9 ms·

It took 10 years to even get a robot that could get close to the fuel... and people still ask if nuclear might not be as bad as coal! The truth is that acciden

It took 10 years to even get a robot that could get close to the fuel... and people still ask if nuclear might not be as bad as coal! The truth is that accidents like this can never be cleaned up or salvaged. It's time to move away from nuclear, as other countries have already figured out. Fortunately for us in the US, the last nuclear plant under construction today will likely be cancelled, as the last two were. There are no plans to build another one here. That doesn't relieve of us of the chance of a homegrown Fukushima on American soil, but it shows that the future isn't nuclear for environmental and cost reasons -- of which "decommissioning" costs billions, even if there's no meltdown.

Kuinox 8y ago
Yes, and move away to what ?
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  Solar, wind, storage. Fusion at a distance. EDIT: "20 years from now" is still faster than any nuclear generator getting built.
  - aurailious 8y ago
    So a mixture of unreliable, expensive, and "20 years from now".
    - moate 8y ago
      Don't forget the chemical byproducts of producing solar and storage. All options are trade offs, and I don't understand why "perfect" keeps preventing us from just getting "better".
    - hanniabu 8y ago
      With many recent breakthroughs, fusion is now seen as very viable and just needs funding to finish it off. The last of the hard problems are solved and they just need to pull it all together and "adjust for rounding errors", so to speak.
      - aurailious 8y ago
        ITER won't become fully operational until 2035 and that is just for conducting experiments. We are still decades from commercial fusion power plants.
  - avar 8y ago
    Nuclear power plants take at most 5 years to build from the time we break ground until the reactor's hooked up to the grid. Look at how fast the Chinese are building them, or how fast e.g. the French or the US were at building them in the 60s and 70s. That it takes so long now in the west is because we're not building enough of them, thus losing the advantage of experienced workforces and inability to leverage mass-manufacturing of standardized designs. It's also slow because of onerous safety regulation seeking to make nuclear too safe, when we consider the result of a slowdown in commissioning of new reactors, thus increasing the reliance on coal killing way more people than if we were to hypothetically mass manufacture relatively unsafe reactor designs from the 60s today.
    - toomuchtodo 8y ago
      >Look at how fast the Chinese are building them, or how fast e.g. the French or the US were at building them in the 60s and 70s. "The country [China] has the capacity to build 10 to 12 nuclear reactors a year. But though reactors begun several years ago are still coming online, the industry has not broken ground on a new plant in China since late 2016, according to a recent World Nuclear Industry Status Report. Officially China still sees nuclear power as a must-have. But unofficially, the technology is on a death watch. Experts, including some with links to the government, see China’s nuclear sector succumbing to the same problems affecting the West: the technology is too expensive, and the public doesn’t want it." https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612564/chinas-losing-its-taste-for-nuclear-power-thats-bad-news/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612564/chinas-losing-its-... (China’s losing its taste for nuclear power. That’s bad news.) > That it takes so long now in the west is because we're not building enough of them, thus losing the advantage of experienced workforces and inability to leverage mass-manufacturing of standardized designs. Can you provide evidence that the cost of nuclear would be comparable to solar and wind if built at scale? > It's also slow because of onerous safety regulation seeking to make nuclear too safe, when we consider the result of a slowdown in commissioning of new reactors, thus increasing the reliance on coal killing way more people than if we were to hypothetically mass manufacture relatively unsafe reactor designs from the 60s today. I'm unsure you can sell nuclear to the public or politicians as "it's expensive because it's too safe". It's unlikely we're going to relax safety regulations when cheaper alternatives already exist (solar, wind, natural gas, storage). We're not increasing our reliance on coal, we're temporarily increasing our reliance on natural gas (which is driving coal and nuclear out of business). EDIT: "but pointed out that it taking anywhere near 20 years to build a nuclear power plant is clearly off by an order of 4x at the very least." I’d prefer nuclear reactors not be built in the developed world to Chinese standards.
