4 ms·

Nuclear energy is clean and to some extent cheap. But, if a war breaks out and someone bombs a nuclear reactor, it will be messy to clean up the mess.

marze 10y ago
Do you mean cheap (to some extent) to build, or cheap to operate?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- asitdhal 10y ago
  Cheap in the sense, build and operate(and not phase out). Coal may be cheaper than nuclear, but the damages to environment and health are too high.
  - marze 10y ago
    Coal is dead, no point to compare. Solar is cheaper to deploy. And cheaper to operate.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
_delirium 10y ago
Running it is cheap, but the large costs of construction and decommissioning that bookend a plant's lifespan mean you need a really, really long and mostly trouble-free operating life for the overall amortized costs to look good. At least with conventional large-scale plants. There are alternatives [e.g., 1] that might change that aspect of the economics, if they turn out to be feasible (politically and otherwise). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor
- pasbesoin 10y ago
  It's also not "clean" -- just ask the Navajos, for example. As for my experience, figuring out what to buy and what not, in Munich in the months after Chernobyl. Apples from Tirol were found to contain significantly higher levels of fallout -- one thing that happens to stick in my mind, because I was eating them until I learned this. And wild mushrooms, particularly from Eastern Europe? Forgetaboutit -- fungii were concentrating fallout up to 400 times (not percent, but 400-fold). A good friend cooked a meal containing wild mushrooms from her family back in Poland. I felt I had to pass on it. Granted, coal-based energy spreads heavy metals around, and forests were taking it on the chin from acid rain before scrubbers and switching to coal supplies containing lower levels of sulfur -- primarily, as I recall, in the U.S. being "hard coal" from deposits/mines in western states. Global warming was a concern back then, but it hadn't entered the knowledge of the larger general public. Everything has trade-offs. That includes nuclear, and we shouldn't be calling it "clean". Like the heavy metals from coal burning, a significant concern is the very long-term nature of the pollution that does result, and that, with current and immediately foreseeable technology, said pollution is "irreducible". CO2 warms things, but it doesn't directly poison them nor leave the ground infertile or unusable. Organic toxins can, largely, with enough will and investment literally be burned away -- at least, until you spread them out over the soil. If you have a vat of e.g. dioxin, you can -- carefully -- burn it away. Just make sure you burn ALL of it; one erstwhile proposal for such disposal was to inject the waste into a molten metal mass in a disposal "reactor" with careful monitoring and filtering of the exit gases. We haven't yet achieved significant alchemaic control. Heavy metals stay heavy metals, and radio-nucleotides keep their own schedules of decay. Once spread around the environment, we are left quarantining that environment -- either wholesale, or where possible by scraping off the contaminated bits/layer and quarantining that. A more immediate-term solution may be better concentrating and/or filtering mechanisms, for separation of such contamination from the environment it's dispersed through. (As one example, natural or engineered biological concentration and harvesting.) Maybe nuclear is better than the wholesale smog that kills millions each year, and that used to kill many more in the U.S. but still takes probably hundreds of thousands a year. But I'm not willing to call it "clean". And given some of the potential, catastrophic risks, I'm not prepared to call it "better". P.S. Another, primary concern I have with nuclear, is that no human society has demonstrated continuity and consistent reliability on the kind of timeframes required to manage current nuclear technology and its waste. Even if a properly handled device is perfectly safe, do we have any guarantees -- or even real, high-likelihood hopes -- that humans will properly handle it (and its waste) until it is effectively retired or neutralized?
yongjik 10y ago
> But, if a war breaks out and someone bombs a nuclear reactor, it will be messy to clean up the mess. Still will be environmentally cleaner than a coal plant with no war breaking out and nobody bombing it. ...Even when we add the war itself to the nuke side. (...Well, unless we do have a nuclear war. Then all bets are off.) Edit: What, do I look flippant? Here are statistics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di... > A United Nations study estimates the final total of premature deaths associated with the disaster will be around 4000, mostly from an estimated 3% increase in cancers which are already common causes of death in the region. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster_casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... > Predicted future cancer deaths due to accumulated radiation exposures in the population living near Fukushima have ranged in the academic literature from none to hundreds. Compare this with: http://news.mit.edu/2013/study-air-pollution-causes-200000-early-deaths-each-year-in-the-us-0829 http://news.mit.edu/2013/study-air-pollution-causes-200000-e... > Air pollution causes 200,000 early deaths each year in the U.S. (...) Emissions from road transportation are the most significant contributor, causing 53,000 premature deaths, followed closely by power generation, with 52,000. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/18/world/asia/china-coal-health-smog-pollution.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/18/world/asia/china-coal-hea... > Burning coal has the worst health impact of any source of air pollution in China and caused 366,000 premature deaths in 2013, Chinese and American researchers said on Thursday. In short, (a year of operating coal plants, without accidents) > (worst nuclear disaster mankind has witnessed), by an order of magnitude (or two).
