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I am flabbergasted that some commenters here argue against nuclear because of waste and accidents, while ignoring that - coal produce radioactive waste too -

I am flabbergasted that some commenters here argue against nuclear because of waste and accidents, while ignoring that - coal produce radioactive waste too - it kills a lot more persons (without taking into account global warning) due to air pollution - the economic cost of nuclear may be underestimated, but this is nothing compared to the economic cost of global warming. Renewable (wind and solar) are extremely important, but nuclear replace coal and gas. Renewable alone are not enough, especially since we will need a lot more electric energy for transport and to decarbonise the atmosphere; so both are needed. It boggles my mind that Germany made a great effort on renewable, and used this extra energy to close nuclear plants rather than coals ones. (At the beginning they even had to open more coal plants!) This means that Fukushima (which made Germany close its nuclear plants) killed a lot more people in Germany than in Japan. People's priority are wrongly aligned: first close coals and gas plants using renewable, and then think about reducing nuclear plants once we have good storage technology. Recall that coal is 1000 times more deadly than nuclear per unit of energy (including the nuclear accidents). Taking global warming into account, this is way worse; if nothing is done we are talking about billions of death to total collapse of human civilisation. Compared to that, the human and economic cost of nuclear waste and a few potential large nuclear explosions due to accident/malice is trivial. Nuclear energy is a vital tool against global warming, and I am very concerned for the future of my children that even well educated people (I have these same arguments with my university colleagues) don't realise that.

