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Fact-check: Five claims about thorium made by Andrew Yang

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Re: Fact-check: Five claims about thorium made by Andrew Yang

#61

Post by hyperbovine »

RivieraKid wrote: post #23
erentz wrote: post #5

Yang is to be credited for stating he is open to all possible solutions to the climate crisis, and rightly pointing out that with a crisis of this magnitude no solutions should be taken off the table at this point. Something other candidates are reluctant to do when it comes to the topic of nuclear energy. He shouldn’t be expected to be an expert in the nuances of the technology or fuels. This should always be left t…

I like that he mentions geo-engineering. To me, the most promising is stratospheric aerosol injection. I don't understand why there's not more talk about it given the cost / value ratio. If it turns out that there are no serious side effects or risk and governments agree to do it, we have solved climate change.

> If it turns out that there are no serious side effects or risk

Literally the only way to determine that would be to try it. And then let’s hope the proponents are correct, because if not...

There is just so much we don’t understand about the global climate to think this sort of solution is a good idea. I’ll start taking the geoengineering people seriously when they can accurately predict the weather one month from now.

Re: Fact-check: Five claims about thorium made by Andrew Yang

#62

Post by oska »

sjwright wrote: post #16
djohnston wrote: post #12

im not sure it's useful to hold yang accountable for such technical minutae. i generally believe that nuclear has an important role to play in our mitigation of climate change, but that our bias to remember flash-point events like chernobyl and fukushima will overshadow the far more deadly and ubiquitous proliferation of CO2 and methane that lacks the same "pizazz"

And it's important to remember that the Fukushima nuclear disaster has caused one confirmed death so far. I'm not saying that it wasn't a horrific disaster, but it's like comparing one dramatic aeroplane accident to the totality of road vehicle deaths worldwide—one plane is newsworthy; whereas the vehicle death toll is normalised and ignored. Worldwide, around 50 to 500 people die in planes each year. Worldwide, over…

The Fukushima nuclear disaster came close to forcing the Japanese Prime Minister to shut down and evacuate Tokyo. [1]

Also, you are making an error in how you calculate risk. It's not just how many fatalities are caused by each source of risk on an annual basis. It's also how much potential a risk-source has to scale. Nuclear can potentially scale into causing a massive number of fatalities and that is why people, correctly, identify it as a serious source of risk.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/world/asia/japan-consider...

Re: Fact-check: Five claims about thorium made by Andrew Yang

#63

Post by evanlivingston »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #46
thebean11 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear accidents have unique and sometimes unpredictable environment impact, like Fukushima continuing to pollute the ocean with radioactive material to this day. Not saying that's a good reason to swear ourselves off nuclear, but it's more complicated than low carbon emissions.

I agree that it's complicated. Radiological hazards are indeed pretty unique in the human experience. I disagree that any given release has unpredictable impact though. Top scientists around the world have studied the effects of radiation on living things and the environment in elaborate detail for 80 years. We have vast amounts of good data. This really became political around 1953 as the radioactive fallout from th…

That second article talks a whole lot about how tritium can't hurt humans but then says that keeping the contaminated water in tanks poses a risk to humans...

Re: Fact-check: Five claims about thorium made by Andrew Yang

#64

Post by fsh »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #59
Klinky wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is an economical reactor model available to be built today? Practically every commercial reactor built seems to be a multi-billion dollar project that takes years to complete, with cost overruns common.

Shipyard-constructed several-hundred-megawatt pressurized water reactors. The Navy has basically achieved economies of mass production with their reactors. The submarine and aircraft carrier weapons systems are expensive, but if you just did something similar for civilian power, I believe you could capture both economies of scale and economies of mass production. For decarbonizing the world very rapidly, this would b…

Both Chernobyl's RBMK and Fukushima's GE BWR reactors are widely used standard designs.

Re: Fact-check: Five claims about thorium made by Andrew Yang

#65

Post by TeMPOraL »

redis_mlc wrote: post #53
sjwright wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it's important to remember that the Fukushima nuclear disaster has caused one confirmed death so far. I'm not saying that it wasn't a horrific disaster, but it's like comparing one dramatic aeroplane accident to the totality of road vehicle deaths worldwide—one plane is newsworthy; whereas the vehicle death toll is normalised and ignored. Worldwide, around 50 to 500 people die in planes each year. Worldwide, over…

> And it's important to remember that the Fukushima nuclear disaster has caused one confirmed death so far. I wish nuclear apologists with an agenda would stop repeating this. 250,000 residents were displaced, many spending their final days in gyms and other camps as rufugees in their own country. An entire army will spend decades and likely trillions of dollars trying to do something with the shattered remains of th…

> 250,000 residents were displaced, many spending their final days in gyms and other camps as rufugees in their own country.

For which overreaction to the powerplant failure is partially to blame.

Re: Fact-check: Five claims about thorium made by Andrew Yang

#66

Post by acidburnNSA »

evanlivingston wrote: post #63
acidburnNSA wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that it's complicated. Radiological hazards are indeed pretty unique in the human experience. I disagree that any given release has unpredictable impact though. Top scientists around the world have studied the effects of radiation on living things and the environment in elaborate detail for 80 years. We have vast amounts of good data. This really became political around 1953 as the radioactive fallout from th…

That second article talks a whole lot about how tritium can't hurt humans but then says that keeping the contaminated water in tanks poses a risk to humans...

I think the second point is that if insist that tanks with tritium are indeed dangerous (which the first point argued against), then you should want the hazard eliminated (by dilution) to avoid hurting living things.

Re: Fact-check: Five claims about thorium made by Andrew Yang

#67

Post by ants_a »

hyperbovine wrote: post #61
RivieraKid wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like that he mentions geo-engineering. To me, the most promising is stratospheric aerosol injection. I don't understand why there's not more talk about it given the cost / value ratio. If it turns out that there are no serious side effects or risk and governments agree to do it, we have solved climate change.

> If it turns out that there are no serious side effects or risk Literally the only way to determine that would be to try it. And then let’s hope the proponents are correct, because if not... There is just so much we don’t understand about the global climate to think this sort of solution is a good idea. I’ll start taking the geoengineering people seriously when they can accurately predict the weather one month from…

Predicting weather and predicting climate are almost completely different things. It's about predicting where a single state space trajectory of a chaotic system ends up versus predicting bounds and average positions for an ensemble of trajectories. The first is impossible, the second is routinely done. Think of a double pendulum, one can't predict where it is in an hour, but can predict reasonably accurately how high it can still go due to the amount of kinetic and potential energy it is going to have.

Re: Fact-check: Five claims about thorium made by Andrew Yang

#69

Post by chillacy »

juped wrote: post #21
acidburnNSA wrote: post #6

I'm involved in a public education nuclear website. We get tons of questions about thorium so we made a few pages to handle stuff like this. For instance, we have one on molten salt reactors specifically (which aren't always fueled with thorium) [1]. [1] https://whatisnuclear.com/msr.html And then we have our most popular, the Thorium Myths page [2]. [2] https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-myths.html I love that Yang i…

The thing I hate most in nuclear advocacy is the trope of "the new, exciting, safe and economical nuclear reactor based on new, exciting miracle tech!". We have amazing, safe, economical, etc. nuclear reactors. They're called nuclear reactors, and don't need any miracle tech conjured up in some magazine columnist's imagination.

The pivot to Thorium is to some extent a marketing issue. The "amazing safe economical" modern reactors have a tarnished reputation, possibly irreversibly so, given the political unpopularity today.
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