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By the numbers nuclear is very safe but it does have asymmetric risk and most importantly a bad reputation. Next gen nuclear should be a marketing rebrand in ad
by chillacy 7y ago
By the numbers nuclear is very safe but it does have asymmetric risk and most importantly a bad reputation. Next gen nuclear should be a marketing rebrand in addition to new tech. So Yang is right to focus on thorium.
- ianai 7y agoWish these billionaires with good intentions would invest in marketing to revamp public nuclear sentiment. There’s clearly the possibility of progress given how effective other political campaigns are.
- wallace_f 7y agoIf most billionaires are optimizing for social image / good will, your idea makes no sense to most of those people.
- roenxi 7y agoOn inspection, if they are optimising for social image / good will then a marketing campaign is the obvious starting point.
- ianai 7y agoTheir money can market both that nuclear is safe and they’re to be trusted. Plenty of oxygen for both.
- wallace_f 7y agoDo you really believe that a billionaire clearly funding a marketing campaign for themselves would be received well? Charity often does good, but often does not have the intended or apparent result. See William Easterly on the subject.
- imtringued 7y agoIf they really cared they would invest into getting rid of the source of the anti nuclear sentiment: shut down obsolete power plants with unsafe designs. Fukushima and Chernobyl happened because everyone ignored this simple advice. Nuclear power plants are so capital intensive that operators keep plants with known design defects or gross mismanagement running.
- Symmetry 7y agoIs the asymmetric risk really any worse than hydro-electric, though? The Banquiao Dam failure killed something like an order of magnitude more people than Chernobyl. And there was the recent Oroville Dam incident which didn't kill anyone but it came pretty close to failing catastrophically.
- cesarb 7y ago> Is the asymmetric risk really any worse than hydro-electric, though? Yes. You are only looking at the immediate damage. After the dust settles, with a worst-case nuclear accident you have a heavily contaminated area which cannot be resettled for a long time; after a worst-case hydroelectric accident, you have mostly only water and mud, and can start rebuilding almost immediately.
- mistermann 7y agoIs there an accepted methodology for calculating risk estimations in these situations? I mean, it's essentially speculation afaict, so how do you put a number on it?
- chillacy 7y agoI suspect there's some relevant work in the financial sector, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taleb_distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taleb_distribution
- ovi256 7y ago>a heavily contaminated area which cannot be resettled for a long time That's only with modern risk-avoiding-at-all-costs safety standards. The initial plans for handling Chernobyl, the worst fallout nuclear incident, was to cleanup - which they did - and resettle soon afterward the cleaned up area - which they did not. And now we have that useless extended exclusion zone - a monument to giving in to our fears. Those plans were made before the incident by medical physicists. They were then modified by the party to suit political realities on the ground. Even the authoritarian URSS knew how far it could push people.