Insurance companies didn‘t change their mind about nuclear power. Without the guarantee that in case of an accident the government (and so all tax payers) will cover the costs, no nuclear power plant would ever have been built. This is a huge subsidy to the nuclear industry. No other industry has this or needs this.
I changed my mind about nuclear waste
411–420 of 428 posts
Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste
#412Earlier quoted context omitted.
And solar increases the need for storage. There are certainly all kinds of indirect effects that might skew those numbers, and so it's very much possible solar does better. That isn't really the point - the point is that nuclear is a whole lot safer than many widespread alternatives. While some would like nuclear to replace solar as well, I think most of those of us who see nuclear as unnecessarily maligned are more…
Sure. I too am annoyed by the shut down of nuclear power plants. Any marginal ultra-long-term safety gain of not generating new waste is more than offset by the already sunk costs of the nuclear power plant. And the bad effects of coal burning.
Also, spent nuclear fuel is very easy to safely dispose of, we just don't want to because:
A. It's useful and can be reprocessed into useful fuel once that's allowed and we can do it cheaply.
B. The media and public would throw a fit if people started dumping (glassed) nuclear waste on the ocean floor. Because the media and public are completely innumerate and cannot do things like multiplication required to calculate the less than 0.1% radioactivity increase the ocean would experience.
Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because the 'actual numbers' were protested against even by the scientists on whose work they are based and represent (or rather misrepresent) what an industry that is constantly trying to cut corners does when there is enough attention and scepticism to go around to stop them before they do anything critically stupid. In spite of various plant operators' attempts, no serious accident has ever occured because there a…
Of course they cut corners! They're so overburdened with endless overly cautious regulations that see spending a billion man hours as better than letting a single curie of material get loose into the wider environment (which is incredibly stupid given how much more good a billion man hours can do in, say, healthcare). If they didn't cut corners nothing would get done. And once corner cutting starts it doesn't disting…
"Of course they're going to be willfully negligent! Just change the rules so they're allowed to kill you and they won't have to break them." While being novel isn't particularly compelling. It also has no explanatory power over all of the corruption and willful negligence pre-1979 or the spiralling costs elsewhere.
Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure if that's controversial? I don't think the fossil fuel industry (or Putin) could've wished for better allies than the Energiewende (anti-nuclear, pro Russian gas with a bit of solar and wind) supporters in Europe. Whoever was behind it successfully managed to delay nuclear fission adoption by about 60 years for all of the EU and UK except France causing massive amounts of totally unnecessary CO2 emissions in…
Putin is an omni-present monster, sure, and an oil and gas monster to that. But he also is THE biggest nuclear power monster: [Rosatom] ranks first in the overseas NPP construction, responsible for 76% of global nuclear technology exports: 35 nuclear power plant units, at different stages of development, in 12 countries, as of December 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosatom
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Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste
#415Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course they cut corners! They're so overburdened with endless overly cautious regulations that see spending a billion man hours as better than letting a single curie of material get loose into the wider environment (which is incredibly stupid given how much more good a billion man hours can do in, say, healthcare). If they didn't cut corners nothing would get done. And once corner cutting starts it doesn't disting…
"Of course they're going to be willfully negligent! Just change the rules so they're allowed to kill you and they won't have to break them." While being novel isn't particularly compelling. It also has no explanatory power over all of the corruption and willful negligence pre-1979 or the spiralling costs elsewhere.
We allow people to drive. We allow burning of fossil fuels and use of tires.
These things kill people. Life is not infinitely valuable, a higher quality of life for years can be worth a few life hour reduction in life expectancy.
In the domain of public policy, money is lives. Spending more money on nuclear safety means less money on cancer detection or rare disease research, which costs lives. Spending money inefficiently costs lives.
> It also has no explanatory power over all of the corruption and willful negligence pre-1979 or the spiralling costs elsewhere.
By the latter, are you referring to Cost Disease?
Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Of course they're going to be willfully negligent! Just change the rules so they're allowed to kill you and they won't have to break them." While being novel isn't particularly compelling. It also has no explanatory power over all of the corruption and willful negligence pre-1979 or the spiralling costs elsewhere.
