11–20 of 201 posts
It would be really, really nice if we lived in a world where people new nuclear power mostly just means heating water (like many methods of power generation…)
Yeah, heating water with radioactive material. And then having to dispose toxic byproducts that can kill millions for thousands of years.
Did the inverse square law stop working recently or do they all take turns touching it?
If nuclear power was invented today, it would have been considered a breakthrough capable of changing the course of climate change dramatically. Since it exists for long and people formed an emotional reaction to incidents that were not that serious, while dying constantly from things they cannot see (like air pollution from coal), we are in this weird scenario where otherwise educated people say absolutely stupid th…
Air pollution from coal has many problems.
But invisibility is not one of those problems. You can see it.
That’s backwards: it actually means that protecting against nuclear hazards is astronomically expensive, that nukes are borderline unmanageable in the long term
We have had very few nuclear hazards in the past, with very limited impact as shown in this article. Nuclear plants that were really old rarely failed as well, before we added all this regulatory overhead. Weird how something "borderline unmanageable" causes way less damage than the alternatives.
A nuclear reactor in Sweden had a severe incident in 2006 when many of the "defense in depth" layers had been accidentally removed through freak occurrences and upgrades.
It is still impossible to get private third party insurance for a nuclear plant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsmark_Nuclear_Power_Plant#J...
If nuclear power was invented today, it would have been considered a breakthrough capable of changing the course of climate change dramatically. Since it exists for long and people formed an emotional reaction to incidents that were not that serious, while dying constantly from things they cannot see (like air pollution from coal), we are in this weird scenario where otherwise educated people say absolutely stupid th…
And as someone already mentioned. Nuclear needs to be very reliable, because malfunctions, while they may not cause armageddon, can kill entire blocks and make the cleanup even more costly than a normal decomissioning. You absolutely want to build these things to last and be reliable. Just look at Greifswald Unit 5 partially melting down less than a month into operation. In fact, Greifswald and their numerous close calls are a great example for where "less safe nuclear" would lead us.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, heating water with radioactive material. And then having to dispose toxic byproducts that can kill millions for thousands of years.
>that can kill millions Did the inverse square law stop working recently or do they all take turns touching it?
So no, they do not take turns. The live 1000 km away, and just buy a fish that swam 100 km away from the fire.
I never understand why the "man in the street" with their zero knowledge will decide if which type of power plant is safe/sustainable/economical. Imagine if they would be also allowed to tell your car mechanical what is wrong and how to fix that.
Nuclear triggers some primal fear. The safety regulations have become table stakes, unfortunately.
> "All the evacuations at Fukushima were unnecessary, and in the case of the frail [or] elderly murderously so. If there had been no evacuations, few members of the public would have received more than 1 mSv/day peak and some 1600 lives would have been saved, and some 100,000 less lives sadly disrupted. Even the EPA now counsels shelter-in-place rather than evacuation.
> At Chernobyl, it probably made sense to evacuate the 45,000 non-workers from Pripyat for a month or so. (Most of the plant workers never left. ) All the other evacuations were tragically unnecessary. The 1990 evacuations were completely senseless as is making the Exclusion Zone off-limits when the dose rates almost everywhere in the zone are below average planet wide and have been for a very long time."