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Greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry

technologyreview.com

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Re: Greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry

#31

Post by mschuster91 »

jjoonathan wrote: post #23
mschuster91 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No. They can't as long as cheap energy storage on mass scales doesn't exist. It does, Tesla's grid-scale Powerwall made 25% of its cost in profits in 6 months (per https://insideevs.com/news/340702/tesla-powerpack-in-austral... ). Aside from using Powerwalls, us Europeans have extensive experience with using hydro pump storage.

So why did Germany go with gas and coal?

Our coal infrastructure is on the way to be phased out, it won't be around for long-term any more - the Kohlekommission proposed 2035-2038 for the final shutdown, with 12.5 GW of 42.6 GW capacity going offline until 2022 (per https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2019-01/kohlekommission-kohle...).

What's left will be gas and renewables.

Re: Greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry

#32

Post by nickelcitymario »

clarkmoody wrote: post #26

Nuclear power presents the perfect storm for negative public image: - Environmental movement went anti-nuclear in the '70s for no particular reason. - Fear Sells in the media. Nothing strikes fear like the invisible killer of radiation. Nuclear disasters get media attention like nothing else. - Nuclear weapons are scary, and rightfully so. And they share a word in common with "nuclear power," so there you go. Being t…

> for no particular reason

I don't think that's quite accurate. It may be more accurate to say they were misinformed or miscalculated.

The reasons were that they believed, and many people still do, that nuclear was bad for the environment because:

1) It required mining to extract the resources necessary, and mining isn't exactly a green activity.

2) Nuclear disasters are unquestionably bad for the environment, and bad in an immediately visible way. (Compared to carbon, which takes many decades for the effects to take hold.)

3) There's a general sense that we don't know what to do with the nuclear waste.

To be clear, I 100% support nuclear power as the most pragmatic and environmentally friendly solution to our energy needs. But if we're going to tackle the political problem, we have to be honest about why that problem exists.

Re: Greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry

#33

Post by mschuster91 »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #27
mschuster91 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In terms of disaster potential it's on the order of hydroelectric. Water disappears. Yes, a failed dam may kill thousands to tens of thousands, but the land is generally immediately reusable without major problems as long as there is no chemical industry in the floodpath. A nuclear reactor blowing up, though? The immediate death potential is mostly limited to the on-site staff and the "liquidators" (as evidenced in…

>A nuclear reactor blowing up, though? The immediate death potential is mostly limited to the on-site staff and the "liquidators" (as evidenced in Chernobyl), but the land wide swaths around the site can remain uninhabitable for hundreds of years. If the land is really that valuable it can be cleaned. Nobody is going to remediate a forest in the Ukraine though because the Ukraine doesn't have that kind of money and i…

> If the land is really that valuable it can be cleaned.

Not really. Even in Japan, regulators basically screwed over regulations to declare the land as "inhabitable" again (https://www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2017-03/fukushima-japan-...).

> If by "have to" you mean "in order to make people feel safe" then sure.

Keeping people safe is the primary objective for a state, not allowing private entities to extract the most possible profits while offloading the risks to the state. We saw this in Japan, it is impossible for any private entity to shoulder the cost of an accident.

Re: Greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry

#34

Post by metric10 »

clarkmoody wrote: post #26

Nuclear power presents the perfect storm for negative public image: - Environmental movement went anti-nuclear in the '70s for no particular reason. - Fear Sells in the media. Nothing strikes fear like the invisible killer of radiation. Nuclear disasters get media attention like nothing else. - Nuclear weapons are scary, and rightfully so. And they share a word in common with "nuclear power," so there you go. Being t…

I suspect the Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima Daiichi incidents also had a part to play in public perception.

Re: Greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry

#35

Post by cglace »

nickelcitymario wrote: post #32
clarkmoody wrote: post #26

Nuclear power presents the perfect storm for negative public image: - Environmental movement went anti-nuclear in the '70s for no particular reason. - Fear Sells in the media. Nothing strikes fear like the invisible killer of radiation. Nuclear disasters get media attention like nothing else. - Nuclear weapons are scary, and rightfully so. And they share a word in common with "nuclear power," so there you go. Being t…

> for no particular reason I don't think that's quite accurate. It may be more accurate to say they were misinformed or miscalculated. The reasons were that they believed, and many people still do, that nuclear was bad for the environment because: 1) It required mining to extract the resources necessary, and mining isn't exactly a green activity. 2) Nuclear disasters are unquestionably bad for the environment, and ba…

It there any sources of energy that doesnt depend on mining at some point?

