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You say afraid as if it is a bad thing. When you consider the timescale of nuclear power plants and how long nuclear power has existed, safety stats seem to ha

You say afraid as if it is a bad thing. When you consider the timescale of nuclear power plants and how long nuclear power has existed, safety stats seem to have a pretty low sample size with a lot of uncharted territory. That fear you mention is a very real and important one, because even if 99% of plants operate under strict safety, it only takes one failure to cause massive damage. Beyond lives and into land and resources, and additional risks of further ecological harm. For me, when considering if nuclear power is worth it, I think that we have so many alternatives that will work well enough for a long-term horizon (let's say 200 years) that any sort of risks of charting that new territory in nuclear power and having that very large risk is not worth it currently. That's not to say it won't be worth it in the future perhaps as climate change worsens or in a century with additional safety tools possibly fueled by additional scientific insight, but right now I think you're severely undermining that some (not all) fear of nuclear power comes from a very rational place.

vectorEQ 8y ago
i agree to a lot of your points. nuclear power has had few incidents, but those there have been have had far stretching consequences and have caused massive casualties spanning multiple generations let alone the permanent increase in background radiation which is slowly eating away at everything. for me it's the ultimate of the bad / destructive ways to create energy and should be avoided (opinion.) i'd say with those stats in mind hydroelectric and wind power are some of the winners, even though of course the equipment manufacturing and decomissioning of these isn't totally clean, they are a big step in the right direction of non-destructive cleanER energy source.
yellowapple 8y ago
"When you consider the timescale of nuclear power plants and how long nuclear power has existed, safety stats seem to have a pretty low sample size with a lot of uncharted territory." That's true of literally all of our modern sources of electricity aside from maybe coal and oil.
sjwright 8y ago
What are you talking about? The timescale of nuclear power is comparable to most other forms of electricity generation. We have reliable, long term statistics which show it to be insanely safe compared to all other forms of generation, and that's despite the fact that all these reactors are shithouse designs from the stone ages. We know how to build reactors that are orders of magnitude more safe, which is remarkable since nuclear is already the safest form of electricity. As for using risk as an excuse to avoid it—nuclear power is orders of magnitude safer than air travel, but you don't see anyone deciding that we should continue to travel by boat.
- adjkant 8y ago
  > As for using risk as an excuse to avoid it—nuclear power is orders of magnitude safer than air travel, but you don't see anyone deciding that we should continue to travel by boat. if you look at failure rate, there are only 450 nuclear power plants currently in existence as of 2016. To save time, let's do some napkin math and estimation with charitable rounding. Let's say there are 1000 in existence. So far we have seen at least one critical failure. For the sake of rounding, let's charitably round that to 1 failure. Let's say that of those 1000 power plants, the average time of existence is 40 years. That means that we have about 40000 years of nuclear power plant testing so far. And we've had 1 failure in that, so if we use years, we have 1 in 40000 years. Even adjusting to days, we get 1 in 14.6 million. Looking at air travel, the crash rate is about 1 in 4 million. Now consider the consequences of that one catastrophic failure compared to the cost of a plane crash on average. You can't be serious when you say those are the same. Even with incredibly charitable looks at nuclear power safety stats it's nowhere near your uncited "orders of magnitude" safer. I think you really don't get the risk formula here. It's not about failure percentage, it's about the consequences of any failure at all, no matter how rare. An increase in nuclear power only increases the chances of any failure. https://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/n/nuclear-power-plant-world-wide.htm https://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/n/nuclear-powe... https://www.cnn.com/2015/01/22/travel/flight-crash-app/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2015/01/22/travel/flight-crash-app/index...
  - sjwright 8y ago

vectorEQ 8y ago

i agree to a lot of your points. nuclear power has had few incidents, but those there have been have had far stretching consequences and have caused massive casualties spanning multiple generations let alone the permanent increase in background radiation which is slowly eating away at everything. for me it's the ultimate of the bad / destructive ways to create energy and should be avoided (opinion.) i'd say with those stats in mind hydroelectric and wind power are some of the winners, even though of course the equipment manufacturing and decomissioning of these isn't totally clean, they are a big step in the right direction of non-destructive cleanER energy source.

yellowapple 8y ago

"When you consider the timescale of nuclear power plants and how long nuclear power has existed, safety stats seem to have a pretty low sample size with a lot of uncharted territory." That's true of literally all of our modern sources of electricity aside from maybe coal and oil.

sjwright 8y ago

What are you talking about? The timescale of nuclear power is comparable to most other forms of electricity generation. We have reliable, long term statistics which show it to be insanely safe compared to all other forms of generation, and that's despite the fact that all these reactors are shithouse designs from the stone ages. We know how to build reactors that are orders of magnitude more safe, which is remarkable since nuclear is already the safest form of electricity. As for using risk as an excuse to avoid it—nuclear power is orders of magnitude safer than air travel, but you don't see anyone deciding that we should continue to travel by boat.

adjkant 8y ago
> As for using risk as an excuse to avoid it—nuclear power is orders of magnitude safer than air travel, but you don't see anyone deciding that we should continue to travel by boat. if you look at failure rate, there are only 450 nuclear power plants currently in existence as of 2016. To save time, let's do some napkin math and estimation with charitable rounding. Let's say there are 1000 in existence. So far we have seen at least one critical failure. For the sake of rounding, let's charitably round that to 1 failure. Let's say that of those 1000 power plants, the average time of existence is 40 years. That means that we have about 40000 years of nuclear power plant testing so far. And we've had 1 failure in that, so if we use years, we have 1 in 40000 years. Even adjusting to days, we get 1 in 14.6 million. Looking at air travel, the crash rate is about 1 in 4 million. Now consider the consequences of that one catastrophic failure compared to the cost of a plane crash on average. You can't be serious when you say those are the same. Even with incredibly charitable looks at nuclear power safety stats it's nowhere near your uncited "orders of magnitude" safer. I think you really don't get the risk formula here. It's not about failure percentage, it's about the consequences of any failure at all, no matter how rare. An increase in nuclear power only increases the chances of any failure. https://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/n/nuclear-power-plant-world-wide.htm https://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/n/nuclear-powe... https://www.cnn.com/2015/01/22/travel/flight-crash-app/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2015/01/22/travel/flight-crash-app/index...
- sjwright 8y ago