- eecc 8y ago
  LED lights? Highly isolated apartment buildings? Revised urban planning to accommodate a post-commuting work-life? Other energy saving technology? In EU we have a comfortable living off consumption levels that in the US would qualify as church mices' (still not enough to prevent collapse though: https://web.archive.org/web/20140913032823/http://graduateinstitute.ch/files/live/sites/iheid/files/sites/political_science/users/elena.gadjanova/public/Issues%20in%20Env%20Politics%202010/Turner%202008.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20140913032823/http://graduatein...)
  - sigstoat 8y ago
    > LED lights? you need to be addressing the larger chunks of these pie charts: https://www.epa.gov/energy/electricity-customers https://www.epa.gov/energy/electricity-customers
    - teamonkey 8y ago
      Switching to LED lights (and reducing usage) is one example of low-hanging fruit that is easily achievable without affecting lifestyle much. The fat needs to be trimmed in all areas.
    - eecc 8y ago
      Yeah, did I mention "Highly isolated apartment buildings"? (I did ;) In fact, there are apartments here in Amsterdam that stay a cool 20C in winter with little or no heating at all, just the warmth from the water boiler flue running through the heat exchanger of the air ventilator. Nationally sponsored infrastructure plans to replace existing buildings with energy class A at scale would put a big dent on energy consumption.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
acidburnNSA 8y ago
If you look objectively at the numbers, you'll see that nuclear is one of the safest forms of energy production we know. Even considering conservative estimates from Fukushima and Chernobyl, nuclear power has net saved over 2 million lives simply by displacing air-pollution related deaths that would have occurred had the nukes not been built. Coal kills on the order of hundreds of thousands of people per year. Fukushima killed zero. Chernobyl directly killed 60, and caused up to 4000 early cancer deaths over the next several decades on top of a population that would get millions of cancer deaths anyway, and that's with a bizarro linear no-threshold model almost unheard of in other latent estimates. Nuclear is also very nearly carbon free. So if you start factoring in health effects of global warming, nuclear's even better.
- tonyedgecombe 8y ago
  We shouldn’t be burning coal either.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - crowdpleaser 8y ago
    Okay, how should we have powered the industrial revolution?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - ars 8y ago
    But we are, so it's better to go with the cleaner option. You are basically saying: Since you can't be perfectly clean, I'd rather you be as dirty as possible.
  - yongjik 8y ago
    Of course we shouldn't be burning coal, but we are. In 2017, 17.8% of US energy production was from coal. 28.0% from petroleum, and 31.8% from gas. Until these three numbers become 0.0, 0.0, and 0.0, building more nuclear plants to displace them is an immense progress.
cgrand-net 8y ago
> The truth is that accidents like this can never be cleaned up or salvaged. While global warming is easily solved. Coal or nuclear are both bad but differently. Which one is less bad depends on your risk model
- rabidrat 8y ago
  If climate change truly is incompatible with global civilization, I would rather have some defunct coal plants laying around than spent nuclear fuel. Nuclear maybe would have helped us avoid the worst of climate change if we had adopted it at a broader scale sooner, but at this point I think we have to be planning for post-civilization scenarios.
  - mimixco 8y ago
    You might want to read "The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels" for a slightly less dire perspective.
    - rabidrat 8y ago
