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I get so frustrated reading anything in the popular press about nuclear power. Everyone commits the same fucking fallacy over and over again: measuring it again

I get so frustrated reading anything in the popular press about nuclear power. Everyone commits the same fucking fallacy over and over again: measuring it against an absolute idea instead of anything in the real world. Even here in the HN comments, I see "if it can be made safe." In TFA, it's the explanation that people are afraid of a three mile island or Chernobyl event, that his killer feature is the impossibility of meltdowns. Here in the real world, you have to measure options against other real world options. The other real world options we have for baseload power on this scale are fossil fuels, primarily coal. Coal plants emit much more radiation than nuclear plants - even old ones. There's lots of research about HOW MUCH more radioactive coal power is, but we're talking about anywhere from 50-200% more. Coal power is responsible for 800,000 deaths per year, WHEN IT'S WORKING PROPERLY. That's the bar nuclear, and any other alternative baseload power source, has to beat. It doesn't have to failure proof, it doesn't have to have zero deaths. It just has to be significantly better than the alternatives. Refusing to consider a power source unless it has zero deaths, zero radiation, zero side effects for all time, is living in a fantasy world. It's the paradigm promoted by the fossil fuel industry, and bought hook line and sinker by the dumber end of the environmentalist movement. And it keeps us from ever decreasing our power generation carbon footprint.

