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After 48 years, Democrats endorse nuclear energy in platform

forbes.com

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Re: After 48 years, Democrats endorse nuclear energy in platform

#111

Post by schoen »

RhysU wrote: post #83
schoen wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Doesn't believe in science" is pretty reductionist here. Most Democrats and Republicans, like everyone else, is operating with heuristics about which risks are especially salient and concerning. Those heuristics are influenced by social biases. Democrats are more likely to be enthusiastic about the practice of science than Republicans, but that doesn't mean that Democrats always carefully and dispassionately weigh r…

Have sources on claims in the last two paragraphs?

I don't think so -- which parts are you wondering about?

Re: After 48 years, Democrats endorse nuclear energy in platform

#112

Post by IshKebab »

defnotashton2 wrote: post #101
legulere wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s already a disinvestment in fossil fuel going on. You have to compare nuclear with renewables.

Your assuming we can run on renewable, which we can't, and won't be able to in our life time. Germany is a good example.

I don't see why not. Renewables are already cheaper than nuclear. The only issue is the fact that it is intermittent and we don't have cheap enormous batteries yet. But that can probably be solved by over-provisioning, long distance HVDC power lines, and gas power stations as backup.

Re: After 48 years, Democrats endorse nuclear energy in platform

#113

Post by viraptor »

tbenst wrote: post #64

I’m continuously baffled by those that claim that nuclear power is safe. Look at Fukushima for example. It seems hard to imagine a nuclear power plant design, even Gen III or IV that would be immune to any possible natural disaster. Analysis of nuclear power should take into account Black Swan events: no matter how well designed, some fraction of plants will cause INES Level 7 disasters. If the resulting cost (ie $10…

One is the issues in Fukushima is that it did not have a working core catcher which is a feature in new (as in, last few decades) designs. You don't need to be immune - only handle failures which have been predicted for the region and warned about.

Re: After 48 years, Democrats endorse nuclear energy in platform

#114

Post by burfog »

cure wrote: post #62
erikerikson wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may need to get to know more Republicans. Yes, they host a fair bit of anti-climate science sentiment. Democrats host a fair bit of homeopathic sentiment. Both persuasions include competent scientists. Republicans are no more unidimensional than Democrats. In my observation, the conversations between them are far more tribal fueding than epistemological clarification: epistemology is just a prop. It seems to me t…

> It seems to me that when we allow ourselves to be distracted by the category conflicts, we are distracted from the fight between those trying to maximize our well-being and those happy to throw us all under the bus to optimize for their individual circumstance. That's a reasonable point I agree with. But you're just practicing bothsideism here. It is quite obvious that the ones throwing everyone under the bus to op…

What you call "screw the poor" can be seen as a way to prevent moral hazard. By that I mean the term as used by the insurance industry, not something religious.

Simply put, every economic system finds a way to force people to do miserable work. Passive systems (roughly "free market") use the natural consequences of poverty. Active systems end up with brutal prison camps, because normal people just won't volunteer to do miserable jobs for the common good.

Re: After 48 years, Democrats endorse nuclear energy in platform

#115

Post by hymangrickover »

notRobot wrote: post #4

For the uninitiated, nuclear power is actually much, much safer than it was in the previous century, and fossil fuel power plants have killed exponentially more people through pollution than all nuclear power accidents combined – it's just not something that happens all at once so it doesn't seem like a big deal to most people. We will not be able to "defeat" climate change and keep this planet inhabitable for future…

We have Hyman G. Rickover, Admiral in the US Navy to thank for steering nuclear energy research away from thorium to uranium.

He very much wanted the Navy to be in command of nuclear wessels carrying nuclear missiles.

If I can remember correctly from research in US energy policy history in college, the US had sunk about 10 years into thorium reactor research when Hyman came along.

Seems rather important to not ignore the violence monopoly. Quit paying it too much serious attention for too long and it gets chippy.

Let’s hope this is PTSD from a generation that was forced to go through hell, often for no reason, and it can normalize out. So long as we live long enough to test that hypothesis.

On the upside, the Navy has never had a nuclear accident. We’ve proven it’s doable.

Re: After 48 years, Democrats endorse nuclear energy in platform

#116

Post by burfog »

cure wrote: post #100
mensetmanusman wrote: post #2

That’s great, anti-nuclear energy was definitely one of the anti-science stances standing in the way of progress.

It's odd to me that anti-nuclear is being labelled anti-science. It's almost like the pro-nuclear people have blinders on. Nuclear is fantastic, in theory. In practice, in the real world, the consequences of accidents are extraordinarily bad and costly. The odds of a bad accident may be very small, but they are not zero (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident... ). And dealing with the waste…

Plutonium-239 is not waste. It is fuel. Use it.

The longer the half-life, the less we care. Bismuth and tungsten are radioactive, with half-lives longer than the age of the universe, but they aren't going to hurt anybody.

Re: After 48 years, Democrats endorse nuclear energy in platform

#117

Post by legulere »

option wrote: post #49

A general anti-science movement really hurts human progress with these 3 particularly bad: 1) anti vaccines 2) anti GMO 3) anti nuclear Great to see Dems starting to endorse nuclear after decades of oppositions (see John Kerry’s boneheaded earlier efforts to kill it)

You don’t have to be anti-science to be against building new nuclear power plants. And it’s a bit ridiculous to speak about human progress when talking about GMO in agriculture, when all it’s used for is plants creating their own insecticides and herbicide tolerance for furthering unsustainable monoculture farming.

Re: After 48 years, Democrats endorse nuclear energy in platform

#119

Post by cesarb »

burfog wrote: post #103
himinlomax wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Look at Fukushima for example. It seems hard to imagine a nuclear power plant design, even Gen III or IV that would be immune to any possible natural disaster. For Fukushima, it seems that the panicked response of the local authorities (evacuating the whole area ...) was what caused the most problems.

The automatic shutdown contributed. Fukushima needed cooling pumps to operate. There were 3 ways to power the pumps: 1. the reactor itself, automatically shut down when the earthquake was detected 2. diesel generators, shut down by flooding 3. power lines from elsewhere, shut down by the tsunami knocking them down Clearly, shutting down the reactor is a self-inflicted problem. Had they left it running, the pumps woul…

> It's a stupid panic-driven regulation that a nuclear power plant must shut down for an earthquake. Once the earthquake hits, it is too late to reach a cool shut-down state.

It might be too late to reach a cold shut-down state, but it should be enough to reduce a lot of the pressure within the pressure vessel and the piping. If the earthquake causes a crack in the pressure vessel or the piping, this could be the difference between it bursting open and a small leak (or even nothing, if the crack is small enough to not penetrate all the way).

Re: After 48 years, Democrats endorse nuclear energy in platform

#120

Post by Dahoon »

retrac wrote: post #69
legulere wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear also got much, much more expensive than it was in the previous century, making it economically completely unreasonable in the west. Nuclear is also the only energy source where people get displaced from their homes in thousands of square kilometers in catastrophic events.

Dam failures would like a word.

You can live on that land unlike on radioactive wasteland.
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