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Please, never say "safer than solar". Even if technically correct from a certain perspective, it sounds like an "argue to win" point, and just alienates the ver

• petschge 7y ago
  Also there is a huge difference between workers installing solar panels dying on the job from falling of roofs and citizens getting killed by exploding nuclear plants. The former is a risk they were very aware of, had some control over and were payed to accept. The latter is a risk imposed on them outside of their control and without compensation (and if they vote to get rid of that risk HN viciously attacts them).
  • option 7y ago
    My point is that nuclear is very safe, not that we should get rid of solar. People, think! I now live in Bay Area (very sunny place) and have solar on my house. Problem is that it covers at best 40% of my family’s (4 people) energy needs
    • CyanBird 7y ago
      Reduce, reuse, recycle That has always been the mantra and always will. I'm certainly opposed to God forbids opening new nuclear plants, but I'm also opposed to closing existing ones, those are different arguments and should be treated as such. Nuclear fission is a relic of early 50's, but we already paid the co2 cost of building said plants, therefore should continue operating to reduce further damage to the biosphere by releasing more co2/methane. But we don't need to build new nuclear plants, as they are overly expensive and the safer you try to make them the more expensive they get, not to mention that they take a huge amount of time to actually get built and in the meantime release ungodly amounts of co2 with the colossal amounts of steel and concrete needed for the construction, a co2 budget that will take a long time to be recovered
      • mooseburger 7y ago
        They only take that long due to red tape, not due to any intrinsic reason. France did not have this problem. The U.S. could do like them, create the one standardized design for a nuclear plant, build them all the same way, which of course will help with construction, safety and maintenance.
    • Jill_the_Pill 7y ago
      Needs or wants? Could you conserve another 40% if you tried?
      • gwbas1c 7y ago
        A lot of that depends on what the energy medium is. Is the other 40% gas for cars and natural gas for heating? It's very easy to do 100% of electricity from solar in the Bay Area in a home that still drives gas cars, has gas heat and no AC. I coughed up the money to go as solar as I can, (heat pumps, electric vehicles, ect,) but my state's financing had its limits; and then Mother Nature sent me an unusually cloudy April. I'm probably going to be somewhere between 70-85% solar after I have a few years of data. Anyway, when it comes to reducing CO2, celebrate the partial victories. Rooftop solar can take a huge dent in emissions, but it's not a complete solution. There is no silver bullet for this problem.
    • Spooky23 7y ago
      It's a religious argument. The "death per MW" is a red herring. A nuclear advocate will tell you that on a per-MW basis nuclear is safer from a "death from radiation" POV because your installer may fall off a roof or you might get knocked on the head by a loose panel. Conveniently, these "death per-MV" claims exclude the construction of the nuclear plants, the potentially thousands of years of waste containment and human labor associated with it. You also need to price risk higher with nuclear because safety depends heavily on competent administration. That's expensive, and human failure is very common. End of the day, the economics of nuclear are the problem. We would be building nuclear if they made money. In my state, nuclear plants need direct government subsidy (to the tune of billions) as they are unable to sell their electricity at a rate that sustains the plant. The capital costs are extreme and the plant needs to operate at capacity to work financially.
  • falcolas 7y ago
    And the latter (killed by exploding nuclear power plants) is historically zero. All nuclear related fatalities are due to radiation exposure, and the immediate deaths are rather small numbers, with the lingering effects of the fallout (i.e. cancer) only pushing the numbers into the 10's of thousands.
    • petschge 7y ago
      Claiming that the fallout is in no part due to exploding nuclear plants is disingenuous.
      • falcolas 7y ago
        The power plants aren't exploding - that's my point. Calling a meltdown an explosion is factually incorrect, and furthers misconceptions about what happens when a nuclear power plant goes critical. These misconceptions help nobody.
        • colordrops 7y ago
          Chernobyl exploded.
        • petschge 7y ago
          Factually there was a hydrogen explosion in Fukushima due to things doing wrong in the nuclear part. And it produced fall out. That is was not a prompt critical nuclear explosion is semantics. You just want to push nuclear instead of being honest.
          • darkpuma 7y ago
            > "That is was not a prompt critical nuclear explosion is semantics." In a world where nuclear weapons are a thing and the public is generally aware of their horrific effects, the distinction between a meltdown and a 'nuclear explosion' is not semantics.
• option 7y ago
  Regarding risk analysis - past track record is very important, especially when we have decades of it. Nuclear is very heavy regulated (and it should be) to prevent possible risks and new designs are very safe
  • beat 7y ago
    The RBMK design was very safe, too. And it exploded due to a combination of design flaw and dangerous operation. Sure, the rest of them were fixed after that, but. Fukushima was a very safe design, too, and well regulated. Three Mile Island was a very safe design. And let's not even get into the history of lesser-known accidents with less-safe designs, in the hands of paranoid military operators and secretive, embarrassment-shy governments. Of the well-known accidents, all of them were unexpected. And all of them could have gone far worse, were it not for heroic actions and some luck on the part of the operators. And all of them involved a degree of government coverup and the public distrust that causes. So it's not only expected that the public would distrust nuclear power more than is maybe absolutely needed, it's very reasonable for them to do so. The safety of nuclear power worldwide is the safety of the worst design with the worst crew, built by the lowest bidder. Don't just react as if the public is stupid, or there's no risk involved. Those things are the reason the public doesn't take pro-nuclear activists seriously.
