Official 2020 US Election: Democratic Party Discussion

[Bofferbrauer2]

the-pi-guy said:

HylianSwordsman said:
After that amazing climate plan from Bernie, if Inslee doesn't endorse him, his entire candidacy was a joke.

https://earther.gizmodo.com/bernie-sanders-climate-plan-is-nothing-short-of-a-revol-1837456120

This reminds me of one of the things about Bernie that I don't agree with.  

He's anti-nuclear and that's very much written into his plan.  

Same here. But that's also about his only weakness

HylianSwordsman said:

Alright, I'll give you a chance to defend this. Why nuclear? Because as far as I can see, it's a dead industry dragging the green movement down, and we'd be better off investing billions into fusion than trying to keep alive a failing fission industry. Everyone I've talked to so far just repeats talking points from the nuclear industry.

Several points and reasons:

1. Fusion is still a long ways off. We're only achieved a quarter of a second of stable fusion right now, and we still need to inject more power than we gain from it. So we still need something else for the baseline energy. I don't expect to have a stable fusion test reactor before the mid 2030's, and a fusion production reactor before the 2050's, so we need something to bridge that gap.

2. The aforementioned baseline energy. Renewables alone are too shaky in their power output, too dependent on factors we don't have any influence over. Batteries can only do so much to smooth that out. At current tech, you would need a battery as large as Wyoming to ensure that all the fluctuations  can be taken hold of just for the US. That's just not feasible or practical at any level right now. Granted, there are already some battery plants, and electric cars on charge can be used as temporary batteries, but that would need to be massively scaled up, and these things need tons of space, which isn't always easy to come by.

3. While I do support nuclear, I don't support extending the lifetimes of the old, existing nuclear power plants. Those are outdated and unsafe and need to be replaced. All those second generation nuclear reactors would need to be shut down as soon as possible and replaced by Gen 3/3+, which are designed with safety in mind. 3 mile, Tchernobyl, Fukushima, neither of those 3 would have happened with a gen 3 design as they are inherently safe against those types of accidents (in fact, they were designed after the first two to avoid such problems in the future). The reason those are not built is because they are much more expensive to build than second gen reactors, limiting profits of nuclear companies, and there we need legislative changes to force them to build newer and stop extending the lifetimes of old the existing ones.

4. I also stress that we need to find a final storage for nuclear waste first. This is also one advantage of some 3rd gen reactors: they can also run on MOX, which means they can also use those weaker fission materials as fuels, reducing the nuclear waste we already have at hand. It ain't a final solution however, and we need to find one first.