lazyjones 8y ago
> I am very concerned for the future of my children that even well educated people (I have these same arguments with my university colleagues) don't realise that. Perhaps it's not very convincing to claim that "a few potential large nuclear explosions due to accident/malice" aren't as bad as an average temperature increase of 1 degree or so. Certainly seems borderline insane to me.
- kuzehanka 8y ago
  The worst nuclear accidents that could possibly happen have already happened. We couldn't have a worse nuclear power disaster than Lake Karachay even if we tried on purpose. And yet the sum damage they caused is a negligible blip compared to how many people die due to the use of fossil fuels on any given month of any given year. The environmental impact of nuclear power vs. fossil fuels or even renewables is just a negligible number no matter how you spin it. I too am confused like the GP poster as to how otherwise intelligent people just break down into baseless fearmongering about imaginary disaster scenarios while ignoring that today's conventional energy industry is literally thousands of times worse. If every single operational nuclear power plant had a meltdown incident after operating for 20 years, they'd still be orders of magnitude less damaging than what we're doing today. The environmental impact and safety numbers are just that far apart. https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
  - lispm 8y ago
    far from it. If nuclear fallout had been reached Tokyo, then we would talk about a much greater problem.
    - ElBarto 7y ago
      An accident in a nuclear plant that was constructed in a highly seismic and tsunami-prone area isn't an argument against nuclear power. I'm sure that Germany can find a more suited location if they wanted... Anyway, France is peppered with nuclear plants and Germany is right downwind from many of them.
      - lispm 7y ago
        > Anyway, France is peppered with nuclear plants and Germany is right downwind from many of them. That's why we would like to see some of them being closed immediately.
  - lazyjones 8y ago
    > We couldn't have a worse nuclear power disaster than Lake Karachay even if we tried on purpose. How can you write such a ridiculous sentence? We have nuclear power plants in the middle of inhabited areas with tens of millions of people who would be immediately affected by an explosion. It's a permanent subject of dispute here in Europe. > If every single operational nuclear power plant had a meltdown incident after operating for 20 years, they'd still be orders of magnitude less damaging than what we're doing today. The environmental impact and safety numbers are just that far apart One single accident in Europe would dwarf these inflated WHO numbers.
    - kuzehanka 8y ago
      > We have nuclear power plants in the middle of inhabited areas with tens of millions of people who would be immediately affected by an explosion. Cite please. The tens of millions affected by a feasible powerplant issue. Explosion is not really in the realm of feasible unless we're talking about bombs or uncontained soviet reactors.
- Gondolin 8y ago
  Again, coal related death are of the order of 1-5 millions by year. By contrast the worst estimate for Chernobyl is 200000 deaths. The closing of germany's reactor, which amount to around 60GWh, if it had been used instead to close coal based plants would have saved around 6000 lives per year. So over 10 years would have saved 60000 lives. An average temperature increase of 1 degree would not be so bad, it would probably amount for a few million deaths and a few trillion dollar (don't forget the economic cost of displacement due to increased water level, this will concern a lot more km^2 than nuclear exclusion zone). Still worse than nuclear but not orders of magnitude more. But the Paris agreement is about 2°C more and we are not headed to respect that, we are headed for at last a 3°C increase. This is way way worse than a 1°C increase. I am not joking about billions of death if we reach this point. What is borderline insane is not realizing the impact that climate change is going to have is nothing is done. And I live near a nuclear plant in France which almost had an accident similar to Fukushima during the 1999 tempest. So it's not like a Nuclear accident would not affect me...
  - lazyjones 8y ago
    > we are headed for at last a 3°C increase. This is way way worse than a 1°C increase. I am not joking about billions of death if we reach this point. What is borderline insane is not realizing the impact that climate change is going to have is nothing is done. It's beyond borderline insane how people make up these "billions of deaths" numbers with a straight face.
    - DennisP 8y ago
      Then you should read the book Six Degrees by Mark Lynas, who read 3000 peer-reviewed papers on the effects of climate change and summarized them, one chapter per degree. Billions of deaths at three degrees is probably overstating things, but three degrees does bring massive food shortages and hundreds of millions of refugees. At four degrees, billions of deaths doesn't look that unlikely, and it starts getting hard to imagine how modern civilization could survive. More than that is unthinkable. The book is a decade old but more recent work hasn't improved the outlook at all.
lispm 8y ago
I find it puzzling that proponents of nuclear technology make various claims without any calculations to back that up. 'a vital tool agains global warming'? What does that mean in numbers? How many nuclear power plants of what types for what amount of effort would be built in what timeframe for to make any sizeable contribution? How would it work? A single reactor in the west is >10bn $ and takes a decade or more to build, while not being able to be financed on the market (see the UK).
- orbifold 8y ago
  People have done these calculations. They come out in favor of nuclear in terms of area efficiency and price per kilowatt hour. It is just that politically it is a hard sell in a lot of countries.
  - pfdietz 8y ago
    And in the real world, instead of the calculations, nuclear is far behind in price per kWh. Unfortunately for nuclear, the power has to be generated in the real world, not on powerpoint slides.
- Amygaz 8y ago
  There isn’t a single line in OP’s post that isn’t wrong. He gets the costs wrong, he gets the deployment wrong, he gets efficiencies wrong, he get political stories wrong. If a post is not going to get downvoted, HN should at least have a way to label it as incorrect.
- theshrike79 8y ago
  Building new nuclear is slow and expensive because we stopped doing it for a looong time. Way too many power plants are from the 80's and before. Maybe they've had a few upgrades, but they're mostly at the end of their lifespan or even over their recommended life.
