Comment by stymaar
10 hours ago
Decomissionning is a made-up issue: no other industrial activity is expected to return clean nature after they stopped operating, even mundane things like business offices real estate or highways wouldn't be economically viable if they had to provision for decommissioning.
You could clean up the high activity thing and let the buildings and their asbestos in place and nuclear decommissioning would still be more environmentally friendly than every other heavy industry.
I have a family member working for a Canadian company that steps in after a mine has stopped operating. It cleans up and remediates the surrounding land and water to minimize environmental impact. This is usually a thorough process that takes a long time. Many months or years.
> Decomissionning is a made-up issue: no other industrial activity is expected to return clean nature after they stopped operating,
That is factually wrong. Coal mining has to re-naturalize the areas used for mining after the coal was removed.
And most industries are supposed to not just leave toxic waste and instead have a plan what to do with toxic waste products these days. And no, an empty building cannot be compared to radioactive waste.
You throw the radioactive waste in a breeder reactor and make more fuel out of it. It's really not that hard.
They consider the concrete around the plant's parking lot to be nuclear waste though (I'm not kidding, that's how the French regulations works).
Wind farms are expected to a account for it and it is routinely included in cost calculations.
> no other industrial activity is expected to return clean nature after they stopped operating,
Oil and gas extraction platforms here in Norway, I believe.
> no other industrial activity is expected to return clean
Does not mean it's a made up issue. That's classic whataboutism. Ecologists are not concerned just about nuclear activity, but precisely about the overall industry destroying our entire environment, and for whose profit?!
Funny how all that concern they have never manifests for wind and solar power.
Nor do I see a great deal of concern for manufacturing, as long as it is done somewhere else. If it done here: it is super dirty and dangerous, jobs no one wants. Elsewhere: what great opportunity for them to rise out from poverty. The fact that the environmental regulations are nonexistent, either never brought up or dismissed because we can't regulate another government.