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Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

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Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#121

Post by thaumasiotes »

projektfu wrote: post #111
mycall wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we had enough solar to power the world, would all of the solar cells actually lower the temperature of Earth due to being black?

Solar radiation that is absorbed by a solar panel will either heat the panel or generate electricity, which will also mostly become heat in the end. Reflected radiation will hopefully leave the earth. The things that cool the planet are mostly white — reflective. Clouds, white roofs, etc. Trees cool their local area by performing endothermic reactions creating carbohydrates and lignans.

> Trees cool their local area by performing endothermic reactions creating carbohydrates and lignans.

Let's not forget shade. How much are they cooling the air above them?

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#122

Post by pdonis »

icedistilled wrote: post #98
Lazare wrote: post #53

Do we stress about the risks nuclear power far out of proportion to how safe it is? Yes. Even accounting for the worst accidents, it kills a very low number of people per TWh. Do we ignore the risks of fossil fuels far out of proportion to how dangerous they are? Also yes. They kill an absurdly high number of people per TWh; by most estimates coal is several hundred times more dangerous than nuclear. Does that mean n…

>Does that mean nuclear is just a totally great idea? No; the issue with nuclear is cost. Oh don't forget the other issue: It takes decades to build a new plant. We don't got that time. For the $6 Billion or more it takes to build a nuclear plant that will then take 15 to 20 years to license and build before it generates a single Watt, we could have had a $6 Billion of solar and wind deployed and operating for 12+ ye…

> It takes decades to build a new plant.

No, it doesn't. It only takes a few years. What takes decades is resolving all the NIMBY lawsuits.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#123

Post by thaumasiotes »

p1mrx wrote: post #119

I think the most legitimate concern about nuclear safety is, what happens to the plant if you push the "OFF" button and go home? The current gigawatt-scale plants (AP1000, Hualong One, etc.) can cool without external water for 72 hours, after which a meltdown occurs. NuScale plans to run their reactors at the bottom of a pool, with enough water to passively transition to air cooling over the course of a month. (There…

> I think the most legitimate concern about nuclear safety is, what happens to the plant if you push the "OFF" button and go home?

Local peasants get in, take some pretty glowing things back home, apply the stuff as makeup, and die horrible deaths. When the family tries to bury their daughter in the town cemetery, the rest of the town marches in protest.

Clearly, the lesson is that we should stop building... hospitals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#124

Post by johnisgood »

zyxzevn wrote: post #120

I don't care much about the radiation. And this is always the wrong argument. I care about (1) the pollution with 100,000 years of half-life and (2) corruption and (3) Murphy's law. None of these problems are even closely solved. The only constant is that errors will be made. My previous generation thought that it was OK to put waste into the oceans. Or dump it in Africa. Some Thorium solutions may work, but they nee…

What about fusion reactors? ITER is WIP.

https://www.iter.org/sci/Fusion

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#125

Post by ComputerGuru »

Lazare wrote: post #53

Do we stress about the risks nuclear power far out of proportion to how safe it is? Yes. Even accounting for the worst accidents, it kills a very low number of people per TWh. Do we ignore the risks of fossil fuels far out of proportion to how dangerous they are? Also yes. They kill an absurdly high number of people per TWh; by most estimates coal is several hundred times more dangerous than nuclear. Does that mean n…

Nuclear is only so relatively expensive because it’s the only fuel source that’s forced to pay up for all the externalities up front (and I’m not saying that is a bad thing to require). A nuclear plant can’t be built if the money to make it safe (as per some specification), insure against all health complications while it’s in operation, decommission it, clean up the site, securely dump all spent fuel, and return the site back to “normal” decades later isn’t put up in escrow from the start: that’s all captured in the price.

If we did that for fossil (and other) fuels, you’d bet they would cost more too.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#126

Post by searchableguy »

jimmcslim wrote: post #61
read_if_gay_ wrote: post #9

I think it's definitely true people are overly anxious about radiation, and irrationally so. For example, it's easy to find people who get anxious about xrays but not about flying even though it gives you roughly the same amount of exposure. I know I was pretty anxious when I had a chest xray as a kid. It's just the invisible nature of radiation. Coupled with the real and brutal effects of extreme doses, it just lend…

I’ve just had approximately 7 weeks of radiation therapy as post-surgery treatment for a cancer in my neck. 2 grays each treatment (I think) and 33 treatments, 66 grays in total. My skin in the treatment area held up fine until the last week when it basically gave up, so I’m looking forward to a couple of weeks of applying gel and changing bandages... So even quite moderate exposures can have significant effects, I c…

I hope you recover soon. Wishing for the best!