  - lispm 8y ago
    Check the fate of the EPR projects. Just replacing eol reactors in the west will be hard.
progfix 8y ago
And I am flabbergasted (again) because of the pro nuclear power comments. Why should we create energy from something so complicated and hard to control when we have something simple and easy to grasp like water, solar and windpower? I understand statistically speaking a nuclear power plant is save, but the risk is calculated by multiplying propability of occurance and potential loss. The potential loss in a maximum credible accident of a power plant is much much higher than in any other form of energy generation. Sure, we can build nuclear power plants, but let's make sure that we have used our potential for wind-, water- and solar power generation first (besides other stuff, like having good insulation on buildings, LEDs, etc). I also feel like people are pro- or contra nuclear power to show their alliance to their political parties more than for rational reasons. We should stop that.
- mk89 8y ago
  >Why should we create energy from something so complicated and hard to control when we have something simple and easy to grasp like water, solar and windpower? I think because it's way more expensive than having a mixed source of energy. The issue is what are we able to give up for having energy? Air pollution? Security that I don't get blown in a nuclear plant explosion (the fear is always there it seems...) ? Money? I think that nuclear energy is not bad, it's just a transition, as the parent comment said. And it's a better transition than coal.
- theshrike79 8y ago
  Because you can't run steel mills and other big energy consumers with solar or wind. These require power in the scale of Terawatts each year. 24/7. Renewables like solar and wind are decent for offsetting peaks and maybe generate some household electricity, but you're delusional if you think they can be used to replace coal or nuclear in the next decade. Or even quarter century. Until we make giant leaps in energy storage technology, we NEED something that can provide a steady base flow of electricity 24/7/365. And currently nuclear power is our best option for that. Burning fossil fuels (coal, wood, etc) is shit, we have only a limited number of places for water power.
  - the_why_of_y 8y ago
hutzlibu 8y ago
"It boggles my mind that Germany made a great effort on renewable, and used this extra energy to close nuclear plants rather than coals ones. " Yes, that twisted logic annoys me as well. But beeing a german, I probably know more of the context. Anti-Nuclear movement in germany is strong for historic reasons. Top-down politics who praised nuclear power and bombs for the people, which the people disagreed and then there were clashes with police, not only from extremists, but also the very normal people who got upset [0] Also there was tschernobyl. The radioactive cloud from then went down in my area. Even today it is advised against eating mushrooms and meat from boars must be tested for radiation before it can be selled and they don't tell, how much meat is too contaminated, but probably much, as the hunters are still angry. Also there were rumors that childs born shortly after tschernobyl had a much higher chance of missformed feet for example, but I never checked for truth. A friend of mine had, and the doctors made inofficial remarks, but officially nothing bad happened, because ukraine was a brother socialist state. (but this did was not the case for western germany, so again, I never fact checked that, but the rumors are there). So there is a lot of fear. And now we come to the twisted part: most of the anti-nuclear movement is indeed also against coal. And their solution (like mine, long-term) is renewable and they don't like the fact, that renewables are not 100% ready today or tomorrow, so they say, just reduce. So basically wishful thinking and rather doing something than nothing. (even if it is not the smartest move) And btw. there is massive activism going on against coal at the moment, there is for example a forest occupied[1], which was supposed to get shoveld down for coal. And even though quite some of the protesters are lunatics, I wish them the best, as we really, really don't need more coal. But, and here comes the other important reason: money. There are still many companys and workers and unions deeply tied to coal mining and processing. So also a strong motivator for politics ... to still use coal, despite all climate change blabla. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorleben https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorleben [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hambach_Forest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hambach_Forest
jtolmar 8y ago
Has anyone discredited the old deaths per kilowatt hour metric? [1] If not, nuclear is still the safest source of power, even including disasters like Chernoble and Fukushima. The major disasters come to mind more readily because they receive heavy media coverage, but this is in part because they're so rare, unlike the utterly routine problem of coal ash ponds spilling. Outside of major disasters, nuclear power produces so much energy that it's safer than wind power, which only kills people via construction and maintenance accidents. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/#4546f47d709b https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
- theshrike79 8y ago
  Yep. Coal plant deaths are local news. A nuclear power plant failure (however minor) is global news for weeks and weeks.
  - v_lisivka 8y ago
    Nuclear power plant failure, like Chornobyl, _can_ make whole continent inhabitable for thousands of years.
    - gambiting 8y ago
      Chernobyl made a large area a restricted zone, but nowhere near a continent scale. Besides, I really dislike people bringing up Chernobyl as an example of dangers - the RBMK reactor type like the one in Chernobyl still operates in 10 reactors producing electricity(and they will until 2024 at least). Even Chernobyl itself operated into 2000s before the last reactor block was shut down. And the only catastrophic fault with them happened because of an idiotic test that basically was meant to test what happens if you switch off all cooling and disable all safeguards - well, the reactor explodes, that's what. The test itself was criminal.
      - Tomte 8y ago
        Sure, if we exclude everything that could go wrong, we have a very safe system. Unfortunately, it happened. It really happened. And "only those stupid Russians could have done it" doesn't comfort me.
tramav 8y ago
