3 ms·

Agreed. We no longer have the luxury of being prissy about ionising radiation.

• throwanem 10y ago
  It's not even something we need to be prissy about. We've pretty much had the basic "we don't know everything we don't know yet" accidents. Stopping at this point is as much a waste as giving up on aircraft development in 1965 or so would have been.
• pjc50 10y ago
  Do we have the luxury of giving up multiple hundreds of square kilometers for the exclusion zones if there is a failure, though? And the technology doesn't scale well. Few big plants that take ages to build, compared to panels on every roof and turbines put up one by one.
  • VLM 10y ago
    Isn't that extremely small area compared to submerged coastline and harbors and coastal cities? Some industrial processes and some datacenter services require baseload power. "most" power demand doesn't truly require baseload. Conveniently they require approx no people. Go build the plants and the data centers and the aluminum refineries in the desert next to the a-bomb test sites and no one will notice or care. As an example my cheap old refrigerator "needs" 24x7 power but with better insulation and higher thermal mass it could trivially run once a day, or even less, at peak solar production. Another example is culturally we "need" to have retail and service businesses open during the lowest solar generation times of the day, but that cultural demand has no technological basis. There are cultural and economic reasons walmart can't replace all its gigawatts of light bulbs with skylights but no technological reasons. Another cultural example is there's no reason we "have to" have millions of people living in deserts, and no matter how much environmental damage it causes we're not going to depopulate the West USA down to a sustainable level for purely political and cultural reasons. Ditto the far south. We as a culture have decided no level of environmental damage is too large to stop providing water and air conditioning for millions to live in historically unlivable climates, even if there's plenty of land in livable climates. In that way, ionizing radiation doesn't matter any more than the destruction of the Colorado River matters, for example.
    • pjc50 10y ago
      The US might have plenty of desert, but you need rather a lot of cool water to run a nuclear plant, which is why they're often built on coasts. And what of other places? France has a decent set of nuclear reactors, but there aren't really uninhabited areas in Europe to put more in. Only relatively less populated areas. The UK is currently struggling to get one off the ground and the economics of it look terrible.
      • white-flame 10y ago
        The Palo Verde nuclear generating station is the largest nuclear reactor in the US, and possibly in the western hemisphere. It is located in the US desert, an hour out of town pretty much in the middle of nowhere & nothing.
        • pjc50 10y ago
          Wikipedia tells me they have a clever solution: "The facility evaporates water from the treated sewage of several nearby municipalities to meet its cooling needs. 20 billion US gallons (76,000,000 m³) of treated water are evaporated each year." Interesting read, I'd never heard of Palo Verde.