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I see this argument made again and again. Just because one is "worse" by selective parameters doesn't mean that the other option is any good either. Can we buil

I see this argument made again and again. Just because one is "worse" by selective parameters doesn't mean that the other option is any good either. Can we build safe nuclear power plants? Yes. Does money, greed, pride, and stupidity triumph in the end? Yes. And then you end up with safety precautions and risks being hand-waved just as what is happening in the US where most of the nuclear power plants are operating beyond their designed life span. Why are we ignoring the fact that this geographic location is unusable now? I don't see anybody rushing to get in line to walk into the Fukushima plant or to move back to Chernobyl. There's more damage than immediate death. That environment is lost. It contaminates ground water, soil, the wildlife, the air. You're willfully ignoring the reality and taking the hopeful ideals.

soperj 7y ago
Same thing happens with Hydro plants, except immediately.
falcolas 7y ago
Animals and plant life are thriving in the fallout zone of Chernobyl. It's only unusable by humans, and even then not all humans; there is a community that lives in the fallout zone, not to mention tourism. https://thebabushkasofchernobyl.com/ https://thebabushkasofchernobyl.com/ Also, money and greed does not always win out. See: the Onagawa nuclear reactor which is closer to the epicenter than Fukishima, and which was properly managed and is still running.
- freebear 7y ago
  Thriving? https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/april-27-2019-oilsands-emissions-underestimated-chernobyl-s-wildlife-a-comet-trapped-in-an-asteroid-and-mo-1.5111304/cataracts-small-brains-and-dna-damage-chernobyl-s-wildlife-33-years-after-the-meltdown-1.5111321 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/april-27-2019-oilsands-emiss... They are f'd, their DNA is also f'd so...
  - arcticbull 7y ago
    That wasn't my take-away after reading this. The article shows that animals are in fact being affected by the radiation. Is that not expected? It'd only been 33 years at the time this article was written - a handful of generations - and evolution takes time. Life on this planet hasn't really evolved to deal with high levels of background radiation for the most part. That said, it appears they are in fact evolving: > "Some birds make use of melanin for coloration, but they also make use of the precursor to melanin as an antioxidant, which may provide some measure of defence against the ionizing radiation," said Mousseau. > In a study, he found that those birds that seemed to show less genetic damage ended up being a bit lighter coloured. > "It looks like there's a tradeoff in the use of this antioxidant between colouration and defence against oxidative stress or ionizing radiation." Or, alternatively, to paraphrase, while the animals there haven't yet evolved a complete defense to the ionizing radiation, some species are expressing traits correlated to their ability to withstand it. This gives them a survival advantage, so over time, it stands to reason they will compensate. > "But it's clear that there's more going on than just the acute exposure effects." I must have missed the part where the author threw up their hands and yelled "looks like the animals are f'd." I'm not saying this is good or bad, just that changes to the environment are very much in nature's wheelhouse. Humans, especially individual humans, are the fragile ones. Life has shown itself incredibly resilient, and some increases in background radiation aren't about to stop it. After all, tardigrades are able to survive constant irradiation hundreds of times the lethal dose for humans while frozen solid in space.
- patrickhogan1 7y ago
  It is a cognitive bias to believe the worst thing that has happened in the past is the worst that will happen in the future. Chernobyl occurred in an era with less people globally, less people locally, worse sensing technology/less transparent politics to more accurately gauge worldwide impact, and smaller nuclear reactors. Chernobyl proves the black swan risk could have been far graver - making Kiev and large parts of Ukraine uninhabitable. Most people are logical to choose a risk they can understand (solar, carbon, etc.) vs a complicated risk they can’t (nuclear). Which may be 1000x worse. The nuclear argument gets weaker by the year considering rapid advancements in renewables and the decades+ period of time it takes to build a new nuclear reactor. We have the safest nuclear reactor available. The sun.
  - njarboe 7y ago
    The amount of cancer caused by the sun each year worldwide is probably in the millions. Not very safe, but turning it off would be worse. Life is full of trade offs. Until coal burning plants are all gone the world should embrace nuclear power as a much better alternative.
