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The Radiation Exposure Lie

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Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#111

Post by womble2 »

Schiendelman wrote: post #90
loeg wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Up to how many hours of battery capacity?

I'm not sure I understand the question. It's always cheaper.

No it isn't. Storage capacity for energy is expensive, if you want to have a grid that is largely dependent on intermittent sources and still have a stable grid providing power at all times you need large amounts of storage as well as generating capacity.

For example if nuclear costs 1bn for a GW and solar+wind costs 0.6bn but you need to also install 0.5bn of storage to make the grid reliable to the safety margin you deem acceptable then it is no longer a cheaper system.

Amount of storage needed scales up rapidly as you get towards an grid with entirely intermittent generation.

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#112

Post by memcg »

tribal808 wrote: post #52

technically not a lie, and the article need to show more data

Agreed, being wrong does not always involve lying. The article title is "How to lie about radiation" and the HN title is "The Radiation Exposure Lie", but the word "lie" does not appear in the article except the title.

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#113

Post by wat10000 »

the_af wrote: post #74
wat10000 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't even make any sense. How can you compare the harm of completely different things with completely different mechanisms and exposures? And why would nuclear winter have anything to do with it?

Surely that the West's perception (especially the popular narrative) of Chernobyl is tinted with Cold War logic is self-evident?

Cold war? Probably. Nuclear winter? No.

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#114

Post by memcg »

comrade1234 wrote: post #80
NotGMan wrote: post #68

Only ~35% of women in the UK support nuclear power while ~65% of men do. https://spectator.com/article/why-are-women-so-anti-nuclear/ So technically, if one extrapolates the best case scenario, if women wouldn't have voting rights, we'd already have nuclear power everywhere. Though to be fair, this varies from country to country and in some countries even women are over 50%. But in many countries women are under 50%…

What are you trying to say? Women shouldn't be allowed to vote? Women, at least in the USA, are going to college and graduating at a higher rate than guys. They have a more legitimate opinion. To be honest, i have chud fatigue.

Your answer is in the linked article.

https://spectator.com/article/why-are-women-so-anti-nuclear/

"Some will inevitably use this polling for point-scoring in the battle of the sexes. They shouldn’t. Everyone is ignorant about something. Most of the time, it is because there is no need or opportunity to learn the facts. The sad truth is that the case for nuclear power is most often confined to publications and media disproportionately consumed by men."

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#115

Post by the_af »

wat10000 wrote: post #113
the_af wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely that the West's perception (especially the popular narrative) of Chernobyl is tinted with Cold War logic is self-evident?

Cold war? Probably. Nuclear winter? No.

Agreed, I think it's unrelated to nuclear winter, that bit seems like a red herring. But Cold War perceptions definitely permeate our perception of Chernobyl.

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#116

Post by Kon5ole »

Kon5ole wrote: post #88
amarant wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your not wrong, but you seem to be missing one significant detail: we have altered the biosphere even more by not engaging in nuclear activity, instead opting for less-scary-but-worse alternatives like coal, oil and gas.

>we have altered the biosphere even more by not engaging in nuclear activity You imply that we could have made enough nuclear plants to replace coal, oil and gas and that would have prevented the effects of fossil fuel consumption. That's not the case. It would have been entirely impossible to make enough plants to even replace coal and oil fast enough, and even if we did, electricity is only 25% of emissions.

Perhaps I didn't make my point clearly enough?

The claim that lack of nuclear power is to blame for global warming doesn't hold up because even in a best case scenario, nuclear power can only replace a small part of the activities that cause global warming, and it takes way too long to even replace that.

The argument that we have a choice between nuclear power or global warming is therefore either misinformed or dishonest.

We're already dealing with global warming, and as of 2026 the fastest, cheapest and most effective way to replace fossil fuel is solar power and batteries, not nuclear power.

Batteries are so far mainly deployed in cars, where they replace millions of gallons of fossil fuels from being consumed every day, but they can also effectively be deployed in homes, communities and cities. It takes days to deploy, can be mass produced and distributed to any country in the world with no issue (even North Korea and Iran) and immediately reduces fossil consumption.

