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Why has nuclear power been a flop? (2021)

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Re: Why has nuclear power been a flop? (2021)

#61

Post by ekianjo »

berkeleynerd wrote: post #41
littlecranky67 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fully agreed. When the Ukraine war broke out, in Germany we had discussions how we could no longer rely on cheap russian gas and there we politicians actively demanding NPP to be reactivated. At the same time our government decided to spent 100 bilion € for the military and defense. This is surreal, when experts explain how "safe" NPPS are, the safety assumptions never asume a war going on around that NPP. If you fac…

I wonder if it would make sense to house these reactors in underground facilities to the extent possible to harden them against at least accidental threats?

how do you cool them if they are underground?

Re: Why has nuclear power been a flop? (2021)

#62

Post by robertlagrant »

anonymous_sorry wrote: post #33
wyager wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> whilst people are getting poorer their access to resources has been scaling well enough to keep them above the poverty line Defining poverty as "wealth relative to the richest person on earth" or whatever you're doing here is unproductive crab-bucket envy, not a useful definition. If you're talking about wealth, all that matters is if the baseline is going up. If you're talking about status, be honest and say that…

Wealth distribution is important, because very rich people disproportionately buy up limited-supply assets in order to earn passive income on them. In densely populated places, that includes assets like homes, which pushes up housing costs. Housing costs often aren't included in popular measures of inflation. If you do use an inflation measure that includes housing and all other everyday expenditure, then I think it'…

Unless someone buys up so many properties they can start unilaterally increasing prices, the problem with housing going up isn't rich people buying them and renting them at a market rate. It's the amount of demand vs supply that does it.

And you're right - this is possibly the single biggest issue that's a downgrade for people vs their parents/grandparents, and it's a huge one. But the problem needs to be attributed correctly.

Re: Why has nuclear power been a flop? (2021)

#63

Post by ekianjo »

qwertox wrote: post #49
XorNot wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making your plans around existential crises happening to your nation is foolish. There isn't going to just be "a war" in Germany - there never was. A war in germany is a war with NATO, which is a nuclear war, and thus "what if the nuclear powerplant is hit" is rather mundane compared to "our cities and citizens have been incinerated".

> A war in germany is a war with NATO, which is a nuclear war Nuclear war is only one option of many, and the last one among all of them. It's a skewed perspective to think that NATO involvement would end up in a nuclear war. Also, a nuclear war does not automatically mean the end of humankind, as some like to portray it. Most will still be alive, even lead a healthy, unaffected life. The negative effects of a broken…

> m. It's a skewed perspective to think that NATO involvement would end up in a nuclear war.

of course it would end up in a nuclear war. NATO is encircling Russia and if Russia feels cornered you should expect them to use anything available to them.

Re: Why has nuclear power been a flop? (2021)

#64

Post by ZeroGravitas »

robertlagrant wrote: post #60
philipwhiuk wrote: post #10

I don't really think he understands why the safety paradigm is the way it is. The problem is fear. Fear generated by individual incidents that have terrible local harmful effects. And the (perhaps inaccurate) perception that plants may still have issues. Plus the fairly unsolved waste storage problem. Fukushima, 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl were existential for the nuclear industry. Like it or lump it, they made nucle…

> Plus the fairly unsolved waste storage problem. I don't think it is unsolved, is it? > Fukushima, 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl were existential for the nuclear industry. Like it or lump it, they made nuclear feel less safe. I don't think Fukushima made nuclear feel less safe. The terrible reporting and existing mindsets might have, but how could a single death when a tsunami hits a reactor make people feel unsafe in…

Someone in Germany pointed out that on their TV coverage of Fukushima they had German Nuclear Scientists who were correctly describing based on 3rd party observations what was happening while official spokespeople were claiming there was no issue and downplaying risks. That's a killer blow to credibility, doubly so if you have a high respect for Japanese industry.