    - badloginagain 7y ago
      Shit if you want to talk about radioactive damage, coal mines emit huge amounts of radiation that aren't "counted" because the radiation is "naturally occuring".
      - saalweachter 7y ago
        My personal favorite analogue are coal seam fires, which can render areas inhospitable and burn for hundreds or thousands of years.
  - jdietrich 7y ago
    The soviet nuclear industry was very close to the worst-case scenario - inherently unsafe reactors being operated by badly trained personnel and overseen by a corrupt and secretive agency that barely deserves the title of "regulator". The Chernobyl disaster could have been far worse if it weren't for the extraordinary bravery of the liquidators, but there's just no way that such a catastrophically dangerous reactor could be built in 2019. The RBMK reactors at Chernobyl were based on a design from the the early 1950s and were crude even by the standards of the time. The reactor design is inherently unsafe for several reasons, which was compounded by inadequate monitoring and containment systems. Safe operation of the reactor was hindered by a deliberate and systematic cover-up of the flawed nature of the reactor design; the emergency response was similarly hindered by a deliberate and systematic cover-up of the scale of the disaster. Comparing a modern nuclear power plant to Chernobyl is like comparing a 2019 Honda Civic with a 1961 Chevy Corvair. We've learned so many lessons and changed our safety culture so profoundly in in the intervening period. If we are allowed to keep developing and building nuclear reactors, we'll keep building safer and more efficient reactors.
- jupp0r 7y ago
  I wouldn't call it "thriving", there are probably lots of animals dying from radiation poisoning, having birth defects, etc all the time. On the other hand, being mostly undisturbed by people is certainly increasing their population.
- hanniabu 7y ago
  > Also, money and greed does not always win out. See: the Onagawa nuclear reactor which is closer to the epicenter than Fukishima, and which was properly managed and is still running. If it's still in operation then you can't make that deduction yet.
erentz 7y ago
> Why are we ignoring the fact that this geographic location is unusable now? Everyone always ignores the huge amount of land made unusable by hydro and increasingly solar. It’s unfathomable to me how okay people seem to be with the amount of CA land being covered by solar panels. Pretty sure most desert tortoises would rather live next to a nuclear power plant.
- tdhoot 7y ago
  With solar you remove the solar panels and the area is immediately reusable. Or the panels can be mounted above usable space. Or am I missing something?
  - bargl 7y ago
    The problem is that you can never remove them, we just have to replace them. Unless we reduce our use of electricity or come up with a new source, those panels will always be there. It will also take time for the wild life to grow back and if the the ecosystem has changed enough it won't come back the same. This isn't a problem by itself. But if Chernobyl is an example all you have to do is wait 50 years and wild life will move back in too. I'm 100% for renewable energy, but we're making a lot of assumptions on how we're going to get rid of and recycle solar panels. That's a lot of material we have to re-process and see how much we can use and how much was consumed.
    - stephenr 7y ago
      If you want to go build a house out there, it’s hardly rocket science to put the panels on top of it.
      - bargl 7y ago
        Even rocket scientist have fairly bad foresight, see space debris as an example. The reason these plants are reasonably cheap is that there are rows and rows of uniformly hooked up and distributed easy to access solar panels. What you're suggesting is best accomplished by a government subsidy on solar panels. But then individuals own them and we won't have a way to recycle them when they all go bad in 30 years.
boomboomsubban 7y ago
>Why are we ignoring the fact that this geographic location is unusable now? Hydroelectricity has made far more unusable geographic locations. The earth is massive. Losing a couple KM is regrettable but isn't comparable to a million people. >Does money, greed, pride, and stupidity triumph in the end? Yes. >You're willfully ignoring the reality and taking the hopeful ideals. The reality is a million fewer people died, despite money, greed, pride, and stupidity triumphing. How is this the idealistic view?
- zeptoon 7y ago
  Funny how there's always an idiot like this who isn't actually profiting from any of the greed, pride, or stupidity, but still nevertheless is so ready to defend it.
- blub 7y ago
