31–40 of 69 posts
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I've said many times that nuclear power needs better marketing. Drop nuclear from the name like the MRI manufacturers did. It's no longer a nuclear plant, it's a traveling wave plant, or a molten salt plant- more descriptive and also separates the concept in people's minds from a Simpsons-esque nuclear plant.
"Krypton production facility"? The mascot could be a neon light.
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.
> 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 the…
Fukushima was commissioned in 1971. Chernobyl happened in 1986. I would not call the design a "post-Chernobyl" reactor.
I can recommend the section on the wiki page for further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_Nuclear_Powe...
> I had even, ignorantly, parroted back
I think this is probably the root cause ;)
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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 1: Don't build nuclear plants in the middle of major cities. 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…
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.
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…
The tail risks involved in nuclear power are just too high. It's not a question of laymen misunderstanding or thinking that radiation is magic or being scared by the specter of Chernobyl.
If there's anything that Fukushima should have taught us, it's that we underestimate the risk that bad things can happen with nuclear, and we overestimate our ability to engineer around those things.
I think it's increasingly likely that in the far future, when energy needs are no longer the bottleneck for progress, we'll look back on the idea of using nuclear fission as a power source as a laughably dangerous concept; on par with using x-rays for shoe sizing [1] or an atomic powered car [2].
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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…
Not sure I agree with #1. Nuclear power had a super utopian vibe going for a good couple of decades. Nuclear power plant orders only started to decline in the early 70's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_Age
The governor's desire to prolong their relicensing process made it more cost effective for Entergy to just agree to close them in 4/5 years, which is a shame because nuclear plants are all about the sunk capital costs.
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…
> People got scared (somewhat legitimately) Not really. The reality is that most fear is based on totally false believes that exist in popular culture. If people actually understood the real level of dangers they would not nearly be as scared.