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Just looking at your first point, She dispelled rumors left and right: "fracking causes earthquakes!" - actually it's poorly built injection wells and wastewate

Just looking at your first point, She dispelled rumors left and right: "fracking causes earthquakes!" - actually it's poorly built injection wells and wastewater storage that causes earthquakes In your mind fracking is separate from building injection wells and wastewater storage? All of your examples are the reasons why fracking is dangerous. Just because people get confused about whats being pumped in, doesn't make them wrong that 'radioactives' are appearing. I think you have been duped by the power of the p . . .

rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
Dangerous doesn't mean too dangerous. Nuclear energy is dangerous but any projection of energy use that accommodates growing population and energy usage AND expects carbon reductions AND doesn't include growing nuclear use is simply impossible. EDIT: Also worth noting that there is a clear correlation between the increase of electronics/battery recycling in the West and lead poisoning cases in Kenyan children where the recycling is done. America cleaned up its sooty and smoggy cities by exporting the freedom to pollute to China and Mexico. No such thing as a free lunch. Burning fossil fuels in perpetuity is dangerous too. The point is, fracking can be done safe, it can be done properly. The only reason we see these hyperbolic results in places like Oklahoma is that states that tend to allow fracking just so happen to be the ones that couldn't give a rat's ass about effective and proper regulation. We've come a long way from rope seat belts, haven't we?
- pyre 10y ago
  Nuclear power can be done safe, but we also have many examples of it not being done safe. Saying, "well it will be different this time. We will build systems to make corruption, laziness, and dangerous actions impossible!" is believing in a pipe dream.
  - rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
    We have come a long way from Chernobyl. Most of the people posting here probably weren't even alive when it happened. Nuclear power is so well-controlled (unless you build reactors on earthquake hotspots or tsunami zones, I mean c'mon Japan) that you can't even use regular statistical models because the only probable risks are human. Reactors are really, really well-designed these days to seal themselves off in the (super-rare) case of a critical malfunction. The real risk with nuclear right now is the boogeyman fears of a meltdown keeping us from updating our ancient reactors. So I ask: how do we provide energy to a rapidly growing global population without surging carbon emissions using readily deployable technology? Renewables might work - if people stopped having kids for a while - but aside from truly revolutionary advances in energy efficiency, generation, and storage, we are left with an unfortunate but undeniable fact: we need nuke.
    - ArtDev 10y ago
      What about leaks (almost common in old plants) and the nuclear waste storage problem? There is plenty of energy out there. Recent advances in solar and wind technology make it within reach. Nuclear is simply not an economical solution.
      - rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
        Exactly as you said: old plants. We don't update them as we should to make them as safe as they can be. That's not an engineering problem, that's a political problem. Waste storage? Same story. We have plenty of useless desert in the US, but people don't want to be anywhere remotely near them. Recent advances in solar and wind technology might make it within reach...if we were dealing with 1-2 billion people, not close to 10 billion people in our lifetimes. All of these people want to live like we do: they want to eat meat, they want light at the flick of a switch, they want heat at the turn of a dial. Assuming prices will go down and efficiency will go up to match skyrocketing demand is greatly misguided. Not to mention, extracting and refining the rare earths necessary for a lot of these devices is unfathomably ruinous to the environment, and recycling is just as bad (see my other comment about lead poisoning in Kenyan kids). You have brought up 2 political problems and 1 technological fantasy. Nothing about economics. Nuclear is fine.
        TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
        I don't understand the nuclear waste "problem". Anything that is radioactive for thousands of years is also not very radioactive because it has such a long half-life. More concerning would be the chemical toxicity hazard, but that is void because nuclear waste is vitrified (turned in to glass), which makes it extremely chemically inert. Then there's the possibility of recycling the spent fuel (waste?) in fast spectrum reactors, if we can work out how to do that reliably / economically.
        mjevans 10y ago
        It's radioactive for that long because it /is/ waste. We haven't finished extracting the valuable energy from it yet. (that's what 'waste reduction' (breeder) reactors are supposed to do; concentrate up the useful stuff and leave most of it clean enough to either decay really quickly, or so slowly that it's not harmful.)
  - gohrt 10y ago
    Coal power can be done safe, but we also have many examples of it not being done safe. Saying, "well it will be different this time. We will build systems to make corruption, laziness, and dangerous actions impossible!" is believing in a pipe dream.
  - Goronmon 10y ago
    Nuclear power can be done safe, but we also have many examples of it not being done safe You could replace "Nuclear power" with quite a lot of things we do these days. Such as "Driving" or "Home construction".
  - WalterBright 10y ago
    We made airliner travel safe, we can make nuke plants safe.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
    Despite the laziness and corruption, human fallibility and mistakes, the fast majority of nuclear power is safe now. We don't have to do it differently in the future ("this time"), we just need to do it marginally better over time. Every new power plant built, whether goal or gas or nuclear, or solar / wind, is marginally better than the previous design because of what we've learned.
  - ekianjo 10y ago
    Coal has killed way more than nuclear energy so far. Please check data before having an opinion.
- gukov 10y ago
  Many things can be done safe, but safe is often a route that's not taken because it's much more expensive.
- gaia 10y ago
  What about the absurd amount of water, an increasingly scarce resource, used by fracking?
  - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
    https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/09/150915135827.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/09/150915135827.h... 250 B gallons in, 210 B gallons out. So net-net 40B gallons for the entire industry between 2005 and 2014. Call it 40,000 swimming pools worth. The "out" is completely treatable. "Large though those numbers seem, the study calculates that the water used in fracking makes up less than 1 percent of total industrial water use nationwide." - FTA. "Gasland" is a bad movie. Now, in some places, the available water is sufficiently short that it probably should not be used for industrial use at all.
- sullyj3 10y ago
  Relative to say, coal, Nuclear is anything but dangerous. The availability heuristic strikes again. http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/#2c32d85149d2 http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-de... Nuclear is safe, affordable and the only alternative to non-renewables that doesn't require us to drastically reduce our energy usage. Because realistically, we all know that's just not going to happen. Not to mention, throughout the 20th century, we in the first world reaped the benefits of readily available energy to drastically boost our living conditions. To deny that benefit to developing countries by restricting them to wind solar and hydro would be immoral.
- GantzGraf 10y ago
  Source for American recycling being done in Kenya leading to lead poisoning? I live here and this is the first I'm hearing of it.

