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Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

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Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#411

Post by hrktb »

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #252
CydeWeys wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lets take your car that is smashed, upside-down in a ditch. 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 r…

What this car comparison is missing is that people accept cars getting crushed into flat metal sheets.

Agree or not, as a society we have accepted that traffic accident is a problem we don't want to pay the price to solve.

A "safe" car is just a mildly safer death trap.

In comparison, people haven't accepted that reactors would go shit and somewhat kill hundreds of people and trash whole regions for hundreds of years.

That's a risk that developpers have included in their plans to some point, but that the general public has not fundamentaly accepted.

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#412

Post by roryisok »

ars wrote: post #393
beat wrote: post #369

Of course, this is only comparing to fossil sources, not solar, wind, or other renewables (except biomass). I don't think this is going to matter in the end, though. The best, most optimistic arguments the nuclear proponents can make would still take 20-30 years to build out enough to make a standard-deviation difference in greenhouse gasses. Meanwhile, solar/wind are already hitting production costs that rival or be…

> Of course, this is only comparing to fossil sources, not solar, wind, or other renewables (except biomass). You can include them, nuclear still comes out ahead. Solar, wind, etc, are not very power-dense. So you need a LOT of installations, building all of them inevitably has fatalities and injuries. (Falls for example.) From here: http://energyrealityproject.com/lets-run-the-numbers-nuclear... (and you can google…

The risk of injury or death while installing solar may be greater than nuclear by the numbers, but if a guy falls off his roof installing a solar panel it doesn't poison the land around him for hundreds of years

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#414

Post by sliverstorm »

beat wrote: post #408
hashmal wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear being safer than other major sources just means we shouldn't demonize it and stop everything right now out of panic. it means it's just an important asset while waiting for renewables to take off.

See my argument above, though... it's going to be faster and cheaper to replace a standard deviation's worth of fossil electricity with solar/wind than it would be to replace it with nuclear. So the "transitional power" argument doesn't really hold.

That ignores another factor- we've been decommissioning nuclear and replacing it with natural gas & coal capacity while we wait for the eventual renewable ramp.

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#415

Post by lispm »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #392
Retric wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Civilian nuclear plants where designed, built, and operated to reduce the costs of nuclear weapons. This resulted in huge subsides, but also a lot of export controls. You can't say that about the internet. PS: A lot of past regulations seem dumb today, but power was not the primary goal which shaped a lot of policy.

"Civilian nuclear plants where designed, built, and operated to reduce the costs of nuclear weapons." Nope. They were, in fact, designed in a manner that made it very difficult/inefficient to use them to produce weapons-grade plutonium. Reactors designed to produce weapons-grade material operate in a completely different regime. In particular, you need to refuel them on a short continuous cycle, lest the desired plut…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield#Calder_Hall_nuclear...

Early commercial nuclear reactors, here the British Calder Hall Power Station, were producing plutionium and electricity.

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#416

Post by Koromix »

brianpan wrote: post #390
jsonne wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no biologist or scientist of any sort, but it seems this is a problem with all apex predators to some degree. You get to the top of the food chain by adapting to and being highly reactive to short term and catastrophic risk. Once you get there you have to do a 180 and suddenly be highly attuned to subtle and long term issues to stay there. It's simply a different skill set and frame of mind.

Is there anything in all of biology that IS attuned to subtle and long-term issues? I think I would argue that we are the closest to that.

You are right, there is pretty much nothing in biology that is. Humans are no exception, but until recently it was not a big problem because we did not have the power to significantly damage the climate and the biosphere (though the megafauna would probably disagree).

Fossil fuel powered technology has changed that, but we are psychologically and socially ill-equipped to deal with its transformative power.

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#417

Post by beat »

mitchty wrote: post #379
pil4rin wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention not having some nuclear waste to store for the rest of the foreseeable future.

What is the rest of the forseeable future exactly? If we use breeder reactors we can get the half life down to 500 years which is easily dealt with via stuff like glass entombment. The current nuclear waste solution is ignoring a lot of advances from the 90's.

Breeder reactors are ridiculously dangerous. There's a good reason nobody uses them except for weapons-grade material generation.

They're also a major weapon proliferation problem, since it's easy to use them to generate weapons-grade material. Are you planning to build one in Libya anytime soon?

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#418

Post by mdpopescu »

tabtab wrote: post #296

It's going to be politicized no matter what. Stop spanking humans for having human nature and lecturing them about being more rational. Politicians have to consider perception or they get voted out. It's just a technology that freaks people out on an emotional level and you can't stop that.

You underestimate the power of propaganda. It's what made people like radioactive materials half a century ago [1] and what makes them fear nuclear power now.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=radium+water+filter+ads+from...

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#419

Post by sliverstorm »

hueving wrote: post #222
lispm wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear energy was politicized from day minus one. It was developed out of government driven military technology. In day zero nuclear energy was set up by politicians: goals, strategies, financing, deployment, risk handling, etc. Everything was coming from energy politics. Investments were directed and the market&regulations for nuclear were set up. Government largely financed it and insures it. The large scale, the…

>It was developed out of government driven military technology That's not a justification. The internet was also developed out of DARPA. Most of silicon valley exists because of cold war electronics warfare research, etc.

My favorite bit is, the first customer & funding grant of the transistor was for a particular application that needed something far more resilient to vibration, temperature, etc than vacuum tubes - ICBM's.

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#420

Post by Turing_Machine »

lispm wrote: post #415
Turing_Machine wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Civilian nuclear plants where designed, built, and operated to reduce the costs of nuclear weapons." Nope. They were, in fact, designed in a manner that made it very difficult/inefficient to use them to produce weapons-grade plutonium. Reactors designed to produce weapons-grade material operate in a completely different regime. In particular, you need to refuel them on a short continuous cycle, lest the desired plut…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield#Calder_Hall_nuclear... Early commercial nuclear reactors, here the British Calder Hall Power Station, were producing plutionium and electricity.

That was more or less a prototype. No one uses power reactors to produce plutonium. It just isn't done.
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