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I'm one of those fission sceptics. The main problems I have with fission isn't technological issues, it's human issues. E.g. in Fukushima, people were forced t

• avar 8y ago
  What we've got right now is on the order of a million people dying prematurely every year because of the human issue of people worrying too much about concentrated risk (nuclear) and not understanding the diffuse risk (coal). Sure, we can improve fission in various ways, but this sort of skepticism is way riskier in the aggregate as it translates into public policy.
  • est31 8y ago
    Indeed, coal is even worse than nuclear. So let's have neither but renewables instead :). Compared to europe, the USA is a big country and it is also further in the south which means more sun for solar collectors.
    • avar 8y ago
      Yeah that's fortunately increasingly an option we can take, but the world would sure suck less if we weren't dealing with the compounded effects of 50-70 years of the sort of nuclear skepticism expressed in your comment upthread. But still, even if we're going to aggressively build out renewables there's still room for a lot more nuclear in the energy mix. There's use-cases for it where solar, wind etc. isn't a substitute, e.g. shipping[1]. 1. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2008/feb/13/climatechange.pollution https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2008/feb/13/climatec...
      • mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
        Are you willing to live next door to a nuclear plant? People don't experience coal related problems unless they live in areas that are heavily polluted. Sure it impacts them and everyone else but it's perceived less harmful.
        • TomMarius 8y ago
          > Are you willing to live next door to a nuclear plant? Most of the people in my friend group actually live next to one. Zero issues, and it's an old communist party-built one.
          • mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
            Where I'd you don't mind me asking?
            • TomMarius 8y ago
              Temelin, Czech Republic
          • selimthegrim 8y ago
            Krško?
  • joe_the_user 8y ago
    Yes, fossil fuels are an ongoing disaster, one that in the form of global warming has a capacity to possibly make the planet unlivable. But all the disasters of fossil fuels are invisible and thus provoke little reaction in the public - and moreover, fossil fuels have vast vested interests protecting them. We need to come up with an alternative to this. Nuclear in the ideal could be that. But nuclear's track record is murky, nuclear's cost is murky. For all I know, solar and wind are X times less effective than nuclear though as mentioned real world costs versus theoretical costs are still problem. I mean, consider raw solar now is the cheapest energy source but maybe solar plus reverse hydro would be some proportion more expensive. Thus if we're creating an alternative to fossil fuels, solar and wind seems like a clear real world win. An nuclear requires huge upfront money because it requires huge upfront energy investment. This risk of nuclear isn't just disaster, it's that this huge investment fails to pay as calculated and this is a risk that's materialized in the past.
    • belorn 8y ago
      It would be ideal if we could replace fossil fueled power plants with solar and wind, but it is not currently technically possible and as they provide different forms of services. Fossil fueled power plants generate power based on demand. Solar and wind generate power based on weather. With current technology we really only have two distinct options. We can use solar and wind when the weather allows for it and then burn coal, gas and oil when it doesn't. The global warming impact is the combined result averaged over the year, and the energy cost is similar to the combined price. The other option is nuclear which has the huge upfront cost and nuclear waste, but with minimal global warming. In the future we could get more alternatives. Different form of batteries (like reverse hydro) would allow solar and wind to be separated from on-demand fossil fueled power plants, and dynamic energy market could change demand based on supply so that a lower base generation from nuclear and regular hydro would work in combination with wind and solar.
      • joe_the_user 8y ago
        The other option is nuclear which has the huge upfront cost and nuclear waste, but with minimal global warming. I don't see why the various battery types aren't practical today. Unlike nuclear, there's no huge political resistance and once solar and wind are online, investment in energy storage becomes online energy fairly quickly. Moreover, the huge energy include huge uncertainties, uncertainties whether the plant will shutdown early, especially. Remember, the huge upfront costs of nuclear includes energy expenditure and as you're pointing out, expending more energy means more global warming until we have fully replaced fossil fuel. Long ago, solar and wind advocates were derided for contrasting hypothetical ideals with current realities. Nuclear proponents now seem much closer to doing that.
