3 ms·

Nuclear power plants are not safe, never have been, and never will be. That's because no matter how great your technology and redundant safety systems are, it's

by brazzy 7y ago

Nuclear power plants are not safe, never have been, and never will be. That's because no matter how great your technology and redundant safety systems are, it's all still run by humans who are fallible, often stupid, and very often greedy. If you can make a buck by cutting corners and shirking security regulations, someone will. Air travel is nowadays pretty safe, but this has been achieved over decades of trial and error, with each major error costing dozens if not hundreds of lives - not something we can affords with nuclear technology. And as the 737 MAX and its insights into Boeing company culture and the FDA shows, people can and will piss away already gained safety improvements.

mlyle 7y ago
Maybe not, but we can bound the number of people they kill at much lower than other forms of power generation.
- pvaldes 7y ago
  At this moment talking about how few people has killed nuclear versus other energy sources is BS. We can compare both values only if we forget that we talk about a stuff that will remain lethal for thousands years, in a world that is getting unstable at a fast pace, with politicians even more unstable that act in totally random ways. We will not have a trustable nuclear body count value until many generations in the future. Is not over until is over.
  - mlyle 7y ago
    > only if we forget that we talk about a stuff that will remain lethal for thousands years, But rapidly becomes less lethal, with the vast majority of the risk removed in tens of years. Vs. many kinds of chemical waste which are potent effectively forever.
- brazzy 7y ago
  WTF? That is pretty much the exact opposite of reality.
  - mlyle 7y ago
    Electricity Generation and Health, Markandya & Wilkinson, The Lancet, 2007. It finds a death rate of 0.074 deaths per terawatt-hour for nuclear, compared to 24.5 for coal, 18.4 for oil, and 2.8 for gas. The edges of the nuclear and gas confidence interval get somewhat close to each other but do not overlap. While there was not enough data for the author to estimate the rate for solar and wind, subsequent estimates are about 2 for solar and 10 for wind. Of the 0.074, 0.003 deaths are non-occupational from accidents; 0.022 are total deaths from accidents. The vast majority of this 0.022 is not radiological, but instead ordinary industrial and mining accidents where people are in traffic accidents, asphyxiate, are killed by hot steam, or crushed to death. The rest is from various kinds of air pollution impacts in the nuclear fuel and transportation chain. Even if we have a horrid accident that has 1000x the impact of previous accidents, we will not reach the death rates associated with other sources of power.
tapland 7y ago
Still the lowest death toll per time unit of energy produced. Lower than solar or wind. So, producing electricity isn't safe, but doing the safest thing isn't usually called unsafe.
- PostOnce 7y ago
  Lowest death toll in the best-case scenario, but what about the worst-case scenario? It's not like a fluke once in a lifetime event, we've had meltdowns and partial meltdowns all over the world from the US to Switzerland to the Soviet Union to Japan time and again, and while they were bad, they could have been worse, substantially worse. We're investing tons of money into fusion though, so maybe that'll make all these fission plants a moot point.
  - mlyle 7y ago
    There's also the alternative view that maybe we've gotten better at things, and the safety record of nuclear going forward might be better than what we've experienced so far. Calling our history of accidents so far the "best-case" scenario may be misleading.
    - PostOnce 7y ago
      I'm not calling our history the best case, it's a bad case, but it's not the worst case. Nuclear is completely safe in the best-case scenario. Nuclear is safe if nothing goes wrong, if the weather is fine, if the people follow the protocols, if nothing unforeseen occurs. If one of those things isn't true, we get Chernobyl, or Fukushima, or perhaps next time, instead of being "not that bad", or "pretty bad", it's worse, because of something we didn't foresee, and we regret it for the rest of human history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_and_radioactive_incidents#Lists_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_and... It's not like we've only had one or two incidents with one or two technologies. I think we're not ready, yet.
      - mlyle 7y ago
perilunar 7y ago
> Air travel is nowadays pretty safe, but this has been achieved over decades of trial and error, with each major error costing dozens if not hundreds of lives - not something we can affords with nuclear technology. Why not? We accept aircraft accidents as one of the costs of air travel. Why do we not accept power station accidents as one of the costs of having power? The worst nuclear power station accidents have killed far fewer people than the worst aircraft accidents. Why is one so feared and the other not?
- brazzy 7y ago
  > The worst nuclear power station accidents have killed far fewer people than the worst aircraft accidents. This is just simply a lie.
  - perilunar 7y ago
    Chernobyl killed less than 100 people. 31 direct deaths, later raised to 54. There is considerable debate about expected deaths due to increases in cancer rates, but there is no consensus on the numbers (ranging from 4,000 to 60,000 projected deaths), and not even consensus about whether cancer risk due to exposure to radiation is even linear or not (linear no-threshold vs radiation hormesis). In contrast, there have been more than 500 aircraft accidents with 50 or more deaths. Aviation accidents have killed 83,000 people since 1970. Top 3 Nuclear Power accidents: Chernobyl: 54 deaths, SL-1: 3 deaths, Fukushima Daiichi: 1 death Top 3 Aviation accidents: Tenerife disaster: 583 deaths, JAL Flight 123: 520 deaths, 1996 Charkhi Dadri mid-air collision: 349 deaths
    - brazzy 7y ago
      > Chernobyl killed less than 100 people. 31 direct deaths, later raised to 54. Repeating a lie does not make it true. The official numbers are completely worthless because the Soviet leadership massively mis- and underdocumented pretty much everything related to the accident. > There is considerable debate about expected deaths due to increases in cancer rates, but there is no consensus on the numbers (ranging from 4,000 to 60,000 projected deaths), and not even consensus about whether cancer risk due to exposure to radiation is even linear or not (linear no-threshold vs radiation hormesis). ...so you'll simply assume that all that radioactive material spread far and wide over huge swaths of Asia and Europe had no ill effects at all?

