Okay, I’m a South Korean citizen.
That, is one aspect.
Consider another aspect.
Nuclear reactors are dangerous. That doesn’t change. We get the Fukushima accident much more prominently because Japan is so close th Korea and everyone (literally everyone) had to worry about eating Fukushima fish.
Nuclear reactors are dangerously close to so many cities, and that can’t change, because our country is too small, and there are so many mountains (which take up space).
It’s different from saying ‘Hey, it’s failure rate is super small, it’s gonna be safe.’ and living close to the reactors and worrying about the tiny failure rate.
And, I was Science High School student which studied nuclear reactors in detail. What would usual people feel?
Greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry
91–100 of 130 posts
Re: Greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
In fairness, nuclear is also just incredibly expensive. Witness Vogtie. Take away all taxes and regulations, then compare the price of, say, Iowa, building a nuclear plant instead of just slapping up windmills wherever they want. (Remember, we're assuming zero regulations. So while slapping up windmills would normally be incredibly illegal, we're able to do that under the conditions that our thought experiment postul…
> In fairness, nuclear is also just incredibly expensive. This is only now wit the current regulation and legal technology. There is no fundamental reason, that nuclear power production should be so expensive. If we go from first principle, nuclear power requires the least amount of land, the least amount of resources and not a lot of people to run. It runs for very long time. Nuclear plants were massively out-compet…
>Nuclear plants were massively out-competing coal in the 80s until there was a huge regulatory changes that essentially killed the industry. Since then no new reactor technology has been license, pretty much all research has been killed, access to nuclear materials is basically impossible, almost no new nuclear plants were built.
Are you talking about the US or South Korea? China seems to be investing pretty hard into nuclear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China
Re: Greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry
#93it's one industry where you must assume the worst of the companies that run it because the consequences of mistakes are so terrible
Re: Greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
At the same time the NRC is too cozy with the industry it has kept all nuclear projects in the US tied up in red tape for literally decades.
Citation needed! From what I've read the US government has been incredibly supportive of the nuclear industry. For example, both Obama and Trump have secured federal funding for the Vogtle 3 and 4 plants. US public opinion has also been heavily in favor of nuclear power, even after Fukushima. The "red tape is causing all our problems!" seem, to me, to be just a myth spread by the nuclear lobby.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/153452/americans-favor-nuclear-...
Re: Greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 t…
> This it as tangential to a discussion of nuclear safety compared to the safety of any other power source. No, it is not. No other power source comes even close in the amount of time that has to be covered by insurances. A dam breaks, a gas plant explodes, that's a couple billions of dollars of damage plus a couple billions in payments for the relatives of the dead. For corporations making billions of years in profi…
Forget Munich (don’t but you get my point) what’s the liability of the 40-year old 2GW Indian Point plant, which is constantly receiving safety citations, being 30 miles upwind from NYC? 20 million people live there..
Re: Greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
> because you still have all those coal, gas, and nuclear plants providing baseload power... That's right. So why would you not decommission all of that incredibly expensive nuclear, and draw down your use of the coal plants to fill in the gaps? That's how most dispatch stacks work. It's just common sense. Consumers want to save money. Utilities want to make enough money. There's just no way you use nuclear in any sc…
Coal can't dispatch fast enough, and most coal plants are at the end of their lifecycle and need to be replaced. So you have to build new baseload capacity, usually gas. (And really, you still need a bunch of batteries to handle short-term fluctuations in renewables output.) The problem, then, is that you have all new coal or gas plants, which are expensive capital assets, that you're basically using for standby powe…
> So you have to build new baseload capacity, usually gas.
Since when was natural gas ever good for base load? It's almost always used peak load because it spins up quickly.
Re: Greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't disagree with anything you said here, however: > and they have the old coal plants to fill in the gaps ...this is the problem with solar and most renewables. They have gaps. The question, it seems to me, is are we in a fight for the survival of our species, or not? If we are, then we should pull all the stops. I want my grandchildren and their grandchildren to have a liveable planet. I'll pay the bloody premium…
Get more hydro then as it's faster at adapting to changing loads than nuclear.
Hydropower has environmental issues and the number of places with sufficient hydraulic head and no dam there already is not all that large.
Re: Greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
It there any sources of energy that doesnt depend on mining at some point?
Yes, but many people are reluctant to give up electricity which is hard to use without metals. But wooden windmills, water mills and heating with fire are tried technology.
Wooden windmills, water mills, and heating with fire are not significant sources of energy.
Re: Greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry
#99Nuclear 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…
To add another rebuttal to this comment. I think Nuclear energy also represent situations that are both hyper rewarding and hyper risky. An oil tanker can spill millions of gallons off the coast but that can be cleaned up and the damage will repair. Meanwhile Chernobyl and Fukushima are still abandoned and under constant surveillance and there are still no firm dates for when it will be "safe" to live there. People w…
I'm no ecologist, but as far as I was aware the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is actually quite vibrant due to lack of human interference, while oil spills have extreme consequences for local wildlife.
Re: Greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect the Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima Daiichi incidents also had a part to play in public perception.
Or rather the MASSIVE overreaction compared to the actual events. Chernobyl was a Soviet reactor that was designed to make nuclear weapons. Three Mile Island killed less people then 1000s of mining accidents, pipeline explosions and lots of other things. The perception of Three Mile Island was hilariously out of scale with the actual danger. The regulatory overreaction was so big that since then basically the whole n…
> Chernobyl was a Soviet reactor that was designed to make nuclear weapons.
Source?