>It boggles my mind that Germany made a great effort on renewable, and used this extra energy to close nuclear plants rather than coals ones. Today Germany is still affected by the radioactive fallout (Chernobyl). For example many wild boars in Thuringia are radioactively contaminated with caesium-137. It will still take about 300 years until the radioactive caesium-137 vanishes.
- stingraycharles 8y ago
  A banana is radioactive as well. What is the exact negative effect compared to coal?
  - tramav 8y ago
    Don't you think it's a little short-sighted to think just in categories like black and white (i.e. coal and nuclear energy)? Coal is also very bad in my opinion. We should work towards using more renewable energy and its research. And what about reducing energy consumption?
  - Xylakant 8y ago
    I hate the banana equivalent dose. It entirely papers over the substantial difference between alpha, beta and gamma radiation, ignores where radioactive substances accumulate in the body and what effect those differences on the actual inflicted damage have. It’s a cheap stunt to dismiss any sort of reasonable debate. If you cite it in defence of any actual nuclear fallout pollution, I personally consider it as proof that you’ve just disqualified in this discussion.
    - Amygaz 8y ago
      Not only that but, you would have be constantly exposed by constantly eating bananas. And even at one banana/minute you would only be exposed to an amount of radiation that is lower than living on earth. If BED was a thing, banana plantation workers would all radiation poisoning.
    - wtallis 8y ago
doe88 8y ago
I'm pro-puclear energy, but I also have enough experience and cynicism in life to also know that the biggest danger of nuclear is the human factor itself. As long as men and women will be men and women, there will be errors, malice, corruption, and all kind of factors that will affect our safety. Applying strict measures and processes will limit these risks but the current opacity of this industry is already a bad start and an hindrance to its success. I know it's not an easy problem to fix but it is vital to our safety on the long term.
- j16sdiz 8y ago
  Nuclear energy need long term commitment. You can't simply shut it down by stop funding it. This is not something I trust our government can do. Other then that, nuclear is very clean and safe.
tangue 8y ago
what strikes me about pro nuclear comments, is the fact that never it's mentionned that uranium is a finite ressouce. So we're going to invest billions in a technology that will last 50 years ? The key word in renewable energies is renewable
- jason0597 8y ago
  If you use the ancient reactor technology of a PWR burner, then sure. However, most pro-nuclear people are for breeder reactors, not burner reactors.
- leetcrew 8y ago
  what makes you think we will run out of fissile materials in 50 years?
- radford-neal 8y ago
  Since 50 years is about the lifetime of a nuclear power plant, why not? But in any case, thorium is very plentiful, and there has been good progress on extracting uranium from seawater. Plus, experience with other minerals would lead one to believe that there is probably more uranium that could be mined if there were a motive to find it.
vinniejames 8y ago
The best solution is to first implement distributed battery power instead of reliance on a grid. This eliminates the need to have nuclear plants in close proximity to densely populated areas. Plants can then be built in remote areas where the negative externalities will be drastically reduced, while still receiving the benefit of green, reliable energy.
beders 7y ago
Renewables can replace all of those: coal, gas, nuclear, oil. No reason to be flabbergasted.
blablabla123 7y ago
> - coal produce radioactive waste too That's quite a statement. Do you have references? I mean the nuclear waste from nuclear power plants is ridiculously difficult to handle because of its high temperature. It has to be wrapped in layers of containers - after cooling off for months (years?) in a water bath. > It boggles my mind that Germany made a great effort on renewable, and used this extra energy to close nuclear plants rather than coals ones. (At the beginning they even had to open more coal plants!) This means that Fukushima (which made Germany close its nuclear plants) killed a lot more people in Germany than in Japan. Fukushima lead to closing of Nuclear power plants, obviously, and not coal plants. The share of renewables in Germany increased a lot. To my knowledge the only coal power plants that were set up in the recent years were really modern ones. Therefore I cannot follow the argument, could you elaborate? > Recall that coal is 1000 times more deadly than nuclear per unit of energy (including the nuclear accidents). Recall also that there is no insurance that covers nuclear power plants but driving a car without insurance is not allowed in most countries. The difference between coal and nuclear energy is that the latter is very close to the limits of what we can control.
- DanBC 7y ago
  > That's quite a statement. Do you have references? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-... https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html > Coal is largely composed of organic matter, but it is the inorganic matter in coal—minerals and trace elements— that have been cited as possible causes of health, environmental, and technological problems associated with the use of coal. Some trace elements in coal are naturally radioactive. These radioactive elements include uranium (U), thorium (Th), and their numerous decay products, including radium (Ra) and radon (Rn). Although these elements are less chemically toxic than other coal constituents such as arsenic, selenium, or mercury, questions have been raised concerning possible risk from radiation. In order to accurately address these questions and to predict the mobility of radioactive elements during the coal fuel-cycle, it is important to determine the concentration, distribution, and form of radioactive elements in coal and fly ash.
nikdaheratik 7y ago
Again, if nuclear power is such a great idea, why aren't more companies lobbying for it? The reality is that every place in the U.S. that it is economically feasible to build a plant, already has one. There's a nuclear plant in the middle of Kansas and it's barely viable. And that's ignoring the proliferation issue when we try and export any new versions of the tech to other countries that need new energy. We're better off making solar, wind, etc. viable than pouring tons of money into a single area that we can't safely export to other places in the world. And electrical energy is still only one part of the problem since we still need to replace the internal combusion enginees, and jet engines or at least find an alternative fuel source. Nuclear power isn't a panacea.

