6 ms·

I'm uncomfortable with this argument. The implied conclusion is that nuclear is safer than coal. That may be true, I don't know. But it's not clear you can arg

by feral 7y ago

I'm uncomfortable with this argument. The implied conclusion is that nuclear is safer than coal. That may be true, I don't know. But it's not clear you can argue this from historical data. For comparison, you could argue nuclear weapons are safer than conventional ones, as they have killed fewer people, and that bioweapons are the least dangerous. The issue is whether there is a tail to the distribution of nuclear event impacts (costs or fatalities), which we may not have seen much of empirically yet. It seems hard to address that empirically with nuclear (although you could argue that perhaps the same is true for climate change for coal?)

pmorici 7y ago
Coal power plants release radiation into the atmosphere as a matter of routine. If you live near one your radiation exposure is guaranteed to be much hire than if you live near a nuclear power station.
Cthulhu_ 7y ago
Facts are that a nuclear power plant can fail catastrophically and its waste is dangerous for 100.000 years. These are easy to explain, and instances of catastrophic failure are known by pretty much everyone. Coal however is a lot more problematic because it's invisible; people are shaken when there's nuclear material leaking out in the water around e.g. Fukushima, but the gradual emission of burning coal waste (33.1 gigatons of CO2 alone; see another comment about coal ash as well) happens unseen. And that's emitted into the air, whereas the (according to wikipedia) 12,000 tonnes of nuclear waste is solid, much easier to keep contained.
- feral 7y ago
  >instances of catastrophic failure are known by pretty much everyone. I don't think anyone says we've seen the worst possible failures of nuclear plants. As an extreme example, what if some crazy terrorist deliberately blows one or several up attempting to maximize damage? How bad would that be? How frequently does this occur? I guess my point is that if there's real risks of that magnitude, they are just as invisible as coal radiation.
  - renjimen 7y ago
    Nuclear power plants are designed with scenarios like terrorist attacks in mind. The problems we've seen have all stemmed from systematic failures that were complex and hard to predict.
    - feral 7y ago
      I feel folks aren't really taking the effort to understand my point here. >Nuclear power plants are designed with scenarios like terrorist attacks in mind Look, the world trade center was 'designed with scenarios like plane crashes in mind'. The towers still fell :( No one really expected bad guys to use planes as weapons, and things to get so hot. Fukushima was designed with tsunamis in mind. No one expected a tsunami so far outside the design envelope. That's fine, you can't economically design for every eventuality, so you define an envelope. If you design a system to be robust against the 1 in 50 year Tsunami/attack/whatever, then after 50 years, all events are likely going to be in your margin of safety. If you extrapolate purely from that observed data, you are going to get a real shock 70 years in when a 1-in-100-years storm/attack/whatever occurs. It's great that things are designed for robustness. But it then takes a long time for the true costs to be naively estimated just by looking at historical data. Analysis based on 'the problems we have had' is fundamentally rearward looking. There's a value to it, but it's not the complete story. I argue its particularly dangerous with a technology that has rare but catastrophic failure modes. In particular, it is flawed to look at a limited history of a tech with rare but catastrophic failures/costs, and empirically compare against a tech with more normally distributed failures/costs.
      - renjimen 7y ago
        The companies that ran Fukushima failed to implement tsunami-proofing measures that were standard internationally, and studies had shown were necessary at the site [1]. So back to my point about complex failures: an engineering project's success is a function of both the physical assets and the organisations set to run them. Chernobyl is a prime example of where this intersection resulted in catastrophy. I do understand your point, by the way. I completely agree that we can't account for every possible scenario using history alone. But there's a balance between over-engineering for fantastical events that are difficult to predict and keeping things affordable. Equally, at some point you have to weigh up the very present and deadly effects of coal power plants against the low probability, high impact of a nuclear power plant going boom. [1] https://carnegieendowment.org/2012/03/06/why-fukushima-was-preventable-pub-47361 https://carnegieendowment.org/2012/03/06/why-fukushima-was-p...
zaroth 7y ago
Except nuclear energy safety is measured by unit of productive output (GWh) over decades compared to the same unit of productive output over decades from coal, gas, solar, etc. Nuclear power is not being built, stockpiled, and used as a deterrent.

by feral 7y ago

pmorici 7y ago

Coal power plants release radiation into the atmosphere as a matter of routine. If you live near one your radiation exposure is guaranteed to be much hire than if you live near a nuclear power station.

