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Public's Dread of Nuclear Power Limits Its Deployment

129 points by Reedx 7y ago

mimixco 7y ago
As it should. Since the world experiences a catastrophic nuclear meltdown every 20 years on average, we can get ready for the next one. It would be impossible to count the cost of Fukushima in lives or cancers since the damn thing is still leaking massive amounts of radioactive water into the ocean. This article, like most nuclear puff pieces, says we should move on 'cause there's nothin' to see here. The industry must constantly release this kind of PR (notice it appears every single day on HN) because, as much as they don't like to admit it, their industry is dying worlwide. As others here have pointed out, nuclear is the technology of the past, not the future. The future of energy production is local, small scale, and, distributed.
- striking 7y ago
  "Please don't make insinuations about astroturfing. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried, email us and we'll look at the data."
  - mimixco 7y ago
    Sorry, which part of my comment is unfactual?
- wool_gather 7y ago
  > says we should move on 'cause there's nothin' to see here It says nothing of the sort. It's a straightforward, albeit brief, report of a public opinion study that someone at the university did.
- andrewprock 7y ago
  While nuclear is certainly going to be around longer than coal, the impact is just as catastrophic, if not more so than coal. The reason it is hard to see is that the cost of both of these technologies is going to be with us for thousands, and tens of thousands of years. It may also be that solar, wind, and geothermal will also have similar cost integrations over time, but it seems less likely.
  - CountSessine 7y ago
    It may also be that solar, wind, and geothermal will also have similar cost integrations over time, but it seems less likely. Some of the storage technologies associated with solar will almost certainly have huge death tolls associated with them. There's been a proposal that we stack large blocks of concrete into towers with cranes to store solar energy. But this is basically a construction site. We can pretend otherwise, but with cranes and heavy blocks of concrete, it's hard to call this something other than a construction site. Workers and site managers in modern construction sites in developed countries are almost fanatical about safety, and yet accidents happen and people die. And these storage sites would be larger than the cities they supply back-up power to - they would be the largest construction sites ever built.
    - bronson 7y ago
      What you’re saying may or may not come true one day but it’s not on anyone’s road map today. Your last sentence veers into science fiction.
      - CountSessine 7y ago
        The future is now! https://qz.com/1355672/stacking-concrete-blocks-is-a-surprisingly-efficient-way-to-store-energy/ https://qz.com/1355672/stacking-concrete-blocks-is-a-surpris... All of the technology surrounding solar storage is science fiction right now - we have lots of things working at a nano-scale. And every one of them has problems when we imagine using them to store nation-sized power. If stacking blocks of concrete is what prevails, then of course we need to compare the death tolls from that to what we see with nuclear and other technologies.
        bronson 7y ago
        A 20-meter-tall, single-armed crane is the future? According to your article, that’s all that exists now. So, again, maybe or maybe not. You have a long, long way to go first.
        7y ago
- stevenwoo 7y ago
  Obviously it's slightly fictionalized but the Chernobyl mini-series on HBO illustrates how people just doing their job to the best of their ability manage to come close to killing millions of people - SPOILER for something that happened a long time ago - the first approach to put out the fire was ignorant of the danger of a nuclear lava flow into full water tanks - and the writer claims to be pro nuclear power in his interviews and postings on reddit.
floatingatoll 7y ago
I would have worded this headline differently, in a way that focuses on what I see to be the core issue: Public's Dread of Nuclear Power Management Limits Its Deployment It's not that we're afraid of nuclear power, it's that we're afraid that nuclear power will be managed as poorly as our other basic infrastructure is.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  HN may care about the difference between nuclear power and management/operation thereof but the general public does not draw that distinction.
  - imtringued 7y ago
    Pretty much every failure of nuclear power can be summed up as a management problem.
    - floatingatoll 7y ago
      And so if we can present underground thorium capsule reactors as “if mismanaged, it cools into a lump of harmless rock”, and design them to do so, we have a viable marketing solution to nuclear power.
option 7y ago
Anti-nuclear movements and sentiments are very similar to the anti-vaxer ones in their denial of science and basic statistics. Perhaps even more dangerous for society.
- falcrist 7y ago
  I'm very pro-nuclear, but I still think this is an extremely unfair comparison. If you actually talk to anti-nuclear advocates, they have reasonable concerns about safety, disposal, oversight, and proliferation. Now I don't think those concerns override the fact that nuclear fission is our best stop-gap as we slowly transition to renewables. But that doesn't mean everything anti-nuclear folks say is bunk. The whole anti-vaxx movement, on the other hand, is based almost exclusively on lies and propaganda. Maybe it's because the anti-vaxx movement grew via social media channels, which increased its toxicity substantially.
  - avar 7y ago
    They have "reasonable" concerns, but the comparison is spot-on. Their narrow-minded paranoia has by-and-large resulted in the alternative being coal, which is killing almost a million people every year, and that's just yearly deaths, not the cumulative carbon released into the atmosphere which we'll be paying for for the next thousand years at best. Just like someone not vaccinating their kids isn't right just because they can point to some miniscule fatality rate as a result of vaccinations (e.g. infections, adverse reactions to vaccines etc.). Those tiny numbers are drowned out by the death rate of not vaccinating. So pick the shittiest Soviet nuclear design you can think of. If we powered the whole world on that and had 10 Chernobyls every year it would still suck less than coal.
    - falcrist 7y ago
      They don't have ""reasonable"" concerns with scare quotes. They have legitimately reasonable concerns. Nuclear is prohibitively expensive, inherently dangerous (in terms of being high-stakes), difficult to oversee properly (particularly since reactors can outlive governments), and it requires disposal of some of the most toxic waste mankind has ever produced. I have an answer to all of those concerns, but that does NOT mean they're any less reasonable. Anti-vaxx on the other hand have completely UNreasonable concerns. Most of those I talk to in the anti-vaxx movement still think there's a risk of autism. Many think this is all a conspiracy by big pharma to sell more medicine. That's not reasonable. That's not even "reasonable". That's a conspiracy theory. I think there's a fundamental difference here as well as a difference in scale. That's why I'm saying this is a terrible comparison.
imglorp 7y ago
The public also dreads vaccines, dihydrogen monoxide, and planetary alignments. The solution to all of these problems is solid education to make informed citizens.
- umvi 7y ago
  > The solution to all of these problems is solid education to make informed citizens. Easier said than done. Even if you drop a world class school with world class teachers into a poor neighborhood, you still won't guarantee everyone gets a "solid education". Education is tightly coupled not just to public schools, but private family life as well, and the latter is much more difficult to solve.
  - cameronbrown 7y ago
    I disagree - the education system itself is deeply unforgiving in how it functions. From even the most basic level of school scheduling being directly at odds with teenage biology, all the way to how students are ranked and filed purely based on test scores. These kids in poor neighborhoods usually (statistically) don't have the support that even the best students need to get through school. Of course there are always exceptions, but this is just what I've observed.
    - umvi 7y ago
      Well, my neighbors are on public assistance, and I swear the kids are truant half the time. Doesn't matter how great your school is if the kids don't go and the parents don't care if they go or not.
