I often hear the argument that "nuclear is bad because there is a chance of a catastrophic loss of life". Well, there has not yet been any large scale nuclear disaster. Cars kill hundreds and we still use them.
>Cars kill hundreds and we still use them. Cars in the US alone kill 30,000 people every year. It's one of the biggest killers we have, only behind things like heart disease, and it's easily the biggest thing that kills younger, healthy people. Worldwide, the number is somewhere around 250k.
250k is an understatement, according to the WHO it's closer to 1.35 million. Road traffic injuries are the leading cause of death, worldwide, for people aged 5-29.
And yet, for the same quantity of energy over the same timeframe, nuclear is cheaper. It's not so much that it loses because of economics, it's losing because of the perceived uncertainty of the economics.
Risk, not uncertainty. The long-term (or even medium-term) pricing situation for renewables is highly volatile right now. It makes investing in new nuclear extremely risky financially. What if you start building a plant now, expecting a certain energy price to pay for it over decades, and by the time you finish, solar power costs half as much as your target? That could well happen. That's how utility companies go ban…
So, yeah, uncertainty about the prices creates a risk that has to be bet on
Most "common" people who hold themselves as "climate conscious" have no clue how the science of modern nuclear reactors or economic implication of energy production systems / distribution infrastructure work at all. Anything nuclear they think, "fukushima was nuclear and it went bad", even though it was near the coast and a known fault-zone...
The rhetoric of "anything nuclear is bad" will likely be looked back upon as a core reason the human race didn't meaningfully curb climate change.
> 20 years ago was essentially a zero point for the statistic they cite. It was less than 5 gigawatts, anyway. It grew by over 100 times in that 20 years, and it will be "unprecedented" to grow by 5 times in the next 20? Do you expect the growth rate of Google over the next 20 years will be the same as it was between 1999 and today? As things mature you don't get the same level of exponential growth. Meanwhile the su…
> That doesn't really work because solar can't produce at night photovoltaic no, molten salt yes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crescent_Dunes_Solar_Energy_... btw, driving by them at daytime is pretty weird... the collectors look literally like close-up stars floating above the surface
Are those actually more environment-friendly than nuclear?
Seems like those would take up lots of land area and easily fry and possibly blind animals, especially birds that get too close.
> That said, nuclear will never, ever be able to achieve either the real or the apparent risk levels of a wind farm or a bunch of rooftop solar panels. I'm going to go ahead and point out that more people die falling off their roofs installing solar per kWh than have died per kWh from decades of nuclear operation [1]. Denigrating that data as mansplaining seems pretty anti-scientific. Both death/kWh rates are nearly…
It doesn't matter if it's technically correct, from a certain perspective. What matters is that when you say something like that, you come off like a smug mansplaining dudebro who treats anyone who disagrees like they're an idiot. It's not a science problem, it's a sales problem. And if you want concerned environmentalist-oriented people to come to your side, you do not do it by mocking their stupidity with a ridicul…
OK well I can agree with that! I have never converted an antinuke with that fact. I have converted dozens (at least from absolute rejection to cautious optimism) with 10-15 minute in-person discussions. I have not found out how to scale that.
No, that's not how it works. It's hard in the beginning, because of research and development. After that, you got the technology side covered, you got the processes side covered, all you need is to build and install. Making the first mobile phones was hard. Making another million mobile phones today: not that hard. Especially if you make a million more of an established model.
No, that's not how it works. Every growth process has limits. Solar has much more limits than mobile phones: land, resources (phones are tiny compared to solar panels), labour (not just production, but also placing the panels and maintaining them)... I reckon if we treat solar panels like mobile phones (throw away every 1.5 years) we won't get far...
Limits only matter when we at least start getting close to reaching those. There is enough land, labor and resources for lots of solar panels while most of us in the western world already have a smartphone and seem to replace them less often due to a seemingly slower tech cycle.
If other low-carbon sources, namely wind and solar PV, are to fill the shortfall in nuclear, their deployment would have to accelerate to an unprecedented level. In the past 20 years, wind and solar PV capacity has increased by about 580 gigawatts in advanced economies. But over the next 20 years, nearly five times that amount would need to be added. This is misleading enough to make one question every "fact" stated…
The growth rate for solar is x10/8 years, so in 20 years we are at >90% solar.
A lot of news pieces about nuclear are unrealistically rosy. Waste reprocessing isn't really all that new and it doesn't really get rid of waste. It replaces much of the solid waste with even more liquid waste. The problem with having any discussion of nuclear is agreeing upon the facts. It's crazy hard to find an unbiased source. If you asked a random bystander why we haven't built nuclear reactors in recent years,…
Aren't the "environmentalists" the ones that are creating the mood that makes it hard to invest in nuclear?
Mood has nothing to do with investing in nuclear. We are talking something you build that prints money at a guaranteed rate, there's no one to sell to that you need to influence one way or another to make them throw more of their money at you.
The only reason why nuclear power isn't widespread is that shareholders see a 30 year return on investment and run away to juicier returns.
Haven't nuclear waste recycling and safety features gotten really good in the past few decades? I feel like not many people know just how little waste is created with modern recycling and just how safe nuclear is with modern safety features. Seems like we need a positive PR campaign to help convince folks that nuclear is way better than fossil fuels. This could easily be bipartisan.
> Haven't nuclear waste recycling and safety features gotten really good in the past few decades? I thought you were being snarky at first, but the rest of the comment appears to indicate you're being serious. In Belgium we've been stuck in endless discussions regarding what to do with our nuclear waste. We used to dump it in the sea, which was probably a bad idea. Now it's stored in barrels which are apparently leak…
I believe the issue with recycling is non-proliferation from one or both of these reasons: 1) If I'm not mistaken, recycling generates/accumulates plutonium, which in the wrong hands can be made into a thermonuclear weapon. 2) Enriching the spent waste back into fuel is much too close to the process of enriching it for bombs. I distinctly remember a YT video where they said that it's very hard (as in, much work) to enrich U to x-% for reactor fuel, but once you're at x-%, it's realtively easy to keep going to to y-% for bombs. So to recycle waste involves running that process and the NRC or some governments simply don't allow anyone to do it. My apologies if I'm incorrect in any of this.