lazyjones 8y ago

> I am very concerned for the future of my children that even well educated people (I have these same arguments with my university colleagues) don't realise that. Perhaps it's not very convincing to claim that "a few potential large nuclear explosions due to accident/malice" aren't as bad as an average temperature increase of 1 degree or so. Certainly seems borderline insane to me.

kuzehanka 8y ago
The worst nuclear accidents that could possibly happen have already happened. We couldn't have a worse nuclear power disaster than Lake Karachay even if we tried on purpose. And yet the sum damage they caused is a negligible blip compared to how many people die due to the use of fossil fuels on any given month of any given year. The environmental impact of nuclear power vs. fossil fuels or even renewables is just a negligible number no matter how you spin it. I too am confused like the GP poster as to how otherwise intelligent people just break down into baseless fearmongering about imaginary disaster scenarios while ignoring that today's conventional energy industry is literally thousands of times worse. If every single operational nuclear power plant had a meltdown incident after operating for 20 years, they'd still be orders of magnitude less damaging than what we're doing today. The environmental impact and safety numbers are just that far apart. https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
- lispm 8y ago
  far from it. If nuclear fallout had been reached Tokyo, then we would talk about a much greater problem.
  - ElBarto 7y ago
    An accident in a nuclear plant that was constructed in a highly seismic and tsunami-prone area isn't an argument against nuclear power. I'm sure that Germany can find a more suited location if they wanted... Anyway, France is peppered with nuclear plants and Germany is right downwind from many of them.
    - lispm 7y ago
      > Anyway, France is peppered with nuclear plants and Germany is right downwind from many of them. That's why we would like to see some of them being closed immediately.
- lazyjones 8y ago
  > We couldn't have a worse nuclear power disaster than Lake Karachay even if we tried on purpose. How can you write such a ridiculous sentence? We have nuclear power plants in the middle of inhabited areas with tens of millions of people who would be immediately affected by an explosion. It's a permanent subject of dispute here in Europe. > If every single operational nuclear power plant had a meltdown incident after operating for 20 years, they'd still be orders of magnitude less damaging than what we're doing today. The environmental impact and safety numbers are just that far apart One single accident in Europe would dwarf these inflated WHO numbers.
  - kuzehanka 8y ago
    > We have nuclear power plants in the middle of inhabited areas with tens of millions of people who would be immediately affected by an explosion. Cite please. The tens of millions affected by a feasible powerplant issue. Explosion is not really in the realm of feasible unless we're talking about bombs or uncontained soviet reactors.
Gondolin 8y ago
Again, coal related death are of the order of 1-5 millions by year. By contrast the worst estimate for Chernobyl is 200000 deaths. The closing of germany's reactor, which amount to around 60GWh, if it had been used instead to close coal based plants would have saved around 6000 lives per year. So over 10 years would have saved 60000 lives. An average temperature increase of 1 degree would not be so bad, it would probably amount for a few million deaths and a few trillion dollar (don't forget the economic cost of displacement due to increased water level, this will concern a lot more km^2 than nuclear exclusion zone). Still worse than nuclear but not orders of magnitude more. But the Paris agreement is about 2°C more and we are not headed to respect that, we are headed for at last a 3°C increase. This is way way worse than a 1°C increase. I am not joking about billions of death if we reach this point. What is borderline insane is not realizing the impact that climate change is going to have is nothing is done. And I live near a nuclear plant in France which almost had an accident similar to Fukushima during the 1999 tempest. So it's not like a Nuclear accident would not affect me...
- lazyjones 8y ago
  > we are headed for at last a 3°C increase. This is way way worse than a 1°C increase. I am not joking about billions of death if we reach this point. What is borderline insane is not realizing the impact that climate change is going to have is nothing is done. It's beyond borderline insane how people make up these "billions of deaths" numbers with a straight face.
  - DennisP 8y ago
    Then you should read the book Six Degrees by Mark Lynas, who read 3000 peer-reviewed papers on the effects of climate change and summarized them, one chapter per degree. Billions of deaths at three degrees is probably overstating things, but three degrees does bring massive food shortages and hundreds of millions of refugees. At four degrees, billions of deaths doesn't look that unlikely, and it starts getting hard to imagine how modern civilization could survive. More than that is unthinkable. The book is a decade old but more recent work hasn't improved the outlook at all.