      Thanks, I'll check it out. I've been watching the shitshow for a few decades now though, and to be honest the only surprising thing is that it hasn't already fallen apart. In my mind it's inevitable, and not just due to fossil fuel usage. We won't change course until it's demonstrably catastrophic and then it will be "too late" for a majority of humans. The only question is, will it happen within 20 years or 50 or 100? Malthus was right in principle, only wrong in timeline.
  - eeZah7Ux 8y ago
    > Nuclear maybe would have helped us avoid the worst of climate change Not even that. People seem to forget that most utilized energy is eventually dissipated in heat in the atmosphere! Any unlimited and extremely cheap energy source would only encourage more unsustainable consumption. Not to mention that many industrial products that lead to pollution (e.g. plastic) are correlated to the cost of electricity. Give the world free energy and people will want a new smartphone every month. (let's sit back and count the downvotes now...)
Thaxll 8y ago
There is nothing even close to be as cheap / clean and give as much power than nuclear right now. Not every country have wind / sun / rivers to match what produces nuclear energy.
lucb1e 8y ago
> ... and people still ask if nuclear might not be as bad as coal! That's playing on feelings rather than making a rational argument. Regardless of whether I am for or against widely deploying nuclear energy, this is not the way to talk about it and create informed opinions. The media are already doing their best to play on feelings on this topic, we don't need to replicate that here.
- petschge 8y ago
  The logical argument is that we still do not have a good way to deal with the radioactive waste and that a lot can still go wrong in the next million years.
  - lucb1e 8y ago
    And another logical argument could be that this causes us to delay cutting emissions enough to prevent massive ecosystem changes resulting in humanity's death in the next few hundred years. It's just not that simple. We need to look at both sides, weigh the options, and find a solution which probably involves a mix where we compromise on having X m³ of earth dedicated for a long time to nuclear waste to save us in the short term. I'm not informed enough to give exact figures and make proper arguments, but reiterating known one-liners won't get us anywhere.
    - petschge 8y ago
      The thing is that there is a rather pro-nuclear crowd on HN here that does not understand enough of the physics and the systems engineering of the large scale electrical grid that goes into making this trade-off in a rational way.
      - saagarjha 8y ago
        What parts are we missing?
        petschge 8y ago
ars 8y ago
> and people still ask if nuclear might not be as bad as coal! It's not even close. Nuclear is so much better than coal it's unbelievable. Just to start with coal releases orders of magnitude more radiation than nuclear. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-... Then the number of deaths from coal, take a look at the numbers: Coal: 100,000 deaths per PWh. Nuclear: 0.1 deaths per PWh. That means coal is 1 MILLION times worse than nuclear. I mean seriously, what else would it take to convince someone? Let's see, what's worse? Taking 10 years to do something, or killing 1 million times as many people?
EamonnMR 8y ago
We haven't figured out how clean up or salvage atmospheric CO2 either.
tomatotomato37 8y ago
Considering the failure mode of nuclear posions maybe 10 sq miles, whereas the operating mode of coal posions the entire fucking atmosphere, I'd say coal is still worse
moate 8y ago
Frequently people worrying about environmental impact aren't as concerned about financial impact. I don't care if it cost eleventy-gazillion-bitcoins to decommission a nuclear plant if the alternative is continued global warming and an inhospitable planet when the bill comes due. >>The truth is that accidents like this can never be cleaned up or salvaged. I mean that depends on how pedantic you want to get with a "never" and whether you think "sequestered" is good enough or only "salvaged" is acceptable. Current nuclear isn't great and is incapable of solving climate issues by itself. It still seems like a more viable option than continued reliance on fossil fuels.
8ytecoder 8y ago
The bad parts of nuclear power is extremely concentrated and so has great visibility. I have asthma and I used to live near a coal plant. My lifespan is shortened considerably - not to mention the huge decrease in quality of life. And I'm just one the many millions who are affected by increased pollution and particulate matter in the air. However because the effects of coal is diffused from your perspective you have no idea the damage it causes to people like us. On aggregate coal kills more people (earlier than what their lifespan would otherwise be and that has to count for something).