- philipkglass 10y ago
  I initially downvoted, undid it, then wrote this reply. A fleet of many coal plants operating normally kills more people than one nuclear plant accident. A nuclear reactor that is bombed during war (or otherwise suffers catastrophic loss of containment) is not environmentally cleaner than one coal plant of comparable capacity operating normally. Nuclear power is safe by the numbers, but you have to use the right numbers. If reactor containment failed more often then reactors wouldn't be any better for human health than fossil power plants. It's because they are designed and run with such care that they have such a good environmental and safety record, on average. I was reacting partially to something that you haven't said that I've heard all too often in discussions like these: reactors are so safe, we should get rid of these burdensome regulations so they can be affordable too. It's the "burdensome" attention to detail that makes nuclear so safe. If the nuclear industry had the same cavalier cowboy attitude to safety as the coal mining industry, it would be an environmental disaster. But you didn't actually call for deregulation, and just making a poorly worded numerical comparison isn't enough for a downvote. I apologize for that.
Spooky23 10y ago
Not at all. Operations are relatively cheap, but when you amortize the capital costs that get dumped on ratepayers, it's not cheap at all. That's not even including the costs associated with decommissioning that eventually get dumped on the taxpayer indefinitely.
teslaberry 10y ago
the biggest threat to civlization, is not global warming. it is not even limited nuclear war. it is an all out war where nuclear power plants are all attacked with the deliberate goal of creating nuclear disasters in countries that are vulnerable by virtue of possession of these ticking time bombs. in particular, those nations with the most nuclear power plants are most vulnerable to this attack. all the fail safes and shielding and bunkering won't work at all. it just won't. our systems are too complex and interdependent. all older nuclear plants,and in particular all plants with large fuel pools for cooling large amounts of waste, are simply the largest ticking time bombs in the world and thus primary targets for attack in a major war. the reason this is the only real and major threat to civlization is that if you took a nuclear bomb and used it to directly explode a set of cooling pools storing large amounts of 'spent fuel' , you would wind up aersolizing ungodly amounts of radioactive matter. and this would irradiate the planet. the oceans, the surface, the air, pretty much all of it. nuclear weapons aren't even really that bad. it is the vast quantities of radionisotopes released by aerosolizing entire fuel pools. orders of magnitutde more massive than the small dozens of kilograms found in each of thousands of nucleear weapons in the entire world of nations nuclear stockpiles. the waste is the weaponized threat to humanity; a ticking time bomb set of targets. if you want to look at the obvious and interesting points about this.....you need to examine nuclear plant density relative to population density. also, you can do all the research you want on hardening of nuclear power plants, but none of them are going to withstand repeated attack by bunker busting bombs or nuclear weapons. they might not even withstand far lesser attacks. france is essentially a county waiting for near total irradiation. the eastern seabord of the united states is going to be a zombie land. but more than this.........the irradiation will spread globally. the nuclear winter will not be a winter, it will simply be fukushima x the entire planet . there will be no opportunity to encase all of these bombed reactors in concrete like chernobyl. chernobyl was a great example of success in containing radiation. fukushima is the pardimatic example of what awaits humanity. a open gash on the planet's civilization sustaining activity that cannot be closed. now------consider that germany is phasing out the very last of their power plants ( an interesting political choice by the greens and pacifists who seem to ignore the strategic value of having a cover for producing one's own enriched weapons grade uranium). the great irony here is that due to political concerns most nations that want nuclear weapons will pursue nuclear power as a cover for it. the truth is that it is far safer to simply and openly pursue nuclear weapons directly, but suffer the consequences of political embarrassment, than take the suicidal path that will be realized through the next world war, which is not totally guaranteed but more than likely. it is remarkable how few people consider this scenario at all , let alone, with seriousness . it is a major possible outcome of a major nuclear war that could happen at any time. the ONLY long term strategy for countries that want to aggressively pursue nuclear war and become dominant superpowers will and capable to engage in massively destructive full scale war, ---is to moth ball fission style plutonium nuclear reactors as they currently exist and to deal with the massive nuclear waste problem. i am not scared of the u.s. or russia engaging in nuclear war because i believe the generals are rational enough to understand this threat, and would solve this problem before taking practical steps towards engaging in a real doomsday scenario. that said, perhaps i give them too much credit, and the existing nuclear infrastructure really isn't indicative of the lack of seriousness and dedication of the u.s or russian militaries for engaging in real nuclear war against one another..........

