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What do you do in 30 years when another incident like the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster happens? Batteries will be the long term solution to energy baseload needs, not nuclear.
> Whether or not nuclear power costs too much will ultimately be a matter for markets to decide It’s not a market decision, but a government decision, as nuclear power has always been built with state guarantees and/or subsidies. This article also again equates safety with lack of deaths. That’s like saying a neighborhood is safe, because in the robberies there only a few people die. Chernobyl and Fukushima had drama…
Chernobyl was underbudgetted in terms of safety. For instance no protective dome was places around the reactor housing as done in other countries. Add that to a suboptimal design to start with and sheer bad luck...
Fukushima on the other hand is a better comparison. But on larger scales, such as Europe or the US, surely it must be possible to place the plants in areas that are not subject to such natural disasters that would threaten the safety of the reactors?
> Whether or not nuclear power costs too much will ultimately be a matter for markets to decide It’s not a market decision, but a government decision, as nuclear power has always been built with state guarantees and/or subsidies. This article also again equates safety with lack of deaths. That’s like saying a neighborhood is safe, because in the robberies there only a few people die. Chernobyl and Fukushima had drama…
So at one point maybe we should start considering that nuclear is mostly dangerous to human society. As human society is responsible for climate change maybe that is some form of karma. Should nuclear be part of the solution this is the risk we might need to take because we will be the most impacted by consequences.
Life, Uh, Finds a Way...
No other fuel has the energy density of nuclear, no other source has the capability to run 24/7/365. Renewables are based on the hope that one day we will either had transcontinental grids, which no one has managed to build, or get batteries with energy storage seen only in Star Trek. Nuclear on the other hand has been here for 50 years and could have already solved our CO2 problems. But because it's unfashinable to…
You're right that we aren't there yet, but Star Trek level technology is hyperbole. Just to give one example, the German gas grid can store several hundreds TWh of energy, and there are lab results that indicate we might be able to improve power-to-gas-to-power efficiencies to make this viable[1].
[1] https://www.kit.edu/kit/english/pi_2018_009_power-to-gas-wit...
What do you do in 30 years when another incident like the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster happens? Batteries will be the long term solution to energy baseload needs, not nuclear.
> Whether or not nuclear power costs too much will ultimately be a matter for markets to decide It’s not a market decision, but a government decision, as nuclear power has always been built with state guarantees and/or subsidies. This article also again equates safety with lack of deaths. That’s like saying a neighborhood is safe, because in the robberies there only a few people die. Chernobyl and Fukushima had drama…
One point the article could have made but curiously didn't is that even in the case of a catastrophic aftermath like Chernobyl or Fukushima the end result is primarily human moving away from the zone because of cancer risk and nature claiming back control of the exclusion zone. So at one point maybe we should start considering that nuclear is mostly dangerous to human society. As human society is responsible for clim…
No other fuel has the energy density of nuclear, no other source has the capability to run 24/7/365. Renewables are based on the hope that one day we will either had transcontinental grids, which no one has managed to build, or get batteries with energy storage seen only in Star Trek. Nuclear on the other hand has been here for 50 years and could have already solved our CO2 problems. But because it's unfashinable to…
Don't be fooled by disastrous events, nuclear is statistically the safest energy source we have[1], so don't fear it senselessly. This is a whole topic on it's own and I won't delve deeper into it here.
[1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
What do you do in 30 years when another incident like the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster happens? Batteries will be the long term solution to energy baseload needs, not nuclear.
We could do just as badly and still have nowhere near as many deaths (including evacuation related deaths) as a single coal plant causes due to pollution.
Solar, wind, geothermal, and hydro are more than enough to power the world. They're cheaper too.