We allow people to drive. We allow burning of fossil fuels and use of tires. These things kill people. Life is not infinitely valuable, a higher quality of life for years can be worth a few life hour reduction in life expectancy. In the domain of public policy, money is lives. Spending more money on nuclear safety means less money on cancer detection or rare disease research, which costs lives. Spending money ineffic…
There is a fractal of terrible assumptions here.
Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
And solar increases the need for storage. There are certainly all kinds of indirect effects that might skew those numbers, and so it's very much possible solar does better. That isn't really the point - the point is that nuclear is a whole lot safer than many widespread alternatives. While some would like nuclear to replace solar as well, I think most of those of us who see nuclear as unnecessarily maligned are more…
> German decision to shut down nuclear plants and as a consequence needing to run coal plants longer will likely cause more deaths than all nuclear plants combined through the history of nuclear power That's a funny way of spelling cancelling tens to hundreds of gigawatts of renewable investment which was to replace those nuclear reactors and the fossil fuels and replacing them with gas.
If they'd come through on that, before shutting down the nuclear plants, you'd have a point. Without shutting down the nuclear power plants a lot of that money wouldn't have been needed in the first place. But it didn't happen, and so it's perfectly reasonable to blame them for either or both of those decisions. Fact remains that in retaining the coal power they've caused a huge number of unnecessary deaths.
Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste
#418Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Incidentally this is about the same amount of coal we burn per year. Who are "we"? The US alone consumed about 545 million short ton of coal in 2021 [1]. From what I can tell, that's in the range of 400 million m^3. Did I get the numbers wrong? (I just semi-randomly picked a converter online as I have no reference point to how heavy a cubic meter of coal is). Because that does not seem at all like about the same am…
That's the whole point about my criticism. Uranium is incredibly dense so phrasing it in terms of volume of the uranium is just misleading. Regarding the calculation https://www.worldometers.info/coal/ says we are burning 1,147,083 cubic feet of coal which is about 30000 cubic meters which is about the same as a football field up to 10 yards (~50mx90mx10m).
It says:
> The world consumes 1,147,083 cubic feet of coal per capita every year (based on the 2016 world population of 7,464,022,049 people) or 3,143 cubic feet per capita per day.
(My emphasis).
So closer to a football field per person according to this. That sounds excessive to me, so I'm not sure I trust those numbers.
This [1] says "1 ton of coal is approximately 40 cubic feet per ton, might be a little less, might be a little more....". Using my earlier numbers from DOE, that gives 545 million short tons * 40 = ca. 21,800 million cubic feet, or ~ 600 million m^3, or ca. 1.67m^3 per capita in the US. That sounds low, but as a global average, maybe not.
[1] https://coalpail.com/coal-forum/viewtopic.php?f=57&t=2591#:~.......
Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
> German decision to shut down nuclear plants and as a consequence needing to run coal plants longer will likely cause more deaths than all nuclear plants combined through the history of nuclear power That's a funny way of spelling cancelling tens to hundreds of gigawatts of renewable investment which was to replace those nuclear reactors and the fossil fuels and replacing them with gas.
If they'd come through on that, before shutting down the nuclear plants, you'd have a point. Without shutting down the nuclear power plants a lot of that money wouldn't have been needed in the first place. But it didn't happen, and so it's perfectly reasonable to blame them for either or both of those decisions. Fact remains that in retaining the coal power they've caused a huge number of unnecessary deaths.
The people that made the decision to cancel the planmed renewables are not pro renewables.
Your bad propaganda is completely incoherent.
Re: I changed my mind about nuclear waste
#420Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they'd come through on that, before shutting down the nuclear plants, you'd have a point. Without shutting down the nuclear power plants a lot of that money wouldn't have been needed in the first place. But it didn't happen, and so it's perfectly reasonable to blame them for either or both of those decisions. Fact remains that in retaining the coal power they've caused a huge number of unnecessary deaths.
The people that made the decision to cancel the planmed renewables are not pro renewables. Your bad propaganda is completely incoherent.
My "bad propaganda" does not rely on the intent of any of the people who did this cancellations. All it relies on is the fact that the shut down of nuclear ensured a reliance on coal that has killed and will kill a huge number of people.
If you're trying to make a point, you're failing.