      - cameronbrown 7y ago
        Let me rephrase my point: if school was more engaging and less of a punishment (which is what it can feel like for these already disadvantaged kids) then they might be more inclined to want to go. Obviously some home situations are too rough to sort out, but I think that's a situation where the government needs to step in.
jwr 7y ago
I have conflicted thoughts on this. On one hand, nuclear energy seems to be the only way we have right now to at least try to avoid the oncoming climate catastrophe. On the other hand, I'm reading "Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies" by Charles Perrow and it's scary. Really scary. The combination of very complex systems with interactions that no one understands and greed, poor oversight, and other human behaviors results in something we should be afraid of. And yet, we might have no choice but to use nuclear power. By the way, official statistics are one thing (I used to love quoting them as well), but if you look at the number of "close calls" that we had and if you look into the causes behind various incidents, a different picture emerges and you might lose some of the confidence. I also now think that anyone taking part in the discussion should read Perrow's book. One thought I had while reading the book is that these days it might make sense to try to model these complex systems and run simulations to at least try to discover the unexpected interactions and mitigate them. Similar to (for example) how FoundationDB was developed. Simulations on that scale were likely difficult or impossible at the time when most nuclear plants were designed, but with modern computing power we might have better ways of reducing the problem domain.
- dv_dt 7y ago
  I find it very likely to be wrong when statements say xxx is the "only" way to do something. Particularly with nuclear which has strong evidence in the US, France and China that plants can't be built in sufficient time to make a difference at this point, while it's pretty clear that renewables and storage are not only feasible, but more cost effective and faster to rollout, as well as to advance technologically vs nuclear.
  - Robotbeat 7y ago
    I agree that nuclear isn’t technically the only option, but statements like “Can’t be built fast enough to make a difference” is also not true, particularly if you use historical examples YES in France. We’re going to need deep decarbonization, and actually the most likely scenario is it will take decades, so there’s actually substantial time for nuclear to make a difference. It doesn’t HAVE to take a long time to build a nuclear power plant. I’m firmly in the “every zero carbon option now, as fast as possible.” And nuclear is definitely part of that. I’ve become worried about the stalling solar power deployment rate in the US (and other places). It hasn’t stopped, but it no longer appears to be on the same exponential growth curve we needed it to be on. We’re going to need everything we can get.
cameronbrown 7y ago
Nuclear power is the only real option we have to limit climate change, that we can put into motion right now. The downsides are the politics associated, glacial construction times, and the fact we still lack proper disposal sites. Critical thinking skills and more statistics education is something the world sorely needs.
- option 7y ago
  waste disposal is not as big of a problem for modern reactors
- p_l 7y ago
  You don't need waste disposal sites if you have full reprocessing chain. Which was made nearly-illegal and an invitation for us-sanctioned airstrike for several decades even if you abide by NPT, so...
  - cameronbrown 7y ago
    My apologies, I was under the impression that waste was an order of magnitude lower on modern designs, but I was unaware it's effectively eliminated.
    - mimixco 7y ago
      The waste problem has in no way been solved. Reprocessing is, itself, horribly polluting and its waste byproducts are more dangerous than the original spent fuel rods. I'll also add here that Fukushima is still pouring radiation into the Pacific Ocean while we pontificate.
    - p_l 7y ago
      It's not so much eliminated, so much as we can reprocess a lot of what we now have as "waste". Yes, it still involves possibly polluting reagents (some common reagents are the same as in microchip production, btw). However, it enables use of different types of reactors and different total economy of nuclear power generation. The end result is that properly managed, you can limit remaining waste as well as extend usability of each kilogram of fissile material several times. Reprocessing of waste is also how several crucial isotopes are produced - for example, Canadian CANDU reactors are famous for producing important resources for medicine (radiation sources mainly). Similarly, Polish research reactors near Warsaw partially pay for their upkeep by reprocessing the spent fuel into medical isotopes and weapons-grade plutonium (which is then milled with uranium into MOX fuel for civilian reactors)
RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
I am becoming more convinced that we as a civilization will not cut CO2 emissions in time and we will need some type of carbon sequestration. Carbon sequestration is going to horrendously energy intensive and we will need something like nuclear power to provide that kind of energy.
- beat 7y ago
  I agree we'll probably need some sort of carbon sequestration. I disagree that nuclear is the only possible power source for that (or for that matter, that sequestration is going to be that energy-intensive).
  - gizmo686 7y ago
    How can sequestration not be energy intensive? Carbon is diffused throughout the atmosphere as relativly low energy statw molecules. Even assuming 100% efficiency, what end state of sequestration would not require significant energy just from conservation of energy.
    - beat 7y ago
      Okay, maybe not energy intensive is the wrong way to put it, but... what about organically capturing carbon? Trees or algae farms? It's energy intensive, but it's solar energy, not generated electricity.
    - pfdietz 7y ago
      The reaction of CO2 with olivine is mildly exothermic.
    - pfdietz 7y ago
      I'll add that you could have figured out that there must be exothermic ways to sequester CO2, since CO2 naturally is scrubbed from the atmosphere by some process. If this process were not exothermic, CO2 would just accumulate in the atmosphere until the Earth resembled Venus. https://skepticalscience.com/weathering.html https://skepticalscience.com/weathering.html
mistrial9 7y ago
Is it coincidental, that something so complex, and multi-faceted, with both huge potential risks and benefits, attracts floods of simple-minded and "I told you so" comments, from even this very intelligent crowd
- kikoreis 7y ago
  I don't think it's actually that multi-faceted. It's simple. 1. We have a coal problem. Fixing that would buy us critical space in the climate change equation. 2. Nuclear is the only viable short-term alternative. 3. Nuclear has a bad reputation, but new information has come to light (modern reactor design, handling of waste, total impact proportional to coal). We need a lot of active debate on this.
  - cesarb 7y ago
    > Nuclear is the only viable short-term alternative. One of the arguments against nuclear is that it's not a short-term alternative; nuclear power plants take decades to build. For instance, the latest nuclear power plant in my country is under construction for over 30 years, and is still not complete; the other reactors in the same complex took 12 years and 24 years to build, according to Wikipedia.
Reedx 7y ago
> ... there remains a gulf in understanding the difference between the technology's statistical risks and the dread it evokes ... that dread about nuclear power leads respondents to choose 40% less nuclear generation in 2050 than they would have chosen in the absence of this dread." Education on nuclear statistics and modern nuclear technology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor) would be useful. Though I wonder if we're stuck for a similar reason many are afraid of flying, but not of driving - despite driving being significantly more dangerous statistically - the idea/story of a plane crash is vastly scarier than a car crash.
- the8472 7y ago
  Have there been any commercial deployments of Gen IV reactors? You can't cite statistics of things that haven't been in operation for a reasonable fraction of their expected lifecycle.
  - kikoreis 7y ago
    Gen IV you're right. Gen III (and "III+") reactors already bring significant safety changes ("passive nuclear safety", though that is a spectrum) and we've had a few of those running for a while now, the longest for 20+ years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_III_reactor#Generation_III_reactors_currently_operational_or_under_construction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_III_reactor#Generat...