  The German magazine "Der Spiegel" has a catastrophe map, depicting which areas would become uninhabitable in case of nuclear accidents: https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/atomkraft-diese-interaktive-karte-zeigt-das-strahlenrisiko-a-1133716.html https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/atomkraft-diese-i... It's significantly more than a few km, according to that map. It's based on the research of Viennese climate scientists, according to the article.
  - _ph_ 7y ago
    Thanks for the link, I had not seen that before. This shows very well how large regions, which are highly populated would be affected by a large nuclear incident in Europe. Even if one assumes, that every endangered citizen could be evacuated without suffering from any direct damange, it would mean that far to many people would lose their housing and that the food production in the affected regions would suffer.
  - Robotbeat 7y ago
    Dams are a good analogy, here. Dam failures can be catastrophic and far, FAR worse in life lost than even worst-case nuclear failures. The 1975 failure of the hydroelectric Banqiao Dam killed between 100,000 and 230,000 people and destroyed 11 million homes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure Nuclear power is worth the risk when faced with the threat of climate change. At very least, we must keep existing plants operating until we decommission all fossil fuel power plants.
guscost 7y ago
If the government were to let people live downwind of Fukushima, I’d try it out. Probably wouldn’t try the same at Chernobyl, even after all the cleanup...
skwb 7y ago
Uh, yes it does! Economics and policy is all about making (often hard) decisions. Low energy costs have enabled us to make huge economics advances, enabling me to use the computer I'm typing this on. And as promising as renewables are, they still cannot fully replace baseline energy sources (such as coal or nuclear), nor modulate their output to comply with variances in grid demand (batteries, physical or otherwise, would still need to be accounted for in any fair comparison).
- cesarb 7y ago
  > And as promising as renewables are, they still cannot [...] modulate their output to comply with variances in grid demand Even if you forget to count hydroelectric as a renewable (my country has a huge amount of hydroelectric, and every time I look at the realtime power generation graph, it's the hydroelectric that's following the load, while thermal generation is flat), other renewables like solar and wind can also reduce their output as necessary to match the load. They currently don't because, since they're the cheapest power source, it makes more sense to reduce the generation elsewhere first.
  - skwb 7y ago
    It's not so much that they can wind down the energy they make, it's the fact that they cannot store energy for when there's increased demand. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYLzss58CLs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYLzss58CLs
Krasnol 7y ago
> I see this argument made again and again. Yeah, because it's a campaign by the same people who are responsible for money, greed, pride and stupidity. They see their tech disappearing into history and now they start screaming. You see the same straw man arguments painting the people who don't want to go back to nuclear as stupid, paranoid or fans of coal. This has been going on for months now and seems to reach a new high with the Chernobyl TV show showing clearly how those few accidents look like to a generation that has not been around or lived far away. It's disgusting and ignorant but luckily it leads nowhere as nobody is turning around to invest into nuclear because of it.
cm2187 7y ago
I don’t think anyone is suggesting to build 1960s soviet designed nuclear power plants. It’s like pointing at the safety record of the DC-3 and claiming in 2019 that aviation is unsafe.
- hanniabu 7y ago
  I'm not saying anyone is. I'm saying that nuclear power plants are expensive and people are stupid. Corners are cut and mistakes are made to protect their investment and bottom dollar. I've seen reports of concrete cracking on the outdated nuclear plants (operating past life expectancy) in the US and they're basically ignoring it because they're not critical components, but by the time something happens to a critical component it's a little too late. This is all to protect investment and you end up looking the other way until you can't anymore.
  - arcticbull 7y ago
    That's a great way to literally do nothing ever. You could make the same claim about coal mines, about hydro dams, about skyscrapers, about bridges, about aircraft, about self-driving cars. Life is risky. We design mitigations and hold ourselves to them. That's why we're alive right now.
foldingmoney 7y ago
>I see this argument made again and again. Just because one is "worse" by selective parameters doesn't mean that the other option is any good either. It means it's the better option given the choices available. Everything in life is a trade-off. Everything has downside. Some things have more downside than others.

