251–260 of 679 posts
Two important points: 1. What about wind and solar? 2. The death/unit energy misses out the fact that we spend a lot more to keep nuclear safe because we are worried about it. If we spent a fraction of the same amount on other energy, we might get similar safety results.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fukushima was safe, by all standards. This was not related to corruption. It was simply not designed for the rarity of a magnitude 9 earthquake and the scale of the tsunami that followed. Your house in a five hundred year floodplain is not unsafe for lacking stilts. Safety costs money, this wasn't corruption.
How can you say it was safe with a straight face when it clearly wasn't? That's like saying your car is fine when it's smashed upside-down in a ditch on the side of the highway. If some standards claimed it was safe, then those standards were simply wrong. By other standards (including, most importantly, reality), it definitely wasn't safe.
When you bought the car, did you think it was safe? Did it pass the government tests, even ones you think might be a bit ridiculous? Were you under the impression it was designed to withstand being upside-down in a ditch?
In all reality, the car was safe when it was new. It simply wasn't designed to withstand such an accident because such a thing is pretty rare in everyday vehicles, although it happens. Some vehicles have such safety precautions, but only when the situation seems to warrant it (a Jeep, for example).
The nuclear plant was the same. It was safe when it was built, only it wasn't designed to handle that magnitude of earthquake because that strength is rare, especially for that area. This is despite designing it to withstand stronger than ever recorded earthquakes. Sure, afterwards the plant was unsafe, but so are many cars after accidents.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fukushima was safe, by all standards. This was not related to corruption. It was simply not designed for the rarity of a magnitude 9 earthquake and the scale of the tsunami that followed. Your house in a five hundred year floodplain is not unsafe for lacking stilts. Safety costs money, this wasn't corruption.
How can you say it was safe with a straight face when it clearly wasn't? That's like saying your car is fine when it's smashed upside-down in a ditch on the side of the highway. If some standards claimed it was safe, then those standards were simply wrong. By other standards (including, most importantly, reality), it definitely wasn't safe.
I'd argue it's more like saying your car is safe when it's smashed upside-down in a ditch on the side of the highway.
It is safe. The safest minivan is fantastically safe. Then it smashes into a semi truck at 80 mph and everyone dies. It was still a safe car, when compared to other cars.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Solar doesn't have to be reliable; it just has to charge a battery (or some other means of energy storage) which is reliable. Also worth mentioning (at the risk of being very pedantic) that solar is technically nuclear power.
A very expensive battery made from a material we likely don't have enough of to scale for the world.
You're right that at large scales (neighborhood-wide, city-wide, nation-wide, etc.) we don't really have the battery infrastructure in place quite yet. I'd guess that said lack of infrastructure could be resolved well before 2025, though.
Ah, they didn't include renewables. Colour me surprised.
The public's nuclear acceptance is not about day to day death toll. It's about broken promises and Armageddon. Looking at the chart, I'd take gas over nuclear in a heartbeat thinking of what nuclear has done to Japan. Nuclear can both power and destroy a country. Gas and other options do not. Neither does solar or wind which are not even in that chart. Say we have a new technology that is safer than nuclear, but had…
Natural gas kills 4,000 people per PWh generated. Fukushima killed zero immediately, and might kill 100-200 eventually through increased cancer incidences. Fukushima made a few hundred square kilometers briefly unsafe, and some tens of square kilometers temporarily uninhabitable. (Or really, inhabitable but slightly unhealthy.) Fossil fuels are wrecking the entire planet. It's interesting that Fukushima seems to be a…
The public's rejection of nuclear is about terror. With terrorists, we're willing to turn foreign policy on its head and wage war and go as far as travel bans. And with the terror of nuclear, Germany has shut down all of it's plants. The consequence? Germans feel safer.
And no, no one has forgotten the Tsunami. That's blatantly offensive. I'm talking about nuclear to stay on topic.
Before Chernobyl blew up, nuclear energy proponents promised us, nuclear energy was safe. When Chernobyl blew up, it was obviously a stupid Soviet design, with stupid operating personnel. But now we've got new reactors, they are safe! Nothing could ever happen! Then Fukushima blew up. That was obviously okay, because it was a Tsunami in conjunction with a few other improbable acts, and we obviously can't expect the n…
We know that using fossil fuels will kill a few people every day, eventually adding up to a large number, as well as causing widespread, low-grade damage to the environment. On the other hand, nuclear has the potential to kill a moderate number of people at once if something goes horribly wrong, and cause severe damage to the environment of a small area.
It seems to me that a preference for more deaths and environmental damage overall because they happen a little at a time instead of in a catastrophic event is not rational.
Apart from the waste. We really don't know what to do about it other than bury it and leave it for a few tens to hundreds of generations in the future to deal with with the hope that they will know what to do. So it's the safest option. But only for now. We might just be dooming our descendants to deal with the mess and they might be in a worse state than we are now.
Breeder reactors have been around since the dawn of nuclear energy and are extremely efficient, re-using the bulk of harmful waste material as fuel. If we built more of those waste would be far less of a problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor Hell Thorium-based reactors could theoretically generate the same energy while being much safer and producing orders of magnitude less waste. But as of yet suppo…
The lack of production thorium reactors, over half a century since the first experimental reactor was built, suggests to me that there are serious complications that thorium proponents are missing out on. On paper, it seems ideal. So why has nobody built one? Don't wave silly treehugger regulations at me, because it's not just the US and Europe - Russia and China, with rather less concern for safety and rather less regulatory process than us, aren't building them either. Even India, with a third of the world's thorium, is just now in the process of bringing on their first thorium reactor.
The problem isn't "grow some balls". The problem is taking an honest look at the situation and ditching the wishful thinking.
I believe the politicization of nuclear energy (the resulting lack of investment & innovation) will go down as one of the major blunders in human history. We'd be in a far, far better situation with greenhouse gasses if we (as a human race) had continued to invest in nuclear energy. There would have been mishaps along the way, but at a much smaller scale than we're experiencing now with deaths from air pollution and…
What do you mean "politicization"? Please saw the movie the China syndrome and then 3 mile island happened. Then people were very afraid. These were real possibilities. Does anyone want to live near a nuclear power plant? Do you? I sure as hell would not. How can you twist fear of a disaster in "politicization"? You are also looking thru the lens of our current situation. Very little was being discussed about the ris…
Ctrl+F "Solar", "Wind". No matches found. That's weird, huh? I'm all for a rational assessment of risk, but shouldn't they be on the list? Actually, I've seen such comparisons, and solar and wind do pretty well. They don't kill anyone from air pollution and global warming, but manufacturing and maintenance isn't risk-free. When you install things on roofs, sometimes people fall off. Most solar installation these days…
Nuclear "waste" can actually be used as fuel again, we just need to research that technology. You still need a lot more plastic and rare earths for solar and wind compared with nuclear (per watt). I think solar and wind are a good intermediate step but not for long-term.
Unfortunately a few years later they had to issue a correction, because older (more experienced) engineered stepped in and showed them where the mistakes in their work were, and they couldn't eliminate nearly as much HLW as they thought with existing technology.
In other words, a closed nuclear fuel cycle doesn't exist. We could be better than we are currently with investments in molten salt and fast reactors, but I don't think we know how to get to zero HLW using fission.
Considering that HLW lasts for a million years, that's imposing too high a cost on too many of our descendants, IMO.
My personal belief is that solar and wind are the best way to go for now, and if we ever get zero-HLW fission or aneutronic fusion working, cool.