Eh? Germany does not share borders with Russia, and assuming "other" refers to Poland and/or Czechia (formerly part of Czechoslovakia), they were not in the fifteen states of the Soviet Union.

Finland, who do border Russia, cancelled a contract for a new nuclear plant after the invasion of Ukraine - not out of fear of invasion, but because the construction firm was Russian; they have continued with adding an additional Swedish-built reactor to one of their existing plants.

Or maybe, we're currently like a kid who leaves the crust from their sandwiches, and eventually we'll learn processes that improve reprocessing and allow us to stop wasting the energy which remains in used fuel rods.

El Nino has changed my shop work hours to night crew.

Too hot in Tx to work outdoors in the daytime. At least 90F at night is bearable.

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/new...r-18171869.php

No other energy source has the potential to cause areas of the earth too radioacative and toxic to sustain life for hundreds of thousands of years, only Nuclear. I am waiting to see if Fusion power does better, but that is far from ready for production use. I stand by my earlier statement. Fusion is an excellent short term solution, but should not be considered as a long term solution. The risks, long term, are greater than the benefits.

Full disclaimer: my first degree was in Physics.

I think there's a sad side to this.

This thread has already made clear that mankind is wreaking havoc to this planet in a number of ways, chief among these being using too much energy, burning too much fossil fuels and farming far too many animals for meat & dairy consumption. There is no way the earth can support this.

The fact is that the changes required are would result in widespread impoverishment. Even dictators with the army in their pockets Like Lukashenko or that guy in Venezuela (whose name escapes me) would have great difficulty in forcing them through. Other administrations have zero chance.

Absent a change in these habits, and the kind of change required will remain absent, what you're talking about is like polishing the brasses on the Titanic or the Lusitania. The Lusitania was only hit by one torpedo, but that exploded near the bow just where the munitions this "neutral" ship was carrying were stored. The munitions blew the bow away, and it went down very quickly indeed. The foretold alternative of Divine Intervention has already been mentioned, and scorned.
Can we please stop polishing the brasses, and put our minds to solving the existential issues?

While I certainly do respect your efforts to achieve a degree in Physics (mine is only in Engineering, specifically Electrical) is yours in Nuclear Physics? However far more importantly and apart from potential, here is the actual track record.

The first time nuclear energy production was caused and observed was in 1932. Just 10 years later the first nuclear reactor energy producing facility was created. Globally, hundreds of plants soon followed but by the 1970s (notably shortly after such overblown freakout fiction like the aforementioned "China Syndrome" movie) growing public protests began to curtail and cancel large numbers of planned facilities. Aside from the "melt a hole through the planet" absurdities there were real concerns, some about radiation leaks but the area of greatest concern to governments, and not at all without reason, was the potential for using materials stolen or side-stepped from energy production to weaponry.

At the substantially reduced rates of scheduled construction by the 1980s (from Wikipedia - History of nuclear power) still about "every 17 days a new facility went online globally". As an example by 2019, 71% of French electricity was generated by 58 reactors, the highest percentage by any nation in the world. The global majority of all these many hundreds of facilities were and are currently of the submarine derived design requiring constant water cooling. Despite what should be obvious about the inherent problems of the complexity of water cooling requirements the number of deaths caused by these many hundreds of facilities is less than one (1) per facility. Over almost 100 years, more deaths have been caused just by fertilizer explosions than nuclear accidents.

These historical facts exist as indisputable despite the concomitant fact that chemical interaction has thousands of years of history and experience while nuclear has slightly less than 100. This record exists despite the early mistake of trying to use a water cooling system design on land. Modern designs, devoid of the complexity of the sensors, pumps, pipes, reservoirs and controls required for water cooling are vastly safer than even those existing previous designs levels. Additionally the startup costs per megawatt of produced energy are a fraction of water cooled design. Also, some designs actually reduce the production availability of fissionable materials as well as nuclear waste and in a few cases actually safely dispose of such already existing materials.

Any time we are considering the production of vast amounts of energy there are risks because vast amounts of energy can do vast amounts of work whether beneficial or detrimental. Simply put, Living involves Risk. Currently and globally approximately 100,000 deaths occur each and every year from vehicle related road injuries. The best we can do is to minimize risk of detrimental results compared to the beneficial results. Very few people will give up the value of mobility, even for just commuting to employment, to avoid such a huge scale of risk because the benefits are so high compared to the perceived risk ... and that's what this is really all about - perception of risk in proportion to the facts.

As Business_kid says, it may be too late to deal with the problems now without hopelessly impoverishing ourselves. But the irony is that we could have dealt with them easily when global warming was first discovered by the Club of Rome back in the 1970's. As they showed in their model projections, all that was required then to avert catastrophe was somewhat slower economic growth. We would then have reached environmental equilibrium by the turn of the century.

Why did this not happen? For two reasons:

1) Slower growth would have required more redistribution of resources from the rich North to the poor South to avoid bloody wars. Rapid economic growth was the magic formula that could make the poor richer without the rich having to give up anything.

2) Because of the nature of exponential change, the visible temperature increases in the 1970's were small enough to be discounted as artefacts. By the time they grew large enough to be inescapable, they were too large for us to cope with without totally impoverishing ourselves.