Re: Greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry

#36

Post by cjslep »

bjourne wrote: post #25
cjslep wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is a lot of the tech advancements in the last 30 years of the field have not had a chance to play out and instead retrofits are all that's been rolled out to the existing fleet. Criticizing an entire field based on the cutting edge 60 years ago feels really unfair. Additionally the modern US standard for safety regulation by the NRC is so stringent that anyone criticizing safety often sounds like spreadin…

> The problem is a lot of the tech advancements in the last 30 years of the field have not had a chance to play out and instead retrofits are all that's been rolled out to the existing fleet. Criticizing an entire field based on the cutting edge 60 years ago feels really unfair. AP1000 is a new reactor design from the 2000s. Vogtle 3 and 4 are AP1000 reactors. The construction was started in 2013 and should have take…

You're bringing very fair critiques on costs and construction time to... a discussion about safety.

There's many ways you could be implicitly connecting the dots to this discussion somehow. I welcome you making those clear. I am not going to put words in your mouth, though.

Re: Greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry

#37

Post by AFascistWorld »

bboygravity wrote: post #13
tim333 wrote: post #5

Yeah there was greed and corruption but as the article says other countries have stopped too: >A similar reversal is beginning in China, until recently seen as nuclear energy’s biggest champion. There, as in South Korea, Fukushima awakened public fears and forced the government to adopt tougher safety standards, which now threaten to push the cost of nuclear power out of reach. Of the world’s other major producers of…

I call BS on "a similar reversal is beginning in China" : "China is no stranger to nuclear power. The stated PRC goal is to raise domestic nuclear energy output from 43 gigawatts (GW) to 300 GW by 2030." https://www.forbes.com/sites/arielcohen/2019/04/25/china-ent...

There are reactors that are under construction, and the prices per KW/h are generally higher than coal power.

Re: Greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry

#38

Post by mturmon »

metric10 wrote: post #34
clarkmoody wrote: post #26

Nuclear power presents the perfect storm for negative public image: - Environmental movement went anti-nuclear in the '70s for no particular reason. - Fear Sells in the media. Nothing strikes fear like the invisible killer of radiation. Nuclear disasters get media attention like nothing else. - Nuclear weapons are scary, and rightfully so. And they share a word in common with "nuclear power," so there you go. Being t…

I suspect the Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima Daiichi incidents also had a part to play in public perception.

And in particular, Three Mile Island happened in 1979 and crystallized a lot of US opposition to nuclear power. One of the problems it exposed is a too-friendly connection between the NRC and the nuclear power industry. According to a recent book [1], this problem still exists.

[1] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6424/237

Re: Greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry

#39

Post by dsfyu404ed »

mschuster91 wrote: post #33
dsfyu404ed wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A nuclear reactor blowing up, though? The immediate death potential is mostly limited to the on-site staff and the "liquidators" (as evidenced in Chernobyl), but the land wide swaths around the site can remain uninhabitable for hundreds of years. If the land is really that valuable it can be cleaned. Nobody is going to remediate a forest in the Ukraine though because the Ukraine doesn't have that kind of money and i…

> If the land is really that valuable it can be cleaned. Not really. Even in Japan, regulators basically screwed over regulations to declare the land as "inhabitable" again ( https://www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2017-03/fukushima-japan-... ). > If by "have to" you mean "in order to make people feel safe" then sure. Keeping people safe is the primary objective for a state, not allowing private entities to extract the m…

>Keeping people safe is the primary objective for a state

You seem to be confusing "keeping people safe" with "keeping people safe theater". Monitoring the radioactivity of European crops and livestock in 2019 is solidly in the latter category.

>not allowing private entities to extract the most possible profits while offloading the risks to the state.

This it as tangential to a discussion of nuclear safety compared to the safety of any other power source.

>We saw this in Japan, it is impossible for any private entity to shoulder the cost of an accident.

And this is different than a dam failure, or any other industrial accident of similar magnitude, in a similarly populated/developed location how?

Re: Greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry

#40

Post by nickelcitymario »

cglace wrote: post #35
nickelcitymario wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for no particular reason I don't think that's quite accurate. It may be more accurate to say they were misinformed or miscalculated. The reasons were that they believed, and many people still do, that nuclear was bad for the environment because: 1) It required mining to extract the resources necessary, and mining isn't exactly a green activity. 2) Nuclear disasters are unquestionably bad for the environment, and ba…

It there any sources of energy that doesnt depend on mining at some point?

No, not if we look at the entire supply chain and the construction of the power plant (whatever the source of power may be).

But people don't get as emotional about the resources required to build windmills (so long as it's not in my backyard) as they do about nuclear. And once a windmill or a dam or a solar farm has been built, there's a belief that there's no ongoing environmental damage. Whereas nuclear (and coal and gas) require ongoing resource extraction.

Again, I'm not the one making these arguments. I'm saying this is public perception. (Or at least my perception of public perception.) I happen to think the only environmentally responsible way to supply all the energy we need for 7 billion people (and growing), especially when more and more of those people are industrializing, is to go nuclear. Every other option seems like a guaranteed way to kill ourselves in the long run.

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