marze 10y ago

Do you mean cheap (to some extent) to build, or cheap to operate?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
asitdhal 10y ago
Cheap in the sense, build and operate(and not phase out). Coal may be cheaper than nuclear, but the damages to environment and health are too high.
- marze 10y ago
  Coal is dead, no point to compare. Solar is cheaper to deploy. And cheaper to operate.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

_delirium 10y ago

Running it is cheap, but the large costs of construction and decommissioning that bookend a plant's lifespan mean you need a really, really long and mostly trouble-free operating life for the overall amortized costs to look good. At least with conventional large-scale plants. There are alternatives [e.g., 1] that might change that aspect of the economics, if they turn out to be feasible (politically and otherwise). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor

pasbesoin 10y ago
It's also not "clean" -- just ask the Navajos, for example. As for my experience, figuring out what to buy and what not, in Munich in the months after Chernobyl. Apples from Tirol were found to contain significantly higher levels of fallout -- one thing that happens to stick in my mind, because I was eating them until I learned this. And wild mushrooms, particularly from Eastern Europe? Forgetaboutit -- fungii were concentrating fallout up to 400 times (not percent, but 400-fold). A good friend cooked a meal containing wild mushrooms from her family back in Poland. I felt I had to pass on it. Granted, coal-based energy spreads heavy metals around, and forests were taking it on the chin from acid rain before scrubbers and switching to coal supplies containing lower levels of sulfur -- primarily, as I recall, in the U.S. being "hard coal" from deposits/mines in western states. Global warming was a concern back then, but it hadn't entered the knowledge of the larger general public. Everything has trade-offs. That includes nuclear, and we shouldn't be calling it "clean". Like the heavy metals from coal burning, a significant concern is the very long-term nature of the pollution that does result, and that, with current and immediately foreseeable technology, said pollution is "irreducible". CO2 warms things, but it doesn't directly poison them nor leave the ground infertile or unusable. Organic toxins can, largely, with enough will and investment literally be burned away -- at least, until you spread them out over the soil. If you have a vat of e.g. dioxin, you can -- carefully -- burn it away. Just make sure you burn ALL of it; one erstwhile proposal for such disposal was to inject the waste into a molten metal mass in a disposal "reactor" with careful monitoring and filtering of the exit gases. We haven't yet achieved significant alchemaic control. Heavy metals stay heavy metals, and radio-nucleotides keep their own schedules of decay. Once spread around the environment, we are left quarantining that environment -- either wholesale, or where possible by scraping off the contaminated bits/layer and quarantining that. A more immediate-term solution may be better concentrating and/or filtering mechanisms, for separation of such contamination from the environment it's dispersed through. (As one example, natural or engineered biological concentration and harvesting.) Maybe nuclear is better than the wholesale smog that kills millions each year, and that used to kill many more in the U.S. but still takes probably hundreds of thousands a year. But I'm not willing to call it "clean". And given some of the potential, catastrophic risks, I'm not prepared to call it "better". P.S. Another, primary concern I have with nuclear, is that no human society has demonstrated continuity and consistent reliability on the kind of timeframes required to manage current nuclear technology and its waste. Even if a properly handled device is perfectly safe, do we have any guarantees -- or even real, high-likelihood hopes -- that humans will properly handle it (and its waste) until it is effectively retired or neutralized?

yongjik 10y ago

> But, if a war breaks out and someone bombs a nuclear reactor, it will be messy to clean up the mess. Still will be environmentally cleaner than a coal plant with no war breaking out and nobody bombing it. ...Even when we add the war itself to the nuke side. (...Well, unless we do have a nuclear war. Then all bets are off.) Edit: What, do I look flippant? Here are statistics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di... > A United Nations study estimates the final total of premature deaths associated with the disaster will be around 4000, mostly from an estimated 3% increase in cancers which are already common causes of death in the region. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster_casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... > Predicted future cancer deaths due to accumulated radiation exposures in the population living near Fukushima have ranged in the academic literature from none to hundreds. Compare this with: http://news.mit.edu/2013/study-air-pollution-causes-200000-early-deaths-each-year-in-the-us-0829 http://news.mit.edu/2013/study-air-pollution-causes-200000-e... > Air pollution causes 200,000 early deaths each year in the U.S. (...) Emissions from road transportation are the most significant contributor, causing 53,000 premature deaths, followed closely by power generation, with 52,000. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/18/world/asia/china-coal-health-smog-pollution.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/18/world/asia/china-coal-hea... > Burning coal has the worst health impact of any source of air pollution in China and caused 366,000 premature deaths in 2013, Chinese and American researchers said on Thursday. In short, (a year of operating coal plants, without accidents) > (worst nuclear disaster mankind has witnessed), by an order of magnitude (or two).

