Where's the actual data on safety to people of nuclear vs coal vs wind/rain/sun?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents
Every row in the table has a citation at end.
Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push
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Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push
#152I'm pro-nuclear fission (full disclosure, I work on fusion related research, but I don't care about who wins more than I want society to win), but I think talking to any random person in the public who are already skeptical about fusion, to them fission has not had a great track record. Make as many arguments you want to make about fukushima facing a natural disaster, w/e, and how the field has advanced since three-m…
Interesting, I think, that Fukushima was built at a location that had experienced two huge tsunamis within living memory at the time.
Wonder what kind of hand-waving dismissals and assurances were used to sell that project.
Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push
#153Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push
#154Coal kills more than nuclear. Modern nuclear is safer and reliable. It's similar to the fear of planes vs the actual safety statistics of planes.
Never mind coal, nuclear is safer than even wind and solar - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents#Fatalities
The problem, as you point out, is that people are generally very bad at understanding risk.
Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Cuts I to profits, no can do! Capitalists, funny to say, are actually highly protective of their capital. If you have an asset worth billions of dollars no rational manager would take a risk on it; the maintenance generally gets done. Billion dollar assets generally don't get associated with reckless people. That sort of short-termism no-maintenance approach is more likely a symptom of the political risk of running…
Too simplistic. There are plenty of examples of short term thinking from professional managers acting on behalf of owners. Trashing a corporate reputation by trading on it charging a premium price while cutting costs and quality is really common. Managers cash out ridiculous share grants right away when they go, not 10 years after they resign it are fired. There are other factors driving behaviour but that incentive…
Although that is true, reputation is an intangible asset. There is not really an engineering discipline related to maintaining and asset-managing a reputation (not to anywhere near the same level of rigor as managing, eg, a skyscraper).
You might be underestimating how many high-value assets we are surrounded by that are well maintained and extremely reliable. They tend to blend into the background because there are so many.
Obviously mistakes happen, but the central point here shouldn't be controversial: a rational and greedy agent maintains their assets. Otherwise they sorta get booted out of of the club of people who own assets, because their competition would have similar realised returns and a fully functional asset (if maintenance is possible it is usually a more economic option than building from scratch). If the government is going to obsolete your asset by force, then the agent's decisions will change, but the agent isn't exactly in control of their situation if the government is stepping in.
Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push
#156That's awesome.
I really respect it when people are willing to put their money where their mouth is. Kudos to Gates.
Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents Every row in the table has a citation at end.
The table is extremely misleading by not estimating risks for the next 100,000 years.
You're right great Cheops, king of kings, we should stick to bronze swords, the next 100,000 year risk profile of iron smelting hasn't been drawn up yet.
Nobody in any environment or endeavour in history applies 100k years risk assessment on any activity. This is green fundamentalism and next comes mandatory veganism and forced sterilization.
Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
You ignore the time it takes to get a nuclear power plant online. Let alone all the permissions for it. Know what would work today? Reducing our energy consumption.
Reducing our energy consumption and building alternatives to fossil fuels are not mutually exclusive. Let’s do both.
Also western nations have been doing this for the last 30 years. The house you live in today has appliances that are 3x or more efficient then it did 30 years ago. It's better insulated, it's more recyclable etc.
It also doesn't make a damn bit of difference of base load power comes from coal.
Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hang on, are you absolutely sure that renewables are less damaging than nuclear? The footprint for nuclear is tiny, it might be competitive. Fukashima was a level 7 nuclear distaster, so that is as bad as it gets. The actual damage done is objectivly not that bad compared to a lot of things we have accepted in the past with only increased safety regulation (like dam failures). 2 lvl 7 accidents in 35 years; and desig…
> Renewables need materials, which are mined So, what about mining fissile materials? How clean is that, particularly with regard to tailings and wastewater? Are there any studies out there without a bias on this? I mean, it's okay to be biased against coal, any non-metallurgical uses really put the "fossil" in fossil fuels. But I know there are all sorts of weird edge cases. Like we're going to want to continue to c…
> So, what about mining fissile materials?
I worked with Rio Tinto (mining corporation) for some time, and happened to know a few people in management positions at the Ranger Uranium Mine. I can assure you it was one of the most environmentally conscious operations the group was managing, and super-senior management seemed to take the whole thing very seriously. It was a source of much frustration, because as a company we had a good grasp of what acceptable mining practice looks like and Ranger was beyond the standard of reasonable. I dunno, what can you do? Follow the Environmental Management Plan.
Anyway, any comparison is a bit academic, because we can exhaustively list everything that has ever gone wrong in the nuclear industry but the renewables are too diverse for there to be a fair comparison. Which is why I suspect the environmental damage done by renewables is being glossed over.
Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents Every row in the table has a citation at end.
The table is extremely misleading by not estimating risks for the next 100,000 years.
That's true. If we estimated the risks for the next 100,000 years then these numbers would change immensely.
A hundred years of burning coal has damaged our atmosphere a little bit; doing the same for another hundred thousand years would be absurdly catastrophic to our ecosystem, killing and displacing billions.
You'd also need to look carefully at hydro as well, as thousand-year-old mega-dams begin to randomly fail.
Nuclear risk will probably be lower as the shockingly naive Soviet-era and 1960s-era designed reactors are all replaced with new designs built with immensely improved understanding of nuclear physics, materials design, computer augmentation, and local climatic risks.