To you guys leaning back on your degrees, don't let them expand your estimation of yourself.

While I respect your addressing the history, I notice that you ignore the details about storage of nuclear waste, and the disparity between the expected lifespan of the storage compared to the expected lifespan of the thread from the contents.

Nuclear accidents have potential to do great damage, as we have seen in several examples. That we can address with better engineering, and we have. Nuclear "accidents" in time of war cannot be addressed by better engineering alone. As long as we continue to use nuclear power we will continue to make it safer from accidents and as clean as we know how, but fission power will always be dirty. Fusion power might be a solution, but it is not ready for prime time and may never be ready: only time will tell.

No matter how safe the technology, it is the threat from human misuse that is the greatest risk to us, the environment, and life.

No current solar, wind, wave, or geothermal power generation is a significant threat. (Although misuse does have the potential to have a localized negative effect, we have better engineering to remediate that and reduce or eliminate the threat.) In no case does any green, clean energy solution cause a lasting threat to life that fission nuclear waste does.

Note: I did not argue AGAINST using nuclear power, just that it is a stopgap fill for fossil fuels that should be eliminate as soon as we have enough other and cleaner energy sources to replace it. I believe we could, if motivated, be on totally green energy within 22 years, With some help form Nuclear power we can be that clean without causing needless pain or inconvenience within 54 years. Either way there will be pain, form the changes due to global warming that have already begun and that cannot be prevented. (We can REDUCE the pain, but not eliminate it. Had we acted at any time before the mid 1980s we might have headed this off almost entirely, and we should have, but recognizing that does not help. We have to take smart steps form where we are to get the best outcome we can.)

Seems not: US public wants climate change dealt with, but doesn't like the options:

(This is about the US, but I expect at least all Western countries would have similar poll results. If anyone knows otherwise, I'm happy to be proved wrong.)

I can speak for the European Block as we have the utterances of the European Commission in our news feed. You're dead right. I'm dead right. Revelation 11:18 agrees also.

That's what makes this thread a little pointless and sad. The problem could have been solved decades ago, but wasn't. It's crazy difficult to solve now, but if we united we might still get it done. But with power blocks in conflict, we're going to achieve nothing. Farming here is only economic grass feeding animals. There's >25% reduction in greenhouse gases being demanded of them, and they're howling. But increased herd size means increased methane. No Government can take on that lobby and win. It's unclear what's going to happen, because greenhouse gas reduction will rob them of their livelihood.

A similar reduction in greenhouse gas emission is now being imposed on farmers also across Europe (Holland, Denmark et.c.).
Many countries have for some years in fact reduced their emissions significant, without any visible effect on the growth of atmospheric CO2 content.
The graph from NOAA is a mystery as birth rates are low worldwide, except for some countries in Africa (with per capita emission of greenhouse gas extremely low).
Recent firestorms may play a role, and if they do we may have reached one (of many possible) tipping points - meaning that the effect of mankind's many efforts to this day for lowering CO2 output now may be counterbalanced by natural feed-back mechanisms.
(Not to be an alarmist, and just a thought)

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You can reduce methane emissions from cattle about 20% by supplementing feed with certain seaweeds. (cheap) The cattle seem to like it. There may be other ways we can reduce methane at scale, research is ongoing.

I am convinced that animal sources are NOT the issue. Industrial and commercial sources from fossil fuels and chemical production are the factor that was new with the advent of the industrial revolution. Wild or domesticated, the animals were here without causing a problem for millions of years. Deflecting the attention to livestock might actually help, but only if we do not take our attention off of the other (and arguably more responsible) factors.

Many savings are in fact being made, but when you take stock of the totals, they seem pointless in terms of effect. Some are dutifully saving kilos while others squander tons. What makes it worse is that positive feedback effects such as melting ice and rewetting bogs or wetlands release methane, a potent warming gas. We are far enough into positive feedback that we cannot look forward to overall savings in the long term to save us.

You'll notice that the Governments who do anything are polishing the brasses on a ship that is sinking. So they count CO2, save a little CO2, talk about the futuire, and pat themselves on the back. They don't want to talk about methane, and get themselves voted out of office. The Scripture I quoted in post #670 is actually on the nail, but nobody wants to think about that either. Who would foresee these events nearly 2000 years in advance?

you do have to look at the bigger picture, it has several layers:
#1 Governments and industries making attempts to reduce greenhouse gas production - any effort here is good but is inadequate by itself.
#2 Group (multiple industries, scientists, and countries) designing new efforts or technologies to attach or contain greenhouse gasses. None of these is enough, but several together may have more effect than all of the purely government efforts together.
#3 Environmentlists (Scientists and otherwise) monitoring and bringing attention to new factors, old ignored factors, and the changing situation. Some of these taking political action to FORCE attention onto a problem.
#4 others that I cannot think about until after my next cup of coffee. (Currently running on three cylinders, sorry.)

It is not the effect of one thing that got us here. it will not be the effect of one thing that decides if we survive or die.

The amount of domesticated animals today is several times higher than the amount of wild animals that used to exist: https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mamm...ncreased-a-lot