efaref 10y ago
Agreed. Nuclear accidents may have made some bits around Chernobyl and Fukushima unpleasant, but coal and oil have ruined the entire planet. People simply aren't rational. It has been so hard for me to accept that.
- SmkyMt 10y ago
  >People simply aren't rational. It has been so hard for me to accept that. You raise an important point: human irrationality is as real as climate change. And probably more challenging. We might more quickly tackle climate change by simultaneously tackling human irrationality. It's a shame that more of the best and brightest minds don't enter the (messy)fields of behavioral science - where progress is much less impressive of late than in technology IMHO.
lukealization 10y ago
> The other real world options we have for baseload power on this scale are fossil fuels, primarily coal. Sure, but... will this be the same in 10 years? 20? 50? Within merely the past 3 years, the amount of battery energy storage has expanded by a few orders of magnitude. Because when you build a nuclear power plant, it takes a minimum of a decade to go from on paper to operation, and the operational life, which pays off the capex at the beginning, is hopefully, at least 50. Nuclear power isn't agile. It has poor reactivity to future market changes. It costs billions to get up and running, and isn't modular. You can't commission it in 100MW increments. A solar power plant requires a dozen handy men and a couple of electrical engineers to maintain, a nuclear power plant requires a few dozen nuclear engineers. Solar power doesn't have publicly socialized decommissioning or waste storage costs. I'm not trying to tell you nuclear doesn't have a future. What I am saying, with the likes of Tesla Energy and the rise in solar + battery storage, is that the energy grid is in for turbulent times in the next few decades. This makes the economics of nuclear questionable - we don't know if it is going to be economically viable in a few decades. If I had $10b? I wouldn't touch the nuclear energy sector, personally.
- ageofwant 10y ago
  And why is all that? Red tape and bureaucracy, while the world literally burns. If the same rules applied to coal or even gas burning generators the cost would exceed that. Nuclear power stations are extremely modular, there are at least twenty of them circling australian waters as I type. I'm going to go out on a limb and venture that you will find less coal and solar powered submarines than that. These issues are not technical, they are political, and rooted in irrational bullshit propagated by stupid and irresponsible people.
  - lukealization 10y ago
    > And why is all that? Red tape and bureaucracy, while the world literally burns. Can I ask what specific requirements surrounding the development and operation around nuclear plants constitutes red tape in your opinion? My understanding is that most of the regulations concerning operation are in place to ensure the possibility of a disaster is minimized to nil. > These issues are not technical, they are political As expressed in my above comment, I would argue that nuclear power's problems are neither technical nor political, but nearly totally economic in nature. It's on the losing side of current trends.
jleahy 10y ago
Further the fact that nuclear power has to pass a higher safety bar than coal is part of what's making it more expensive. If we were rational we'd be saying that it's currently too safe and too expensive and we should be compromising on safety to get an overall benefit (through reduced CO2 emissions and reduced radiation from burning coal). I think at this point it's just considered a dirty word and is probably unrecoverable. If we can make fusion work then the benefit won't just be that it's better but that it's a new brand. There'll still be nuclear waste (you can't prevent radioactivation when you have neutrons), but it'll fusion waste rather than nuclear waste.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
wohlergehen 10y ago
> Coal plants emit much more radiation than nuclear plants - even old ones. There's lots of research about HOW MUCH more radioactive coal power is, but we're talking about anywhere from 50-200% more. I don't fully understand this argument: A well-maintained nuclear power plant emits next to no radioactivity (compared to the natural background), so a coal plant that emits even a huge factor more radioactivity is still negligible. I feel like the absolute number (x times more radioactive than nuclear) is really not helpful, if one of the numbers is (just as an example) 0.0001% of natural background, and the other is 0.001% of it.
- vidarh 10y ago
  Failing nuclear plants have contributed far less radiation than working coal plants over the lifetime of nuclear. The point is that even if you see these failures as inevitable going forwards, coal is the larger radiation threat too, even though the radiation threat from coal is tiny compared to the vast numbers of dead due to respiratory illnesses caused by coal.
Retric 10y ago
Coal is under 40% of US electrical generation and dropping fairly quickly relative to 50+ year plant lifetimes. Peak was near 60% in late 80's and it's dropped 30%. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=25392 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=25392. Current issue is it's more expencive than wind and not viable as peaking power, just like Nuclear making this a non starter.
redwood 10y ago
I'm sorry, but to mention Coal at the primary alternative is blatantly untrue in this decade. Natural gas is the primary fossil fuel alternative, and it burns clean.
- acidburnNSA 10y ago
  From the air pollution safety on the table, you're right. From a more uncertain Carbon emission climate perspective, natural gas is still terrible compared to non emitting sources like nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar.
  - redwood 10y ago
    Well that's true, when I said Burns clean I was referring to the discussion around radioactive and other pollution aspects of coal.
- notsrg 10y ago
  I'm sorry, but claiming natural gas burns clean is blatantly untrue in this decade.
notheguyouthink 10y ago
I'm very foreign to facts like these about coal. I had always assumed/considered it "dirty energy", but that is all i had known. With that said, my coworker seems to think "coal is far more clean than most people think", and is pro-coal. Are there some really blatant and easy to digest articles explaining coal? Eg, 800,000 deaths sounds big, and while i don't agree with my coworker, i assume those deaths are far more subtle and debatable. To be clear, i'm not trying to defend coal, i just want to provide him with some clear and irrefutable evidence.
Zigurd 10y ago
This supposed cabal in the fossil fuel industry apparently extends to to the insurance industry. I can insure a gas fired plant, but not a nuke. Maybe that is due to some fault in the way non-nuclear liability is calculated. Or, just maybe, the environmental and economic destruction that happens when nuclear plants suffer major malfunctions, especially when their operation is extended past the initial designed lifespan, is so large it is impossible to insure in a way that makes economic sense.
abalone 10y ago
> Coal power is responsible for 800,000 deaths per year Umm... source? Clean Air Task Force puts U.S. deaths at 13K/year.[1] Obviously the concern with nuclear is not that it needs to achieve "zero deaths". That is a straw man argument. It's Chernobyl, Fukushima, etc. and waste. [1] http://www.catf.us/fossil/problems/power_plants/ http://www.catf.us/fossil/problems/power_plants/
- stinky613 10y ago
  I think the 800k figure may be a global number. This 2012 Forbes article has a global average 100,000 deaths _per trillion kWhr_[1]. I have no clue if the the world uses 8 trillion kWhr of coal power in a year though. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/#6fbcce81709b https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
cletus 10y ago