keiferski 7y ago
Correct me if I’m wrong, but nuclear energy fundamentally requires a strong state, at least one capable enough of maintaining facilities and disposing of the waste. Looking at human history, the assumption that some state power will always be able to manage it seems rather naive. There have been long stretches of feudalism, warfare, and all-out anarchy and indeed the current relatively stable forms of government are not the norm historically. If all it takes to cause a nuclear meltdown is a brief lapse in order or relative peace, then that doesn’t strike me as very anti-fragile. Furthermore, nuclear power requires and perpetuates government control over things in a way that say, solar energy, doesn’t. Whether that’s a good thing or not depends on your political persuasion, of course. That said, one could probably also make the opposite argument that nuclear power would lead to more incentives for peace and stability, in the same way that arguments for Mutually-Assured-Destruction argue that nuclear weapons prevent warfare.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
  >There have been long stretches of feudalism, warfare, and all-out anarchy and indeed the current relatively stable forms of government are not the norm historically. If all it takes to cause a nuclear meltdown is a brief lapse in order or relative peace, then that doesn’t strike me as very anti-fragile. If that happens, the death caused by nuclear power will be the least of your concerns. A descent into anarchy would result in millions or tens of millions of deaths resulting from the collapse of civilization. A few hundred or thousand deaths from any nuclear power plants would be a rounding error in the calculation.
  - amanaplanacanal 7y ago
    Since other systems are also fragile, we shouldn't care about adding one more? I'm pretty sure I'm against that line of thinking.
  - pfdietz 7y ago
    If the world descends into horrific disorder, I want our descendants to have lots of easily accessible plutonium so they can come out on top. :)
NickM 7y ago
Conversations about public perception ignore the bigger problem of cost. Why build big expensive nuclear plants that frequently have to be subsidized and bailed out, when solar/wind/storage are already cheaper and continue to drop in cost? Even if we never have another meltdown again, and even if we never have a containment breach of the waste for the next 10k years, the economics just don't make sense.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- CountSessine 7y ago
  Because there are only a few sites in the world that can supply reliable wind power in the megawatts, and the scales of storage required to provide even minimal backup power for solar to make it useful at the 3TW of power used by the United States are probably impossible (the figure I've heard for pumped water, e.g., is that every lake in the US would have to be raised 400m). Solar/wind/storage means getting by with orders of magnitude less energy usage. Maybe we should? I just think that asking people to vote for that is even more impossible than getting them to vote for nuclear.
  - ourlordcaffeine 7y ago
    Needing massive amounts of storage to make renewable work is an often repeated myth. Large reductions in carbon output are achievable with current storage with a mixture of wind, limited solar and the right price/balancing incentives.
    - CountSessine 7y ago
      Do the math. Figure out how much water you need to lift and how high to supply a day of 3TW of power.
      - imtringued 7y ago
        My numbers tell me North America has 1 PWh of storage capacity just for gas alone. This isn't even counting all the EWhs that we haven't extracted yet or the unlimited amount we could produce by using excess energy and turning it into hydrogen or methane.
StreamBright 7y ago
Just one pic: https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2017/05/hypothetical-number-of-deaths-from-energy-production.png https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2017/05/hypothetical-numb...
- SECProto 7y ago
  "Over 11000 people will die PER YEAR if we switch to nuclear energy!!" Despite that, I use a similar argument to that graph on the (rare) occasions I've discussed nuclear energy with friends and family.
- eeZah7Ux 7y ago
  The calculation completely ignores any risk of nuclear disaster. It's simply based on historical data, which is hugely misleading and dishonest. Each existing barrel of nuclear waste has been causing risk for few decades at max but will cause risk for thousands of years. (Not to mention all the waste that has been dispersed in the environment) This is like driving a car for a 30 seconds and claiming that it's safe.
  - mercutio2 7y ago
    This is not how radioactivity works. There’s lots of construction material that has isotopes with a long half life. But the long half life means it’s barely dangerous (less dangerous than background levels of radiation in many habited places in the world). The stuff that’s actually dangerous for humans are isotopes with short half lives. Those isotopes, by definition, don’t last long.
  - StreamBright 7y ago
    So does coal waste. Handling nuclear waste is not improving because humanity gave up on using tis energy. There are reactor types which “burn” nuclear waste from traditional plants and make them less dangerous. All of the problems you mention are solvable: safety, radioactive waste etc if we commit to it. Fire and burning is 400.000 years old, nuclear power is 70-80. We have technology ready to make it safe just as we did with fire.
instabird 7y ago
I am in no way near an expert on this topic, but from what I know and given nuclear's track record, nuclear energy is probably mankind's only way out of total climate breakdown.
maxander 7y ago
I'm generally in favor of nuclear power, but I recognize that there's some reasonable ground for opposing its development on grounds of potential catastrophe or radiation leakage risk. What gets me, rather, is that while we as a society have rejected nuclear power plants as too dangerous, we're still sitting on thousands and thousands of nuclear weapons- and still building more in the present day! [0] The failure of anti-nuclear activists to address the kind of nuclear technologies which can actually be catastrophic, while instead focusing on those which are constructive and at least generally safe, is maddening. [0] https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/us-nuclear-weapons-modernization https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/us-nuclear-weapons-moderniz...
- 0xffff2 7y ago
  The grounds really aren't that reasonable. Nuclear has potential for catastrophe, but coal and other fossil fuels are a constant ongoing catastrophe by their very nature even if you disregard climate change. It would take many, many nuclear disasters for nuclear to come even remotely close to killing as many people as fossil fuel energy generation already has. https://climate.nasa.gov/news/903/coal-and-gas-are-far-more-harmful-than-nuclear-power/ https://climate.nasa.gov/news/903/coal-and-gas-are-far-more-...
  - pfdietz 7y ago
    Arguiung that we should stick with nuclear because it's cleaner than coal is like saying we should continue with gasoline fueled cars because they're cleaner than horses. It's looking at the wrong competition.
    - 0xffff2 7y ago
      Huh? This analogy makes no sense to me at all. Which is cleaner is only incidentally related to my point. Nuclear is safer than goal in terms of deaths caused by such a tremendous margin that no single nuclear catastrophe could possibly even make a dent.
      - 7y ago
thrillgore 7y ago
Stop trying to make nuclear power a thing. It's not happening. We're all concerned about the state of the aging plants in the US and many are not hardened enough for the impact of climate change.
- mimixco 7y ago
  The whole industry is dying, all over the world, and must now reply on PR puff pieces such as this one that continue to haul out the "climate will kill us!" bogeyman. Perhaps nuclear advocates haven't considered that, given enough time, the Earth's cyclical climate will kill us anyway. Personally, I'd rather wait for that than have nuke plants speed up the death toll and pollute the land with uranium tailings and contaminated water. But that's just me.
  - zaq_xsw 7y ago
    > Earth's cyclical climate will kill us anyway Why? The reason climate change is dangerous is not because it'll get too hot or cold for us, but because the temperature is changing too fast. It's the gradient that's the problem.
    - mimixco 7y ago
