371–380 of 399 posts
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It does benefit society by creating a baseline energy source that is cleaner than coal or natural gas.
Which ignorants can - and will - proceed to piss away on terrace heaters to have drinks while having a smoke outside on the street
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What do you mean by "safer"? Less accidents compared to eg coal plants? No exploding coal plant will render a whole region unlivable for >30 years. Both happened at Tschernobyl and Fukushima.
I guess deaths per energy unit produced ? According to this [1], for every death caused by nuclear power, 350 people die because of coal power. Note that most of these people died as a consequence of Chernobyl accident (~4000 vs ~500), so by current standards Nuclear Power is probably even safer. The issue with nuclear is that deaths are concentrated in a few "big" accidents, that have much more visibility and leave…
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What do you mean by "safer"? Less accidents compared to eg coal plants? No exploding coal plant will render a whole region unlivable for >30 years. Both happened at Tschernobyl and Fukushima.
Areas around coal power plants can exceed radioactivity limits for nuclear power plants, due to trace elements in the soot landing back down. Never mind all the other stuff. That’s pretty nasty, I’d rather be close to a nuclear power plant.
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It is statistically safer than almost anything even if you take Chernobyl and Fukushima into account.
The number of people displaced by coal is lower. Nuclear does well on deaths, yes.
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Who compares against fossil plants nowadays? Except wanting to put a carbon tax on them to account for that issue you mention. Truly, it's new built nuclear compared compared to renewables, storage and long-distance distance transmission. Spatial and temporal arbitrage of energy.
Germany is shutting down nuclear and replacing it with coal and gas. The comparison to fossil fuel is incredibly apt.
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Being impossible to insure is related more to a high degree of synchronization of risk pools than overall danger of death. Death rates are averages - it is possible that one person dying per time period is rate-equivalent to the whole town dying at once in a once-in-a-tens-of-millenia event. But the risk exposure in that event is quite different. You can get life insurance/death benefits as a mercenary or even as a c…
A couple of years ago there was a study about what this kind of insurance would cost: about 72 billion Euro per year. > The study proves for the first time the years of market distortion in favor of nuclear energy and at the expense of the competition, said Uwe Leprich from the Saarbrücken University of Technology and Economics. "The study also shows that if you look at the economy from a regulatory perspective, nucl…
I would just do one thing myself: I would make mandatory to label products with the pollution manufacturing process: this used coal, this used nuclear, this used blabla. This is the amount of waste produced to the environment. And let people choose, with the appropriate information.
In that setup, if nuclears are not worth, they would disappear by themselves.
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Why invest into something that will only last 100 years in fuel, take 30k years to deconstruct and may blow into your face at every point in time. Sounds insane.
Nuclear reactors cannot explode. It is not physically possible. It isn't even close to physically possible. Reactor-grade uranium is about 5% U235 while you need >90% to make something that can explode. May as well ask why we use wind turbines when they might take off and start dropping napalm.
They can and they do (see: Chernobyl, Fukushima). But it's not a nuclear explosion (as you say, it's not possible with their fuel enrichment and geometry); it's a steam or hydrogen explosion.
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> ugly architecture An interesting one to bring up. There is a cultural dimension, but also the fact the modern architecture is much less labor intensive even though it will break down. Generally I like such a response to labor shortages, but clearly we've gone wrong. Perhaps we just need to value key buildings more, based on a long lifespan, and just admit they will be crawling with craftsman to a large degree? Or,…
This isn't just an issue about things not being handmade. The ornate victorians with lots of flourishes were actually assembled from mass produced pieces. This is about architects intentionally turning away from beauty, because they believe the world is ugly, and their architecture needs to show this 'truth'. Check out the famous debate between Christopher Alexander (traditionalist) and Peter Eisenman (modernist) in…
I guess having spent a lot of time with "western art music", I've seen what happens when people tried to transcend culture over the last 100 years in what is ultimately a culturally-specific practice. With music, people have other choices, with buildings the effective monopoly is quite something.
The forum post doesn't really render right for me, but I'll check out the others, thanks.
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it wouldn't be devastating
>A meltdown or explosion at a nuclear facility could cause a large amount of radioactive material to be released into the environment. https://www.oregon.gov/oha/PH/HEALTHYENVIRONMENTS/RADIATIONP...
Big mess, sure, but no meltdown.
Also remember war is really bad no matter what. If someone blow up all the powerplants regardless of sort, a huge portion of people will die simply because the lack of electricity.
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Nuclear energy kills about zero person per annum. Coal itself kills at least 50000 Europeans every year. Even taking into account the worst case scenarios such as Chernobyl, coal (and fossil fuels generally) is several orders of magnitudes more dangerous than nuclear. I just don't get this mindset. People prefer killing literaly millions of persons right now while there's a safer alternative. That's incredible, reall…
There is a safer alternative in the short term. The two are comparable in the long term for safety. Also "Coal itself kills at least 50000 Europeans every year." is far from a truth. Coal may have increased the chance of death by some amount for at least 50000 Europeans every year is more correct.