I don't think that helps. People are terrible at assessing risk. Just look at flying. There are people who are afraid to fly, some to the point where it's impossible. Compare that to driving, which is far riskier yet where is the equivalent phobia? I think there's two reasons for this: 1. People trust the familiar. 2. An event with a plane is likely to be catastrophic. Both of th set factors work against nuclear power too. Between Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, no one is going to trust it or want it in their backyard. That's a problem because nuclear plants need water and that puts them near people. Then add in distrust of companies to run them properly, th spent fuel storage problem and this logistics chain that creates the opportunity for malfeasance (i.e. Terrorists getting their hand on materials for a dirty bomb) and its almost I,possible. So it doesn't matter what coal does or doesn't do, people are used to it and catastrophic failure scenarios are greatly diminished. Renewable sourc s that create fuel you can use elsewhere are currently cost prohibitive (i.e. It's more expensiv than drilling for oil or digging up coal) but the cost is co,king down. This provides a ceiling on just how expensive traditional power generation can get.
sunstone 10y ago
In case it's not obvious this argument is a disingenuous appraisal of current nuclear energy as a power source. The important facts that are left unsaid are: when current nuclear goes bad it goes VERY bad indeed; the intermittent powers sources of wind and solar are much less intermittent in aggregate when their geographical dispersion is large enough; the costs of both solar and wind are declining rapidly while nuclear costs are not; widely distributed storage batteries will be come more common as their price continues to decrease and the grid will strengthen in proportion. Solar and wind have the added important advantage that capacity can be added incrementally whereas nuclear is one huge, wildly expensive project at a time. I'm not against nuclear in principle. The problem is not, as stated, the unreasonable condition that it has to be 100% safe. The problem is that the risks have to be reasonably limited when something does go wrong. Nuclear fails that requirement. If there was not a viable alternative to nuclear then sure, nuclear would be a necessity. As it is, nuclear's viability window has closed, at least for now.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  It's not a disingenuous appraisal; you're overblowing the safety issues. When nuclear fails, the bad isn't that bad. Fukushima impact was mostly from panic and unnecessary evacuations. Even Chernobyl wasn't that bad (compare to e.g. hydroelectric dam failures). As for solar power, I hope what you say is true; I still wonder what's their EROI and real carbon footprint, when you correct for the subsidies (which are fine as means to get solar running, but not fine for calculations of impact on climate and energy security).
  - kbenson 10y ago
    > When nuclear fails, the bad isn't that bad. Fukushima impact was mostly from panic and unnecessary evacuations. Doesn't that imply to some degree that the "isn't that bad" is because we have people to stop it from going really bad when it goes bad? I can't help but feel what's missing from the assessment is the various levels of failures of each technology, how much intervention is required if any to keep it to that failure level, and how likely that failure level is. We're all talking about probability of outcomes but we still seem to be leaving out essential information.
clarkmoody 10y ago
If it bleeds, it leads. The press will always seek to sensationalize any rare events to gain clicks / views. For this reason, people vastly outweigh the risks of nuclear meltdown, terrorist attack, plane crash, child abduction, etc. So people are easily swayed to oppose nuclear development by fossil-fuel lobbying. Since the government must give approval for nuclear plants, their development becomes a political issue, replete with fear-mongering and NIMBYism. You're citing facts and calling for a balance of risk / reward for energy production, which is noble and should convince the HN crowd. But the reality of nuclear power is that it's political, and facts and politics do not cross paths very often :-) The way to change public opinion is through education, so I suggest every go and watch Pandora's Promise, which is an excellent documentary about nuclear power.
Taylor_OD 10y ago
I recently had a discussion with family about nuclear energy. One member was worried about it because the plants would be targets for foreign attacks. I told him we already have plenty of plants operating that could be attacked. Then I quickly pulled up a list of all the nuclear plants in the US. There's already one less then a hundred miles from his home. He still wasn't convinced. I think a lot of people have irrational fear about nuclear and nothing short of a miracle will change that.
sathackr 10y ago
Agreed. This is like the calls to ban self driving car technology such as Tesla's autopilot because they sometimes make mistakes. Completely overlooked is the number of accidents prevented because of the technology. Just recently when the guy in Florida was killed while the car was driving under autopilot there was news story after news story about the dangers of it, how it should be outlawed. To have it 'their way' we could never permit self driving cars until there was a 0% chance of malfunction or accident. That would be like outlawing seatbelts because on 0.1% of crashes they might cause more injury. Thankfully reason mostly prevailed in the car "autopilot" battle. Hopefully reason will eventually prevail in the nuclear power battle.
LinuxFreedom 10y ago
You are wrong. The alternative is not cole, but of course never-ending energy sources like sun, wind, water etc. - many of those technologies are still in a very early stage because lots of government money was put into nuclear power - for only one single reason: to produce nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are the only stupid reason why we will leave many unsolvable nuclear waste problems to our children - because of psychotic war-fetishists and primitive anti-social whoriticians. Luckily the discussions are already won around the globe: renewable energy is the future, no matter how retarded any government will be that US citizens choose to lead "their country". Of course old school lobbyists that have siphoned billions of dollars selling a failed and plain stupid technology will not just disappear, they will do everything to keep their positions selling their old ideas as "new and clean" and will be an extremely annoying obstacle to human progress for a long time, unfortunately. But every initiative from these old greedy hateful minority will produce an even stronger impulse of reaction by the open-minded and peace-loving young people that are working hard to establish renewable energy systems around the world. The time of the anti-social egoist-monkey has gone in most parts of the world.
- wbl 10y ago
  Nuclear weapon production is not helped by civilian reactors, with the one exception of low-burnup Magnox and CANDU. The all-in cost of nuclear is below that of solar and wind.
maverick_iceman 10y ago
Couldn't agree more. Chernobyl killed 28 and both Three Mile and Fukushima killed 0. Still people are so afraid of nuclear reactors. This and the opposition to GMO food show that pseudoscientific scaremongering is extremely effective in a scientifically illiterate population.
abecedarius 10y ago
There was a book making this case in detail, The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear. I liked it when I read it 30 years ago.
7952 10y ago
You could use the same argument to justify pushing renewables or even gas. It is pragmatic because it is easy. Nuclear engineering is hard. Most energy development "in the real world" is financially driven. This applies even when other political objectives exist. The uncertainty in costs of nuclear are a serious issue that makes renewables seem like the pragmatic solution.