If they're lying/mistaken about stuff obvious to scientists half a globe away then who can you trust with nuclear?

edit to add some sources to back up this third hand anecdote:

https://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/communicating-science/

> The government was telling us nothing. TEPCO [Tokyo Electric Power Co., operator of the plant] was telling us nothing. We had very little input from the scientific community in Japan. Here we are trying to figure this out, and we had first one, then two, then three explosions.”

Fackler had to talk with scientists overseas to learn that what he had witnessed were likely hydrogen explosions, which probably meant partial meltdowns of the affected reactors. “But when we reported this, we had so much criticism from the Japanese side for using the word ‘meltdown,’ ” he said.

Re: Why has nuclear power been a flop? (2021)

#65

Post by Festro »

Earw0rm wrote: post #45
Festro wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you missed my definition by a wide mile. On a world-scale we've been reducing the overall number of people below the poverty line each decade, however there is a discussion to be had around inflation and whether the poverty line itself needs to move (there a re lots of poverty lines used in analysis, I'm not referring to any single definition). And I'm not talking specifically about wealth. Wealth is fine in…

Isn't the most useful definition of rich/poor how much access to resources you can buy? As in, how can someone be both getting poorer but also enjoying increasing access to resources? Buying power is a pretty good measure here unless I've missed something? (I'm talking about this in a global context where we can assume asset wealth is pretty much negligible, i.e. it's not a case of people burning through savings to a…

I agree, but in practise this has been difficult to measure, thus the existence of 'poverty lines' which have been defined as $1/day, $2/day etc, and been fairly static for a long time.

For a poverty line definition then, as I mentioned, we can observe fewer people being below the poverty line as time goes on, but we're ignoring inflation and buying power. Fewer people being under the $1/day poverty line is great, unless essential purchases have doubled in price.

What we've seen in recent decades has been a mix of inflation and basic resources becoming more assessible/cheaper. So when I say people are getting poorer, I'm saying poverty lines ignore this the access angle unless they adjust for inflation, but then also counter to that some essentials have become more accessible, like access to medicine, education and energy. So whilst buying power may get worse for some, they're 'wealthier' in terms of things that they have increased cost-free/low-cost access to.

There have been attempts to use definitions that do adjust for access but they're a lot more difficult to normalise across countries. Something like the Big Mac Index is a quick and dirty tool but obviously it focusses on a single item in a single category (food) so it can't provide a very detailed picture of access to resources, buying power, and poverty on the whole.

Re: Why has nuclear power been a flop? (2021)

#66

Post by robertlagrant »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #64
robertlagrant wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Plus the fairly unsolved waste storage problem. I don't think it is unsolved, is it? > Fukushima, 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl were existential for the nuclear industry. Like it or lump it, they made nuclear feel less safe. I don't think Fukushima made nuclear feel less safe. The terrible reporting and existing mindsets might have, but how could a single death when a tsunami hits a reactor make people feel unsafe in…

Someone in Germany pointed out that on their TV coverage of Fukushima they had German Nuclear Scientists who were correctly describing based on 3rd party observations what was happening while official spokespeople were claiming there was no issue and downplaying risks. That's a killer blow to credibility, doubly so if you have a high respect for Japanese industry. If they're lying/mistaken about stuff obvious to scie…

Sure, but this is you finding very specific stuff. Most of the world wasn't watching German TV and seeing that difference.

Re: Why has nuclear power been a flop? (2021)

#67

Post by bryanlarsen »

TheRoque wrote: post #30
uniqueuid wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that it's stupid not to take the game-changer of solar and wind (and batteries) into account. Even though I believe that nuclear no longer has a role in energy (fuel sources, disposal, concentration of risk into few small units), the statement is still correct and it has another dimension: There is a conflict between poverty, climate change, gravity of climate change harms and the speed at which we can reduce…

Is it really a game changer though ? AFAIK countries that made the shift to solar and wind can't still store they energy and have to rely on fossil still to power they country (e.g. Germany). On top of that, if the whole world made the shift to solar, wind and batteries, I assume the scarcity of some materials will become an issue. According to this [1] Lithium for example is expected to have a shortage by 2025. Ther…

Watching what China does is always instructive. Despite platitudes to the contrary, climate change is a tertiary concern of theirs. What they care most about is (1) energy independence and (2) cost. So 10-15 years ago they started building a lot of nuclear, solar and coal.