  • addicted 8y ago
    Most nuclear renewable energy competitors are cheaper than nuclear. Sure, nuclear provides baseload energy in a way its cheaper competitors cannot, but as long as you have more than 20-30% fossil fuel the baseload is not really a concern anywhere. It seems foolish to divert money intended to reduce polluting sources of energy into the more expensive nuclear alternative, until the share of coal and natural gas is low enough that more stable sources of energy are neeeded.
    • vkou 8y ago
      All non-nuclear renewable energy competitors require us to derive ~40-60% of our energy generation from burning natural gas, that generates GHGs. This natural gas comes from either fracking, or Russia. Climate change is an exsistential threat to our way of life. > Sure, nuclear provides baseload energy in a way its cheaper competitors cannot, but as long as you have more than 20-30% fossil fuel the baseload is not really a concern anywhere. Yes, it is a concern. We need to hit net zero emissions in the next five years, or net negative emissions, with massive carbon sequestration, in the next 15. How exactly are we going to do that between shipping, air travel, AND fossil-fuel baseload power?
    • jabl 8y ago
      It's a question of path dependency. A least-cost grid with 80% less GHG emissions than current will likely be, depending on the location, lots of wind and solar, improved transmission, a little bit of batteries and demand response, and then NG backup. For a deep decarbonized grid (95%+ less emissions), the least-cost will OTOH likely involve a rather high fraction of nuclear, plus a somewhat smaller fraction of the aforementioned wind, solar, transmission, demand response, batteries on top. Dealing with climate change requires a deep decarbonized grid. So while most grids can take a lot more wind and solar than currently, if we overbuild those sources we can get locked into higher emissions long-term.
  • audunw 8y ago
    As an engineer I do feel that just because a risk is diffuse, doesn't make it better. I.e. if coal kills more people, it's objectively worse. But I'm not sure if you can say that definitively. Peoples feeling of the "badness" of an outcome matters. And you also have to consider that dying a bit earlier might not be as bad as some of the immediate consequences a nuclear disaster can have to people of all ages. I'd be all for building more nuclear, but I feel like it's just unrealistic to expect a sudden revival of nuclear. I think it's likely more productive to focus more R&D and investment on solar/wind and storage. Solar/wind+storage also has some really nice benefits like being more decentralised and does not depend on a steady source of fuel. This has big benefits for developing nations as they don't need to build out big centralised grids. Accelerating solar/wind+storage could have a bigger impact on the developing areas in e.g. Africa, as if their choice is between coal and nuclear, they may be more likely to go for coal as it's just much simpler for a nation that's not as advanced.
• kovek 8y ago
  Imagine if we could have a reactor running in a very remote area, accessible by robots. No people would work in the area, only remotely controlled robots would be present. People would come into work in a remote office and have high-bandwidth internet access to the cameras installed on the robots. All the installations would be created with "robot-first" interfaces.
  • est31 8y ago
    IIRC the highly radioactive part of a nuclear power plant is already robot-only. It's pretty cool technology. But technology isn't the problem.
  • javagram 8y ago
    Robots have not proven very successful in nuclear disasters IIRC. Radiation hardening for the computers is an issue, as are manipulators and other things. Moreover, in a disaster situation like Fukushima, power loss would be an issue. Fukushima was fine in the immediate aftermath (24 hours?) of the disaster until the on-site batteries ran out and backup generators couldn’t start due to damage from flooding. A fully robotic installation would face similar and greater problems after a SCRAM. It’s an interesting sci-fi idea that might be possible in a hundred years, once we master simpler robots like vacuums and folding laundry!
• arduanika 8y ago
  > The greatest advances in drawers don't help if you still have ticking time bombs The greatest advances in drawers don't help if you stop building new nuclear plants. The choice today is not about whether to build more outdated plants; it's about whether to build new modern plants.
  • est31 8y ago
    I'm not sure whether this much nuance is possible in politics. There isn't just a choice between building new plants or not building them, but there is also one between the outdated plants online vs bringing them offline, and if there is a new push to nuclear, I's very possible that the plants will get an "upgrade" and declared safe to use while in reality they just got a new coat of paint or something equivalently effective. Just look at coal: The coal lobby is also constantly talking about how many jobs they are bringing and so on while in reality they bring only very few jobs and those that exist are being reduced due to automation.
