not nearly as bad. Orion would throw nuclear waste behind you, literal fallout would occur. Fusion should only kill people looking at it.
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That’s probably why fussion reactors are placed underground, sheltering what’s outside from them…
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Really old thread, but a “fissile” isotope undergoes fission when struck by a thermal (“slow”) neutron, “fissionable” isotopes undergo fission when struck by a fast neutron (fissile isotopes also qualify as being fissionable), and “fertile” isotopes can capture a neutron to become fissile or fissionable.
Thorium is also not really that much safer than Uranium, as reactor design is much more important than the fission qualities of the isotopes. Modern reactors do exist (small modular reactors and molten salt reactors), and these have passive safety systems that are effectively foolproof. Even a dated plant like Fukushima barely failed, and only really failed because it was faced with an unexpectedly disastrous tsunami. There are plants that use dated tech, but it’s, pardon my rudeness, actually very uninformed to imagine that nuclear plants are “fundamentally the same” since the 1970s.
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With how there are plans atm to miniaturize and build NPPs everywhere, would it increase the chance that overall one of em fails even despite better security with em?
Nuclear Power Plants? Technically yes, but passive safety systems, by nature of working structurally, are almost impossible to fail (especially the passive safety systems inherent to Molten Salt Reactors and especially to fusion reactors). A passive safety system is the opposite of an active one in more ways than just the name; typically an active safety system interrupts a passive (or comparatively passive) process, while passive safety systems usually interrupt active processes. That’s why MSRs and fusion reactors are basically impossible to catastrophically melt down; a meltdown in one of these systems doesn’t release hazards to the outside world, but merely destroys the capacity of the reactor to produce anything (remember that the hazard is uncontrolled and uncontained reactions, but fission requires maintaining geometry, density, and the proper interaction of different substances and temperatures to work, so fission related materials deprived of this will, like fire, just become cold chemistry again, and fusion is even more fragile), either temporarily or permanently.
Though if enough of em are around and enough time is at hand, that chance would increase right?
Technically, and naturally. Although, the more systems are online, the more chances for updates to nuclear safety operations can be made. Fukushima taught the nuclear industry valuable lessons about site risk, for example. These systems are far, far better than what came before them, and nuclear safety has come a long, long way, so nuclear anxiety is one of the only anxieties in the modern world that I can confidently say is overblown.
…While fossil fuels continue to empty their waste right into the very air we breathe.
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Exactly. Coal plants actually subject nearby residents to more annual ionizing radiation than fission plants do.
I was also about to say that. Aren’t mine waste hills also more radioactive than actual nuclear waste?
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Something like that, though I’m pretty sure a lot of that comes actually from Uranium waste that is discarded somewhere along the way, which decays into Radium and Radon. A lot of this decay happens underground though, hence why Radon gas is a common mining hazard (and perhaps something about the way that coal is harvested and transported, naturally being in crude bulk, causes coal mining and plants to less safely manage this waste and these hazards). Generally, it’s more of a mining problem than specifically a coal problem, but you need a lot more mining to generate power by coal than by nuclear, so it’s more of a rounding error for nuclear than it is for coal. Oil is, funny enough, better for the environment for coal, just because oil extraction is a lot less damaging, and oil is also needed for a lot of industrial processes that coal isn’t, so on a side note, we’re never getting rid of oil, but coal has got to go.
Is gas also better than coal?
It’s more similar to oil in the way you extract it, but these gasses are, as you might expect, often greenhouse gasses (like methane), so any leakage (accidental or mundane) will contribute a small but meaningful amount to climate change. Harvesting enough for industry is no problem, but harvesting the amount needed for power generation isn’t ideal.
How reduced do you think oil industry could become in its final state?
I don’t know. Petroleum products are extremely important, but only 10-15% of oil goes to non-energy roles. (as per the stupid Google AI overview; at least there is enough data that I can kinda trust it on this particular topic). Of course, most of the “energy” roles are merely transportation (60-70% of the total), while the rest goes into powering machinery, heating, and the energy grid.
It will still eventually run out so still we’d need to find out how to replace it right?
Certainly. Though oil is the most efficient way we know of to create hydrocarbons, “hydro-” is everywhere and “carbons” are found in asteroids and are cultivated by large self-replicating machines (life), so it can’t be too hard to replace it when push comes to shove.
I wonder if oil industry will stay spread out between its many extractor countries after the fall in demand or if one or few countries will come to inherit the lion’s share of it…