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Nukes makes it sound like they want nuclear missiles but this is about nuclear energy...
Yes... is this an American phrasing? I (from UK) would definitely write this as "renewables and nuclear".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that it seems like a massive wasted opportunity, but the most compelling argument I've heard against nuclear power is that it creates a vulnerability. If a nuclear power plant in New York City had been successfully attacked 18 years ago, what would the damage have been? We may need to focus on the security of existing infrastructure before we begin to build the next generation of power.
In US anyway, my understanding is that most of our containment structures should be sufficient to survive a plane impact without loss of containment. [1] [1] https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/PVP/proceedings-abstr...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that it seems like a massive wasted opportunity, but the most compelling argument I've heard against nuclear power is that it creates a vulnerability. If a nuclear power plant in New York City had been successfully attacked 18 years ago, what would the damage have been? We may need to focus on the security of existing infrastructure before we begin to build the next generation of power.
In US anyway, my understanding is that most of our containment structures should be sufficient to survive a plane impact without loss of containment. [1] [1] https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/PVP/proceedings-abstr...
Unpopular opinion (though getting less so): the politicization of nuclear energy in the 1960s and the resulting lack of investment & R&D advances may go down as one of the biggest blunders in human history. Even with some modest ongoing investments, we'd have designs that are FAR safer than systems currently in operation.
To me it's even more mind boggling that the club of rome 72 report was a Million-scale best seller printed book and nothing happened regarding energy and resource waste. And that's far less sensitive than nuclear physics.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It might confuse an AI, but a human would immediately know because the word renewables is first.
Maybe it's a regional way of saying "nuclear" but, given the highly negative context of actual nukes, I expected a fervently anti-nuclear article. It'd be like an article in support of euthanasia being titled: "This state wants both end of life care and murder".
“No Nukes Is Bad News for Climate” https://www.wsj.com/articles/no-nukes-is-bad-news-for-climat...
“How Old Nukes Can Help Green New Dealers” https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-09-10/elizab...
Any reasonable intelligence would have understood from the context.
Would make a good test for anyone’s AI.
Unpopular opinion (though getting less so): the politicization of nuclear energy in the 1960s and the resulting lack of investment & R&D advances may go down as one of the biggest blunders in human history. Even with some modest ongoing investments, we'd have designs that are FAR safer than systems currently in operation.
Why would you think that? The problem with nuclear is that we are playing with significant tail risks, which are the hardest to engineer around. Catastrophic failures can have tremendous consequences, and in a sufficiently complex design there will be possibilities of catastrophic failures. While there are dead-simple reactor designs (like radiothermal), the vast majority of approaches work by layering complexity.
After Fukushima I became much more lukewarm on the subject of nuclear power, not so much because it was a huge Chernobyl-like disaster, but because I had repeatedly been told that a modern (post-Chernobyl) reactor was simply incapable of these failures modes. I had even, ignorantly, parroted back almost those exact words when discussing nuclear with people.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People got scared (somewhat legitimately) and we regulated them to death. It became so risky and so expensive to invest in nuclear that nobody, not even the big companies with nuclear divisions like GE did it. People talk about failures of the market all the time, and there are many. This was one of the failures of regulation. I think we're starting to see a small revival here finally, but is it too late? Renewables…
I think it was mostly a failure of human psychology. The over-regulation was simply a manifestation of that - democracy working perfectly. Blunder 1: war. We dropped a nuclear bomb before we ever made a nuclear power plant. Nuclear became inextricably linked with sickness and death instead of power and prosperity. Blunder 2: broken heuristic risk assessment. Radiation is scary because it's "spooky" - it's undetectabl…
and? Nuclear power is just as "renewable" as wind, solar & hydro in every sense of the word.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People got scared (somewhat legitimately) and we regulated them to death. It became so risky and so expensive to invest in nuclear that nobody, not even the big companies with nuclear divisions like GE did it. People talk about failures of the market all the time, and there are many. This was one of the failures of regulation. I think we're starting to see a small revival here finally, but is it too late? Renewables…
I agree that it seems like a massive wasted opportunity, but the most compelling argument I've heard against nuclear power is that it creates a vulnerability. If a nuclear power plant in New York City had been successfully attacked 18 years ago, what would the damage have been? We may need to focus on the security of existing infrastructure before we begin to build the next generation of power.
Step 2: Build extremely strong containment. Not that hard, just keep pouring concrete.
Step 3: Be at peace with the fact that even the worst nuclear incident, while harrowing, would not be the end of the world - which fossil fuels literally are. And it's not like fossil fuels are immune to massive eco-disaster failure points. Deepwater Horizon was far more damaging than Chernobyl - millions of animals perished.
Optional Step 4: don't use a reactor design that involves huge piles of flammable radioactive carbon, uncontained - try for something where the reaction stops if anything goes wrong. Then at worst you get a toxic site, instead of vast amounts of atmospheric radiation.
Unpopular opinion (though getting less so): the politicization of nuclear energy in the 1960s and the resulting lack of investment & R&D advances may go down as one of the biggest blunders in human history. Even with some modest ongoing investments, we'd have designs that are FAR safer than systems currently in operation.