    • shawnz 7y ago
      > Of the well-known accidents, all of them were unexpected. What accidents are "expected" in any industry, energy or otherwise?
      • beat 7y ago
        All sorts of accidents are expected. We take them into account. For example, if you operate a large data center, you simply assume that a certain number of drives and motherboards will fail, and build it into the plan. No one planned for Fukushima to be flooded. No on planned for one of Chernobyl's reactor cores to explode. (The phrase "impossible" was tossed around a lot; it took a good deal of thinking to finally recognize the design flaw.)
• falcolas 7y ago
  Decades after the Chernobyl disaster, a worst case scenario, and the total number of people's health negatively impacted is well under 100k. I think it's safe to say that, regardless of the choice between "could" or "have", the number of lives impacted is relatively small (in the scale of power-generation related injuries and deaths).
  • CyanBird 7y ago
    What happened at chernobyl WAS Not a "worse case scenario", had the entire with the other 3 reactors plant exploded in a thermal explosion. Now that would had been a worse case scenario, and today there are still RBMK reactors in operation You wont ever hear of such a risk from a solar plant exploding... If you want to discuss the safety of nuclear energy, then own up the risk and face the criticism, to do otherwise is misleading and cowardly
  • DubiousPusher 7y ago
    But Chernobyl was not a worst case scenario. It was bad but the Soviet government did respond to it seriously. It could've been much worse had they not. In fact, that's what this article gets entirely wrong about the film. The most disturbing thing the film highlights is not the gruesome deaths of a handful of individuals. It's how the disaster could've been much worse.
    • falcolas 7y ago
      > the Soviet government did respond to it seriously If by seriously you mean covering up the problem so the appropriate experts could be brought in to contain the problem before the fallout covered half of Europe, or in not providing proper shielding for the first responders, or by not providing proper funding and training for the staff at Chernobyl... sure, they took it very seriously. /s
      • DubiousPusher 7y ago
        I have read many books about the Soviet Union. The government was full of perverse incentives which encouraged fraud, deception, denial and corruption. The dogma was so perverse it lead to a total corruption of logic and reason. To the point it essentially warped reality. In the Soviet Union, to ask for a better tool was to imply that your managers were incompetent. Or the tool designers were. Or the manufacturers were. All of whom were appointed by the government. A government which saw itself as the manifest will of the people. To imply something wasn't good enough was to imply the Russian people themselves weren't good enough. That horrendous logic may have been self inflicted but it none the less set the ground rules for any action taken by the government. The inadequacies you point out say nothing about how seriously the Soviet government took Chernobyl. You will find the exact same problems pervade almost every single Soviet government initiative.
• shawnz 7y ago
  > It's not how many people have been harmed, it's how many people could be harmed. I don't understand. Why should there be any difference between these, unless you're saying that the safety of solar/wind is improving faster than the safety of nuclear is improving?
  • beat 7y ago
    Then you don't understand risk. There is no case in which the failure of a wind farm could cause death or injury to millions of people at once. The whole "safety" argument of solar is buried in flat-out bullshit analysis about how people fall off of roofs while installing panels. There's no safety concern to speak of with solar/wind.
    • shawnz 7y ago
      I didn't claim to be any kind of expert. But I don't understand how the scenario you are describing is necessary for solar/wind to have a higher risk per MWh. What does the presence of catastrophic failure modes have to do with past versus future results?
      • beat 7y ago
        Let's put it in concrete terms. I'm going to toss a coin, you call it. If you win, you get $5. If you lose, you pay me $1. You probably do it, right? Next scenario. I'm going to roll a 100-sided die. If it comes up one, I'm going to shoot you in the head. Anything else, you get $100. Now, would you agree to that? Of course not. Even though you're 99% likely to get $100. It's that 1% chance of dying that stops you. That's because "risk" isn't just one number. Even at a very basic level, we distinguish between the likelihood of the risk, and the consequences of the risk. You're only considering the likelihood, not the consequences. That's where you're going wrong.
        • shawnz 7y ago
          > You're only considering the likelihood, not the consequences. I'm considering the likelihood of the same consequence: people dying. You are describing a totally different scenario with your coin toss example. You are making it sound like I'm weighing profits against lives and that is not correct. I'm weighing lives against lives.
• jabl 7y ago
  > It's not how many people have been harmed, it's how many people could be harmed. Really? So we should take into account scenarios like 1. Solar installer falls from roof, hits car, dies 2. Car didn't have handbrake on, starts to roll down the driveway, rolling over the toddler playing in the yard, killing her too 3. Rolls into the street, causing a school bus full of children to swerve and hit a LNG tanker, causing a massive explosion killing everybody onboard. Of course, in reality, we need to take into account realistic failure pathways and plan accordingly. Per such analysis, both solar and nuclear are both very safe.