4 ms·

> By the time we have lots of nuclear plants, we'll have even more cheap solar panels and cheap batteries. Probably true, for the better. But we shouldn't shut

by devy 8y ago

> By the time we have lots of nuclear plants, we'll have even more cheap solar panels and cheap batteries. Probably true, for the better. But we shouldn't shut down all the existing nuclear plants prematurely simply we fear a meltdown. Newer design are MUCH safer and Fukushima type meltdown is much less possible. Don't forget, the weather dependent, and high peak output during daytime but zero output at night time nature of the solar is still unresolved until mass grid-scale battery or some sort of energy storage device is deployed ubiquitous into our power infrastructure. That's gonna take forever. We haven't found another truly safe and renewable yet mass-scale energy source yet - nuclear is one right now. Don't abandon it before we find a reliable replacement.

another-one-off 8y ago
I'm just going off the wiki articles [1] and some random articles [eg, 2], but given the rarity of 'Fukushima type meltdowns' I'm still confused about why people are worried about them. Flooding and violent storms are much more dangerous. Fukushima's meltdown doesn't appear to have posed (or be posing) any particular threat to humans, given the drought of observable impacts. That said, I'm starting to understand that the risk is to farmland (although I am /extremely suspicious/ that most of the people who don't like nuclear haven't figured that out). Given how hysteric the response is to radiation risk, I'd really like to see a trustworthy source describe how and why the legal limits are set to what they are - maybe one day I will. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_effects_from_the_Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_effects_from_the_Fuk... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-35761136 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-35761136
- DoctorOetker 8y ago
  From a cognitive/psychological/understanding perspective: Fundamentally the reason it is hard for average citizens to understand the dangers of radioactive materials, is because humans are pretty bad at understanding huge numbers, similar to how we are poor at dealing with low probabilities. The big number in question is avogadro's number. A tiny speck of material contains huge amounts of nuclei. A single nuclear disintegration (after being say ingested) can cause mutations in multiple ways (chemically by daughter nucleus and alpha particle, compton effect knocking an electron away, beta particle ionization, ...). for a given level of enrichment in a radioactive material, the number of fissionable nuclei is proportional to Avogadro's constant, it's pretty hard to fathom the number of future disintegrations. Another way in which the paramount requirement that these materials not mix with our environment is hard to visualize is again Avogadro's number: once mixed into the environment it becomes very hard, to unmix them, again because of the sheer number of nuclei in even small samples of normal matter. Then there is also of course our poor intuition with low probability events, and that any unforseen rate/probability that is greater than the sum of all rates/probabilities of all known failure mechanisms would easily dwarf this sum of known failure probabilities, since we engineer the known ones to be as small as possible. Just today I read in the local paper that our nuclear reactors apparently weren't built to specification, and the steel in the reinforced concrete is degrading, and would not withstand many events (like a plane crashing into the reactor) There is a known example of a hijacked plane, where the perpetrators threatened to crash into an experimental nuclear reactor. Cryptocurrencies did not exist yet so they were forced to land in order to receive their demands, today they would not have to... The legal limits are defined in terms of natural background radiation.
  - killjoywashere 8y ago
    The exposure limits are based on the number of cancers from Fukushima, Nagasaki, and Hiroshima, them extrapolated down to tolerable population limits (reduce exposure until signal is below background). A multiplier was added in to account for the fact that radiation workers (x-ray techs, power plant staff, etc) are at far more risk of slipping above background than the general public. The noise is non-trivial: 1 in 4 Americans will be diagnosed with cancer at some point.
  - kryogen1c 8y ago
    ...what? I don't agree with any part of that. Public fear of nuclear power has nothing to do with the magnitude of disintegrations per second/becquerels/curies, Compton scattering, schroedingers equation, or any other science buzz word you want to apply. Why are you going out of your way to make this complicated when almost no one has any idea what you're talking about? The resistance to nuclear power is a straight up FUD campaign. Everyone knows how radiation works - you get sunburned every day and you drastically raise your chances of getting skin cancer. In fact nuclear power is safer per twh than any other fuel source, by a lot. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
