6 ms·
I agree with you that I don't think we can make nuclear safe. But if the choice seems to be between millions of deaths from global warming or thousands of death
by andness 7y ago
I agree with you that I don't think we can make nuclear safe. But if the choice seems to be between millions of deaths from global warming or thousands of deaths from nuclear, isn't the latter vastly preferable? Shouldn't we set out and build out nuclear to steer us away from the edge, and then worry about better solutions once we're safe?
I suspect the reason people don't buy this argument is that they don't truly believe global warming is as bad as they say. We have a history of solving problems in the past, so we'll solve this one too. There's no need to panic.
- michaelmrose 7y agoCan you provide a timeline and justification on "millions of deaths from global warming". Why can't be invest the money in better alternatives and save the same "millions of lives" with actually sustainable tech that doesn't produce what you are describing as "thousands of deaths"
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- theshrike79 7y agoHow much money and time would it take to research battery technology that could put coal and nuclear plants out of business? We know how to build nuclear NOW. Let's do it. We can turn all the plants of the second someone finds out to store terawatts of power produced by renewable means in a cost-effective manner that doesn't rely on some geological anomalies.
- v_lisivka 7y agoI bet, we will develop that technology in much much shorter time than we need to store nuclear waste.
- jki275 7y agoThere’s little need to store nuclear waste. Reprocess it and use the remaining fuel.
- pfdietz 7y agoThis does nothing to the fission products. And reprocessing only lets you destroy the actinides if you burn them in a fast reactor. Fast reactors have, so far, been even more expensive than thermal reactors.
- jki275 7y agoThat's only because the US stopped all R&D on them under Carter. Again, the only reason we're not all nuclear today is because of politics.
- pfdietz 7y agoFast reactors have been disappointing all over the world. The harder neutron spectrum is more damaging to materials, and liquid sodium has serious drawbacks. Fabrication of fuel elements with mixed actinides is also difficult. Fast reactors also require a higher density of fuel (due to the lower fission cross section at high neutron energy), which presents safety issues.
- jki275 7y agoThe French reprocess all their fuel as I understand it. We could do the same, we choose not to. That's probably the wrong choice.
- pfdietz 7y agoThe french choice was clearly the wrong one. It's a net economic loss for them. It was predicated on the use of the separated Pu in fast reactors, but their experience with fast reactors was dismal.
- DennisP 7y agoThe book Six Degrees by Mark Lynas is a good start. It has extensive references to peer-reviewed papers on the effects of climate change. We've already had thousands of deaths from heat waves that probably wouldn't have happened in the absence of global warming. By three degrees warming we'll have massive food shortages and hundreds of millions of climate refugees. I find a lot of anti-nuclear renewables advocates really underestimate the scale of the problem we're facing. This book is a great start to seeing what we're really up against.