5 ms·

Nonsense. This has nothing to do with the planet being destroyed, but minor health effects of air pollution. Which in first world countries, is vastly less than

Nonsense. This has nothing to do with the planet being destroyed, but minor health effects of air pollution. Which in first world countries, is vastly less than it used to be. And could be eliminated entirely in a few years with technology like solar power and electric cars. Possibly it could have been seriously cut back decades ago, if environmentalists hadn't fought so hard against nuclear.

Danihan 9y ago
Thank you. One of my biggest regrets for our country is that we're losing the race for nuclear power-grid adoption. And for what.
addicted 9y ago
Yea. The real problem was fightng against a technology that is more expensive yhan cleaner options, has massive NIMBY problems that are not yet resolved, gets more expensive as time goes on, has led to massive cpncentrated disasters and still is unable to find a solution to its long term problems. A technology whose proponents's best answer even today is "wait until the next breakthrough". Nuclear: The one trick the evil environmentalists won't tell you about that will solve all your energy problems.
- Houshalter 9y ago
  If we had adopted nuclear power decades ago, none of that would be an issue. Solar power is only just now catching up to cost effectiveness with nuclear. And only on sunny days, the storage problem is very far away from being solved. Maybe coal is cheaper, but only if you exclude externalities. The amount of radiation released by nuclear is tiny compared to coal. Not to mention mercury, carbon dioxide, etc.
  - addicted 9y ago
    The only reason nuclear is even viable today is because nuclear technokogy isn't as bad today as it was a few decades ago. Every time we have a massive nuclear disaster the defense (a valid one!) Is that the disaster happened from a poorer technology that isn't used anymore today. If we had built out nuclear earlier we would have had a lot more nuclear disasters. The problem with nuclear is solely that by the time the technology became good enough that it could be used fairly safely it became way more expensive than almost all competitors including most other renewable sources. And this is even before including the geopolitical limitations of nuclear. Would we be living in a better world if every country including countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan had easy access to nuclear.
    - yeellow 9y ago
      Pakistan has nuclear weapon and 4 nuclear power plants.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
      Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't regulatory burden a significant reason for nuclear being so expensive? As of May 2017, the People's Republic of China has 37 nuclear reactors operating with a capacity of 32.4 GW and 20 under construction with a capacity of 20.5 GW.[1] Compare: As of 2016, there are four new reactors under construction with a gross electrical capacity of 5,000 MW, while 33 reactors have been permanently shut down. I'm lead to believe the reason China can have 5 times the number of new nuclear builds is because China seems to be able to get shit done while infrastructure in the US languishes. I could be wrong, I'm just going by what internet would have me believe. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St...
  - freeflight 9y ago
    >If we had adopted nuclear power decades ago, none of that would be an issue. Then we would have even more problems with final disposal than we already have, that's the topic none of the pro-nuclear people ever want to touch on because they fully realize it's quite an issue. As is, it's already bad enough how plant operators socialize these long-term costs while keeping all the profits private, which is the only way these operations can turn a short-term profit. Case in point: http://www.dw.com/en/german-government-does-nuclear-waste-deal-with-energy-companies/a-36089376 http://www.dw.com/en/german-government-does-nuclear-waste-de... It's even more infuriating to see that quote of Sigmar Gabrial boasting that "society alone doesn't have to bear the costs". How generous of them to pay a little bit into a fund for the disposal of their own waste, while the German taxpayer will end up picking the brunt of the bill when, as always, everything ends up going way over the estimated costs. Just take a look at Fukushima: TEPCO has a book equity of $US20 billion, total cleanup costs are estimated at $US250 billion, who's paying for that? Right, the Japanese government aka the tax payer.
    - catdog 9y ago
      Another problem with going fully nuclear: society is going to be highly dependent on basically a hand full of reactors so it's not that easy to shut them down in case unexpected defects are found or if they simply get too old without newer ones being built in time. We see this e.g. in France which largely runs on nuclear power: they still operate some old reactors with serious known issues. There also were some winters in the recent years where their grid was close to a blackout because a substantial part of the nuclear plants where in maintenance mode and electrical heating is widely used. It is only possible to prevent this because neighboring countries like Germany are able to reliably produce a lot of excess electricity (still too much coal unfortunately, thanks Merkel :() which they can import.
    - Houshalter 9y ago
      Even despite that, it's still better than coal. The costs are just more concentrated, and therefore more apparent. But the fact it's concentrated also make it at least possible to contain and cleanup. No one would even attempt to cleanup the environmental damage caused by coal, and it would cost vastly more than hundreds of billions. The estimated deaths are much larger than from nuclear accidents. If we had invested more in Nuclear it would be less of an issue. We've invented much safer reactors, and more efficient ones that produce much less waste. Probably much more would have been developed if the investment was there.
  - verelo 9y ago
    >> "Maybe coal is cheaper" Many make this claim, but I do not buy it. Take Australia as an example: relies on coal for around 85% of electricity production [1], also has some of the most expensive electricity in the western world [2] at around 29c / USD Kilowatt hour (that is over 2x the US national average). [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20070709212140/http://www.iea.org/dbtw-wpd/Textbase/nppdf/free/2006/key2006.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20070709212140/http://www.iea.or... [2] https://www.ovoenergy.com/guides/energy-guides/average-electricity-prices-kwh.html https://www.ovoenergy.com/guides/energy-guides/average-elect...
    - TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
      Until Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and The Wilderness Society come out and publicly claim responsibility for the mess Australia's electricity generation is I won't take "Environmentalism" seriously. I live in Tasmania now, I think most of our electricity comes from hydro. Thirty hydropower stations operating in Tasmania[1], but we still pay ~26 cents a kilowatt-hour here. 1. https://www.hydro.com.au/energy/our-power-stations https://www.hydro.com.au/energy/our-power-stations
      - verelo 9y ago
        Curious, what did (or didn't) those organizations do? I donate to some of them and would gladly change that by donating elsewhere if there is good reason not to. Also, agreed. Australia is a mess. I grew up in Newcastle, living in Toronto Canada now and love looking at where our energy comes from: https://www.cns-snc.ca/media/ontarioelectricity/ontarioelectricity.html https://www.cns-snc.ca/media/ontarioelectricity/ontarioelect... No coal, beautiful!
        TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
        Generally campaign hard against nuclear and hydro. There hasn't been any new hydro in Australia since The Wilderness Society blocked the Franklin Dam project[1]. I'll admit that no new hydro is arguably a good thing for certain aspects of sustainability, but it could be argued that new hydro is better than new coal or gas. That's sort of a false dichotomy because there are other options: An in-principle agreement has been reached to build a new 144MW wind farm in central Tasmania[2], the first new wind project in the state in almost a decade[3]. The Franklin Dam project was to be 180MW, with arguable much greater capacity factor than wind. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Dam_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Dam_controversy 2. http://www.goldwindaustralia.com/aurora-energy-goldwind-announces-agreement-wild-cattle-hill-wind-farm/ http://www.goldwindaustralia.com/aurora-energy-goldwind-anno... 3. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-07/new-$300m-wind-farm-for-tasmania/8594910 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-07/new-$300m-wind-farm-fo...
- akiselev 9y ago
  > A technology whose proponents's best answer even today is "wait until the next breakthrough". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_lightbulb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_lightbulb This was researcher was completed by the United Aircraft Corporation in the late 60's and early 70's before it was canceled by Nixon along with the Mars program. It was under a NASA contract for space exploration so the literature is in the context of a rocket engine but it is even more compelling as a terrestrial reactor as it uses a tiny amount of fuel (tens of kilos instead of tens of tonnes) and actively keeps that fuel at supercritical so if power is lost the entire thing fizzles out. This is a fast neutron design with an extremely high neutron cross section, far beyond that of any other reactor, easily allowing you to feed nuclear waste into it and very efficiently transmute much of it into fuel or more manageable waste that is then separated out by centrifuges (which are already in the design to separate usable UF6 from the neon exhaust). UAC was set to win a contract to test the reactor with nuclear fuel when NASA pulled the plug so the anti-nuclear crowd isn't to blame for that line of development dying. However, all of the technological breakthroughs in computation, material science, and nuclear engineering needed to make this happen at an industrial scale have all been discovered since the project was canceled. If it weren't for all the anti-nuclear hysteria, we might have actually had someone willing to take the risk to bring the nuclear lightbulb reactor to market. Sadly, almost all of the scientists and engineers that worked on this design have passed on so the institutional knowledge is gone and the design was classified for a while so no other nations picked up on it in time. You may be able to find the original papers on NASA/JPL's archives but AFAIK they were reclassified a few years ago.
  - nooron 9y ago
    I recommend To the End of the Solar System by James Dewar, on this topic. He's an evangelist, but it has great primary source docs.
    - KGIII 9y ago
      There is also a prolific guy on YouTube. He's all about the liquid salt thorium reactors. I don't recall his name, but searching YouTube for that phrase will almost certainly find him. I believe they have a project in the works. I just watch documentaries, I am not a nuclear physicist or anything. It sounds like it is safe and efficient. We've got a huge supply of thorium.
legulere 9y ago
Electric cars surprisingly don't reduce particulate matter air pollution by much. A big part of the pollution comes from wear of the tires and the road. It's higher with heavier cars and electric cars generally are heavier because of their batteries. Then you have the effect of reemission of PM already lying on the road that stays the same. Another way of PM emissions that is not tackled at all is agriculture. And it does not just have minor health effects. People are dying because of it.
- jdc 9y ago
  Just how great are the PM emissions from car tires? Has anyone quantified the effect?
  - KGIII 9y ago
    2015 EPA Tire wear is something like 10%, maybe a bit less. Break wear is much higher at 60%. Engine emissions is most of the rest. EVs are heavier so they will have more tire wear. They don't brake as often, so that would go down.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
      Nitpick: I think you mean to say EVs don't apply friction braking as often as use regenerative braking a lot.
      - KGIII 9y ago
        Correct, thanks. I should have been more clear. They also (usually) have smaller pads and rotors.
        TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
        I've often wondered what brake pads are made from. I was aware asbestos had been used in the past. Have you read much about them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brake_pad#Materials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brake_pad#Materials
sliverstorm 9y ago
I think your parent was being humorous. But I do agree with the sentiment that anti-nuclear environmentalists fell victim to perfect is the enemy of good, and unintentionally stuck us with the dirtiest option.