Newly deployed solar panels are adding several nuclear power plants worth of new power to the world every year, and they too start working the same day and can be deployed by almost anyone, everywhere.

If we want to stop altering the biosphere by burning fossil fuels, clearly we should hurry up with batteries and solar and not spend billions and decades on nuclear.

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#117

Post by Kon5ole »

Kon5ole wrote: post #86

>Chernobyl is the only accident in commercial nuclear history that has exposed people to large enough doses of radiation to poison and kill them. This is not true, it wasn't the only and not even the first. Some examples are collected in this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orphan_source_incident... The argument is also an annoyingly common attempt to sell the idea that nuclear power is not dangerous beca…

The article claims:

"After the Windscale fire released radioactive fallout onto grazing land in 1957, Britain discarded contaminated milk for 44 days, thereby avoiding any harm."

This is also not true, the actual reports estimate 33-100 deaths, 90 nonfatal cancers and 10 birth defects. (summary from wikipedia):

"These deaths were attributed not only to thyroid cancer, but also to lung cancer.[74] An updated 1988 UK government report (the most recent government estimate) estimated that 100 fatalities "probably" resulted from cancers as a result of the releases over 40 to 50 years.[75][76] The government report also estimated that 90 non-fatal cancers were caused by the incident, as well as 10 hereditary defects.[75]"

It's hard to imagine ignorance that manages to be familiar with Windscale yet not know anything about the estimated harm.

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#118

Post by ectospheno »

pu_pe wrote: post #104
gurjeet wrote: post #70

> Drinking one beer a night for a year is a lot less harmful than drinking 365 beers in one go. The same applies to radiation exposure, but regulation doesn’t agree. I know I may be overreacting, but when the dentists try to convince me that the annual x-ray of my family members is the same as being outside in the sun for a whole day, I try to explain it with a similar analogy; getting exposed to small amounts of x-r…

The amount of radiation exposure on a dental x-ray is still tiny though, we are talking like 5 or 6 orders of magnitude lower than radiation poisoning thresholds. Plus there is extensive epidemiological data about their safety.

Agreed. My problem is that every dental association I’m aware of recommends dental X-rays on an individual, clinically justified basis and not a regular schedule. There are very few dental scenarios requiring yearly X-rays. They do them to get more money.

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#119

Post by LorenPechtel »

Schiendelman wrote: post #65
loeg wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless by "viability" you're completely ignoring price, I disagree (I would argue that excessively expensive solutions aren't viable). We don't have good alternatives to gas (carbon fuel) peakers yet. Nor is winter generation a solved problem. Non-nuclear carbon-free generation needs a tremendous amount of battery storage to get to 0% carbon-emitting.

That is much, much cheaper than nuclear at today's prices.

Nuclear is expensive because nuclear is defined as expensive.

The problem lies with the standard of As Low As Reasonably Achievable. If you had reasonably priced nuclear power you could add more safety. Thus you have to add more safety. Thus you no longer have reasonably priced nuclear power.

And, when it comes to power it's a totally wrong standard. You should not be looking to minimize individual technology risk, you should be looking to minimize total risk of competing technologies. Making your nuclear plant safer instead drives generation to natural gas (~10x as dangerous as nuclear, plus climate effects) and oil (~10x as dangerous as natural gas, even more climate effects.) Or even coal (~10x as dangerous as oil, even more climate effects plus nasty stuff going up the stack--including emitting more radiation than would be tolerated for a nuclear plant.)

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#120

Post by LorenPechtel »

Schiendelman wrote: post #90
loeg wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Up to how many hours of battery capacity?

I'm not sure I understand the question. It's always cheaper.

What are you smoking??

Storage is more expensive than generation. Always.

We see some storage on the grid because storage is fast. Batteries can respond to load changes a lot faster than anything else. Demand goes up, the batteries are drawn down while cheaper generators are spun up. A few places use pumped hydro for the same purpose, but that's very situational.

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