    • abugher 8y ago
      What you're saying is very hard to accept, which is not to say it's wrong. We have access to an absurd amount of power, and it's safe if we do it right, but we're not currently mature enough to reliably do it right, so we should refrain. Or more specifically, and even harder to accept: We know perfectly well how to do it right, but the danger of someone selling out public safety is high enough that we should refrain from advocating for an entire field of progress, at least presently.
• mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
  It always boils down to greed, power and image. "What's that, we need to do a major upgrade? Cuts I to profits, no can do!" Ask those in charge how close to a plant they are willing to live. I bet most won't live anywhere near. The thought of waking up in a radiated area in the middle of the night as a meltdown occurs is not exactly comforting to anyone. Private entities will always run a risk assessment to calculate whether it's more profitable to turn a blind eye. Most of the time the punishment is a fee that amounts to a slap on the wrist and its back to business as usual. Time heals indeed. Narrative changes. The public is distracted with some flashy personality. People forget and stop caring until it repeats all over again.
  • roenxi 8y ago
    > Cuts I to profits, no can do! Capitalists, funny to say, are actually highly protective of their capital. If you have an asset worth billions of dollars no rational manager would take a risk on it; the maintenance generally gets done. Billion dollar assets generally don't get associated with reckless people. That sort of short-termism no-maintenance approach is more likely a symptom of the political risk of running a reactor. Maybe they want to invest in an upgrade, but there is a reasonable chance that politicians will shut you down (eg, as happened in Germany). In that sort of environment, because the asset is at risk, the rational course of action switches from maintenance to exploitation. And I'd bet the plan managers would live locally, you'd be silly not to. They don't expect their plant to melt down, or they wouldn't be willing to be the plant manager. Nobody would be involved if they didn't expect the plant to function, they'd shut it down.
    • harry8 8y ago
      Too simplistic. There are plenty of examples of short term thinking from professional managers acting on behalf of owners. Trashing a corporate reputation by trading on it charging a premium price while cutting costs and quality is really common. Managers cash out ridiculous share grants right away when they go, not 10 years after they resign it are fired. There are other factors driving behaviour but that incentive works just as you'd expect.
• addicted 8y ago
  I struggle to buy the idea that people are irrationally overestimating the costs of nuclear when the industry has needed a legally mandated cap to its liabilities to operate. The existence of the cap indicates that the industry itself believes that the costs of a black swan event in the nuclear industry could be ridiculously high.
• DrJaws 8y ago
  It doesn't matter where the issue come if it's still an issue.
• Turbots 8y ago
  Do you think it's any different with fossil fuel plants? Regular people get bamboozled by the wealthier ones all the time, nuclear fission plants are not an exception. We should try to minimize the damage a fission power plant can do, even when badly managed and poor safety concerns. Liquid Fuel Thorium Reactos (LFTR) have a much safer Thorium cycle instead of Uranium cycle, have less waste in the form of uranium or plutonium, can be made inherently safe with drain tanks that can be mechanically activated (even during loss of power), they operate at higher temperatures and lower pressures (which is much easier to work with and lowers the cost of all the containment vessels/pipes/tanks) and they have both a higher thermal efficiency and burn a much greater percentage of fuel. Liquid fuels like molten salts will always win over solid fuels like uranium pellets encased in zirkonium... Basically all our fuels are liquid because they mix (petrol, diesel, ...) which solids obviously don't. The thorium fuel cycle also generates useful byproducts which can be extracted without shutting down the reactor, many of them are very useful in medicine like Stronium, Cesium, Rhodium, Technetium, Iodine and Xenon. Thorium is already been mined A LOT since its basically one of the components you dig up when digging for other rare earth materials, right now they are just being discarded or stored somewhere, theres like tens of thousands of tons of thorium stored in the US. More information here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azJGB4LHZMs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azJGB4LHZMs