jade12 8y ago
Lest anyone forget, the Centralia (coal) mine fire has been burning since at least 1962 and no one knows how to stop it. The Fukushima Daiichi incident really doesn't seem that bad to me, comparatively speaking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire
- pixl97 8y ago
  Granted that coal fires can occur due to other causes than mining (such as simply exposing a coal seam to air during construction). That said, mining greatly increases the number of incidents that occur.
- afterburner 8y ago
  The choice is not between coal and nuclear.
lotu 8y ago
Nuclear kills less people than Coal mostly from asthma, but coal even causes more cancer because on a normal day it emits far more radiation in the form of small particles of radioactive dust present in coal. The real danger of Nuclear is it can make land unusable by people for centuries (this actually appears to be good from a biodiversity and ecological heath stand point because people do more damage to that than some radiation). But by contributing to climate change coal has the potential to put far more land under water. If we had gone for widespread adoption of nuclear power on the scale of Japan climate change would not be a problem like it is today.
- acidburnNSA 8y ago
  Centuries? Have you been to the Chernobyl exclusion zone recently? [1] That was the worst accident imaginable. Fukushima is much less bad. Natural background radiation in places like Ramsar, Iran are way higher than what you'd experience at Fukushima even right after it happened. And people have been living healthily there for hundreds of years. Low-dose effects of radiation seem to not be all that bad. [1] https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/060418-chernobyl-wildlife-thirty-year-anniversary-science/ https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/060418-chernobyl...
  - acidburnNSA 8y ago
    I'm going to correct myself and say that Ramsar rates are what you'd experience around Fukushima a year out, not right after it happened. Some of those workers got way higher doses than anything natural.
dev_tty01 8y ago
>The truth is that accidents like this can never be cleaned up or salvaged. It's time to move away from nuclear, as other countries have already figured out. France per-capita CO2 emission is 1/3 the US rate and 1/2 the German rate. This is due to their heavy focus on nuclear power for electricity production. The data shows we should be moving to nuclear rather than away from it. As far as "never" being able to clean up an accident, how could you take such an absolutist position? Do you really believe that with a reasonable research effort we won't understand how to reprocess nuclear waste and/or accident debris within 50 years? We couldn't even fly until a little more than 100 years ago. Our understanding of the physical world is growing more rapidly than any of us can really appreciate. To say we can "never" clean something up is to completely disregard the exponential rate of increase of both scientific knowledge and technological capability. Given progress in the last 100 years, it is reasonable to conclude that nuclear waste is a 50 to 100 year problem at worst. Geez, did we toss out cars or aircraft after a few accidents? Did we stop trying to go into space after some accidents? Did we stop trying to cure cancer after some deaths? No, we learned from the mistakes that were made that led to the accidents and fixed them. The development of nuclear power should follow the same iterative process all other technologies rely upon. Obviously we work as hard as possible to risk reduce the process, but iteration is how science turns into safe and practical technologies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
- blablabla123 8y ago
  > Do you really believe that with a reasonable research effort we won't understand how to reprocess nuclear waste and/or accident debris within 50 years? We couldn't even fly until a little more than 100 years ago. This probably requires a new kind of physics to be discovered and eventually applied. It's absolutely not clear how this should work. Fluid Dynamics is Newtonian physics, Bernoulli equation already exists since the 17th century.

