6 ms·
I think nuclear power is great. Unfortunately we don’t have the means to fix a catastrophe should one occur (and it will, as safe as nuclear is, it it not possi
by jarym 7y ago
I think nuclear power is great. Unfortunately we don’t have the means to fix a catastrophe should one occur (and it will, as safe as nuclear is, it it not possible to eliminate the possibility of a serious accident).
‘Safety’ has to be considered in the context of mitigation options as well as options to correct problems. It’s the latter that lets down nuclear - Chernobyl and Fukushima have shown we just can’t contain and correct the effects when things go wrong.
Until we as a race figure out how to do that, nuclear will remain dangerous in my view.
- seszett 7y agoWe haven't really found any way to fix the problems that fossil fuels are creating, either. Which might not be catastrophic yet if you're optimistic, but are certainly heading that way.
- wsc981 7y agoNot sure which is safer, I believe some research suggests more people die from coal mining then from nuclear energy. See for example this: https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy
- kristopolous 7y agoCoal mining also needs to go.
- TremendousJudge 7y agoGreat. Coal mining could have gone in the forty years ago if nuclear had replaced coal. But I guess it was too dangerous, so now we get to live the hottest years on record. Yay for safety, everybody truly did a great job.
- kristopolous 7y agoFalse equivalency. US is a net coal exporter. If we were 100% nuclear the mining would be the same and it'd be exported. Not a solution. Instead, Swanson's curve should have been accelerated pushing the cost economics of solar to have made it competitive at an earlier date. Then you wouldn't need global legislative compliance, it'd have been cheaper earlier
- TremendousJudge 7y agoI never mentioned the US.
- kristopolous 7y agoWhat were you referring to then? Also, there's more to power than coal and nuclear
- wallace_f 7y agoPeople believe all of the following: >Coal needs to go >Nuclear needs to go >High energy (even unsubsidized gasoline) is politically untenable >Economic deprrssion from 1 and 2 is not tolerable, also
- kristopolous 7y agoAwful broken solutions aren't acceptable. Not in programming, building things, or running society.
- wallace_f 7y agoThe world isn't perfect, and I'm sure your code isn't, either. It's a series of trade-offs.
- kristopolous 7y agoSolutions that work for a while but destroy everything in the process aren't solutions. This isn't some cost/benefit stuff. Single use plastics and building concrete urban blight isn't worth a mass Extinction and global dieoff event. Especially with things like carbon negative concrete available. Not the same thing It's bad solutions, when good ones are available, at massive scale, to address things that either aren't problems or could be addressed in other ways.
- ZeroGravitas 7y agoCoal and Nuclear are both expensive, they just get their hidden subsidies in different ways. Getting rid of them therefore won't cause economic depression, just affect the profits of specific well connected people, so they'll hang around longer than they should.
- wallace_f 7y agoAfaik nuclear appears to be expensive mostly because of excessive regulatory code/capture, and political risk.
- jorge-d 7y agoThere are much more safe alternatives that just need a bit more of funding which do not involve as many risks as current nuclear reactor technology. For example Molten salt reactors have proved to be quite effective back in the 60s already. I wonder why this doesn't get more attention.
- bassman9000 7y agoI wonder why this doesn't get more attention. https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=E https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=E That, and a lot of misinformation. Like believing that driving is safer than flying.
- bassman9000 7y agoMore than coal/oil/gas? And please don't tell me you plan to sell wind/solar to China/India https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=3130 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=3130
- StreamBright 7y agoActually we do, the next gen reactor types all planned safety in mind first. This is the primary focus, everything else is secondary. Liquid fluoride thorium reactor are promising.
- gruez 7y ago>Unfortunately we don’t have the means to fix a catastrophe should one occur (and it will, as safe as nuclear is, it it not possible to eliminate the possibility of a serious accident). meanwhile, coal powerplants are spewing out co2, heavy metals, and radioactive particles during normal operation.
- PavlovsCat 7y agoNuclear plants produce waste, this means now deciding that humans will have to not mess that up for the next ~100.000 years. Sure, maybe we'll find a way to process it all (or shoot it into the sun with a super safe space elevator?), but right now, this is what we got, and it's really not much: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_radioactive_waste_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_radioactive_waste_m... > There is a debate over what should constitute an acceptable scientific and engineering foundation for proceeding with radioactive waste disposal strategies. There are those who have argued, on the basis of complex geochemical simulation models, that relinquishing control over radioactive materials to geohydrologic processes at repository closure is an acceptable risk. They maintain that so-called "natural analogues" inhibit subterranean movement of radionuclides, making disposal of radioactive wastes in stable geologic formations unnecessary. However, existing models of these processes are empirically underdetermined: due to the subterranean nature of such processes in solid geologic formations, the accuracy of computer simulation models has not been verified by empirical observation, certainly not over periods of time equivalent to the lethal half-lives of high-level radioactive waste. On the other hand, some insist deep geologic repositories in stable geologic formations are necessary. National management plans of various countries display a variety of approaches to resolving this debate. We're the species that used x-ray machines in shoe shops, to sell more shoes than the other guy. We put the guy who discovered the usefulness of washing hands into an asylum, out of sheer pride and arrogance. So great, we have a bunch of "complex models", and that's what we want to gamble it on? The weather forecast also keeps getting more accurate, but few people would bet their own life on the forecast for even tomorrow. But we'll do it on behalf of people who don't get a say?