      Vast swaths of North America have been under water or covered in ice sheets at various points in the Earth's history, including the time when humans lived. I think it's fair to say that we are not well adapted to live under water or ice, yet both of those are definitely coming. Someday.
      - zaq_xsw 7y ago
        Okay, so updated: > Perhaps nuclear advocates haven't considered [that if we can slow down climate change then we'll have to make some steady societal changes over the next few thousand years (instead of over a much smaller time-frame) to adapt to the Earth's natural climate changes] Not to be rude, but you're wasting peoples' time when you don't even follow your own line of thinking in your comments. You've made quite a few comments on this post that don't really contribute to the discussion.
cwbrandsma 7y ago
We have a "safety at any cost" mentality in society, which limits development in multiple areas. This was not the case 50 years ago, but it is today. There is a healthy respect for safety, but what we have now is constant fear mongering across society. Not just nuclear power, but immigration, stranger danger, helicopter parents, etc. All brought to you by the 24 hours news cycle that makes money by making sure everyone stays paranoid.
- zaq_xsw 7y ago
  It's worse than that though, because, for example, nuclear power is significantly safer than other technologies currently in use[1][2], and as another example, immigrants (including illegal immigrants) are less likely to commit crimes than native-born citizens in the United States[3][4], at least for several generations (they asymptotically approach native levels). So I think we're fighting a couple of battles here: fear-mongering and misinformation/ignorance, and I guess they go hand-in-hand. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2017/05/hypothetical-number-of-deaths-from-energy-production.png https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2017/05/hypothetical-numb... [2] Kharecha Pushker A, 2013 [3] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1078087417704974?journalCode=uarb https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/107808741770497... [4] https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jul/06/donald-trump/trump-immigration-claim-has-no-data-back-it/ https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jul...
PunksATawnyFill 7y ago
WTF? Where's the actual study? If you go here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421519302125 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151... Once again there's no link to the study. And if you go here: https://s100.copyright.com/AppDispatchServlet?publisherName=ELS&contentID=S0301421519302125&orderBeanReset=true https://s100.copyright.com/AppDispatchServlet?publisherName=... "Read the article" isn't an option! Now the question is: Were public funds used in the study? If so, we own it and should have access.
- howard941 7y ago
  Public funds were used: >This work was supported by the UC San Diego Frontiers of Innovation Scholars Program; the UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy; the Electric Power Research Institute; and the Center for Climate and Energy Decision Making at Carnegie Mellon University, which is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (SES-094970). Unfortunately I had to use a site available at a Taiwan hostname to view the funding source info.
- sampo 7y ago
  > Where's the actual study? Scientific articles can nowadays be found Sci-Hub: https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2019.03.039 https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2019.03.0...
srs_sput 7y ago
One of the most interesting things I've learned this past week is that Ukraine generates almost 50% of it's electricity from nuclear reactors. I think it's impressive a country can suffer the worst nuclear accident but still overcome the fear of using it.
- mimixco 7y ago
  When states impose their will on the people, public sentiment doesn't matter. The idea that a former Soviet state would submit nuclear power to a democratic vote is simply farcical.
- 781 7y ago
  Ukraine is not the kind of place where you need to fight 5 years in court to demolish an old laundromat to build a new building.
- sadris 7y ago
  The other Chernobyl units continued to operate commercially until 1998.
abalone 7y ago
> Crucially, the researchers showed all respondents information about the number of deaths that had historically occurred in the worst accident associated with the technology. This is important for nuclear power, since accidents are rare but can have dire consequences if they do occur. This seems like a flawed study. It implies that previous nuclear accidents are sufficient data to form a precise “statistical risk” level. And if people don’t decide based on those statistics alone they must be irrational and just “anxious”. That is not a scientific conclusion. Nuclear accidents are rare, but potentially extreme. Just one more major accident, or the first case of terrorism, could significantly change the statistics. Thus It is possible that people are being rational when they recognize that we have too few data points to form a precise risk model for nuclear power.
bigbadgoose 7y ago
The issue is that failures are catastrophic, and not under your control. And while systems and protocols can be perfectly designed, human administration is the weak link.
- kikoreis 7y ago
  When plans fail and crash, it's a catastrophe. And yet we trust technology and process to fly everywhere all the time. We need to put nuclear in the same place in our hearts. (I think the root cause of why it's not is irrational fear of radiation, which is why I love https://xkcd.com/radiation/ https://xkcd.com/radiation/ so much)
  - ElijahLynn 7y ago
    A plane crash doesn't have the ability to destroy an entire region.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
HocusLocus 7y ago
From my 2016 letter on Energy to Candidate Trump, https://archive.org/download/20160422TrumpEnergyLetterSC/20160422%20trump%20energy%20letter%20SC.pdf https://archive.org/download/20160422TrumpEnergyLetterSC/201... QUOTE We must finish taming fire. It is no longer enough to raise sensible children without an irrational fear of nuclear energy. They must become aware at a young age that there is a silent war on and they must, in order to ensure the continued survival of modern civilization, begin to oppose and publicly ridicule anyone exhibiting this fear. This may range from a gentle instruction and chiding of those who express misgivings honestly and openly, to a direct and aggressive attack on the greatest dangers of our time — the ones who deliberately cloak their anti-nuclear sentiment in Byzantine ways intended to derail debate and parry the subject to other 'alternative' approaches. It is unethical to see no clear path to unbounded Energy as anything but an existential threat. Sound familiar? That is similar to the tactic fronted by frenetic climate alarmists who are trying to push a dozen pet agendas and several for-profit agendas crafted specially for them, all at once — rallying the people over a global average temperature signal that is presently buried in noise, and a CO2-to-temperature causation that may turn out to be nil or even backwards. Unfortunately there is an international scam in progress and the scammers are clever, they have seized the moral high-ground because it had been left unoccupied and undefended. Those who praise humanity and progress for its own sake, and would remind others we should never judge ourselves in haste, must have wandered off somewhere. There is also a scuffle on the Global Warming moral high-ground as the folks who run nuclear power plants are kicked in the face and tossed off the mound. They expected to be welcomed with open arms because nuclear energy will help save the planet from CO2. They did not realize the movement is rife with people whose irrational fear of radiation exceeds any commitment to the environment. Anyone who even mentions nuclear power gets a feral and brutal response. I've taken pity on the nuclear industry and have tried to explain the phenomenon but they're not taking it very well. Like the Amish, our nuclear power industry needs staunch defenders surrounding it. They're just too polite for their own good. Unfortunately, we have passed beyond peak politeness. To force Energy debates to address practical solutions, bullies are needed. We must rout the occupiers and re-take the moral high-ground because we place a high priority on survival, and for the children's sake. And because ... well ... "What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals..." And other such stuff.
jrjrjrjr 7y ago
Totally safe nuclear reactor operations are easily defined by placing a mandatory employee daycare center in the containment.