Danihan 9y ago

Thank you. One of my biggest regrets for our country is that we're losing the race for nuclear power-grid adoption. And for what.

addicted 9y ago

Yea. The real problem was fightng against a technology that is more expensive yhan cleaner options, has massive NIMBY problems that are not yet resolved, gets more expensive as time goes on, has led to massive cpncentrated disasters and still is unable to find a solution to its long term problems. A technology whose proponents's best answer even today is "wait until the next breakthrough". Nuclear: The one trick the evil environmentalists won't tell you about that will solve all your energy problems.

Houshalter 9y ago
If we had adopted nuclear power decades ago, none of that would be an issue. Solar power is only just now catching up to cost effectiveness with nuclear. And only on sunny days, the storage problem is very far away from being solved. Maybe coal is cheaper, but only if you exclude externalities. The amount of radiation released by nuclear is tiny compared to coal. Not to mention mercury, carbon dioxide, etc.
- addicted 9y ago
  The only reason nuclear is even viable today is because nuclear technokogy isn't as bad today as it was a few decades ago. Every time we have a massive nuclear disaster the defense (a valid one!) Is that the disaster happened from a poorer technology that isn't used anymore today. If we had built out nuclear earlier we would have had a lot more nuclear disasters. The problem with nuclear is solely that by the time the technology became good enough that it could be used fairly safely it became way more expensive than almost all competitors including most other renewable sources. And this is even before including the geopolitical limitations of nuclear. Would we be living in a better world if every country including countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan had easy access to nuclear.
  - yeellow 9y ago
    Pakistan has nuclear weapon and 4 nuclear power plants.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
    Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't regulatory burden a significant reason for nuclear being so expensive? As of May 2017, the People's Republic of China has 37 nuclear reactors operating with a capacity of 32.4 GW and 20 under construction with a capacity of 20.5 GW.[1] Compare: As of 2016, there are four new reactors under construction with a gross electrical capacity of 5,000 MW, while 33 reactors have been permanently shut down. I'm lead to believe the reason China can have 5 times the number of new nuclear builds is because China seems to be able to get shit done while infrastructure in the US languishes. I could be wrong, I'm just going by what internet would have me believe. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St...
- freeflight 9y ago
  >If we had adopted nuclear power decades ago, none of that would be an issue. Then we would have even more problems with final disposal than we already have, that's the topic none of the pro-nuclear people ever want to touch on because they fully realize it's quite an issue. As is, it's already bad enough how plant operators socialize these long-term costs while keeping all the profits private, which is the only way these operations can turn a short-term profit. Case in point: http://www.dw.com/en/german-government-does-nuclear-waste-deal-with-energy-companies/a-36089376 http://www.dw.com/en/german-government-does-nuclear-waste-de... It's even more infuriating to see that quote of Sigmar Gabrial boasting that "society alone doesn't have to bear the costs". How generous of them to pay a little bit into a fund for the disposal of their own waste, while the German taxpayer will end up picking the brunt of the bill when, as always, everything ends up going way over the estimated costs. Just take a look at Fukushima: TEPCO has a book equity of $US20 billion, total cleanup costs are estimated at $US250 billion, who's paying for that? Right, the Japanese government aka the tax payer.
  - catdog 9y ago
    Another problem with going fully nuclear: society is going to be highly dependent on basically a hand full of reactors so it's not that easy to shut them down in case unexpected defects are found or if they simply get too old without newer ones being built in time. We see this e.g. in France which largely runs on nuclear power: they still operate some old reactors with serious known issues. There also were some winters in the recent years where their grid was close to a blackout because a substantial part of the nuclear plants where in maintenance mode and electrical heating is widely used. It is only possible to prevent this because neighboring countries like Germany are able to reliably produce a lot of excess electricity (still too much coal unfortunately, thanks Merkel :() which they can import.
  - Houshalter 9y ago
    Even despite that, it's still better than coal. The costs are just more concentrated, and therefore more apparent. But the fact it's concentrated also make it at least possible to contain and cleanup. No one would even attempt to cleanup the environmental damage caused by coal, and it would cost vastly more than hundreds of billions. The estimated deaths are much larger than from nuclear accidents. If we had invested more in Nuclear it would be less of an issue. We've invented much safer reactors, and more efficient ones that produce much less waste. Probably much more would have been developed if the investment was there.