Kuinox 8y ago

Yes, and move away to what ?

toomuchtodo 8y ago
Solar, wind, storage. Fusion at a distance. EDIT: "20 years from now" is still faster than any nuclear generator getting built.
- aurailious 8y ago
  So a mixture of unreliable, expensive, and "20 years from now".
  - moate 8y ago
    Don't forget the chemical byproducts of producing solar and storage. All options are trade offs, and I don't understand why "perfect" keeps preventing us from just getting "better".
  - hanniabu 8y ago
    With many recent breakthroughs, fusion is now seen as very viable and just needs funding to finish it off. The last of the hard problems are solved and they just need to pull it all together and "adjust for rounding errors", so to speak.
    - aurailious 8y ago
      ITER won't become fully operational until 2035 and that is just for conducting experiments. We are still decades from commercial fusion power plants.
- avar 8y ago
  Nuclear power plants take at most 5 years to build from the time we break ground until the reactor's hooked up to the grid. Look at how fast the Chinese are building them, or how fast e.g. the French or the US were at building them in the 60s and 70s. That it takes so long now in the west is because we're not building enough of them, thus losing the advantage of experienced workforces and inability to leverage mass-manufacturing of standardized designs. It's also slow because of onerous safety regulation seeking to make nuclear too safe, when we consider the result of a slowdown in commissioning of new reactors, thus increasing the reliance on coal killing way more people than if we were to hypothetically mass manufacture relatively unsafe reactor designs from the 60s today.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    >Look at how fast the Chinese are building them, or how fast e.g. the French or the US were at building them in the 60s and 70s. "The country [China] has the capacity to build 10 to 12 nuclear reactors a year. But though reactors begun several years ago are still coming online, the industry has not broken ground on a new plant in China since late 2016, according to a recent World Nuclear Industry Status Report. Officially China still sees nuclear power as a must-have. But unofficially, the technology is on a death watch. Experts, including some with links to the government, see China’s nuclear sector succumbing to the same problems affecting the West: the technology is too expensive, and the public doesn’t want it." https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612564/chinas-losing-its-taste-for-nuclear-power-thats-bad-news/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612564/chinas-losing-its-... (China’s losing its taste for nuclear power. That’s bad news.) > That it takes so long now in the west is because we're not building enough of them, thus losing the advantage of experienced workforces and inability to leverage mass-manufacturing of standardized designs. Can you provide evidence that the cost of nuclear would be comparable to solar and wind if built at scale? > It's also slow because of onerous safety regulation seeking to make nuclear too safe, when we consider the result of a slowdown in commissioning of new reactors, thus increasing the reliance on coal killing way more people than if we were to hypothetically mass manufacture relatively unsafe reactor designs from the 60s today. I'm unsure you can sell nuclear to the public or politicians as "it's expensive because it's too safe". It's unlikely we're going to relax safety regulations when cheaper alternatives already exist (solar, wind, natural gas, storage). We're not increasing our reliance on coal, we're temporarily increasing our reliance on natural gas (which is driving coal and nuclear out of business). EDIT: "but pointed out that it taking anywhere near 20 years to build a nuclear power plant is clearly off by an order of 4x at the very least." I’d prefer nuclear reactors not be built in the developed world to Chinese standards.
eecc 8y ago
LED lights? Highly isolated apartment buildings? Revised urban planning to accommodate a post-commuting work-life? Other energy saving technology? In EU we have a comfortable living off consumption levels that in the US would qualify as church mices' (still not enough to prevent collapse though: https://web.archive.org/web/20140913032823/http://graduateinstitute.ch/files/live/sites/iheid/files/sites/political_science/users/elena.gadjanova/public/Issues%20in%20Env%20Politics%202010/Turner%202008.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20140913032823/http://graduatein...)
- sigstoat 8y ago
  > LED lights? you need to be addressing the larger chunks of these pie charts: https://www.epa.gov/energy/electricity-customers https://www.epa.gov/energy/electricity-customers
  - teamonkey 8y ago
    Switching to LED lights (and reducing usage) is one example of low-hanging fruit that is easily achievable without affecting lifestyle much. The fat needs to be trimmed in all areas.
  - eecc 8y ago
    Yeah, did I mention "Highly isolated apartment buildings"? (I did ;) In fact, there are apartments here in Amsterdam that stay a cool 20C in winter with little or no heating at all, just the warmth from the water boiler flue running through the heat exchanger of the air ventilator. Nationally sponsored infrastructure plans to replace existing buildings with energy class A at scale would put a big dent on energy consumption.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

acidburnNSA 8y ago

If you look objectively at the numbers, you'll see that nuclear is one of the safest forms of energy production we know. Even considering conservative estimates from Fukushima and Chernobyl, nuclear power has net saved over 2 million lives simply by displacing air-pollution related deaths that would have occurred had the nukes not been built. Coal kills on the order of hundreds of thousands of people per year. Fukushima killed zero. Chernobyl directly killed 60, and caused up to 4000 early cancer deaths over the next several decades on top of a population that would get millions of cancer deaths anyway, and that's with a bizarro linear no-threshold model almost unheard of in other latent estimates. Nuclear is also very nearly carbon free. So if you start factoring in health effects of global warming, nuclear's even better.

tonyedgecombe 8y ago
We shouldn’t be burning coal either.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- crowdpleaser 8y ago
  Okay, how should we have powered the industrial revolution?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- ars 8y ago
  But we are, so it's better to go with the cleaner option. You are basically saying: Since you can't be perfectly clean, I'd rather you be as dirty as possible.
- yongjik 8y ago
  Of course we shouldn't be burning coal, but we are. In 2017, 17.8% of US energy production was from coal. 28.0% from petroleum, and 31.8% from gas. Until these three numbers become 0.0, 0.0, and 0.0, building more nuclear plants to displace them is an immense progress.