129 points by Reedx 7y ago

As it should. Since the world experiences a catastrophic nuclear meltdown every 20 years on average, we can get ready for the next one. It would be impossible to count the cost of Fukushima in lives or cancers since the damn thing is still leaking massive amounts of radioactive water into the ocean. This article, like most nuclear puff pieces, says we should move on 'cause there's nothin' to see here. The industry must constantly release this kind of PR (notice it appears every single day on HN) because, as much as they don't like to admit it, their industry is dying worlwide. As others here have pointed out, nuclear is the technology of the past, not the future. The future of energy production is local, small scale, and, distributed.

striking 7y ago
"Please don't make insinuations about astroturfing. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried, email us and we'll look at the data."
- mimixco 7y ago
  Sorry, which part of my comment is unfactual?
wool_gather 7y ago
> says we should move on 'cause there's nothin' to see here It says nothing of the sort. It's a straightforward, albeit brief, report of a public opinion study that someone at the university did.
andrewprock 7y ago
While nuclear is certainly going to be around longer than coal, the impact is just as catastrophic, if not more so than coal. The reason it is hard to see is that the cost of both of these technologies is going to be with us for thousands, and tens of thousands of years. It may also be that solar, wind, and geothermal will also have similar cost integrations over time, but it seems less likely.
- CountSessine 7y ago
  It may also be that solar, wind, and geothermal will also have similar cost integrations over time, but it seems less likely. Some of the storage technologies associated with solar will almost certainly have huge death tolls associated with them. There's been a proposal that we stack large blocks of concrete into towers with cranes to store solar energy. But this is basically a construction site. We can pretend otherwise, but with cranes and heavy blocks of concrete, it's hard to call this something other than a construction site. Workers and site managers in modern construction sites in developed countries are almost fanatical about safety, and yet accidents happen and people die. And these storage sites would be larger than the cities they supply back-up power to - they would be the largest construction sites ever built.
  - bronson 7y ago
    What you’re saying may or may not come true one day but it’s not on anyone’s road map today. Your last sentence veers into science fiction.
    - CountSessine 7y ago
      The future is now! https://qz.com/1355672/stacking-concrete-blocks-is-a-surprisingly-efficient-way-to-store-energy/ https://qz.com/1355672/stacking-concrete-blocks-is-a-surpris... All of the technology surrounding solar storage is science fiction right now - we have lots of things working at a nano-scale. And every one of them has problems when we imagine using them to store nation-sized power. If stacking blocks of concrete is what prevails, then of course we need to compare the death tolls from that to what we see with nuclear and other technologies.
      - bronson 7y ago
        A 20-meter-tall, single-armed crane is the future? According to your article, that’s all that exists now. So, again, maybe or maybe not. You have a long, long way to go first.
      - 7y ago
stevenwoo 7y ago
Obviously it's slightly fictionalized but the Chernobyl mini-series on HBO illustrates how people just doing their job to the best of their ability manage to come close to killing millions of people - SPOILER for something that happened a long time ago - the first approach to put out the fire was ignorant of the danger of a nuclear lava flow into full water tanks - and the writer claims to be pro nuclear power in his interviews and postings on reddit.

floatingatoll 7y ago

I would have worded this headline differently, in a way that focuses on what I see to be the core issue: Public's Dread of Nuclear Power Management Limits Its Deployment It's not that we're afraid of nuclear power, it's that we're afraid that nuclear power will be managed as poorly as our other basic infrastructure is.

dsfyu404ed 7y ago
HN may care about the difference between nuclear power and management/operation thereof but the general public does not draw that distinction.
- imtringued 7y ago
  Pretty much every failure of nuclear power can be summed up as a management problem.
  - floatingatoll 7y ago
    And so if we can present underground thorium capsule reactors as “if mismanaged, it cools into a lump of harmless rock”, and design them to do so, we have a viable marketing solution to nuclear power.

option 7y ago

Anti-nuclear movements and sentiments are very similar to the anti-vaxer ones in their denial of science and basic statistics. Perhaps even more dangerous for society.

falcrist 7y ago
I'm very pro-nuclear, but I still think this is an extremely unfair comparison. If you actually talk to anti-nuclear advocates, they have reasonable concerns about safety, disposal, oversight, and proliferation. Now I don't think those concerns override the fact that nuclear fission is our best stop-gap as we slowly transition to renewables. But that doesn't mean everything anti-nuclear folks say is bunk. The whole anti-vaxx movement, on the other hand, is based almost exclusively on lies and propaganda. Maybe it's because the anti-vaxx movement grew via social media channels, which increased its toxicity substantially.
- avar 7y ago
  They have "reasonable" concerns, but the comparison is spot-on. Their narrow-minded paranoia has by-and-large resulted in the alternative being coal, which is killing almost a million people every year, and that's just yearly deaths, not the cumulative carbon released into the atmosphere which we'll be paying for for the next thousand years at best. Just like someone not vaccinating their kids isn't right just because they can point to some miniscule fatality rate as a result of vaccinations (e.g. infections, adverse reactions to vaccines etc.). Those tiny numbers are drowned out by the death rate of not vaccinating. So pick the shittiest Soviet nuclear design you can think of. If we powered the whole world on that and had 10 Chernobyls every year it would still suck less than coal.
  - falcrist 7y ago
    They don't have ""reasonable"" concerns with scare quotes. They have legitimately reasonable concerns. Nuclear is prohibitively expensive, inherently dangerous (in terms of being high-stakes), difficult to oversee properly (particularly since reactors can outlive governments), and it requires disposal of some of the most toxic waste mankind has ever produced. I have an answer to all of those concerns, but that does NOT mean they're any less reasonable. Anti-vaxx on the other hand have completely UNreasonable concerns. Most of those I talk to in the anti-vaxx movement still think there's a risk of autism. Many think this is all a conspiracy by big pharma to sell more medicine. That's not reasonable. That's not even "reasonable". That's a conspiracy theory. I think there's a fundamental difference here as well as a difference in scale. That's why I'm saying this is a terrible comparison.

imglorp 7y ago

The public also dreads vaccines, dihydrogen monoxide, and planetary alignments. The solution to all of these problems is solid education to make informed citizens.

umvi 7y ago
> The solution to all of these problems is solid education to make informed citizens. Easier said than done. Even if you drop a world class school with world class teachers into a poor neighborhood, you still won't guarantee everyone gets a "solid education". Education is tightly coupled not just to public schools, but private family life as well, and the latter is much more difficult to solve.
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  I disagree - the education system itself is deeply unforgiving in how it functions. From even the most basic level of school scheduling being directly at odds with teenage biology, all the way to how students are ranked and filed purely based on test scores. These kids in poor neighborhoods usually (statistically) don't have the support that even the best students need to get through school. Of course there are always exceptions, but this is just what I've observed.
  - umvi 7y ago
    Well, my neighbors are on public assistance, and I swear the kids are truant half the time. Doesn't matter how great your school is if the kids don't go and the parents don't care if they go or not.
    - cameronbrown 7y ago
      Let me rephrase my point: if school was more engaging and less of a punishment (which is what it can feel like for these already disadvantaged kids) then they might be more inclined to want to go. Obviously some home situations are too rough to sort out, but I think that's a situation where the government needs to step in.

