. yeah, it’s not cheap to build them, but we should stop playing fuckaround and get it done, it’ll be cheaper to do it today than tomorrow.
They can, but when you have any alternative, Agrivoltaics aren’t very appealing.
You frequently end up deliberately setting up solar panels in suboptimal ways to let the plants get the light. So you end up having fewer panels and those panels not able to be used to their full potential at a given site.
So I absolutely vote for parking lots and rooftops to be the first order of business. Yes, Agrivoltaics as it comes to it if the alternative is losing cropland, but it seems like we have a long way to go before we have to make such compromises.
Also, can’t forget that those concerns come back when maintaining the panels. Along with the additional precautions needed to account for foot/other traffic.
i don’t understand it either, because there’s so little of it. and also, we know how to handle dangerous substances. like, asbestos stays dangerous forever.
Oh, this is one i actually know. I wish I could find the exact YouTube video where I learned it, butnuclear waste disposal is a massive long-term problem.
It boiled down to answering the question of - how do you prevent people from digging up all your buried nuclear waste for the tens of thousands of years it will continue to be radioactive? It was a super interesting watch, so I’ll see if I came find the vid after I get off work.
yeah “no great deed is commemorated here” etc etc etc. spooky stuff.
but… that’s also true for asbestos. except it’s worse because the moment you dig it gets worse, it can get into the water supply, and it doesn’t stop being dangerous. it’s carcinogenic forever. there are entire mining towns in canada that are condemned and cordoned off because of the risks of asbestos in the air.
like, there are as of right now two countries that have long-term storage plans for nuclear waste, and they both are “dig a big hole”. …okay? so just do that. there are thousands of abandoned mines that go down almost a kilometer where we have extracted millions, billions of tons of material. the total amount of nuclear waste ever produced is like… 200 000 tons. and uranium is dense, so by volume it’s not a lot. just fucking dump it in an old mine if you want.
or better yet… don’t! the fact that it is still radioactive means that it is still useful for generation. with the technology we have today, we can breed away like 40% into inert substances and new fuel. if we dump it all down a hole, what will happen is we’ll have to dig it back up again in 20 years because it’s too valuable to leave down there.
i used to live next to the biggest iron mine in the world, the luossavaara-kirunavaara mine. they have mountains of slag and waste product. far bigger than the actual mountain the mine is in. and in the mid-2000’s, they started mining the slag. because there’s still so much useful material in there.
That was always so frustrating and annoying to me. “We won’t invest money on nuclear power because someone in 10,000 years might get radiation poisoning from the waste we will carefully bury underground. So, let’s keep burning coal, pump the waste smoke into the air that will kill the atmosphere whitin three decades and give everyone radioactive poisoning, today!”
Humanity was handed the key to stop global warming dead in its tracks and skip straight to renewables with a healthy planet. But we can’t seem to resist the temptation of blowing people up for a slightly higher profit next quarter.
I think it’s basically what we’re already doing with spent nuclear fuel. I’m not aware of any actual real life examples of this being a problem. It seems like people who do know the nuclear fuel life cycle have got it figured out and “what do we do with all this waste?” is more of a hypothetical than an actual issue.
I recall that Canada was working on a long-term nuclear waste storage facility. I looked it up, it’s a 26 billion dollar project.
It’s not a hypothetical issue, it’s a political issue. Political issues are real issues.
You can’t blame Grassy Narrows first nation for opposing the location of the nuclear waste facility near their territory. It’s a community that’s been decimated by industrial waste.
I support nuclear technologies where sustainable energy isn’t feasible but I think people aren’t wrong to consider a waste a problem. It’s not an absolute showstopper, but it is something that is part of the challenge of building nuclear facilities.
Not only this, but research into nuclear waste processing, to make it safer to dispose and maybe even recyclable, is halted. There’s no research grants going there almost at all, because of the off chance it might turn into weapon’s grade fissionable material.
Not only their own waste, but other radionucleotides - it’s very impressive. I’d love to see a crash program to develop a modular thorium reactor that could eat this stuff.
They can use a part of their waste again as fuel. Therefore, they are a bit more efficient with their fuel. But they still require fuel and produce waste.
Until recently I thought that human waste wasn’t used for fertilizer, but I learned that it is. The water treatment plant separates the solids out, composts them, and then it’s sold as “biosolids” to spray on the crop fields.
Let this be your reminder to wash your veggies before eating them!
Composting kills bacteria and parasites when done properly. You should still wash your veggies, but composed human waste is wildly different from non composted human waste.
no radioactive waste to deal with either.
and with solar, most of the hardware can be recycled now into new units; with a 20 year lifespan, that’s going to pull thousands of kilowatts out of the sky, that’ll do just fine.
https://www.pv-tech.org/a-billion-dollar-industry-inside-the-growing-solar-panel-recycling-sector-in-the-us/
My main thing with solar is I wish they’d put panels over existing parking lots or large buildings. This is a thing that is already done in some places, this is a solved engineering problem, but in my area anywhere a solar farm has sprung up it’s been a field that previously either grew crops or was undeveloped woods. And I know the reason someone’s going to come back with: To install solar awnings over an existing Wal Mart parking lot, you need to tear up the asphalt to install power lines, build the actual structure, permitting is probably more expensive, and you have to have some or all of the parking lot down for awhile during construction restricting the use of the store. Meanwhile, clear cut 10 acres of forest and you get lumber to sell to a paper mill.
I disagree, only thinking we should cover EVERYTHING - any human building / structure etc should have solar all over. yeah, it’s not cheap to build them, but we should stop playing fuckaround and get it done, it’ll be cheaper to do it today than tomorrow.
