You are totally ignoring the massive costs associated with nuclear power stations - the construction costs are huge and the decommissioning costs are equally prohibitive - look at the billions that the UK government are spending on decommissioning their older nuclear stations - funded from taxation.
And you are trying to equate the radiation from some of the nuclear waste to that of fly ash arising from coal.
Generally, your contributions on most topics are well balanced, but on this issue, you have a total blind spot.
I'm not ignoring those costs. It's not going to be cheap to get to net zero. Yes, they're high.
But renewables have fundamental problems rooted in physics that are likely to make net zero using them impossible. It might be possible in Ireland, because as a very windy small country, it's probable that Ireland can get 100% of energy* requirements, but few other countries in europe, not to mind the world, are likely to be able to achieve it. Good research saying it's impossible in the UK without enormous environmental costs. So while nuclear is expensive, there is no question at all that we can achieve net zero with it within the next couple of decades. The only blockers are financial and logistical, it can be done with existing technologies, if we have the will.
The same is not true of renewables.
I don't need to equate the radiation from nuclear waste and fly ash, fly ash from coal
IS nuclear waste. Yet nobody seems to give much of a shit that it's just piled up next to power stations:
Them pesky greenhouse gases might not be the worst thing coming out of fossil fuels.
www.sciencefocus.com
"The exact amounts depend on the source of the coal, but are usually in the range of a few parts per million. That might not sound a lot until you realise that a typical gigawatt-capacity coal power station burns several million tonnes of coal per year. That means every such station creates fly ash containing around 5-10 tonnes of uranium and thorium each year.
According to estimates by the US Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the world’s coal-fired power stations currently generate waste containing around 5,000 tonnes of uranium and 15,000 tonnes of thorium. Collectively, that’s over 100 times more radiation dumped into the environment than that released by nuclear power stations."
What's even worse is that coal plants actually send some of that waste into the atmosphere. Imagine a nuclear power plant that deliberately sent radiative waste into the atmosphere just as part of operations. People would lose their minds. But that is the reality of coal fired plants today. The only way that happens with a nuclear power plant is with a fire that breaches the core, and there have only ever been a handful of those incidents globally.
And the fallout from those very, very rare occurrences is less than is generally appreciated, as I said, in Fukishima, the supposed danger zones are as irradiated as 20% of homes in Sligo.
Hence why I think the risks are massively overblown. That misunderstanding of risk is the primary driver of huge construction and decommissioning costs.
*Note the difference between energy and electricity. Right now, a lot of energy requirements such as home heating are from fossil fuels, so electricity use is going to have to massively increase to get to net zero.
