Asklemmy

43946 readers

593 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

323

Why has the world started to mine coal again? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

309 comments fedilink hide all child comments

With climate change looming, it seems so completely backwards to go back to using it again.

Is it coal miners pushing to keep their jobs? Fear of nuclear power? Is purely politically motivated, or are there genuinely people who believe coal is clean?

Edit, I will admit I was ignorant to the usage of coal nowadays.

Now I'm more depressed than when I posted this

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

https://whatisnuclear.com/nuclear-sustainability.html

Several other studies estimate 90 thousand years. All of this is Uranium alone.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I don't think I buy it. Like, there is a lot of uranium around the world, but most of it is prohibitively expensive to mine, the mining itself is extremely destructive, Australia has the largest uranium reserves but most of the rest is in the hands of authoritarian fuckwits like China and Russia, society's collapsing into wars and suffering climate catastrophes around the world so the safety of nuclear plants is increasingly in doubt, it takes decades to build them...

Honestly, if we're gonna spend decades on clean energy megaprojects, wouldn't it be better to go with something like a space solar power station which is a lot safer and the rectennas on the surface a lot easier to fix and replace?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You think mining for solar panels is free or something?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Out in space, it'll unironically be exponentially cheaper both financially and in terms of he environmental damage caused by surface mining as the decade goes on. We actually could get a lot of material to make mirrors to bounce sunlight around from lunar regolith, and where you have mirrors and a liquid to heat up, like water, you have a solar thermal generator, and up in space, that kind of a generator can provide endless amounts of power.

I feel it'd be a better investment than nuclear and all of its political problems.