But re: fields - they can do double duty via agrivoltaics - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics
They can, but when you have any alternative, Agrivoltaics aren’t very appealing.
You frequently end up deliberately setting up solar panels in suboptimal ways to let the plants get the light. So you end up having fewer panels and those panels not able to be used to their full potential at a given site.
So I absolutely vote for parking lots and rooftops to be the first order of business. Yes, Agrivoltaics as it comes to it if the alternative is losing cropland, but it seems like we have a long way to go before we have to make such compromises.
even if it improves the farming?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44264-025-00121-w
https://www.energy.gov/cmei/systems/articles/buzzing-around-solar-pollinator-habitat-under-solar-arrays
https://www.asce.org/publications-and-news/civil-engineering-source/article/2026/03/02/agrivoltaics-how-combining-solar-panels-and-farming-delivers-big-benefits
https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshpearce/2025/11/15/why-farmers-are-shielding-their-crops-with-solar-panels/
Also, can’t forget that those concerns come back when maintaining the panels. Along with the additional precautions needed to account for foot/other traffic.
It sucks though.
I don’t understand why waste was such a big anti-nuclear talking point. The raw material was mined. Just put the waste back in the same hole.
i don’t understand it either, because there’s so little of it. and also, we know how to handle dangerous substances. like, asbestos stays dangerous forever.
Oh, this is one i actually know. I wish I could find the exact YouTube video where I learned it, butnuclear waste disposal is a massive long-term problem.
It boiled down to answering the question of - how do you prevent people from digging up all your buried nuclear waste for the tens of thousands of years it will continue to be radioactive? It was a super interesting watch, so I’ll see if I came find the vid after I get off work.
yeah “no great deed is commemorated here” etc etc etc. spooky stuff.
but… that’s also true for asbestos. except it’s worse because the moment you dig it gets worse, it can get into the water supply, and it doesn’t stop being dangerous. it’s carcinogenic forever. there are entire mining towns in canada that are condemned and cordoned off because of the risks of asbestos in the air.
like, there are as of right now two countries that have long-term storage plans for nuclear waste, and they both are “dig a big hole”. …okay? so just do that. there are thousands of abandoned mines that go down almost a kilometer where we have extracted millions, billions of tons of material. the total amount of nuclear waste ever produced is like… 200 000 tons. and uranium is dense, so by volume it’s not a lot. just fucking dump it in an old mine if you want.
or better yet… don’t! the fact that it is still radioactive means that it is still useful for generation. with the technology we have today, we can breed away like 40% into inert substances and new fuel. if we dump it all down a hole, what will happen is we’ll have to dig it back up again in 20 years because it’s too valuable to leave down there.
i used to live next to the biggest iron mine in the world, the luossavaara-kirunavaara mine. they have mountains of slag and waste product. far bigger than the actual mountain the mine is in. and in the mid-2000’s, they started mining the slag. because there’s still so much useful material in there.
That was always so frustrating and annoying to me. “We won’t invest money on nuclear power because someone in 10,000 years might get radiation poisoning from the waste we will carefully bury underground. So, let’s keep burning coal, pump the waste smoke into the air that will kill the atmosphere whitin three decades and give everyone radioactive poisoning, today!”
Humanity was handed the key to stop global warming dead in its tracks and skip straight to renewables with a healthy planet. But we can’t seem to resist the temptation of blowing people up for a slightly higher profit next quarter.
yeah it seems really simple, but then, you have the realities:
lots of uranium mining is open pits. like this one in namibia -
-
that’s not going to keep stuff in one place.
transporting it, hell even getting the producers to agree to accepting it for storage - would be a political nightmare.
even in places where it was mined underground, you have water tables to worry about. it’s simply not that simple.
I also don’t know a lot about the nuclear fuel life cycle, but don’t you think it might be more complicated than this?
I think it’s basically what we’re already doing with spent nuclear fuel. I’m not aware of any actual real life examples of this being a problem. It seems like people who do know the nuclear fuel life cycle have got it figured out and “what do we do with all this waste?” is more of a hypothetical than an actual issue.
I recall that Canada was working on a long-term nuclear waste storage facility. I looked it up, it’s a 26 billion dollar project.
It’s not a hypothetical issue, it’s a political issue. Political issues are real issues.
You can’t blame Grassy Narrows first nation for opposing the location of the nuclear waste facility near their territory. It’s a community that’s been decimated by industrial waste.
I support nuclear technologies where sustainable energy isn’t feasible but I think people aren’t wrong to consider a waste a problem. It’s not an absolute showstopper, but it is something that is part of the challenge of building nuclear facilities.
Not only this, but research into nuclear waste processing, to make it safer to dispose and maybe even recyclable, is halted. There’s no research grants going there almost at all, because of the off chance it might turn into weapon’s grade fissionable material.
Thorium reactors can use their own waste as fuel.
Not only their own waste, but other radionucleotides - it’s very impressive. I’d love to see a crash program to develop a modular thorium reactor that could eat this stuff.
They can use a part of their waste again as fuel. Therefore, they are a bit more efficient with their fuel. But they still require fuel and produce waste.
Until recently I thought that human waste wasn’t used for fertilizer, but I learned that it is. The water treatment plant separates the solids out, composts them, and then it’s sold as “biosolids” to spray on the crop fields.
Let this be your reminder to wash your veggies before eating them!
Composting kills bacteria and parasites when done properly. You should still wash your veggies, but composed human waste is wildly different from non composted human waste.
That’s not what that word means
Kind of like humans.