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#127

Post by Lazare »

codingdave wrote: post #116
Lazare wrote: post #53

Do we stress about the risks nuclear power far out of proportion to how safe it is? Yes. Even accounting for the worst accidents, it kills a very low number of people per TWh. Do we ignore the risks of fossil fuels far out of proportion to how dangerous they are? Also yes. They kill an absurdly high number of people per TWh; by most estimates coal is several hundred times more dangerous than nuclear. Does that mean n…

> it kills a very low number of people per TWh. I worked in energy for 5 years. Deaths per TWh was not a metric we measured. Deaths are not made acceptable because of energy production. The goal was zero. We did not reach that goal, but nobody ever said deaths would be OK if only the numbers went up.

Obviously zero deaths is a great target, yes. Obviously zero deaths is impossible. No energy production method causes zero deaths; even wind and solar have a death toll (eg, from workers falling off things, construction accidents, manufacturing processes, etc), and yes, at the scale we're talking about that adds up.

Everything causes deaths when you're talking about thousands of TWhs. At most you can minimise the deaths.

> Deaths are not made acceptable because of energy production.

Nor are they acceptable because of food production, and yet food production causes deaths. Fishing boats are famously dangerous places; even farms have a lot of hazards (chemicals, large animals, heavy machinery). We could say the same about minerals, lumber (a friend of mine lost her father at a young age; he worked in forestry and a tree came down the wrong way), and more. And yet, we need all these things.

> Deaths per TWh was not a metric we measured. [...] nobody ever said deaths would be OK if only the numbers went up.

I don't doubt it. That is, after all, how we ended up in this mess.

Japan is currently building a large fleet of coal fired power plants (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/climate/japan-coal-fukush...). Those plants will kill a horrifying number of people; many hundreds of times more than died from the Fukushima disaster.

That seems fairly clearly like the sort of decision you'd made if you weren't thinking about the obvious results.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#128

Post by corty »

mrtksn wrote: post #112
corty wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The failed ones were known to be dangerous. Mostly that big problem was kept under radar of the public, oversight failed big time or was complicit. The other big problem is, we keep running old rustbuckets and dubious designs. More than half of the worlds reactors should probably be shut down immediately, and most of the rest is also due for a replacement very very soon.

How do we know that this time is different? See, the thing that goes wrong doesn’t have to be even a technological one. Fission is a process that spontaneously can go wrong unless harnessed by systems that are built by thousands of people. Anything can go wrong and anyone can screw up. All can happen and the same time as demonstrated by the previous disasters. You say that the current reactors are very dangerous and…

Fission can spontaneously go wrong in the same way all the protons in your body could just decide to decay. A reactor is not magic, just physics.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#129

Post by carry_bit »

dv_dt wrote: post #39
raffraffraff wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whereas with lovely coal and oil we get to ignore the problem. It's just smoke until... Catastrophic climate feedback loops, mass extinction, hundreds of millions of climate migrants escaping uninhabitable parts of earth, coral and shellfish disappear in acidic oceans, entire ecosystems collapse and etc etc. But nuclear had costs. Sure. But we could at least begin to calculate those costs.

Why does the answer always reply with coal and oil instead of Renewables and storage?

For the last 40 years, that has been the actual alternative.

Can you imagine where we'd be if we had continued pursuing the nuclear future? A largely decarbonized grid, advanced reactor designs deployed, knock-on effects from plentiful power, etc. What would the CO2 levels look like now? But no, instead we're now at a crisis point...

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#130

Post by monadic2 »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #24
sto_hristo wrote: post #22

Everything around the nuclear disasters has been a human bullshit of a problem, not a technological one. Probably with the exception of Fukushima, where all the conditions were put into the extreme - killer earthquake and monster tsunami. Being anxious about it is more than justified, especially with idiotic countries in mind. But that doesn't mean we need to abandon it. Nuclear is the future and there is no debate a…

Problem is that you don’t get to opt out of the “human bullshit”. Nuclear power comes with a massive and unavoidable cost from these matters.

Massive compared to what, though? Chernobyl was a catastrophe, but it's also like just a month of driving deaths here in america, or a couple coal plants just doing their thing. None of these are even on the same amount of destruction that climate change will wreak, up to and including possible extinction, something scarier even than a nuclear holocaust. Perhaps you might articulate what the risk you're alluding to is?
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