rm_-rf_slash 10y ago

Dangerous doesn't mean too dangerous. Nuclear energy is dangerous but any projection of energy use that accommodates growing population and energy usage AND expects carbon reductions AND doesn't include growing nuclear use is simply impossible. EDIT: Also worth noting that there is a clear correlation between the increase of electronics/battery recycling in the West and lead poisoning cases in Kenyan children where the recycling is done. America cleaned up its sooty and smoggy cities by exporting the freedom to pollute to China and Mexico. No such thing as a free lunch. Burning fossil fuels in perpetuity is dangerous too. The point is, fracking can be done safe, it can be done properly. The only reason we see these hyperbolic results in places like Oklahoma is that states that tend to allow fracking just so happen to be the ones that couldn't give a rat's ass about effective and proper regulation. We've come a long way from rope seat belts, haven't we?

pyre 10y ago
Nuclear power can be done safe, but we also have many examples of it not being done safe. Saying, "well it will be different this time. We will build systems to make corruption, laziness, and dangerous actions impossible!" is believing in a pipe dream.
- rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
  We have come a long way from Chernobyl. Most of the people posting here probably weren't even alive when it happened. Nuclear power is so well-controlled (unless you build reactors on earthquake hotspots or tsunami zones, I mean c'mon Japan) that you can't even use regular statistical models because the only probable risks are human. Reactors are really, really well-designed these days to seal themselves off in the (super-rare) case of a critical malfunction. The real risk with nuclear right now is the boogeyman fears of a meltdown keeping us from updating our ancient reactors. So I ask: how do we provide energy to a rapidly growing global population without surging carbon emissions using readily deployable technology? Renewables might work - if people stopped having kids for a while - but aside from truly revolutionary advances in energy efficiency, generation, and storage, we are left with an unfortunate but undeniable fact: we need nuke.
  - ArtDev 10y ago
    What about leaks (almost common in old plants) and the nuclear waste storage problem? There is plenty of energy out there. Recent advances in solar and wind technology make it within reach. Nuclear is simply not an economical solution.
    - rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
      Exactly as you said: old plants. We don't update them as we should to make them as safe as they can be. That's not an engineering problem, that's a political problem. Waste storage? Same story. We have plenty of useless desert in the US, but people don't want to be anywhere remotely near them. Recent advances in solar and wind technology might make it within reach...if we were dealing with 1-2 billion people, not close to 10 billion people in our lifetimes. All of these people want to live like we do: they want to eat meat, they want light at the flick of a switch, they want heat at the turn of a dial. Assuming prices will go down and efficiency will go up to match skyrocketing demand is greatly misguided. Not to mention, extracting and refining the rare earths necessary for a lot of these devices is unfathomably ruinous to the environment, and recycling is just as bad (see my other comment about lead poisoning in Kenyan kids). You have brought up 2 political problems and 1 technological fantasy. Nothing about economics. Nuclear is fine.
      - TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
        I don't understand the nuclear waste "problem". Anything that is radioactive for thousands of years is also not very radioactive because it has such a long half-life. More concerning would be the chemical toxicity hazard, but that is void because nuclear waste is vitrified (turned in to glass), which makes it extremely chemically inert. Then there's the possibility of recycling the spent fuel (waste?) in fast spectrum reactors, if we can work out how to do that reliably / economically.
        mjevans 10y ago
        It's radioactive for that long because it /is/ waste. We haven't finished extracting the valuable energy from it yet. (that's what 'waste reduction' (breeder) reactors are supposed to do; concentrate up the useful stuff and leave most of it clean enough to either decay really quickly, or so slowly that it's not harmful.)
- gohrt 10y ago
  Coal power can be done safe, but we also have many examples of it not being done safe. Saying, "well it will be different this time. We will build systems to make corruption, laziness, and dangerous actions impossible!" is believing in a pipe dream.
- Goronmon 10y ago
  Nuclear power can be done safe, but we also have many examples of it not being done safe You could replace "Nuclear power" with quite a lot of things we do these days. Such as "Driving" or "Home construction".
- WalterBright 10y ago
  We made airliner travel safe, we can make nuke plants safe.
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
  Despite the laziness and corruption, human fallibility and mistakes, the fast majority of nuclear power is safe now. We don't have to do it differently in the future ("this time"), we just need to do it marginally better over time. Every new power plant built, whether goal or gas or nuclear, or solar / wind, is marginally better than the previous design because of what we've learned.
- ekianjo 10y ago
  Coal has killed way more than nuclear energy so far. Please check data before having an opinion.
gukov 10y ago
Many things can be done safe, but safe is often a route that's not taken because it's much more expensive.
gaia 10y ago
What about the absurd amount of water, an increasingly scarce resource, used by fracking?
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/09/150915135827.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/09/150915135827.h... 250 B gallons in, 210 B gallons out. So net-net 40B gallons for the entire industry between 2005 and 2014. Call it 40,000 swimming pools worth. The "out" is completely treatable. "Large though those numbers seem, the study calculates that the water used in fracking makes up less than 1 percent of total industrial water use nationwide." - FTA. "Gasland" is a bad movie. Now, in some places, the available water is sufficiently short that it probably should not be used for industrial use at all.
sullyj3 10y ago
Relative to say, coal, Nuclear is anything but dangerous. The availability heuristic strikes again. http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/#2c32d85149d2 http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-de... Nuclear is safe, affordable and the only alternative to non-renewables that doesn't require us to drastically reduce our energy usage. Because realistically, we all know that's just not going to happen. Not to mention, throughout the 20th century, we in the first world reaped the benefits of readily available energy to drastically boost our living conditions. To deny that benefit to developing countries by restricting them to wind solar and hydro would be immoral.
GantzGraf 10y ago
Source for American recycling being done in Kenya leading to lead poisoning? I live here and this is the first I'm hearing of it.