efaref 10y ago

Agreed. Nuclear accidents may have made some bits around Chernobyl and Fukushima unpleasant, but coal and oil have ruined the entire planet. People simply aren't rational. It has been so hard for me to accept that.

SmkyMt 10y ago
>People simply aren't rational. It has been so hard for me to accept that. You raise an important point: human irrationality is as real as climate change. And probably more challenging. We might more quickly tackle climate change by simultaneously tackling human irrationality. It's a shame that more of the best and brightest minds don't enter the (messy)fields of behavioral science - where progress is much less impressive of late than in technology IMHO.

lukealization 10y ago

> The other real world options we have for baseload power on this scale are fossil fuels, primarily coal. Sure, but... will this be the same in 10 years? 20? 50? Within merely the past 3 years, the amount of battery energy storage has expanded by a few orders of magnitude. Because when you build a nuclear power plant, it takes a minimum of a decade to go from on paper to operation, and the operational life, which pays off the capex at the beginning, is hopefully, at least 50. Nuclear power isn't agile. It has poor reactivity to future market changes. It costs billions to get up and running, and isn't modular. You can't commission it in 100MW increments. A solar power plant requires a dozen handy men and a couple of electrical engineers to maintain, a nuclear power plant requires a few dozen nuclear engineers. Solar power doesn't have publicly socialized decommissioning or waste storage costs. I'm not trying to tell you nuclear doesn't have a future. What I am saying, with the likes of Tesla Energy and the rise in solar + battery storage, is that the energy grid is in for turbulent times in the next few decades. This makes the economics of nuclear questionable - we don't know if it is going to be economically viable in a few decades. If I had $10b? I wouldn't touch the nuclear energy sector, personally.

