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Coal, gas, etc increased global warming - but we are talking about timescales of <100 years (sometimes <50) to reverse those changes with appropriate action. Nu

Coal, gas, etc increased global warming - but we are talking about timescales of <100 years (sometimes <50) to reverse those changes with appropriate action. Nuclear is not like that, it takes thousands of years (plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24000 years) to undo or cleanup anything related to nuclear. When we started with coal/oil/gas/etc - we didn't know at that time about these side effects. Now the same could be said about nuclear as well. If radioactive material 10 times the size of chernobyl fallout [1] was released, would that mean the perpetual end of earth, possibly leading to a worse than climate-change kind of scenario? That's why countries like Germany have started shutting down nuclear power plants. Its like favoring a known evil rather than an unknown devil. Note: I'm neither a proponent or opponent of nuclear energy. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#National_and_international_spread_of_radioactive_substances https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#National_an...

acidburnNSA 9y ago
I think you're right that that's what people are concerned about. I'd mention that we have 17,000 reactor-years of commercial experience over the past 7 decades in nuclear. We understand the risks fairly well, though admittedly we are still learning. It is clear that nuclear reactors net save millions of lives over fossil-fuel alternatives. 10x Chernobyl fallout would be very bad but it would be nowhere near the global warming predictions we're seeing. Additionally, Chernobyl was a bad design without a containment running a risky experiment with safety systems turned off. The 4 reactors at Fukushima got hit with a huge earthquake and tsunami and no one died from their failure, and we know from models that no one will die from the radiation that was released. It's exceedingly unlikely that modern reactors would go Chernobyl, much less 10x Chernobyl. Germany has turned away from clean-air nuclear energy and replaced it with brown coal and more clean-air renewables but that's costing them a lot [1]. That's expensive fear, and only feasible for the richest of nations. Side note: Long half-life doesn't necessarily correlate with problems after an accident. It's actually the short half-life stuff that is biologically concentrated (Sr-90, I-131, Cs-137) that can cause the biggest issues. For instance, Uranium-238 has a 4.5 billion year half-life and it's not a radiological hazard (this just means the energy comes out really slowly). [1] http://fortune.com/2017/03/14/germany-renewable-clean-energy-solar/ http://fortune.com/2017/03/14/germany-renewable-clean-energy...

acidburnNSA 9y ago

I think you're right that that's what people are concerned about. I'd mention that we have 17,000 reactor-years of commercial experience over the past 7 decades in nuclear. We understand the risks fairly well, though admittedly we are still learning. It is clear that nuclear reactors net save millions of lives over fossil-fuel alternatives. 10x Chernobyl fallout would be very bad but it would be nowhere near the global warming predictions we're seeing. Additionally, Chernobyl was a bad design without a containment running a risky experiment with safety systems turned off. The 4 reactors at Fukushima got hit with a huge earthquake and tsunami and no one died from their failure, and we know from models that no one will die from the radiation that was released. It's exceedingly unlikely that modern reactors would go Chernobyl, much less 10x Chernobyl. Germany has turned away from clean-air nuclear energy and replaced it with brown coal and more clean-air renewables but that's costing them a lot [1]. That's expensive fear, and only feasible for the richest of nations. Side note: Long half-life doesn't necessarily correlate with problems after an accident. It's actually the short half-life stuff that is biologically concentrated (Sr-90, I-131, Cs-137) that can cause the biggest issues. For instance, Uranium-238 has a 4.5 billion year half-life and it's not a radiological hazard (this just means the energy comes out really slowly). [1] http://fortune.com/2017/03/14/germany-renewable-clean-energy-solar/ http://fortune.com/2017/03/14/germany-renewable-clean-energy...