- javagram 7y agoNuclear waste doesn’t seem like a big issue compared to climate change. Let’s recall the man-made global climate change is supposed to be a continuous worldwide disaster leading to starvation, wars, and so on. Meanwhile, nuclear waste can be buried in a mountain with today’s technology, taking up only a very small portion of our planet to house it. Nuclear disaster zones like Chernobyl have, after only a few decades, been considered to have turned into nature reserves where animals and plants are flourishing, while global climate change caused by the carbon dioxide released by coal plants is expected to have all sorts of bad effects on nature. http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160421-the-chernobyl-exclusion-zone-is-arguably-a-nature-reserve http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160421-the-chernobyl-exclus...
- elsonrodriguez 7y agoNuclear is dangerous for the local ecosystem, fossil fuels are dangerous to the global ecosystem, and renewables will require a total societal makeover in terms of energy consumption. A choice needs to be made, and I'd argue that we're better at mitigating Chernobyl and Fukushima than we are about mitigating global warming, or convincing everyone that we don't need industry.
- bassman9000 7y agoNuclear is dangerous for the local ecosystem Utterly wrong. https://www.nrc.gov/about-nrc/radiation/related-info/faq.html#9 https://www.nrc.gov/about-nrc/radiation/related-info/faq.htm... You get more radiation living in a brick house https://hps.org/publicinformation/ate/q9778.html https://hps.org/publicinformation/ate/q9778.html https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/building.html https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/building.html
- imtringued 7y agoRadiation is just a straw man. Nuclear power plants are like coal plants without CO2, except they are much bigger. The massive amount of water needed to cool down a nuclear power plant takes it's toll on the river ecosystems, sometimes to the point where the nuclear power plant has to shut down to prevent irreversible damage. Then there are the fish that get caught in the coolant system. To them nuclear plants are like those giant Minecraft mob farms that automatically kill monsters without player involvement. A truly magnificient killing machine. http://www.neis.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Its-the-water-stupid-June-2017.pdf http://www.neis.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Its-the-water... But to be fair I only consider our inability to build reactors cost efficiently (less disruptive cooling systems cost more $$$) to be the major roadblock to nuclear power. Just look at every HN submission regarding nuclear power. The vast majority of posters are in favor of nuclear power. So where exactly is the political opposition? I only see coal dependent communities as roadblocks but every non coal technology shares this problem.
- PavlovsCat 7y agoHN isn't the world though, and seems a bit obsessed with nuclear energy to me. For example, when activists stormed a coal mine in Germany a majority of that discussion was about "why not nuclear".. I think that is nowhere near how the average person would react to the same news, which would be either yay or nay, but not making it about nuclear energy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20253954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20253954
- Causality1 7y agoIn the words of Eliezer Yudkowsky, "Shut up and multiply" https://i.imgur.com/uLihyq4.jpg https://i.imgur.com/uLihyq4.jpg
- PavlovsCat 7y agoLooking at that chart, I find it even more annoying that nuclear and renewables are played off against each other. As if environmentalists were worse than the coal and oil lobby, and not very much opposed to them. Why not join forces, why use nuclear to diss renewables, if you'll forgive putting it in such a silly way? And no matter how great it may be, nuclear being finite, renewables would look "infinitely" better in a chart of that.
- sascha_sl 7y agoYou can't really compare ChNPP (or any RBMK) to any modern reactor. It did not have a containment building.
- gmueckl 7y agoThe Fukushima reactors had containment buildings, but other fatal design flaws. We know these flaws and their consequemces now in hindsight. But we can only tolerate so many accidents with containment failures on one planet and all we can realistically do is increase the mean time between accidents through engineering.
- wallace_f 7y agoSo few people die from nuclear relative to coal.
- Luc 7y agoHow many atmospheric nuclear weapons explosions could we tolerate? Certainly more than 500, since that's how many were conducted. We're still here.
- gmueckl 7y agoHow many of them were above ground with a substantial release of long lived isotopes? IIRC the ban of atmospheric weapon tests came quite quickly.
- javagram 7y ago512 nukes were detonated in atmosphere during the era of nuclear weapons testing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_testing#History https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_testing#Hist...
- pimmen 7y agoOne person has been confirmed to have died after the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The fatal design flaw of building cities next to water however killed thousands of people from the tsunami.
- pojzon 7y agoThis is simply untrue. We are able to build ALMR reactors that not only can work using nuclear waste as a fuel but also are "impossible" to blow up or cause disaster because of coolant properties. Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor Ps. China heavly invests in this technology now and its not even new.