jwr 7y ago

I have conflicted thoughts on this. On one hand, nuclear energy seems to be the only way we have right now to at least try to avoid the oncoming climate catastrophe. On the other hand, I'm reading "Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies" by Charles Perrow and it's scary. Really scary. The combination of very complex systems with interactions that no one understands and greed, poor oversight, and other human behaviors results in something we should be afraid of. And yet, we might have no choice but to use nuclear power. By the way, official statistics are one thing (I used to love quoting them as well), but if you look at the number of "close calls" that we had and if you look into the causes behind various incidents, a different picture emerges and you might lose some of the confidence. I also now think that anyone taking part in the discussion should read Perrow's book. One thought I had while reading the book is that these days it might make sense to try to model these complex systems and run simulations to at least try to discover the unexpected interactions and mitigate them. Similar to (for example) how FoundationDB was developed. Simulations on that scale were likely difficult or impossible at the time when most nuclear plants were designed, but with modern computing power we might have better ways of reducing the problem domain.

dv_dt 7y ago
I find it very likely to be wrong when statements say xxx is the "only" way to do something. Particularly with nuclear which has strong evidence in the US, France and China that plants can't be built in sufficient time to make a difference at this point, while it's pretty clear that renewables and storage are not only feasible, but more cost effective and faster to rollout, as well as to advance technologically vs nuclear.
- Robotbeat 7y ago
  I agree that nuclear isn’t technically the only option, but statements like “Can’t be built fast enough to make a difference” is also not true, particularly if you use historical examples YES in France. We’re going to need deep decarbonization, and actually the most likely scenario is it will take decades, so there’s actually substantial time for nuclear to make a difference. It doesn’t HAVE to take a long time to build a nuclear power plant. I’m firmly in the “every zero carbon option now, as fast as possible.” And nuclear is definitely part of that. I’ve become worried about the stalling solar power deployment rate in the US (and other places). It hasn’t stopped, but it no longer appears to be on the same exponential growth curve we needed it to be on. We’re going to need everything we can get.

cameronbrown 7y ago

Nuclear power is the only real option we have to limit climate change, that we can put into motion right now. The downsides are the politics associated, glacial construction times, and the fact we still lack proper disposal sites. Critical thinking skills and more statistics education is something the world sorely needs.

option 7y ago
waste disposal is not as big of a problem for modern reactors
p_l 7y ago
You don't need waste disposal sites if you have full reprocessing chain. Which was made nearly-illegal and an invitation for us-sanctioned airstrike for several decades even if you abide by NPT, so...
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  My apologies, I was under the impression that waste was an order of magnitude lower on modern designs, but I was unaware it's effectively eliminated.
  - mimixco 7y ago
    The waste problem has in no way been solved. Reprocessing is, itself, horribly polluting and its waste byproducts are more dangerous than the original spent fuel rods. I'll also add here that Fukushima is still pouring radiation into the Pacific Ocean while we pontificate.
  - p_l 7y ago
    It's not so much eliminated, so much as we can reprocess a lot of what we now have as "waste". Yes, it still involves possibly polluting reagents (some common reagents are the same as in microchip production, btw). However, it enables use of different types of reactors and different total economy of nuclear power generation. The end result is that properly managed, you can limit remaining waste as well as extend usability of each kilogram of fissile material several times. Reprocessing of waste is also how several crucial isotopes are produced - for example, Canadian CANDU reactors are famous for producing important resources for medicine (radiation sources mainly). Similarly, Polish research reactors near Warsaw partially pay for their upkeep by reprocessing the spent fuel into medical isotopes and weapons-grade plutonium (which is then milled with uranium into MOX fuel for civilian reactors)

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago

I am becoming more convinced that we as a civilization will not cut CO2 emissions in time and we will need some type of carbon sequestration. Carbon sequestration is going to horrendously energy intensive and we will need something like nuclear power to provide that kind of energy.

beat 7y ago
I agree we'll probably need some sort of carbon sequestration. I disagree that nuclear is the only possible power source for that (or for that matter, that sequestration is going to be that energy-intensive).
- gizmo686 7y ago
  How can sequestration not be energy intensive? Carbon is diffused throughout the atmosphere as relativly low energy statw molecules. Even assuming 100% efficiency, what end state of sequestration would not require significant energy just from conservation of energy.
  - beat 7y ago
    Okay, maybe not energy intensive is the wrong way to put it, but... what about organically capturing carbon? Trees or algae farms? It's energy intensive, but it's solar energy, not generated electricity.
  - pfdietz 7y ago
    The reaction of CO2 with olivine is mildly exothermic.
  - pfdietz 7y ago
    I'll add that you could have figured out that there must be exothermic ways to sequester CO2, since CO2 naturally is scrubbed from the atmosphere by some process. If this process were not exothermic, CO2 would just accumulate in the atmosphere until the Earth resembled Venus. https://skepticalscience.com/weathering.html https://skepticalscience.com/weathering.html

mistrial9 7y ago

Is it coincidental, that something so complex, and multi-faceted, with both huge potential risks and benefits, attracts floods of simple-minded and "I told you so" comments, from even this very intelligent crowd

kikoreis 7y ago
I don't think it's actually that multi-faceted. It's simple. 1. We have a coal problem. Fixing that would buy us critical space in the climate change equation. 2. Nuclear is the only viable short-term alternative. 3. Nuclear has a bad reputation, but new information has come to light (modern reactor design, handling of waste, total impact proportional to coal). We need a lot of active debate on this.
- cesarb 7y ago
  > Nuclear is the only viable short-term alternative. One of the arguments against nuclear is that it's not a short-term alternative; nuclear power plants take decades to build. For instance, the latest nuclear power plant in my country is under construction for over 30 years, and is still not complete; the other reactors in the same complex took 12 years and 24 years to build, according to Wikipedia.