As the cost of solar plummeted and nuclear went up they significantly scaled back their nuclear ambitions. For the last 5 years they've built several TW's of solar capacity and a similar amount of coal peaker plants to run when the sun isn't shining.

Now in 2024 they're starting to scale back coal and they're building massive batteries instead. IOW, batteries are now cheaper than coal to offset the intermittency of solar.

Also, the lithium shortage has come and gone already: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium

Re: Why has nuclear power been a flop? (2021)

#68

Post by cameronh90 »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #10

I don't really think he understands why the safety paradigm is the way it is. The problem is fear. Fear generated by individual incidents that have terrible local harmful effects. And the (perhaps inaccurate) perception that plants may still have issues. Plus the fairly unsolved waste storage problem. Fukushima, 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl were existential for the nuclear industry. Like it or lump it, they made nucle…

I'm a huge fan of nuclear power at a technological level, but we have to acknowledge that fundamentally the safety of nuclear power depends on trust. If a NPP is designed, built, and operated correctly, it's perfectly safe to have one next door. I would personally be entirely happy to live next to one in my country (the UK).

There's not much that an individual can do to verify the safety of any given nuclear installation, however, and, bluntly, the global track record isn't great. Even countries with regulatory environments that we'd expect to be very effective have had INES 4+ incidents, and some of those could have been far worse were it not for pure luck. You could rightfully counter that any large civil engineering project relies on trust in a similar way, but a bridge collapse or even dam collapse, while horrifying, cannot conceivably render a large area uninhabitable for hundreds of years.

I think the reason that regulations in nuclear power have become overly burdensome is ultimately an attempt to try to build trust and demonstrate to the public that the risks are being taken as seriously as possible, in an attempt to prove that a worst-case nuclear disaster will never happen. You could think of it as safety theatre or something, but were it not for these regulations, in a democratic country, the public would simply not allow NPPs to be built, and therefore complying with these regulations is just an inescapable cost of that form of power generation. Arguably we even give NPPs a pretty significant subsidy by limiting their total public liability.

Re: Why has nuclear power been a flop? (2021)

#69

Post by littlecranky67 »

XorNot wrote: post #39
littlecranky67 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fully agreed. When the Ukraine war broke out, in Germany we had discussions how we could no longer rely on cheap russian gas and there we politicians actively demanding NPP to be reactivated. At the same time our government decided to spent 100 bilion € for the military and defense. This is surreal, when experts explain how "safe" NPPS are, the safety assumptions never asume a war going on around that NPP. If you fac…

Making your plans around existential crises happening to your nation is foolish. There isn't going to just be "a war" in Germany - there never was. A war in germany is a war with NATO, which is a nuclear war, and thus "what if the nuclear powerplant is hit" is rather mundane compared to "our cities and citizens have been incinerated".

Just look at the explosion of the north stream pipelines. Whether this were government actors, terrorists, or a rogue military interest group independent of government decisions is unknown. But the very same can happen with nuclear plants. Yes they are protected against terrorist attacks (to some extend), but once you factor in military grade capability, the security assumptions crumble. No need for a full-blown nuclear war to happen at all, NPPs are a risk to national safety.

Re: Why has nuclear power been a flop? (2021)

#70

Post by Gud »

ekianjo wrote: post #63
qwertox wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A war in germany is a war with NATO, which is a nuclear war Nuclear war is only one option of many, and the last one among all of them. It's a skewed perspective to think that NATO involvement would end up in a nuclear war. Also, a nuclear war does not automatically mean the end of humankind, as some like to portray it. Most will still be alive, even lead a healthy, unaffected life. The negative effects of a broken…

> m. It's a skewed perspective to think that NATO involvement would end up in a nuclear war. of course it would end up in a nuclear war. NATO is encircling Russia and if Russia feels cornered you should expect them to use anything available to them.

Russia is encircling themselves with NATO by bullying everyone around them.
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