lispm 8y ago

I find it puzzling that proponents of nuclear technology make various claims without any calculations to back that up. 'a vital tool agains global warming'? What does that mean in numbers? How many nuclear power plants of what types for what amount of effort would be built in what timeframe for to make any sizeable contribution? How would it work? A single reactor in the west is >10bn $ and takes a decade or more to build, while not being able to be financed on the market (see the UK).

orbifold 8y ago
People have done these calculations. They come out in favor of nuclear in terms of area efficiency and price per kilowatt hour. It is just that politically it is a hard sell in a lot of countries.
- pfdietz 8y ago
  And in the real world, instead of the calculations, nuclear is far behind in price per kWh. Unfortunately for nuclear, the power has to be generated in the real world, not on powerpoint slides.
Amygaz 8y ago
There isn’t a single line in OP’s post that isn’t wrong. He gets the costs wrong, he gets the deployment wrong, he gets efficiencies wrong, he get political stories wrong. If a post is not going to get downvoted, HN should at least have a way to label it as incorrect.
theshrike79 8y ago
Building new nuclear is slow and expensive because we stopped doing it for a looong time. Way too many power plants are from the 80's and before. Maybe they've had a few upgrades, but they're mostly at the end of their lifespan or even over their recommended life.
- lispm 8y ago
  Check the fate of the EPR projects. Just replacing eol reactors in the west will be hard.

progfix 8y ago

And I am flabbergasted (again) because of the pro nuclear power comments. Why should we create energy from something so complicated and hard to control when we have something simple and easy to grasp like water, solar and windpower? I understand statistically speaking a nuclear power plant is save, but the risk is calculated by multiplying propability of occurance and potential loss. The potential loss in a maximum credible accident of a power plant is much much higher than in any other form of energy generation. Sure, we can build nuclear power plants, but let's make sure that we have used our potential for wind-, water- and solar power generation first (besides other stuff, like having good insulation on buildings, LEDs, etc). I also feel like people are pro- or contra nuclear power to show their alliance to their political parties more than for rational reasons. We should stop that.

mk89 8y ago
>Why should we create energy from something so complicated and hard to control when we have something simple and easy to grasp like water, solar and windpower? I think because it's way more expensive than having a mixed source of energy. The issue is what are we able to give up for having energy? Air pollution? Security that I don't get blown in a nuclear plant explosion (the fear is always there it seems...) ? Money? I think that nuclear energy is not bad, it's just a transition, as the parent comment said. And it's a better transition than coal.
theshrike79 8y ago
Because you can't run steel mills and other big energy consumers with solar or wind. These require power in the scale of Terawatts each year. 24/7. Renewables like solar and wind are decent for offsetting peaks and maybe generate some household electricity, but you're delusional if you think they can be used to replace coal or nuclear in the next decade. Or even quarter century. Until we make giant leaps in energy storage technology, we NEED something that can provide a steady base flow of electricity 24/7/365. And currently nuclear power is our best option for that. Burning fossil fuels (coal, wood, etc) is shit, we have only a limited number of places for water power.
- the_why_of_y 8y ago