cgrand-net 8y ago

> The truth is that accidents like this can never be cleaned up or salvaged. While global warming is easily solved. Coal or nuclear are both bad but differently. Which one is less bad depends on your risk model

rabidrat 8y ago
If climate change truly is incompatible with global civilization, I would rather have some defunct coal plants laying around than spent nuclear fuel. Nuclear maybe would have helped us avoid the worst of climate change if we had adopted it at a broader scale sooner, but at this point I think we have to be planning for post-civilization scenarios.
- mimixco 8y ago
  You might want to read "The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels" for a slightly less dire perspective.
  - rabidrat 8y ago
    Thanks, I'll check it out. I've been watching the shitshow for a few decades now though, and to be honest the only surprising thing is that it hasn't already fallen apart. In my mind it's inevitable, and not just due to fossil fuel usage. We won't change course until it's demonstrably catastrophic and then it will be "too late" for a majority of humans. The only question is, will it happen within 20 years or 50 or 100? Malthus was right in principle, only wrong in timeline.
- eeZah7Ux 8y ago
  > Nuclear maybe would have helped us avoid the worst of climate change Not even that. People seem to forget that most utilized energy is eventually dissipated in heat in the atmosphere! Any unlimited and extremely cheap energy source would only encourage more unsustainable consumption. Not to mention that many industrial products that lead to pollution (e.g. plastic) are correlated to the cost of electricity. Give the world free energy and people will want a new smartphone every month. (let's sit back and count the downvotes now...)

Thaxll 8y ago

There is nothing even close to be as cheap / clean and give as much power than nuclear right now. Not every country have wind / sun / rivers to match what produces nuclear energy.

lucb1e 8y ago

> ... and people still ask if nuclear might not be as bad as coal! That's playing on feelings rather than making a rational argument. Regardless of whether I am for or against widely deploying nuclear energy, this is not the way to talk about it and create informed opinions. The media are already doing their best to play on feelings on this topic, we don't need to replicate that here.

petschge 8y ago
The logical argument is that we still do not have a good way to deal with the radioactive waste and that a lot can still go wrong in the next million years.
- lucb1e 8y ago
  And another logical argument could be that this causes us to delay cutting emissions enough to prevent massive ecosystem changes resulting in humanity's death in the next few hundred years. It's just not that simple. We need to look at both sides, weigh the options, and find a solution which probably involves a mix where we compromise on having X m³ of earth dedicated for a long time to nuclear waste to save us in the short term. I'm not informed enough to give exact figures and make proper arguments, but reiterating known one-liners won't get us anywhere.
  - petschge 8y ago
    The thing is that there is a rather pro-nuclear crowd on HN here that does not understand enough of the physics and the systems engineering of the large scale electrical grid that goes into making this trade-off in a rational way.
    - saagarjha 8y ago
      What parts are we missing?
      - petschge 8y ago

ars 8y ago

> and people still ask if nuclear might not be as bad as coal! It's not even close. Nuclear is so much better than coal it's unbelievable. Just to start with coal releases orders of magnitude more radiation than nuclear. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-... Then the number of deaths from coal, take a look at the numbers: Coal: 100,000 deaths per PWh. Nuclear: 0.1 deaths per PWh. That means coal is 1 MILLION times worse than nuclear. I mean seriously, what else would it take to convince someone? Let's see, what's worse? Taking 10 years to do something, or killing 1 million times as many people?

EamonnMR 8y ago

We haven't figured out how clean up or salvage atmospheric CO2 either.

tomatotomato37 8y ago

Considering the failure mode of nuclear posions maybe 10 sq miles, whereas the operating mode of coal posions the entire fucking atmosphere, I'd say coal is still worse

moate 8y ago

Frequently people worrying about environmental impact aren't as concerned about financial impact. I don't care if it cost eleventy-gazillion-bitcoins to decommission a nuclear plant if the alternative is continued global warming and an inhospitable planet when the bill comes due. >>The truth is that accidents like this can never be cleaned up or salvaged. I mean that depends on how pedantic you want to get with a "never" and whether you think "sequestered" is good enough or only "salvaged" is acceptable. Current nuclear isn't great and is incapable of solving climate issues by itself. It still seems like a more viable option than continued reliance on fossil fuels.