soperj 7y ago

Same thing happens with Hydro plants, except immediately.

falcolas 7y ago

Animals and plant life are thriving in the fallout zone of Chernobyl. It's only unusable by humans, and even then not all humans; there is a community that lives in the fallout zone, not to mention tourism. https://thebabushkasofchernobyl.com/ https://thebabushkasofchernobyl.com/ Also, money and greed does not always win out. See: the Onagawa nuclear reactor which is closer to the epicenter than Fukishima, and which was properly managed and is still running.

freebear 7y ago
Thriving? https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/april-27-2019-oilsands-emissions-underestimated-chernobyl-s-wildlife-a-comet-trapped-in-an-asteroid-and-mo-1.5111304/cataracts-small-brains-and-dna-damage-chernobyl-s-wildlife-33-years-after-the-meltdown-1.5111321 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/april-27-2019-oilsands-emiss... They are f'd, their DNA is also f'd so...
- arcticbull 7y ago
  That wasn't my take-away after reading this. The article shows that animals are in fact being affected by the radiation. Is that not expected? It'd only been 33 years at the time this article was written - a handful of generations - and evolution takes time. Life on this planet hasn't really evolved to deal with high levels of background radiation for the most part. That said, it appears they are in fact evolving: > "Some birds make use of melanin for coloration, but they also make use of the precursor to melanin as an antioxidant, which may provide some measure of defence against the ionizing radiation," said Mousseau. > In a study, he found that those birds that seemed to show less genetic damage ended up being a bit lighter coloured. > "It looks like there's a tradeoff in the use of this antioxidant between colouration and defence against oxidative stress or ionizing radiation." Or, alternatively, to paraphrase, while the animals there haven't yet evolved a complete defense to the ionizing radiation, some species are expressing traits correlated to their ability to withstand it. This gives them a survival advantage, so over time, it stands to reason they will compensate. > "But it's clear that there's more going on than just the acute exposure effects." I must have missed the part where the author threw up their hands and yelled "looks like the animals are f'd." I'm not saying this is good or bad, just that changes to the environment are very much in nature's wheelhouse. Humans, especially individual humans, are the fragile ones. Life has shown itself incredibly resilient, and some increases in background radiation aren't about to stop it. After all, tardigrades are able to survive constant irradiation hundreds of times the lethal dose for humans while frozen solid in space.
patrickhogan1 7y ago
It is a cognitive bias to believe the worst thing that has happened in the past is the worst that will happen in the future. Chernobyl occurred in an era with less people globally, less people locally, worse sensing technology/less transparent politics to more accurately gauge worldwide impact, and smaller nuclear reactors. Chernobyl proves the black swan risk could have been far graver - making Kiev and large parts of Ukraine uninhabitable. Most people are logical to choose a risk they can understand (solar, carbon, etc.) vs a complicated risk they can’t (nuclear). Which may be 1000x worse. The nuclear argument gets weaker by the year considering rapid advancements in renewables and the decades+ period of time it takes to build a new nuclear reactor. We have the safest nuclear reactor available. The sun.
- njarboe 7y ago
  The amount of cancer caused by the sun each year worldwide is probably in the millions. Not very safe, but turning it off would be worse. Life is full of trade offs. Until coal burning plants are all gone the world should embrace nuclear power as a much better alternative.
  - badloginagain 7y ago
    Shit if you want to talk about radioactive damage, coal mines emit huge amounts of radiation that aren't "counted" because the radiation is "naturally occuring".
    - saalweachter 7y ago
      My personal favorite analogue are coal seam fires, which can render areas inhospitable and burn for hundreds or thousands of years.
- jdietrich 7y ago
  The soviet nuclear industry was very close to the worst-case scenario - inherently unsafe reactors being operated by badly trained personnel and overseen by a corrupt and secretive agency that barely deserves the title of "regulator". The Chernobyl disaster could have been far worse if it weren't for the extraordinary bravery of the liquidators, but there's just no way that such a catastrophically dangerous reactor could be built in 2019. The RBMK reactors at Chernobyl were based on a design from the the early 1950s and were crude even by the standards of the time. The reactor design is inherently unsafe for several reasons, which was compounded by inadequate monitoring and containment systems. Safe operation of the reactor was hindered by a deliberate and systematic cover-up of the flawed nature of the reactor design; the emergency response was similarly hindered by a deliberate and systematic cover-up of the scale of the disaster. Comparing a modern nuclear power plant to Chernobyl is like comparing a 2019 Honda Civic with a 1961 Chevy Corvair. We've learned so many lessons and changed our safety culture so profoundly in in the intervening period. If we are allowed to keep developing and building nuclear reactors, we'll keep building safer and more efficient reactors.
jupp0r 7y ago
I wouldn't call it "thriving", there are probably lots of animals dying from radiation poisoning, having birth defects, etc all the time. On the other hand, being mostly undisturbed by people is certainly increasing their population.
hanniabu 7y ago
> Also, money and greed does not always win out. See: the Onagawa nuclear reactor which is closer to the epicenter than Fukishima, and which was properly managed and is still running. If it's still in operation then you can't make that deduction yet.