Cthulhu_ 7y ago

Facts are that a nuclear power plant can fail catastrophically and its waste is dangerous for 100.000 years. These are easy to explain, and instances of catastrophic failure are known by pretty much everyone. Coal however is a lot more problematic because it's invisible; people are shaken when there's nuclear material leaking out in the water around e.g. Fukushima, but the gradual emission of burning coal waste (33.1 gigatons of CO2 alone; see another comment about coal ash as well) happens unseen. And that's emitted into the air, whereas the (according to wikipedia) 12,000 tonnes of nuclear waste is solid, much easier to keep contained.

feral 7y ago
>instances of catastrophic failure are known by pretty much everyone. I don't think anyone says we've seen the worst possible failures of nuclear plants. As an extreme example, what if some crazy terrorist deliberately blows one or several up attempting to maximize damage? How bad would that be? How frequently does this occur? I guess my point is that if there's real risks of that magnitude, they are just as invisible as coal radiation.
- renjimen 7y ago
  Nuclear power plants are designed with scenarios like terrorist attacks in mind. The problems we've seen have all stemmed from systematic failures that were complex and hard to predict.
  - feral 7y ago
    I feel folks aren't really taking the effort to understand my point here. >Nuclear power plants are designed with scenarios like terrorist attacks in mind Look, the world trade center was 'designed with scenarios like plane crashes in mind'. The towers still fell :( No one really expected bad guys to use planes as weapons, and things to get so hot. Fukushima was designed with tsunamis in mind. No one expected a tsunami so far outside the design envelope. That's fine, you can't economically design for every eventuality, so you define an envelope. If you design a system to be robust against the 1 in 50 year Tsunami/attack/whatever, then after 50 years, all events are likely going to be in your margin of safety. If you extrapolate purely from that observed data, you are going to get a real shock 70 years in when a 1-in-100-years storm/attack/whatever occurs. It's great that things are designed for robustness. But it then takes a long time for the true costs to be naively estimated just by looking at historical data. Analysis based on 'the problems we have had' is fundamentally rearward looking. There's a value to it, but it's not the complete story. I argue its particularly dangerous with a technology that has rare but catastrophic failure modes. In particular, it is flawed to look at a limited history of a tech with rare but catastrophic failures/costs, and empirically compare against a tech with more normally distributed failures/costs.
    - renjimen 7y ago
      The companies that ran Fukushima failed to implement tsunami-proofing measures that were standard internationally, and studies had shown were necessary at the site [1]. So back to my point about complex failures: an engineering project's success is a function of both the physical assets and the organisations set to run them. Chernobyl is a prime example of where this intersection resulted in catastrophy. I do understand your point, by the way. I completely agree that we can't account for every possible scenario using history alone. But there's a balance between over-engineering for fantastical events that are difficult to predict and keeping things affordable. Equally, at some point you have to weigh up the very present and deadly effects of coal power plants against the low probability, high impact of a nuclear power plant going boom. [1] https://carnegieendowment.org/2012/03/06/why-fukushima-was-preventable-pub-47361 https://carnegieendowment.org/2012/03/06/why-fukushima-was-p...

zaroth 7y ago

Except nuclear energy safety is measured by unit of productive output (GWh) over decades compared to the same unit of productive output over decades from coal, gas, solar, etc. Nuclear power is not being built, stockpiled, and used as a deterrent.