Reedx 7y ago

> ... there remains a gulf in understanding the difference between the technology's statistical risks and the dread it evokes ... that dread about nuclear power leads respondents to choose 40% less nuclear generation in 2050 than they would have chosen in the absence of this dread." Education on nuclear statistics and modern nuclear technology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor) would be useful. Though I wonder if we're stuck for a similar reason many are afraid of flying, but not of driving - despite driving being significantly more dangerous statistically - the idea/story of a plane crash is vastly scarier than a car crash.

the8472 7y ago
Have there been any commercial deployments of Gen IV reactors? You can't cite statistics of things that haven't been in operation for a reasonable fraction of their expected lifecycle.
- kikoreis 7y ago
  Gen IV you're right. Gen III (and "III+") reactors already bring significant safety changes ("passive nuclear safety", though that is a spectrum) and we've had a few of those running for a while now, the longest for 20+ years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_III_reactor#Generation_III_reactors_currently_operational_or_under_construction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_III_reactor#Generat...

keiferski 7y ago

Correct me if I’m wrong, but nuclear energy fundamentally requires a strong state, at least one capable enough of maintaining facilities and disposing of the waste. Looking at human history, the assumption that some state power will always be able to manage it seems rather naive. There have been long stretches of feudalism, warfare, and all-out anarchy and indeed the current relatively stable forms of government are not the norm historically. If all it takes to cause a nuclear meltdown is a brief lapse in order or relative peace, then that doesn’t strike me as very anti-fragile. Furthermore, nuclear power requires and perpetuates government control over things in a way that say, solar energy, doesn’t. Whether that’s a good thing or not depends on your political persuasion, of course. That said, one could probably also make the opposite argument that nuclear power would lead to more incentives for peace and stability, in the same way that arguments for Mutually-Assured-Destruction argue that nuclear weapons prevent warfare.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
>There have been long stretches of feudalism, warfare, and all-out anarchy and indeed the current relatively stable forms of government are not the norm historically. If all it takes to cause a nuclear meltdown is a brief lapse in order or relative peace, then that doesn’t strike me as very anti-fragile. If that happens, the death caused by nuclear power will be the least of your concerns. A descent into anarchy would result in millions or tens of millions of deaths resulting from the collapse of civilization. A few hundred or thousand deaths from any nuclear power plants would be a rounding error in the calculation.
- amanaplanacanal 7y ago
  Since other systems are also fragile, we shouldn't care about adding one more? I'm pretty sure I'm against that line of thinking.
- pfdietz 7y ago
  If the world descends into horrific disorder, I want our descendants to have lots of easily accessible plutonium so they can come out on top. :)

NickM 7y ago

Conversations about public perception ignore the bigger problem of cost. Why build big expensive nuclear plants that frequently have to be subsidized and bailed out, when solar/wind/storage are already cheaper and continue to drop in cost? Even if we never have another meltdown again, and even if we never have a containment breach of the waste for the next 10k years, the economics just don't make sense.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
CountSessine 7y ago
Because there are only a few sites in the world that can supply reliable wind power in the megawatts, and the scales of storage required to provide even minimal backup power for solar to make it useful at the 3TW of power used by the United States are probably impossible (the figure I've heard for pumped water, e.g., is that every lake in the US would have to be raised 400m). Solar/wind/storage means getting by with orders of magnitude less energy usage. Maybe we should? I just think that asking people to vote for that is even more impossible than getting them to vote for nuclear.
- ourlordcaffeine 7y ago
  Needing massive amounts of storage to make renewable work is an often repeated myth. Large reductions in carbon output are achievable with current storage with a mixture of wind, limited solar and the right price/balancing incentives.
  - CountSessine 7y ago
    Do the math. Figure out how much water you need to lift and how high to supply a day of 3TW of power.
    - imtringued 7y ago
      My numbers tell me North America has 1 PWh of storage capacity just for gas alone. This isn't even counting all the EWhs that we haven't extracted yet or the unlimited amount we could produce by using excess energy and turning it into hydrogen or methane.

StreamBright 7y ago

Just one pic: https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2017/05/hypothetical-number-of-deaths-from-energy-production.png https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2017/05/hypothetical-numb...

SECProto 7y ago
"Over 11000 people will die PER YEAR if we switch to nuclear energy!!" Despite that, I use a similar argument to that graph on the (rare) occasions I've discussed nuclear energy with friends and family.
eeZah7Ux 7y ago
The calculation completely ignores any risk of nuclear disaster. It's simply based on historical data, which is hugely misleading and dishonest. Each existing barrel of nuclear waste has been causing risk for few decades at max but will cause risk for thousands of years. (Not to mention all the waste that has been dispersed in the environment) This is like driving a car for a 30 seconds and claiming that it's safe.
- mercutio2 7y ago
  This is not how radioactivity works. There’s lots of construction material that has isotopes with a long half life. But the long half life means it’s barely dangerous (less dangerous than background levels of radiation in many habited places in the world). The stuff that’s actually dangerous for humans are isotopes with short half lives. Those isotopes, by definition, don’t last long.
- StreamBright 7y ago
  So does coal waste. Handling nuclear waste is not improving because humanity gave up on using tis energy. There are reactor types which “burn” nuclear waste from traditional plants and make them less dangerous. All of the problems you mention are solvable: safety, radioactive waste etc if we commit to it. Fire and burning is 400.000 years old, nuclear power is 70-80. We have technology ready to make it safe just as we did with fire.

instabird 7y ago

I am in no way near an expert on this topic, but from what I know and given nuclear's track record, nuclear energy is probably mankind's only way out of total climate breakdown.

maxander 7y ago

I'm generally in favor of nuclear power, but I recognize that there's some reasonable ground for opposing its development on grounds of potential catastrophe or radiation leakage risk. What gets me, rather, is that while we as a society have rejected nuclear power plants as too dangerous, we're still sitting on thousands and thousands of nuclear weapons- and still building more in the present day! [0] The failure of anti-nuclear activists to address the kind of nuclear technologies which can actually be catastrophic, while instead focusing on those which are constructive and at least generally safe, is maddening. [0] https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/us-nuclear-weapons-modernization https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/us-nuclear-weapons-moderniz...

0xffff2 7y ago
The grounds really aren't that reasonable. Nuclear has potential for catastrophe, but coal and other fossil fuels are a constant ongoing catastrophe by their very nature even if you disregard climate change. It would take many, many nuclear disasters for nuclear to come even remotely close to killing as many people as fossil fuel energy generation already has. https://climate.nasa.gov/news/903/coal-and-gas-are-far-more-harmful-than-nuclear-power/ https://climate.nasa.gov/news/903/coal-and-gas-are-far-more-...
- pfdietz 7y ago
  Arguiung that we should stick with nuclear because it's cleaner than coal is like saying we should continue with gasoline fueled cars because they're cleaner than horses. It's looking at the wrong competition.
  - 0xffff2 7y ago
    Huh? This analogy makes no sense to me at all. Which is cleaner is only incidentally related to my point. Nuclear is safer than goal in terms of deaths caused by such a tremendous margin that no single nuclear catastrophe could possibly even make a dent.
    - 7y ago

thrillgore 7y ago

Stop trying to make nuclear power a thing. It's not happening. We're all concerned about the state of the aging plants in the US and many are not hardened enough for the impact of climate change.