- verelo 9y ago
  >> "Maybe coal is cheaper" Many make this claim, but I do not buy it. Take Australia as an example: relies on coal for around 85% of electricity production [1], also has some of the most expensive electricity in the western world [2] at around 29c / USD Kilowatt hour (that is over 2x the US national average). [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20070709212140/http://www.iea.org/dbtw-wpd/Textbase/nppdf/free/2006/key2006.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20070709212140/http://www.iea.or... [2] https://www.ovoenergy.com/guides/energy-guides/average-electricity-prices-kwh.html https://www.ovoenergy.com/guides/energy-guides/average-elect...
  - TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
    Until Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and The Wilderness Society come out and publicly claim responsibility for the mess Australia's electricity generation is I won't take "Environmentalism" seriously. I live in Tasmania now, I think most of our electricity comes from hydro. Thirty hydropower stations operating in Tasmania[1], but we still pay ~26 cents a kilowatt-hour here. 1. https://www.hydro.com.au/energy/our-power-stations https://www.hydro.com.au/energy/our-power-stations
    - verelo 9y ago
      Curious, what did (or didn't) those organizations do? I donate to some of them and would gladly change that by donating elsewhere if there is good reason not to. Also, agreed. Australia is a mess. I grew up in Newcastle, living in Toronto Canada now and love looking at where our energy comes from: https://www.cns-snc.ca/media/ontarioelectricity/ontarioelectricity.html https://www.cns-snc.ca/media/ontarioelectricity/ontarioelect... No coal, beautiful!
      - TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
        Generally campaign hard against nuclear and hydro. There hasn't been any new hydro in Australia since The Wilderness Society blocked the Franklin Dam project[1]. I'll admit that no new hydro is arguably a good thing for certain aspects of sustainability, but it could be argued that new hydro is better than new coal or gas. That's sort of a false dichotomy because there are other options: An in-principle agreement has been reached to build a new 144MW wind farm in central Tasmania[2], the first new wind project in the state in almost a decade[3]. The Franklin Dam project was to be 180MW, with arguable much greater capacity factor than wind. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Dam_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Dam_controversy 2. http://www.goldwindaustralia.com/aurora-energy-goldwind-announces-agreement-wild-cattle-hill-wind-farm/ http://www.goldwindaustralia.com/aurora-energy-goldwind-anno... 3. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-07/new-$300m-wind-farm-for-tasmania/8594910 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-07/new-$300m-wind-farm-fo...
akiselev 9y ago
> A technology whose proponents's best answer even today is "wait until the next breakthrough". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_lightbulb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_lightbulb This was researcher was completed by the United Aircraft Corporation in the late 60's and early 70's before it was canceled by Nixon along with the Mars program. It was under a NASA contract for space exploration so the literature is in the context of a rocket engine but it is even more compelling as a terrestrial reactor as it uses a tiny amount of fuel (tens of kilos instead of tens of tonnes) and actively keeps that fuel at supercritical so if power is lost the entire thing fizzles out. This is a fast neutron design with an extremely high neutron cross section, far beyond that of any other reactor, easily allowing you to feed nuclear waste into it and very efficiently transmute much of it into fuel or more manageable waste that is then separated out by centrifuges (which are already in the design to separate usable UF6 from the neon exhaust). UAC was set to win a contract to test the reactor with nuclear fuel when NASA pulled the plug so the anti-nuclear crowd isn't to blame for that line of development dying. However, all of the technological breakthroughs in computation, material science, and nuclear engineering needed to make this happen at an industrial scale have all been discovered since the project was canceled. If it weren't for all the anti-nuclear hysteria, we might have actually had someone willing to take the risk to bring the nuclear lightbulb reactor to market. Sadly, almost all of the scientists and engineers that worked on this design have passed on so the institutional knowledge is gone and the design was classified for a while so no other nations picked up on it in time. You may be able to find the original papers on NASA/JPL's archives but AFAIK they were reclassified a few years ago.
- nooron 9y ago
  I recommend To the End of the Solar System by James Dewar, on this topic. He's an evangelist, but it has great primary source docs.
  - KGIII 9y ago
    There is also a prolific guy on YouTube. He's all about the liquid salt thorium reactors. I don't recall his name, but searching YouTube for that phrase will almost certainly find him. I believe they have a project in the works. I just watch documentaries, I am not a nuclear physicist or anything. It sounds like it is safe and efficient. We've got a huge supply of thorium.

