241–250 of 309 posts
> However, 58% thought that nuclear power caused climate change while only 46% thought that coal burning did so This raises some interesting thoughts about the nature and importance of democracy.
Why do you assume that the average politician is better informed than the average citizen?
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France isn't reducing the capacity as a targetted policy but out of necessity. They have 58 nuclear power plants, most of them quite old (before 80ies). To maintain the current level, they would have to be replaced not too far in the future, but currently only 1 or 2 new reactors are under construction and both late and way over budget. So there currently is no route in maintaining the current capacity. Consequently…
> currently only 1 or 2 new reactors are under construction and both late and way over budget. So in a few decades France has forgotten how to build reactors on time and in an affordable way?
Nuclear is clean, it is safe but it is not cheap. It's safe and clean because of it's moderately priced. I stand by nuclear because it's cleanness and safeness which can't be compared to anything else. What will we generate electricity with in non-windy cloudy days? Coal? LNG? ESS? Note that all of those options are more dangerous, more expensive and more dirty than nuclear.
Is it safe considering the 1000 square miles of Ukraine that Chernobyl made uninhabitable? How safe are they against terrorist attacks, an attack by a rogue state or in a conventional war?
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Not really. We test for uranium contamination of water. There's actually a lot of areas where naturally occurring uranium puts it above safe concentrations and it has to be filtered out. This is the case in much of California, the Rockies that feed into this area's water supply naturally had high uranium concentration [1]. Given that we already test and treat water she to naturally occurring uranium I'm not too conce…
So the testing will then also magically clean the water if it gets contaminated? Sure, if Flint MI is our baseline for acceptable living standards this is fine.
The takeaway from Flint is not “we can’t remove uranium from ground water”, but rather “don’t build your water distribution network out of toxic heavy metals like lead”.
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Nuclear is always touted as such a good idea on this site, but I want to take the opposite stance. - Nuclear power has inherit risks that are not present in other forms of modern energy generation. You can claim that todays designs are 99.9999999% safe, but there is no such thing as 100%. If humans build it, it will fail, and a single catastrophic nuclear plant failure isn’t acceptable. - Nuclear waste is difficult t…
If nuclear core meltdowns can be fully contained by design the risk is mitigated. For instance with newer designs of smaller portable reactors by NuScale
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> Reducing nuclear power in France seems to be one of the worst decisions you could make in a time when the rest of the world has its head in the sand. When people claim to have goal A but do things that run counter to A, you must conclude that their real goal is not goal A but instead some other goal B. When environmentalist types rail against nuclear power, they reveal their true preferences. They care more about d…
> When environmentalist types rail against nuclear power, they reveal their true preferences. They care more about dismantling technological civilization than they do about reducing emissions. If they really cared about emissions as much as they claim to care, they'd support nuclear power out of necessity. They don't, so it's fair to conclude they have unstated goals. There's an alternative explanation: that their "t…
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Which ones are those that are also effective enough?
Renewables, pumped and battery storage, HVDC transmission, interconnectors between grids. California and Australia (picked from the top of my head based on knowledge of their forward looking policies) will be almost entirely powered by renewables in 2045 and 2030 (respectively) without any nuclear power. "Green" hydrogen and ammonia are still in early stages of development, but are promising very long duration storag…
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Is it safe considering the 1000 square miles of Ukraine that Chernobyl made uninhabitable? How safe are they against terrorist attacks, an attack by a rogue state or in a conventional war?
Yes because we learned from Chernobyl and Fukushima. The reason nuclear is expensive is because they protect themselves from war or terrorist attacks by drills, policies, strengthened structure and alertness. Actually, if you are in a war or you are a terrorist, there are much more high value targets than a structure with 1.3m thick re-enforced concrete plus 1cm thick steel dome.
The reason is that ever since Chernobyl there has been an active debate in Germany pro/contra nuclear (where in some parts there are still consumption limits on certain types of wild mushrooms and game due to contamination with caesium - 30 years later, 1000+ km away!). And the core argument pro was the same it is today: We learned from Chernobyl, nuclear reactors are way safer, Chernobyl will never happen again.
But if you followed Fukushima closely while it happened, the fact that Fukushima wasn't Chernobyl was sheer luck - had the wind blown southwards towards Tokyo (and not eastwards out to the sea like it did) Fukushima would have been worse.
I'm in no way saying that we have not advanced massively in science and technology - in fact, we have - I'm saying there are tricky biases at play here that make it very difficult to estimate whether we have learned enough.
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France isn't reducing the capacity as a targetted policy but out of necessity. They have 58 nuclear power plants, most of them quite old (before 80ies). To maintain the current level, they would have to be replaced not too far in the future, but currently only 1 or 2 new reactors are under construction and both late and way over budget. So there currently is no route in maintaining the current capacity. Consequently…
> currently only 1 or 2 new reactors are under construction and both late and way over budget. So in a few decades France has forgotten how to build reactors on time and in an affordable way?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe I have not made that point clear enough in my post: currently they are failing to build replacement plants at a cost at which they could replace all of the existing reactors. Unless they can come up with an entirely new design which considerably cuts cost compared to what is considered a "current design" right now, there will be a reduction in capacity.
Nuclear being staggeringly overregulated is the reason for the high costs. If we put the same price on lives lost to car accidents as we do to lives lost in nuclear accidents (which some basic back of envelope calculations using old reactor construction costs and lives lost in nuclear accidents reveals to be well over a billion dollars per life) none of us would drive.