by brazzy 7y ago

mlyle 7y ago

Maybe not, but we can bound the number of people they kill at much lower than other forms of power generation.

pvaldes 7y ago
At this moment talking about how few people has killed nuclear versus other energy sources is BS. We can compare both values only if we forget that we talk about a stuff that will remain lethal for thousands years, in a world that is getting unstable at a fast pace, with politicians even more unstable that act in totally random ways. We will not have a trustable nuclear body count value until many generations in the future. Is not over until is over.
- mlyle 7y ago
  > only if we forget that we talk about a stuff that will remain lethal for thousands years, But rapidly becomes less lethal, with the vast majority of the risk removed in tens of years. Vs. many kinds of chemical waste which are potent effectively forever.
brazzy 7y ago
WTF? That is pretty much the exact opposite of reality.
- mlyle 7y ago
  Electricity Generation and Health, Markandya & Wilkinson, The Lancet, 2007. It finds a death rate of 0.074 deaths per terawatt-hour for nuclear, compared to 24.5 for coal, 18.4 for oil, and 2.8 for gas. The edges of the nuclear and gas confidence interval get somewhat close to each other but do not overlap. While there was not enough data for the author to estimate the rate for solar and wind, subsequent estimates are about 2 for solar and 10 for wind. Of the 0.074, 0.003 deaths are non-occupational from accidents; 0.022 are total deaths from accidents. The vast majority of this 0.022 is not radiological, but instead ordinary industrial and mining accidents where people are in traffic accidents, asphyxiate, are killed by hot steam, or crushed to death. The rest is from various kinds of air pollution impacts in the nuclear fuel and transportation chain. Even if we have a horrid accident that has 1000x the impact of previous accidents, we will not reach the death rates associated with other sources of power.

tapland 7y ago

Still the lowest death toll per time unit of energy produced. Lower than solar or wind. So, producing electricity isn't safe, but doing the safest thing isn't usually called unsafe.

PostOnce 7y ago
Lowest death toll in the best-case scenario, but what about the worst-case scenario? It's not like a fluke once in a lifetime event, we've had meltdowns and partial meltdowns all over the world from the US to Switzerland to the Soviet Union to Japan time and again, and while they were bad, they could have been worse, substantially worse. We're investing tons of money into fusion though, so maybe that'll make all these fission plants a moot point.
- mlyle 7y ago
  There's also the alternative view that maybe we've gotten better at things, and the safety record of nuclear going forward might be better than what we've experienced so far. Calling our history of accidents so far the "best-case" scenario may be misleading.
  - PostOnce 7y ago
    I'm not calling our history the best case, it's a bad case, but it's not the worst case. Nuclear is completely safe in the best-case scenario. Nuclear is safe if nothing goes wrong, if the weather is fine, if the people follow the protocols, if nothing unforeseen occurs. If one of those things isn't true, we get Chernobyl, or Fukushima, or perhaps next time, instead of being "not that bad", or "pretty bad", it's worse, because of something we didn't foresee, and we regret it for the rest of human history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_and_radioactive_incidents#Lists_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_and... It's not like we've only had one or two incidents with one or two technologies. I think we're not ready, yet.
    - mlyle 7y ago

perilunar 7y ago

> Air travel is nowadays pretty safe, but this has been achieved over decades of trial and error, with each major error costing dozens if not hundreds of lives - not something we can affords with nuclear technology. Why not? We accept aircraft accidents as one of the costs of air travel. Why do we not accept power station accidents as one of the costs of having power? The worst nuclear power station accidents have killed far fewer people than the worst aircraft accidents. Why is one so feared and the other not?

brazzy 7y ago
> The worst nuclear power station accidents have killed far fewer people than the worst aircraft accidents. This is just simply a lie.
- perilunar 7y ago
  Chernobyl killed less than 100 people. 31 direct deaths, later raised to 54. There is considerable debate about expected deaths due to increases in cancer rates, but there is no consensus on the numbers (ranging from 4,000 to 60,000 projected deaths), and not even consensus about whether cancer risk due to exposure to radiation is even linear or not (linear no-threshold vs radiation hormesis). In contrast, there have been more than 500 aircraft accidents with 50 or more deaths. Aviation accidents have killed 83,000 people since 1970. Top 3 Nuclear Power accidents: Chernobyl: 54 deaths, SL-1: 3 deaths, Fukushima Daiichi: 1 death Top 3 Aviation accidents: Tenerife disaster: 583 deaths, JAL Flight 123: 520 deaths, 1996 Charkhi Dadri mid-air collision: 349 deaths
  - brazzy 7y ago
    > Chernobyl killed less than 100 people. 31 direct deaths, later raised to 54. Repeating a lie does not make it true. The official numbers are completely worthless because the Soviet leadership massively mis- and underdocumented pretty much everything related to the accident. > There is considerable debate about expected deaths due to increases in cancer rates, but there is no consensus on the numbers (ranging from 4,000 to 60,000 projected deaths), and not even consensus about whether cancer risk due to exposure to radiation is even linear or not (linear no-threshold vs radiation hormesis). ...so you'll simply assume that all that radioactive material spread far and wide over huge swaths of Asia and Europe had no ill effects at all?