I stand corrected then. I wonder why for a cohort that doesn't believe in science.
That's a gross over simplification of the Republican view point. Both sides have blind spots. Republicans on climate change, Democrats on other things like nuclear for instance.
> Partly I think nuclear triggers a cognitive bias where humans will tolerate ongoing low-level shittiness, but really struggle with large catastrophes, even if the catastrophe is far less damaging than the ongoing low-level damage. How come hydroelectric dams don't get treated this way? In 2019 a dam in Brazil had a catastrophic failure that cost the lives of 270 people. In 2019! In 1975 a dam failed in China and th…
Hydro disasters have been large, but are tangible/sensible, immediate, and resolve relatively quickly (days for rescue, months for recovery, possibly a few years for rebuilding). Banqiao is now home to 17 million people (after 40 years, largely achieved within a decade or so). Meantime, Chernobyl still hasn't seen complete containment (after 34 years), and Fukushima hasn't begun initial cleanup (after 9 years). The t…
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…
What does it mean to say that fossil fuel plants killed exponentially more people? Isn’t this just the triviality that any two points (with different y values) are exponentially related?
It basically is used in the same way "only a fraction of the populace supports the measure" just in the opposite direction of meaning. Both expressions have technical shortcomings; but are idiomatically understood.
Neither Fukushima nor Chernobyl were worst-case-scenario.
Chernobyl was actually very close to the worst case scenario. And it was an especially unsafe design.
I'm sure you'll recall that there were three people who risked great personal harm to prevent 3 more cores from exploding and causing much greater harm than just the one that already had.
France seems to be the only country that's very good at it - nuclear reprocessing everywhere else has a pretty poor safety record, with widespread radioactive contamination and an unfortunate tendency to irradiate workers. (It's also, as I understand it, the exact same process used to produce weapons grade plutonium for bombs, not merely similar.)
Well, you separate the spent fuel into chemical components by suitable chemical processes. One of those components is plutonium salts. So, yes, reprocessing is a rather direct way to nuke materials.
There are reprocessing schemes like pyroprocessing that are less useful for producing bomb materials. But yes, currently at industrial scale the method of choice is PUREX, which AFAIK is the same process which is used for producing Pu for weapons. Although when reprocessing high burnup spent fuel from commercial reactors you get Pu with an isotopic composition poorly suited for weapons.
Renewable energy sources have zero fuel costs. Their potential for life-threatening disasters - on the scale of Fukushima, Chernobyl, coal ash floods, etc. - is zero. Just as with coal mines, uranium mines and oilfields, there's a large upfront cost ... but a much lower cost to the environment. Furthermore, anyone can create solar-powered electricity, anywhere. There will be no wars over access to sunlight. Sunlight…
Do you take into account storage? Having zero electricity at night or on cloudy days is not an option. So it’s either batteries or nuclear. On the scale of powering a city, what make more sense?
Burning coal creates fly ash which needs to be stored somewhere, usually large ponds near the power plant. In Tennessee in 2008 a dike ruptured and released 1.1 billion gallons of coal fly ash slurry that flowed into nearby rivers that drained into the Tennessee River. No-one was injured in the initial spill, but people contracted to clean it up developed cancers from being exposed to the toxic coal ash, 300 people d…
Worth noting that this power plant was run by an arm of the United States government.
Is a federally owned corporation (Tennessee Valley Authority) still considered an "arm" of the government?
292 comments and no one talks about the Democratic candidate that was most vocal about nuclear, specifically thorium? "Yang is absolutely right to make these points, and he has gotten some well-deserved attention. But it’s surprising that he hasn’t gotten more, given how much we’re hearing about the crisis nature of climate change. Because if you take climate change seriously, you have to take nuclear power seriously…
It’s not about climate change, it’s about controlling behavior via energy prices. The non-nuclear climate change advocates don’t care about “carbon,” they care about wealth redistribution. That’s why I oppose most “climate” policy. Because it isn’t about climate. Carbon and wealth redistribution should be separate issues, but activists have made them the same and since I oppose wealth redistribution via government ec…
So I thought the consensus among economists, hn, etc was that the best most painless way to solve climate crisis is a carbon tax, that doesn't drastically alter the economy all at once. So what to do with the tax money? Presumably invest in green energy. A lot of that can help people directly, like solar and nuclear jobs, and indirectly, like better trains, or subsidies for the poor on any essential goods that price was raised by the carbon tax a lot. We can probably find a use for all the money raised by placing a carbon tax at the rate needed to prevent catastrophic climate change. But if we put the tax at the right rate and have some money afterwards, what's wrong with free college?
No, I was able to find stats about fossil fuels. What I question is that it would be less harmful to drop a reactor right into the middle of a city. Remember, my question was about worst case scenario for nuclear, which the very pro-nuclear crowd here has so far been unable to describe on the many occasions that nuclear is hailed here as our saving grace. They instead point to Fukushima and Chernobyl and say "see, th…
What, you want an accurate physical simulation of a nuclear reactor falling onto Manhattan, Marvel comics style? Well, considering that an actual nuclear bomb going off on Hiroshima killed "only" <150,000 people, I find it pretty unlikely a falling reactor will kill half of Manhattan. So, there.
Glib response aside, I want a credible description of worst case scenario for nuclear disaster. The probability of such an event increases greatly if there are many plants, particularly if there are plants in nations which go into decline or plants built in highly corrupt or inept nations. So how many people die from the initial event? How much residual radiation? How far does it spread? How many people are displaced? Are food supplies effected? It sounds like you haven't really thought it through all the way. My personal belief is that people are not to be trusted with technology with such high stakes. Especially with the onset of climate catastrophe within the century ensuring the decline of our society.