mimixco 7y ago
The whole industry is dying, all over the world, and must now reply on PR puff pieces such as this one that continue to haul out the "climate will kill us!" bogeyman. Perhaps nuclear advocates haven't considered that, given enough time, the Earth's cyclical climate will kill us anyway. Personally, I'd rather wait for that than have nuke plants speed up the death toll and pollute the land with uranium tailings and contaminated water. But that's just me.
- zaq_xsw 7y ago
  > Earth's cyclical climate will kill us anyway Why? The reason climate change is dangerous is not because it'll get too hot or cold for us, but because the temperature is changing too fast. It's the gradient that's the problem.
  - mimixco 7y ago
    Vast swaths of North America have been under water or covered in ice sheets at various points in the Earth's history, including the time when humans lived. I think it's fair to say that we are not well adapted to live under water or ice, yet both of those are definitely coming. Someday.
    - zaq_xsw 7y ago
      Okay, so updated: > Perhaps nuclear advocates haven't considered [that if we can slow down climate change then we'll have to make some steady societal changes over the next few thousand years (instead of over a much smaller time-frame) to adapt to the Earth's natural climate changes] Not to be rude, but you're wasting peoples' time when you don't even follow your own line of thinking in your comments. You've made quite a few comments on this post that don't really contribute to the discussion.

cwbrandsma 7y ago

We have a "safety at any cost" mentality in society, which limits development in multiple areas. This was not the case 50 years ago, but it is today. There is a healthy respect for safety, but what we have now is constant fear mongering across society. Not just nuclear power, but immigration, stranger danger, helicopter parents, etc. All brought to you by the 24 hours news cycle that makes money by making sure everyone stays paranoid.

zaq_xsw 7y ago
It's worse than that though, because, for example, nuclear power is significantly safer than other technologies currently in use[1][2], and as another example, immigrants (including illegal immigrants) are less likely to commit crimes than native-born citizens in the United States[3][4], at least for several generations (they asymptotically approach native levels). So I think we're fighting a couple of battles here: fear-mongering and misinformation/ignorance, and I guess they go hand-in-hand. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2017/05/hypothetical-number-of-deaths-from-energy-production.png https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2017/05/hypothetical-numb... [2] Kharecha Pushker A, 2013 [3] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1078087417704974?journalCode=uarb https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/107808741770497... [4] https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jul/06/donald-trump/trump-immigration-claim-has-no-data-back-it/ https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jul...

PunksATawnyFill 7y ago

WTF? Where's the actual study? If you go here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421519302125 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151... Once again there's no link to the study. And if you go here: https://s100.copyright.com/AppDispatchServlet?publisherName=ELS&contentID=S0301421519302125&orderBeanReset=true https://s100.copyright.com/AppDispatchServlet?publisherName=... "Read the article" isn't an option! Now the question is: Were public funds used in the study? If so, we own it and should have access.

howard941 7y ago
Public funds were used: >This work was supported by the UC San Diego Frontiers of Innovation Scholars Program; the UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy; the Electric Power Research Institute; and the Center for Climate and Energy Decision Making at Carnegie Mellon University, which is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (SES-094970). Unfortunately I had to use a site available at a Taiwan hostname to view the funding source info.
sampo 7y ago
> Where's the actual study? Scientific articles can nowadays be found Sci-Hub: https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2019.03.039 https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2019.03.0...

srs_sput 7y ago

One of the most interesting things I've learned this past week is that Ukraine generates almost 50% of it's electricity from nuclear reactors. I think it's impressive a country can suffer the worst nuclear accident but still overcome the fear of using it.

mimixco 7y ago
When states impose their will on the people, public sentiment doesn't matter. The idea that a former Soviet state would submit nuclear power to a democratic vote is simply farcical.
781 7y ago
Ukraine is not the kind of place where you need to fight 5 years in court to demolish an old laundromat to build a new building.
sadris 7y ago
The other Chernobyl units continued to operate commercially until 1998.

abalone 7y ago

> Crucially, the researchers showed all respondents information about the number of deaths that had historically occurred in the worst accident associated with the technology. This is important for nuclear power, since accidents are rare but can have dire consequences if they do occur. This seems like a flawed study. It implies that previous nuclear accidents are sufficient data to form a precise “statistical risk” level. And if people don’t decide based on those statistics alone they must be irrational and just “anxious”. That is not a scientific conclusion. Nuclear accidents are rare, but potentially extreme. Just one more major accident, or the first case of terrorism, could significantly change the statistics. Thus It is possible that people are being rational when they recognize that we have too few data points to form a precise risk model for nuclear power.

bigbadgoose 7y ago

The issue is that failures are catastrophic, and not under your control. And while systems and protocols can be perfectly designed, human administration is the weak link.

kikoreis 7y ago
When plans fail and crash, it's a catastrophe. And yet we trust technology and process to fly everywhere all the time. We need to put nuclear in the same place in our hearts. (I think the root cause of why it's not is irrational fear of radiation, which is why I love https://xkcd.com/radiation/ https://xkcd.com/radiation/ so much)
- ElijahLynn 7y ago
  A plane crash doesn't have the ability to destroy an entire region.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

HocusLocus 7y ago

From my 2016 letter on Energy to Candidate Trump, https://archive.org/download/20160422TrumpEnergyLetterSC/20160422%20trump%20energy%20letter%20SC.pdf https://archive.org/download/20160422TrumpEnergyLetterSC/201... QUOTE We must finish taming fire. It is no longer enough to raise sensible children without an irrational fear of nuclear energy. They must become aware at a young age that there is a silent war on and they must, in order to ensure the continued survival of modern civilization, begin to oppose and publicly ridicule anyone exhibiting this fear. This may range from a gentle instruction and chiding of those who express misgivings honestly and openly, to a direct and aggressive attack on the greatest dangers of our time — the ones who deliberately cloak their anti-nuclear sentiment in Byzantine ways intended to derail debate and parry the subject to other 'alternative' approaches. It is unethical to see no clear path to unbounded Energy as anything but an existential threat. Sound familiar? That is similar to the tactic fronted by frenetic climate alarmists who are trying to push a dozen pet agendas and several for-profit agendas crafted specially for them, all at once — rallying the people over a global average temperature signal that is presently buried in noise, and a CO2-to-temperature causation that may turn out to be nil or even backwards. Unfortunately there is an international scam in progress and the scammers are clever, they have seized the moral high-ground because it had been left unoccupied and undefended. Those who praise humanity and progress for its own sake, and would remind others we should never judge ourselves in haste, must have wandered off somewhere. There is also a scuffle on the Global Warming moral high-ground as the folks who run nuclear power plants are kicked in the face and tossed off the mound. They expected to be welcomed with open arms because nuclear energy will help save the planet from CO2. They did not realize the movement is rife with people whose irrational fear of radiation exceeds any commitment to the environment. Anyone who even mentions nuclear power gets a feral and brutal response. I've taken pity on the nuclear industry and have tried to explain the phenomenon but they're not taking it very well. Like the Amish, our nuclear power industry needs staunch defenders surrounding it. They're just too polite for their own good. Unfortunately, we have passed beyond peak politeness. To force Energy debates to address practical solutions, bullies are needed. We must rout the occupiers and re-take the moral high-ground because we place a high priority on survival, and for the children's sake. And because ... well ... "What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals..." And other such stuff.

jrjrjrjr 7y ago

Totally safe nuclear reactor operations are easily defined by placing a mandatory employee daycare center in the containment.