ageofwant 10y ago
And why is all that? Red tape and bureaucracy, while the world literally burns. If the same rules applied to coal or even gas burning generators the cost would exceed that. Nuclear power stations are extremely modular, there are at least twenty of them circling australian waters as I type. I'm going to go out on a limb and venture that you will find less coal and solar powered submarines than that. These issues are not technical, they are political, and rooted in irrational bullshit propagated by stupid and irresponsible people.
- lukealization 10y ago
  > And why is all that? Red tape and bureaucracy, while the world literally burns. Can I ask what specific requirements surrounding the development and operation around nuclear plants constitutes red tape in your opinion? My understanding is that most of the regulations concerning operation are in place to ensure the possibility of a disaster is minimized to nil. > These issues are not technical, they are political As expressed in my above comment, I would argue that nuclear power's problems are neither technical nor political, but nearly totally economic in nature. It's on the losing side of current trends.

jleahy 10y ago

Further the fact that nuclear power has to pass a higher safety bar than coal is part of what's making it more expensive. If we were rational we'd be saying that it's currently too safe and too expensive and we should be compromising on safety to get an overall benefit (through reduced CO2 emissions and reduced radiation from burning coal). I think at this point it's just considered a dirty word and is probably unrecoverable. If we can make fusion work then the benefit won't just be that it's better but that it's a new brand. There'll still be nuclear waste (you can't prevent radioactivation when you have neutrons), but it'll fusion waste rather than nuclear waste.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

wohlergehen 10y ago

> Coal plants emit much more radiation than nuclear plants - even old ones. There's lots of research about HOW MUCH more radioactive coal power is, but we're talking about anywhere from 50-200% more. I don't fully understand this argument: A well-maintained nuclear power plant emits next to no radioactivity (compared to the natural background), so a coal plant that emits even a huge factor more radioactivity is still negligible. I feel like the absolute number (x times more radioactive than nuclear) is really not helpful, if one of the numbers is (just as an example) 0.0001% of natural background, and the other is 0.001% of it.

vidarh 10y ago
Failing nuclear plants have contributed far less radiation than working coal plants over the lifetime of nuclear. The point is that even if you see these failures as inevitable going forwards, coal is the larger radiation threat too, even though the radiation threat from coal is tiny compared to the vast numbers of dead due to respiratory illnesses caused by coal.

Retric 10y ago

Coal is under 40% of US electrical generation and dropping fairly quickly relative to 50+ year plant lifetimes. Peak was near 60% in late 80's and it's dropped 30%. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=25392 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=25392. Current issue is it's more expencive than wind and not viable as peaking power, just like Nuclear making this a non starter.

redwood 10y ago

I'm sorry, but to mention Coal at the primary alternative is blatantly untrue in this decade. Natural gas is the primary fossil fuel alternative, and it burns clean.

acidburnNSA 10y ago
From the air pollution safety on the table, you're right. From a more uncertain Carbon emission climate perspective, natural gas is still terrible compared to non emitting sources like nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar.
- redwood 10y ago
  Well that's true, when I said Burns clean I was referring to the discussion around radioactive and other pollution aspects of coal.
notsrg 10y ago
I'm sorry, but claiming natural gas burns clean is blatantly untrue in this decade.

notheguyouthink 10y ago

I'm very foreign to facts like these about coal. I had always assumed/considered it "dirty energy", but that is all i had known. With that said, my coworker seems to think "coal is far more clean than most people think", and is pro-coal. Are there some really blatant and easy to digest articles explaining coal? Eg, 800,000 deaths sounds big, and while i don't agree with my coworker, i assume those deaths are far more subtle and debatable. To be clear, i'm not trying to defend coal, i just want to provide him with some clear and irrefutable evidence.