    - jacobush 8y ago
      I think you simplify a bit. Nuclear is scary because it's something invisible that can kill you. No smell, no sensation of heat or light, nothing. Oh, and it can take a long time after exposure before it kills and then it's too late to do anything about it. This is the stuff or horror movies and the supernatural. It even comes with the same kind of charms and potions that the supernatural stories do! You take pills to protect you, and your wear a charm in a string around your neck to detect the evil. You give the charm to a temple where the learned priests pour over the results. (Not really, but you give the film to a lab for development.) This is not like sun bathing at all - you sit in the sun for an hour, you feel the heat and the radiation, and you think, maybe I should get inside? Nah, not yet, it feels so good. Maybe I should not have another drink? Nah, it feels good. These are normal tradeoffs we do all the time between pleasure (or convenience) and risk.
- mikeyouse 8y ago
  Compare the fallout map for land that's still uninhabitable in Japan due to Fukushima to the area surrounding the Indian Point plant outside of NYC. If all of the Nuke plants were on the far eastern seaboard ~100 miles from civilization, it'd be one thing, but many of them are immediately proximate to major cities (since that's where power is used!). Fortunately, the meltdown at Fukushima didn't cause too much damage, but that was mostly just luck and a beneficial location. Can you imagine the cost and disruption of a similar meltdown 25 miles outside of New York City? Or at the Pilgrim Nuclear Station that's ~30 miles outside of Boston?
  - yongjik 8y ago
    Umm.. yeah, I can't quite imagine the death and destruction if a 9.0 magnitude earthquake hits New York, followed by 10+ meter tsunami. People seem to gloss over that part.
Baeocystin 8y ago
I think many people miss the larger context of why nuclear (fission for now, fusion hopefully someday) is so important to continue to develop alongside of sources such as solar and wind- energy density and ultimate cost per kWh.* Solar is good, but the amount of power we can get out of it, even at much greater saturation levels than where we are at today, is not a vast amount more than we have access to today with fossil sources. Many of the upcoming resource issues (cheap, potable water and phosphorus for fertilizer come to mind as some of the more pressing needs) are not an issue from a lack of the material itself, but an issue of being able to provide quantities of the material at a low enough price, because the energy required using current systems of production is too expensive. If electricity were, say, 10x or 100x cheaper than it is today, entire categories of issues would simply cease to be, because we could, quite literally, power our way out of them. (* nuclear as it stands today is not cheap. It has the potential to be, however. Solar and wind have much harder limits simply due to the physical constraints of having less energy available to harvest per unit space.) // Relevant links for the interested: https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Energy-and-Civilization https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Energy-and-Civilization https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/energy-and-civilization https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/energy-and-civilization
bonesss 8y ago
> ...until mass grid-scale battery or some sort of energy storage device is deployed... I'm not confident we'll ever see anything of the sort. Just based on the scale of current/projected electricity usage we're talking pyramid++ level projects. Assuming we did have reasonable grid-scale storage, though, we'd bump into a pretty painful issue: the climate crisis is one of energy of which electricity is just a portion. We don't just need grid scale storage, we need storage to handle gridS for low carbon synthetic fuels, shipping, and air travel. We know what that looks like for fission: approx 10 times current reactor numbers. We have no idea what that looks like for WWS...
- gwbas1c 8y ago
  Nuclear power requires grid-scale storage. The power output can't vary much, so excess needs to be stored for when there's a shortage.
  - bonesss 8y ago
    No it does not. The power output can cary massively, especially with multiple reactors, and there are verified designs that are inherently load-following. You build nuclear capacity to demand, including peaker plants and such, you do not (and in all probability can not), try and store your way through peak demand.