legulere 9y ago

Electric cars surprisingly don't reduce particulate matter air pollution by much. A big part of the pollution comes from wear of the tires and the road. It's higher with heavier cars and electric cars generally are heavier because of their batteries. Then you have the effect of reemission of PM already lying on the road that stays the same. Another way of PM emissions that is not tackled at all is agriculture. And it does not just have minor health effects. People are dying because of it.

jdc 9y ago
Just how great are the PM emissions from car tires? Has anyone quantified the effect?
- KGIII 9y ago
  2015 EPA Tire wear is something like 10%, maybe a bit less. Break wear is much higher at 60%. Engine emissions is most of the rest. EVs are heavier so they will have more tire wear. They don't brake as often, so that would go down.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
    Nitpick: I think you mean to say EVs don't apply friction braking as often as use regenerative braking a lot.
    - KGIII 9y ago
      Correct, thanks. I should have been more clear. They also (usually) have smaller pads and rotors.
      - TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
        I've often wondered what brake pads are made from. I was aware asbestos had been used in the past. Have you read much about them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brake_pad#Materials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brake_pad#Materials

sliverstorm 9y ago

I think your parent was being humorous. But I do agree with the sentiment that anti-nuclear environmentalists fell victim to perfect is the enemy of good, and unintentionally stuck us with the dirtiest option.