erentz 7y ago

> Why are we ignoring the fact that this geographic location is unusable now? Everyone always ignores the huge amount of land made unusable by hydro and increasingly solar. It’s unfathomable to me how okay people seem to be with the amount of CA land being covered by solar panels. Pretty sure most desert tortoises would rather live next to a nuclear power plant.

tdhoot 7y ago
With solar you remove the solar panels and the area is immediately reusable. Or the panels can be mounted above usable space. Or am I missing something?
- bargl 7y ago
  The problem is that you can never remove them, we just have to replace them. Unless we reduce our use of electricity or come up with a new source, those panels will always be there. It will also take time for the wild life to grow back and if the the ecosystem has changed enough it won't come back the same. This isn't a problem by itself. But if Chernobyl is an example all you have to do is wait 50 years and wild life will move back in too. I'm 100% for renewable energy, but we're making a lot of assumptions on how we're going to get rid of and recycle solar panels. That's a lot of material we have to re-process and see how much we can use and how much was consumed.
  - stephenr 7y ago
    If you want to go build a house out there, it’s hardly rocket science to put the panels on top of it.
    - bargl 7y ago
      Even rocket scientist have fairly bad foresight, see space debris as an example. The reason these plants are reasonably cheap is that there are rows and rows of uniformly hooked up and distributed easy to access solar panels. What you're suggesting is best accomplished by a government subsidy on solar panels. But then individuals own them and we won't have a way to recycle them when they all go bad in 30 years.

boomboomsubban 7y ago

>Why are we ignoring the fact that this geographic location is unusable now? Hydroelectricity has made far more unusable geographic locations. The earth is massive. Losing a couple KM is regrettable but isn't comparable to a million people. >Does money, greed, pride, and stupidity triumph in the end? Yes. >You're willfully ignoring the reality and taking the hopeful ideals. The reality is a million fewer people died, despite money, greed, pride, and stupidity triumphing. How is this the idealistic view?