Zigurd 10y ago

This supposed cabal in the fossil fuel industry apparently extends to to the insurance industry. I can insure a gas fired plant, but not a nuke. Maybe that is due to some fault in the way non-nuclear liability is calculated. Or, just maybe, the environmental and economic destruction that happens when nuclear plants suffer major malfunctions, especially when their operation is extended past the initial designed lifespan, is so large it is impossible to insure in a way that makes economic sense.

abalone 10y ago

> Coal power is responsible for 800,000 deaths per year Umm... source? Clean Air Task Force puts U.S. deaths at 13K/year.[1] Obviously the concern with nuclear is not that it needs to achieve "zero deaths". That is a straw man argument. It's Chernobyl, Fukushima, etc. and waste. [1] http://www.catf.us/fossil/problems/power_plants/ http://www.catf.us/fossil/problems/power_plants/

stinky613 10y ago
I think the 800k figure may be a global number. This 2012 Forbes article has a global average 100,000 deaths _per trillion kWhr_[1]. I have no clue if the the world uses 8 trillion kWhr of coal power in a year though. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/#6fbcce81709b https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...

cletus 10y ago

I don't think that helps. People are terrible at assessing risk. Just look at flying. There are people who are afraid to fly, some to the point where it's impossible. Compare that to driving, which is far riskier yet where is the equivalent phobia? I think there's two reasons for this: 1. People trust the familiar. 2. An event with a plane is likely to be catastrophic. Both of th set factors work against nuclear power too. Between Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, no one is going to trust it or want it in their backyard. That's a problem because nuclear plants need water and that puts them near people. Then add in distrust of companies to run them properly, th spent fuel storage problem and this logistics chain that creates the opportunity for malfeasance (i.e. Terrorists getting their hand on materials for a dirty bomb) and its almost I,possible. So it doesn't matter what coal does or doesn't do, people are used to it and catastrophic failure scenarios are greatly diminished. Renewable sourc s that create fuel you can use elsewhere are currently cost prohibitive (i.e. It's more expensiv than drilling for oil or digging up coal) but the cost is co,king down. This provides a ceiling on just how expensive traditional power generation can get.

sunstone 10y ago

In case it's not obvious this argument is a disingenuous appraisal of current nuclear energy as a power source. The important facts that are left unsaid are: when current nuclear goes bad it goes VERY bad indeed; the intermittent powers sources of wind and solar are much less intermittent in aggregate when their geographical dispersion is large enough; the costs of both solar and wind are declining rapidly while nuclear costs are not; widely distributed storage batteries will be come more common as their price continues to decrease and the grid will strengthen in proportion. Solar and wind have the added important advantage that capacity can be added incrementally whereas nuclear is one huge, wildly expensive project at a time. I'm not against nuclear in principle. The problem is not, as stated, the unreasonable condition that it has to be 100% safe. The problem is that the risks have to be reasonably limited when something does go wrong. Nuclear fails that requirement. If there was not a viable alternative to nuclear then sure, nuclear would be a necessity. As it is, nuclear's viability window has closed, at least for now.

TeMPOraL 10y ago
It's not a disingenuous appraisal; you're overblowing the safety issues. When nuclear fails, the bad isn't that bad. Fukushima impact was mostly from panic and unnecessary evacuations. Even Chernobyl wasn't that bad (compare to e.g. hydroelectric dam failures). As for solar power, I hope what you say is true; I still wonder what's their EROI and real carbon footprint, when you correct for the subsidies (which are fine as means to get solar running, but not fine for calculations of impact on climate and energy security).
- kbenson 10y ago
  > When nuclear fails, the bad isn't that bad. Fukushima impact was mostly from panic and unnecessary evacuations. Doesn't that imply to some degree that the "isn't that bad" is because we have people to stop it from going really bad when it goes bad? I can't help but feel what's missing from the assessment is the various levels of failures of each technology, how much intervention is required if any to keep it to that failure level, and how likely that failure level is. We're all talking about probability of outcomes but we still seem to be leaving out essential information.