hutzlibu 8y ago

"It boggles my mind that Germany made a great effort on renewable, and used this extra energy to close nuclear plants rather than coals ones. " Yes, that twisted logic annoys me as well. But beeing a german, I probably know more of the context. Anti-Nuclear movement in germany is strong for historic reasons. Top-down politics who praised nuclear power and bombs for the people, which the people disagreed and then there were clashes with police, not only from extremists, but also the very normal people who got upset [0] Also there was tschernobyl. The radioactive cloud from then went down in my area. Even today it is advised against eating mushrooms and meat from boars must be tested for radiation before it can be selled and they don't tell, how much meat is too contaminated, but probably much, as the hunters are still angry. Also there were rumors that childs born shortly after tschernobyl had a much higher chance of missformed feet for example, but I never checked for truth. A friend of mine had, and the doctors made inofficial remarks, but officially nothing bad happened, because ukraine was a brother socialist state. (but this did was not the case for western germany, so again, I never fact checked that, but the rumors are there). So there is a lot of fear. And now we come to the twisted part: most of the anti-nuclear movement is indeed also against coal. And their solution (like mine, long-term) is renewable and they don't like the fact, that renewables are not 100% ready today or tomorrow, so they say, just reduce. So basically wishful thinking and rather doing something than nothing. (even if it is not the smartest move) And btw. there is massive activism going on against coal at the moment, there is for example a forest occupied[1], which was supposed to get shoveld down for coal. And even though quite some of the protesters are lunatics, I wish them the best, as we really, really don't need more coal. But, and here comes the other important reason: money. There are still many companys and workers and unions deeply tied to coal mining and processing. So also a strong motivator for politics ... to still use coal, despite all climate change blabla. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorleben https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorleben [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hambach_Forest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hambach_Forest

jtolmar 8y ago

Has anyone discredited the old deaths per kilowatt hour metric? [1] If not, nuclear is still the safest source of power, even including disasters like Chernoble and Fukushima. The major disasters come to mind more readily because they receive heavy media coverage, but this is in part because they're so rare, unlike the utterly routine problem of coal ash ponds spilling. Outside of major disasters, nuclear power produces so much energy that it's safer than wind power, which only kills people via construction and maintenance accidents. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/#4546f47d709b https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...

theshrike79 8y ago
Yep. Coal plant deaths are local news. A nuclear power plant failure (however minor) is global news for weeks and weeks.
- v_lisivka 8y ago
  Nuclear power plant failure, like Chornobyl, _can_ make whole continent inhabitable for thousands of years.
  - gambiting 8y ago
    Chernobyl made a large area a restricted zone, but nowhere near a continent scale. Besides, I really dislike people bringing up Chernobyl as an example of dangers - the RBMK reactor type like the one in Chernobyl still operates in 10 reactors producing electricity(and they will until 2024 at least). Even Chernobyl itself operated into 2000s before the last reactor block was shut down. And the only catastrophic fault with them happened because of an idiotic test that basically was meant to test what happens if you switch off all cooling and disable all safeguards - well, the reactor explodes, that's what. The test itself was criminal.
    - Tomte 8y ago
      Sure, if we exclude everything that could go wrong, we have a very safe system. Unfortunately, it happened. It really happened. And "only those stupid Russians could have done it" doesn't comfort me.

tramav 8y ago

>It boggles my mind that Germany made a great effort on renewable, and used this extra energy to close nuclear plants rather than coals ones. Today Germany is still affected by the radioactive fallout (Chernobyl). For example many wild boars in Thuringia are radioactively contaminated with caesium-137. It will still take about 300 years until the radioactive caesium-137 vanishes.

stingraycharles 8y ago
A banana is radioactive as well. What is the exact negative effect compared to coal?
- tramav 8y ago
  Don't you think it's a little short-sighted to think just in categories like black and white (i.e. coal and nuclear energy)? Coal is also very bad in my opinion. We should work towards using more renewable energy and its research. And what about reducing energy consumption?
- Xylakant 8y ago
  I hate the banana equivalent dose. It entirely papers over the substantial difference between alpha, beta and gamma radiation, ignores where radioactive substances accumulate in the body and what effect those differences on the actual inflicted damage have. It’s a cheap stunt to dismiss any sort of reasonable debate. If you cite it in defence of any actual nuclear fallout pollution, I personally consider it as proof that you’ve just disqualified in this discussion.
  - Amygaz 8y ago
    Not only that but, you would have be constantly exposed by constantly eating bananas. And even at one banana/minute you would only be exposed to an amount of radiation that is lower than living on earth. If BED was a thing, banana plantation workers would all radiation poisoning.
  - wtallis 8y ago

doe88 8y ago

I'm pro-puclear energy, but I also have enough experience and cynicism in life to also know that the biggest danger of nuclear is the human factor itself. As long as men and women will be men and women, there will be errors, malice, corruption, and all kind of factors that will affect our safety. Applying strict measures and processes will limit these risks but the current opacity of this industry is already a bad start and an hindrance to its success. I know it's not an easy problem to fix but it is vital to our safety on the long term.

