Comments by "justgivemethetruth" (@justgivemethetruth) on "Can Nuclear Energy Help Solve Climate Change?" video.

famous last words
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Let's first talk about what the major problems that generate global warming are. One is human agriculture ... a huge amount of greehouse gases comes from the way we farm, and particularly eat meat. That can be managed if we re-forest the planet. The other major problem is human population. We need to let the population decrease naturally, and that will play havoc with the way we have done the economy for unlimited growth. So, anything we do that will save us requires human lifestyles on planet Earth, especially human life in the developed world to change for the better. This is as big a challenge as just plain global warming, and is probably why we will fail. renewables are perfect. i am going to get solar panels and batteries for my house at some point, soon. but, just think of a scenario where there is a catastrophe like a huge super-volcano explodes like Krakatoa and spews ash high into the upper atmosphere where it travels around the world and attenuates the sunlight, say 50%. Almost all of that solar infrastructure would be useless. Or, consider that they are talking about a meteor strike sometime in the near future, or maybe in the next 200 years and it kicks up dust and debris into the sky and cuts off a lot of solar. We would need either some way to put the solar panels out in space and safely beam that energy back to the Earth through the atmosphere, or a way to generate energy, and food even, on the face of the planet. If sunlight is attenuated so would our agriculture be. We would have to grow huge amounts of food by artificial light. I admit these scenarios are probably low probability, but are they completely unlikely? Why does it not make sense to find a way to manage this technology for its ability to create almost unlimited energy?
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The problem with nuclear power has always been the human factors and the economics in its design and maintenance. I think it would be much less expensive and safe to run the nuclear power industry through the government, possible connected to NASA or even DARPA while funding other technology, such that safety and redundancy was the issue, not profit. Cutting building, training and salary costs to funnel profits to some investors who are not even local most of the time and do not care about how the plants are run is the problem. But I have to say unless people are satisfied about safety and the costs I'd be happier doing nothing with nuclear rather than giving it to the private capitalists to screw and put us all in danger.
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lots of people like you have seen the thorium video and are suddenly willing to believe the hype through re-branding.
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@jb678901 This issue is not going to won by scientists' or engineer's claims. You guys who work for nuclear, coal or oil companies have proven over and over again that you lie, cost-cut and cannot be trusted to do anything but support the claims of your companies. That is virtually always the answer of scientists who have wrecked their brand and blown their image ... we know all this stuff, and everyone else has to go back and study it. Yet the designs are not open and the criticisms are not published. They should be, nuclear and energy technology companies in general have a lot to do to fix their images before anyone is going to trust them again. Here is the problem with the nuclear industry, thorium or uranium or whatever ... https://youtu.be/H6mhw-CNxaE?t=964
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@MS-ev6bd You have to be at least fair when you talk about nuclear power. If I remember right Hanford was one of the places where they made material for the early bombs, and the contamination around it is very old because they did not even think about such things back then. It is a toxic environmental mess that can take up to 100 billion to remediate, from Michael Lewis's recent book The Fifth Risk. But nuclear is much different today than then. I don't know if companies behave any more responsibly though, that is the issue for me.
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@MS-ev6bd Dead loved ones? Prove it.
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exactly, there is the real root cause of our problem
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This guy is being dishonest about the disaster of Fukushima. There were workers that went in there working that got lethal doses of radiation, but they had to go in and do the world because no one else could. We never heard a damn thing about those workers. I support bringing nuclear back under strictly controlled conditions - non-profit, run by the government, but one of the things that needs to happen is it should be open, the public should get all the data on the operations, and they need to be strictly regulated.
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The other thing about a lot of this is that radiation is not well understood by people. There are several things to think about. 1. The radiation from for example, uranium, is different from its chemical toxicity. Uranium is a heavy metal like lead, and we know what lead does from the Flint water crisis. Uranium chemically is toxic to people if they get it on or in their bodies, as separate from the radioativity. 2. When they say that something has a very-long half life, that means it is not giving off that much radiation, it decays slowly. Think of a big tank with a hole in it. The amount of radiation is the water inside. If the water is leaking from a small hole, it has a long half-life A water leak is different from radiation because it is linear pretty much and radiation is exponential. 3. When they say something is very radioactive, it means it is giving off a lot of radiation, and decays fast. That is why the half-life is likely to be short. For some elements that can mean seconds. 4. Then there is the effect on the human body of radiation. This is still not that well understood, or at least publicly explained. There is radiation from radioactive stuff outside your body, and there is radiation from radioactive stuff inside your body. For example iodine from fallout lands in a field and a cow eats the grass and that grass is turned into milk and a human drinks it and it is absorbed into possible causing some common cancers: Adrenal cancer risk is especially high in people who had the medullary type of thyroid cancer. Patients treated with radioactive iodine also have an increased risk of acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL), stomach cancer, and salivary gland cancer. Nuclear is not the total disaster we all have been led to believe. I say that not because I take it lightly, there is a huge global mess to clean up from careless and incompetent use and handling of radiactive materials, but it can be handled safely.
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