Midnight in Chernobyl is a great book about the accident. My husband and I thought it was very good. There’s also a HBO series.
Chernobyl was an accident that would never happen in the US for many reasons. Including that reactor was never used in the US and should have never been used in the USSR.
You can be for nuclear power generation or not. But know that it is very highly regulated in the US. Something has to be done to generate the power we are all accustomed to here. I said it before pick your poison. But it won’t be coal.
It is not his job to get anyone to believe. It is our job to comb through available information to decide on our own as we consider our options for future energy source. We have, wood, coal, oil/gas, solar, wind, nuclear. I used to think solar. We have to separate what happens in Ukraine and Japan or the US. There have been additional safety measures instituted, many layers. That is probably there was lower level of radiation from Three Mile island and Fukushima.
I’m still voting solar as the best option, esp as more technology develops and more ideas come forward like putting panels on/as rooftops of parking lots, etc. I think we’ll always need some fossil fuel for things like commercial aircraft and as backups, but using less is far better for our planet and us humans (as well as other critters).
Some folks have figured out how to make solar siding.
Some energy harvesting means are better adapted to certain situations than others. A backyard wind turbine in our yard? No thanks. A solar roof? Why not. Likewise, a solar farm makes zero sense in some situations while a turbine farm might make sense. Nothing against nuclear here, but I doubt any CC poster would want one literally in their backyard.
Or coal mining or fracking. It’s always fine if it’s in someone else’s backyard. Fracking has done major issues to water supplies around it. Not long ago at least one company had to pay out on it according to our TV news. Money doesn’t fix the past though - and I’m not sure it’s fixed for the present either.
Has anyone here been to Chernobyl? I have. Recently I was writing about it and assembling some details. The land in the exclusion zone will not be habitable for agriculture and long-term habitation for 20,000 years. The exclusion zone is about 1000 square miles in Ukraine with more in Belarus that is separately administered. Read accounts of the short takeover of Chernobyl by Russians in February. Trenches were built in heavily contaminated soil, leading to increased radiation levels. Russian soldiers were reportedly treated for radiation illness. The disaster back in 1986 was the result of a very human error and poor channels of communication as well as the obfuscating of truth rampant in the former Soviet Union. I’m glad no one advocating for nuclear power still thinks that could be an issue in future. Sadly, I have seen errors in my workplace and in communication.
Heck, the risks due to current battles raging around the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station, in southern Ukraine, the largest in Europe are enough to give one pause about nuclear energy. Is another exclusion zone possible? France has done a nice job with their nuclear power plants. It sounds great and has been great for many areas here and abroad though I don’t know the details. But how can anyone predict political calm or lack of natural disaster at a certain site on earth for any number of thousands of years?
I do find poetic justice in the fact that the area in and around the reactors in Chernobyl are powered by solar panels.
I think we’d learn better studying Fukushima than Chernobyl.
With solar and wind, the biggest issue will be storage. Can we produce enough in winter months? If not, do we produce during summer and store to use in winter? If we can manage with rooftop solar panels and garage wall batteries during winter for everything, heating and all other needs, we should be all set. If not, solar and wind need a backup, gas/oil. That is why pollution in Vermont went up 16% when they converted to solar. The opposite of what we’d like. No idea if it is something we can overcome by technical advance.
@mathmom, does your solar take care of all your energy need including heating and cooling? Both in winter and summer?
Explain this further. How does using solar instead of some fossil fuels cause pollution to go up? Seems any reduction would cause it to go down, unless they’re factoring in the “cost” of set up.
If I use solar for some of our electric needs - been using it for our electric fence for decades now with no issues at all overnight or winter - how does that make my contribution to pollution go up? Same goes for our getting solar panels in the future. It may not eliminate our electric needs entirely, but it ought to make a significant dent, so how does pollution go up if we need less gas/oil?
I think Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Zaporizhzhia need to be considered. There are accidents (doesn’t have to be the same type), disasters, and evil people out there. The effects are incredible and nothing we can fix if something goes really wrong.
It takes care of the cooling - we have two mini-splits serving two sides of the house. (Some would want more units for attics and two bedroom which we just cool during the day by leaving the door to our Master bedroom open.) We have gas heat, but one of the units actually does heating as well, as we used it to replace a radiator that leaked on us twice and I got tired if replacing it.
My biggest worry is Zaporizhzhia. As I said, there are a lot of evil people out there. But perhaps I defer back to my AF training where it was drilled into us to look at all failures (and successes) to be best prepared for future events. But you’re right, to each their own. I prefer solar to nuclear. I might prefer nuclear to gas/oil if it came to a vote of some sort.
Very little petroleum is used in electricity generation (Hawaii being the main exception), since its advantages are most relevant for transportation but less so for fixed generation. To the extent that other sources can substitute for petroleum, it is mainly replacing liquid fueled vehicles with those powered otherwise (e.g. electric vehicles that get electricity from non-petroleum sources).
Thanks @mathmom It looks like most single family homes can power themselves fully. I wonder why we need ginormous solar farms. Is individual household not the major consumer of the power?
Industrial factory, schools, stores, municipal buildings are a few non residential places that use electricity. Probably can’t get enough solar generation for all of the places that need it.
I do see some K-12 schools putting big solar arrays over parking lots, where they both generate electricity and provide shade and rain cover over the parking lots.
Also, since US K-12 schools tend to dismiss before peak electricity rate hours, their electricity use pattern can at least theoretically be well matched to solar generation (i.e. it may not matter if the school building is allowed to get a bit warm in the evening with the air conditioning off if there is no one there at the time).
About 38% consumption is residential, 34% commercial, 25% industrial, 0.2% transportation currently. Residential consumption is major. Of course, not all residential homes are single family. Still, that alone seems to do a lot without a solar farm.