clarkmoody 10y ago

If it bleeds, it leads. The press will always seek to sensationalize any rare events to gain clicks / views. For this reason, people vastly outweigh the risks of nuclear meltdown, terrorist attack, plane crash, child abduction, etc. So people are easily swayed to oppose nuclear development by fossil-fuel lobbying. Since the government must give approval for nuclear plants, their development becomes a political issue, replete with fear-mongering and NIMBYism. You're citing facts and calling for a balance of risk / reward for energy production, which is noble and should convince the HN crowd. But the reality of nuclear power is that it's political, and facts and politics do not cross paths very often :-) The way to change public opinion is through education, so I suggest every go and watch Pandora's Promise, which is an excellent documentary about nuclear power.

Taylor_OD 10y ago

I recently had a discussion with family about nuclear energy. One member was worried about it because the plants would be targets for foreign attacks. I told him we already have plenty of plants operating that could be attacked. Then I quickly pulled up a list of all the nuclear plants in the US. There's already one less then a hundred miles from his home. He still wasn't convinced. I think a lot of people have irrational fear about nuclear and nothing short of a miracle will change that.

sathackr 10y ago

Agreed. This is like the calls to ban self driving car technology such as Tesla's autopilot because they sometimes make mistakes. Completely overlooked is the number of accidents prevented because of the technology. Just recently when the guy in Florida was killed while the car was driving under autopilot there was news story after news story about the dangers of it, how it should be outlawed. To have it 'their way' we could never permit self driving cars until there was a 0% chance of malfunction or accident. That would be like outlawing seatbelts because on 0.1% of crashes they might cause more injury. Thankfully reason mostly prevailed in the car "autopilot" battle. Hopefully reason will eventually prevail in the nuclear power battle.

LinuxFreedom 10y ago

You are wrong. The alternative is not cole, but of course never-ending energy sources like sun, wind, water etc. - many of those technologies are still in a very early stage because lots of government money was put into nuclear power - for only one single reason: to produce nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are the only stupid reason why we will leave many unsolvable nuclear waste problems to our children - because of psychotic war-fetishists and primitive anti-social whoriticians. Luckily the discussions are already won around the globe: renewable energy is the future, no matter how retarded any government will be that US citizens choose to lead "their country". Of course old school lobbyists that have siphoned billions of dollars selling a failed and plain stupid technology will not just disappear, they will do everything to keep their positions selling their old ideas as "new and clean" and will be an extremely annoying obstacle to human progress for a long time, unfortunately. But every initiative from these old greedy hateful minority will produce an even stronger impulse of reaction by the open-minded and peace-loving young people that are working hard to establish renewable energy systems around the world. The time of the anti-social egoist-monkey has gone in most parts of the world.

wbl 10y ago
Nuclear weapon production is not helped by civilian reactors, with the one exception of low-burnup Magnox and CANDU. The all-in cost of nuclear is below that of solar and wind.

maverick_iceman 10y ago

Couldn't agree more. Chernobyl killed 28 and both Three Mile and Fukushima killed 0. Still people are so afraid of nuclear reactors. This and the opposition to GMO food show that pseudoscientific scaremongering is extremely effective in a scientifically illiterate population.

abecedarius 10y ago

There was a book making this case in detail, The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear. I liked it when I read it 30 years ago.

7952 10y ago

You could use the same argument to justify pushing renewables or even gas. It is pragmatic because it is easy. Nuclear engineering is hard. Most energy development "in the real world" is financially driven. This applies even when other political objectives exist. The uncertainty in costs of nuclear are a serious issue that makes renewables seem like the pragmatic solution.