j16sdiz 8y ago
Nuclear energy need long term commitment. You can't simply shut it down by stop funding it. This is not something I trust our government can do. Other then that, nuclear is very clean and safe.

tangue 8y ago

what strikes me about pro nuclear comments, is the fact that never it's mentionned that uranium is a finite ressouce. So we're going to invest billions in a technology that will last 50 years ? The key word in renewable energies is renewable

jason0597 8y ago
If you use the ancient reactor technology of a PWR burner, then sure. However, most pro-nuclear people are for breeder reactors, not burner reactors.
leetcrew 8y ago
what makes you think we will run out of fissile materials in 50 years?
radford-neal 8y ago
Since 50 years is about the lifetime of a nuclear power plant, why not? But in any case, thorium is very plentiful, and there has been good progress on extracting uranium from seawater. Plus, experience with other minerals would lead one to believe that there is probably more uranium that could be mined if there were a motive to find it.

vinniejames 8y ago

The best solution is to first implement distributed battery power instead of reliance on a grid. This eliminates the need to have nuclear plants in close proximity to densely populated areas. Plants can then be built in remote areas where the negative externalities will be drastically reduced, while still receiving the benefit of green, reliable energy.

beders 7y ago

Renewables can replace all of those: coal, gas, nuclear, oil. No reason to be flabbergasted.

blablabla123 7y ago

> - coal produce radioactive waste too That's quite a statement. Do you have references? I mean the nuclear waste from nuclear power plants is ridiculously difficult to handle because of its high temperature. It has to be wrapped in layers of containers - after cooling off for months (years?) in a water bath. > It boggles my mind that Germany made a great effort on renewable, and used this extra energy to close nuclear plants rather than coals ones. (At the beginning they even had to open more coal plants!) This means that Fukushima (which made Germany close its nuclear plants) killed a lot more people in Germany than in Japan. Fukushima lead to closing of Nuclear power plants, obviously, and not coal plants. The share of renewables in Germany increased a lot. To my knowledge the only coal power plants that were set up in the recent years were really modern ones. Therefore I cannot follow the argument, could you elaborate? > Recall that coal is 1000 times more deadly than nuclear per unit of energy (including the nuclear accidents). Recall also that there is no insurance that covers nuclear power plants but driving a car without insurance is not allowed in most countries. The difference between coal and nuclear energy is that the latter is very close to the limits of what we can control.

DanBC 7y ago
> That's quite a statement. Do you have references? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-... https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html > Coal is largely composed of organic matter, but it is the inorganic matter in coal—minerals and trace elements— that have been cited as possible causes of health, environmental, and technological problems associated with the use of coal. Some trace elements in coal are naturally radioactive. These radioactive elements include uranium (U), thorium (Th), and their numerous decay products, including radium (Ra) and radon (Rn). Although these elements are less chemically toxic than other coal constituents such as arsenic, selenium, or mercury, questions have been raised concerning possible risk from radiation. In order to accurately address these questions and to predict the mobility of radioactive elements during the coal fuel-cycle, it is important to determine the concentration, distribution, and form of radioactive elements in coal and fly ash.

nikdaheratik 7y ago

Again, if nuclear power is such a great idea, why aren't more companies lobbying for it? The reality is that every place in the U.S. that it is economically feasible to build a plant, already has one. There's a nuclear plant in the middle of Kansas and it's barely viable. And that's ignoring the proliferation issue when we try and export any new versions of the tech to other countries that need new energy. We're better off making solar, wind, etc. viable than pouring tons of money into a single area that we can't safely export to other places in the world. And electrical energy is still only one part of the problem since we still need to replace the internal combusion enginees, and jet engines or at least find an alternative fuel source. Nuclear power isn't a panacea.