8ytecoder 8y ago

The bad parts of nuclear power is extremely concentrated and so has great visibility. I have asthma and I used to live near a coal plant. My lifespan is shortened considerably - not to mention the huge decrease in quality of life. And I'm just one the many millions who are affected by increased pollution and particulate matter in the air. However because the effects of coal is diffused from your perspective you have no idea the damage it causes to people like us. On aggregate coal kills more people (earlier than what their lifespan would otherwise be and that has to count for something).

jade12 8y ago

Lest anyone forget, the Centralia (coal) mine fire has been burning since at least 1962 and no one knows how to stop it. The Fukushima Daiichi incident really doesn't seem that bad to me, comparatively speaking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire

pixl97 8y ago
Granted that coal fires can occur due to other causes than mining (such as simply exposing a coal seam to air during construction). That said, mining greatly increases the number of incidents that occur.
afterburner 8y ago
The choice is not between coal and nuclear.

lotu 8y ago

Nuclear kills less people than Coal mostly from asthma, but coal even causes more cancer because on a normal day it emits far more radiation in the form of small particles of radioactive dust present in coal. The real danger of Nuclear is it can make land unusable by people for centuries (this actually appears to be good from a biodiversity and ecological heath stand point because people do more damage to that than some radiation). But by contributing to climate change coal has the potential to put far more land under water. If we had gone for widespread adoption of nuclear power on the scale of Japan climate change would not be a problem like it is today.

acidburnNSA 8y ago
Centuries? Have you been to the Chernobyl exclusion zone recently? [1] That was the worst accident imaginable. Fukushima is much less bad. Natural background radiation in places like Ramsar, Iran are way higher than what you'd experience at Fukushima even right after it happened. And people have been living healthily there for hundreds of years. Low-dose effects of radiation seem to not be all that bad. [1] https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/060418-chernobyl-wildlife-thirty-year-anniversary-science/ https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/060418-chernobyl...
- acidburnNSA 8y ago
  I'm going to correct myself and say that Ramsar rates are what you'd experience around Fukushima a year out, not right after it happened. Some of those workers got way higher doses than anything natural.

dev_tty01 8y ago

>The truth is that accidents like this can never be cleaned up or salvaged. It's time to move away from nuclear, as other countries have already figured out. France per-capita CO2 emission is 1/3 the US rate and 1/2 the German rate. This is due to their heavy focus on nuclear power for electricity production. The data shows we should be moving to nuclear rather than away from it. As far as "never" being able to clean up an accident, how could you take such an absolutist position? Do you really believe that with a reasonable research effort we won't understand how to reprocess nuclear waste and/or accident debris within 50 years? We couldn't even fly until a little more than 100 years ago. Our understanding of the physical world is growing more rapidly than any of us can really appreciate. To say we can "never" clean something up is to completely disregard the exponential rate of increase of both scientific knowledge and technological capability. Given progress in the last 100 years, it is reasonable to conclude that nuclear waste is a 50 to 100 year problem at worst. Geez, did we toss out cars or aircraft after a few accidents? Did we stop trying to go into space after some accidents? Did we stop trying to cure cancer after some deaths? No, we learned from the mistakes that were made that led to the accidents and fixed them. The development of nuclear power should follow the same iterative process all other technologies rely upon. Obviously we work as hard as possible to risk reduce the process, but iteration is how science turns into safe and practical technologies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

blablabla123 8y ago
> Do you really believe that with a reasonable research effort we won't understand how to reprocess nuclear waste and/or accident debris within 50 years? We couldn't even fly until a little more than 100 years ago. This probably requires a new kind of physics to be discovered and eventually applied. It's absolutely not clear how this should work. Fluid Dynamics is Newtonian physics, Bernoulli equation already exists since the 17th century.