by devy 8y ago

another-one-off 8y ago

I'm just going off the wiki articles [1] and some random articles [eg, 2], but given the rarity of 'Fukushima type meltdowns' I'm still confused about why people are worried about them. Flooding and violent storms are much more dangerous. Fukushima's meltdown doesn't appear to have posed (or be posing) any particular threat to humans, given the drought of observable impacts. That said, I'm starting to understand that the risk is to farmland (although I am /extremely suspicious/ that most of the people who don't like nuclear haven't figured that out). Given how hysteric the response is to radiation risk, I'd really like to see a trustworthy source describe how and why the legal limits are set to what they are - maybe one day I will. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_effects_from_the_Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_effects_from_the_Fuk... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-35761136 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-35761136

DoctorOetker 8y ago
From a cognitive/psychological/understanding perspective: Fundamentally the reason it is hard for average citizens to understand the dangers of radioactive materials, is because humans are pretty bad at understanding huge numbers, similar to how we are poor at dealing with low probabilities. The big number in question is avogadro's number. A tiny speck of material contains huge amounts of nuclei. A single nuclear disintegration (after being say ingested) can cause mutations in multiple ways (chemically by daughter nucleus and alpha particle, compton effect knocking an electron away, beta particle ionization, ...). for a given level of enrichment in a radioactive material, the number of fissionable nuclei is proportional to Avogadro's constant, it's pretty hard to fathom the number of future disintegrations. Another way in which the paramount requirement that these materials not mix with our environment is hard to visualize is again Avogadro's number: once mixed into the environment it becomes very hard, to unmix them, again because of the sheer number of nuclei in even small samples of normal matter. Then there is also of course our poor intuition with low probability events, and that any unforseen rate/probability that is greater than the sum of all rates/probabilities of all known failure mechanisms would easily dwarf this sum of known failure probabilities, since we engineer the known ones to be as small as possible. Just today I read in the local paper that our nuclear reactors apparently weren't built to specification, and the steel in the reinforced concrete is degrading, and would not withstand many events (like a plane crashing into the reactor) There is a known example of a hijacked plane, where the perpetrators threatened to crash into an experimental nuclear reactor. Cryptocurrencies did not exist yet so they were forced to land in order to receive their demands, today they would not have to... The legal limits are defined in terms of natural background radiation.
- killjoywashere 8y ago
  The exposure limits are based on the number of cancers from Fukushima, Nagasaki, and Hiroshima, them extrapolated down to tolerable population limits (reduce exposure until signal is below background). A multiplier was added in to account for the fact that radiation workers (x-ray techs, power plant staff, etc) are at far more risk of slipping above background than the general public. The noise is non-trivial: 1 in 4 Americans will be diagnosed with cancer at some point.
- kryogen1c 8y ago
  ...what? I don't agree with any part of that. Public fear of nuclear power has nothing to do with the magnitude of disintegrations per second/becquerels/curies, Compton scattering, schroedingers equation, or any other science buzz word you want to apply. Why are you going out of your way to make this complicated when almost no one has any idea what you're talking about? The resistance to nuclear power is a straight up FUD campaign. Everyone knows how radiation works - you get sunburned every day and you drastically raise your chances of getting skin cancer. In fact nuclear power is safer per twh than any other fuel source, by a lot. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
  - jacobush 8y ago
    I think you simplify a bit. Nuclear is scary because it's something invisible that can kill you. No smell, no sensation of heat or light, nothing. Oh, and it can take a long time after exposure before it kills and then it's too late to do anything about it. This is the stuff or horror movies and the supernatural. It even comes with the same kind of charms and potions that the supernatural stories do! You take pills to protect you, and your wear a charm in a string around your neck to detect the evil. You give the charm to a temple where the learned priests pour over the results. (Not really, but you give the film to a lab for development.) This is not like sun bathing at all - you sit in the sun for an hour, you feel the heat and the radiation, and you think, maybe I should get inside? Nah, not yet, it feels so good. Maybe I should not have another drink? Nah, it feels good. These are normal tradeoffs we do all the time between pleasure (or convenience) and risk.
mikeyouse 8y ago
Compare the fallout map for land that's still uninhabitable in Japan due to Fukushima to the area surrounding the Indian Point plant outside of NYC. If all of the Nuke plants were on the far eastern seaboard ~100 miles from civilization, it'd be one thing, but many of them are immediately proximate to major cities (since that's where power is used!). Fortunately, the meltdown at Fukushima didn't cause too much damage, but that was mostly just luck and a beneficial location. Can you imagine the cost and disruption of a similar meltdown 25 miles outside of New York City? Or at the Pilgrim Nuclear Station that's ~30 miles outside of Boston?
- yongjik 8y ago
  Umm.. yeah, I can't quite imagine the death and destruction if a 9.0 magnitude earthquake hits New York, followed by 10+ meter tsunami. People seem to gloss over that part.

Baeocystin 8y ago

I think many people miss the larger context of why nuclear (fission for now, fusion hopefully someday) is so important to continue to develop alongside of sources such as solar and wind- energy density and ultimate cost per kWh.* Solar is good, but the amount of power we can get out of it, even at much greater saturation levels than where we are at today, is not a vast amount more than we have access to today with fossil sources. Many of the upcoming resource issues (cheap, potable water and phosphorus for fertilizer come to mind as some of the more pressing needs) are not an issue from a lack of the material itself, but an issue of being able to provide quantities of the material at a low enough price, because the energy required using current systems of production is too expensive. If electricity were, say, 10x or 100x cheaper than it is today, entire categories of issues would simply cease to be, because we could, quite literally, power our way out of them. (* nuclear as it stands today is not cheap. It has the potential to be, however. Solar and wind have much harder limits simply due to the physical constraints of having less energy available to harvest per unit space.) // Relevant links for the interested: https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Energy-and-Civilization https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Energy-and-Civilization https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/energy-and-civilization https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/energy-and-civilization

bonesss 8y ago

> ...until mass grid-scale battery or some sort of energy storage device is deployed... I'm not confident we'll ever see anything of the sort. Just based on the scale of current/projected electricity usage we're talking pyramid++ level projects. Assuming we did have reasonable grid-scale storage, though, we'd bump into a pretty painful issue: the climate crisis is one of energy of which electricity is just a portion. We don't just need grid scale storage, we need storage to handle gridS for low carbon synthetic fuels, shipping, and air travel. We know what that looks like for fission: approx 10 times current reactor numbers. We have no idea what that looks like for WWS...

gwbas1c 8y ago
Nuclear power requires grid-scale storage. The power output can't vary much, so excess needs to be stored for when there's a shortage.
- bonesss 8y ago
  No it does not. The power output can cary massively, especially with multiple reactors, and there are verified designs that are inherently load-following. You build nuclear capacity to demand, including peaker plants and such, you do not (and in all probability can not), try and store your way through peak demand.