zeptoon 7y ago
Funny how there's always an idiot like this who isn't actually profiting from any of the greed, pride, or stupidity, but still nevertheless is so ready to defend it.
blub 7y ago
The German magazine "Der Spiegel" has a catastrophe map, depicting which areas would become uninhabitable in case of nuclear accidents: https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/atomkraft-diese-interaktive-karte-zeigt-das-strahlenrisiko-a-1133716.html https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/atomkraft-diese-i... It's significantly more than a few km, according to that map. It's based on the research of Viennese climate scientists, according to the article.
- _ph_ 7y ago
  Thanks for the link, I had not seen that before. This shows very well how large regions, which are highly populated would be affected by a large nuclear incident in Europe. Even if one assumes, that every endangered citizen could be evacuated without suffering from any direct damange, it would mean that far to many people would lose their housing and that the food production in the affected regions would suffer.
- Robotbeat 7y ago
  Dams are a good analogy, here. Dam failures can be catastrophic and far, FAR worse in life lost than even worst-case nuclear failures. The 1975 failure of the hydroelectric Banqiao Dam killed between 100,000 and 230,000 people and destroyed 11 million homes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure Nuclear power is worth the risk when faced with the threat of climate change. At very least, we must keep existing plants operating until we decommission all fossil fuel power plants.

guscost 7y ago

If the government were to let people live downwind of Fukushima, I’d try it out. Probably wouldn’t try the same at Chernobyl, even after all the cleanup...

skwb 7y ago

Uh, yes it does! Economics and policy is all about making (often hard) decisions. Low energy costs have enabled us to make huge economics advances, enabling me to use the computer I'm typing this on. And as promising as renewables are, they still cannot fully replace baseline energy sources (such as coal or nuclear), nor modulate their output to comply with variances in grid demand (batteries, physical or otherwise, would still need to be accounted for in any fair comparison).

cesarb 7y ago
> And as promising as renewables are, they still cannot [...] modulate their output to comply with variances in grid demand Even if you forget to count hydroelectric as a renewable (my country has a huge amount of hydroelectric, and every time I look at the realtime power generation graph, it's the hydroelectric that's following the load, while thermal generation is flat), other renewables like solar and wind can also reduce their output as necessary to match the load. They currently don't because, since they're the cheapest power source, it makes more sense to reduce the generation elsewhere first.
- skwb 7y ago
  It's not so much that they can wind down the energy they make, it's the fact that they cannot store energy for when there's increased demand. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYLzss58CLs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYLzss58CLs

Krasnol 7y ago

> I see this argument made again and again. Yeah, because it's a campaign by the same people who are responsible for money, greed, pride and stupidity. They see their tech disappearing into history and now they start screaming. You see the same straw man arguments painting the people who don't want to go back to nuclear as stupid, paranoid or fans of coal. This has been going on for months now and seems to reach a new high with the Chernobyl TV show showing clearly how those few accidents look like to a generation that has not been around or lived far away. It's disgusting and ignorant but luckily it leads nowhere as nobody is turning around to invest into nuclear because of it.

cm2187 7y ago

I don’t think anyone is suggesting to build 1960s soviet designed nuclear power plants. It’s like pointing at the safety record of the DC-3 and claiming in 2019 that aviation is unsafe.

hanniabu 7y ago
I'm not saying anyone is. I'm saying that nuclear power plants are expensive and people are stupid. Corners are cut and mistakes are made to protect their investment and bottom dollar. I've seen reports of concrete cracking on the outdated nuclear plants (operating past life expectancy) in the US and they're basically ignoring it because they're not critical components, but by the time something happens to a critical component it's a little too late. This is all to protect investment and you end up looking the other way until you can't anymore.
- arcticbull 7y ago
  That's a great way to literally do nothing ever. You could make the same claim about coal mines, about hydro dams, about skyscrapers, about bridges, about aircraft, about self-driving cars. Life is risky. We design mitigations and hold ourselves to them. That's why we're alive right now.

foldingmoney 7y ago

>I see this argument made again and again. Just because one is "worse" by selective parameters doesn't mean that the other option is any good either. It means it's the better option given the choices available. Everything in life is a trade-off. Everything has downside. Some things have more downside than others.