philipkglass 10y ago
I initially downvoted, undid it, then wrote this reply. A fleet of many coal plants operating normally kills more people than one nuclear plant accident. A nuclear reactor that is bombed during war (or otherwise suffers catastrophic loss of containment) is not environmentally cleaner than one coal plant of comparable capacity operating normally. Nuclear power is safe by the numbers, but you have to use the right numbers. If reactor containment failed more often then reactors wouldn't be any better for human health than fossil power plants. It's because they are designed and run with such care that they have such a good environmental and safety record, on average. I was reacting partially to something that you haven't said that I've heard all too often in discussions like these: reactors are so safe, we should get rid of these burdensome regulations so they can be affordable too. It's the "burdensome" attention to detail that makes nuclear so safe. If the nuclear industry had the same cavalier cowboy attitude to safety as the coal mining industry, it would be an environmental disaster. But you didn't actually call for deregulation, and just making a poorly worded numerical comparison isn't enough for a downvote. I apologize for that.

Spooky23 10y ago

Not at all. Operations are relatively cheap, but when you amortize the capital costs that get dumped on ratepayers, it's not cheap at all. That's not even including the costs associated with decommissioning that eventually get dumped on the taxpayer indefinitely.

teslaberry 10y ago

the biggest threat to civlization, is not global warming. it is not even limited nuclear war. it is an all out war where nuclear power plants are all attacked with the deliberate goal of creating nuclear disasters in countries that are vulnerable by virtue of possession of these ticking time bombs. in particular, those nations with the most nuclear power plants are most vulnerable to this attack. all the fail safes and shielding and bunkering won't work at all. it just won't. our systems are too complex and interdependent. all older nuclear plants,and in particular all plants with large fuel pools for cooling large amounts of waste, are simply the largest ticking time bombs in the world and thus primary targets for attack in a major war. the reason this is the only real and major threat to civlization is that if you took a nuclear bomb and used it to directly explode a set of cooling pools storing large amounts of 'spent fuel' , you would wind up aersolizing ungodly amounts of radioactive matter. and this would irradiate the planet. the oceans, the surface, the air, pretty much all of it. nuclear weapons aren't even really that bad. it is the vast quantities of radionisotopes released by aerosolizing entire fuel pools. orders of magnitutde more massive than the small dozens of kilograms found in each of thousands of nucleear weapons in the entire world of nations nuclear stockpiles. the waste is the weaponized threat to humanity; a ticking time bomb set of targets. if you want to look at the obvious and interesting points about this.....you need to examine nuclear plant density relative to population density. also, you can do all the research you want on hardening of nuclear power plants, but none of them are going to withstand repeated attack by bunker busting bombs or nuclear weapons. they might not even withstand far lesser attacks. france is essentially a county waiting for near total irradiation. the eastern seabord of the united states is going to be a zombie land. but more than this.........the irradiation will spread globally. the nuclear winter will not be a winter, it will simply be fukushima x the entire planet . there will be no opportunity to encase all of these bombed reactors in concrete like chernobyl. chernobyl was a great example of success in containing radiation. fukushima is the pardimatic example of what awaits humanity. a open gash on the planet's civilization sustaining activity that cannot be closed. now------consider that germany is phasing out the very last of their power plants ( an interesting political choice by the greens and pacifists who seem to ignore the strategic value of having a cover for producing one's own enriched weapons grade uranium). the great irony here is that due to political concerns most nations that want nuclear weapons will pursue nuclear power as a cover for it. the truth is that it is far safer to simply and openly pursue nuclear weapons directly, but suffer the consequences of political embarrassment, than take the suicidal path that will be realized through the next world war, which is not totally guaranteed but more than likely. it is remarkable how few people consider this scenario at all , let alone, with seriousness . it is a major possible outcome of a major nuclear war that could happen at any time. the ONLY long term strategy for countries that want to aggressively pursue nuclear war and become dominant superpowers will and capable to engage in massively destructive full scale war, ---is to moth ball fission style plutonium nuclear reactors as they currently exist and to deal with the massive nuclear waste problem. i am not scared of the u.s. or russia engaging in nuclear war because i believe the generals are rational enough to understand this threat, and would solve this problem before taking practical steps towards engaging in a real doomsday scenario. that said, perhaps i give them too much credit, and the existing nuclear infrastructure really isn't indicative of the lack of seriousness and dedication of the u.s or russian militaries for engaging in real nuclear war against one another..........