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No need for weird opinions there. People don't want a potential bomb in their neighbourhood in the same way they don't want a nuclear waste dump in their neigh

No need for weird opinions there. People don't want a potential bomb in their neighbourhood in the same way they don't want a nuclear waste dump in their neighbourhood. No sane person would blame them and that's the whole story. Germany is sitting on decades of dirty waste and has no hole to make it disappear. It creates ridiculous costs that have been shifted to the tax payer and they will pay for it for hundreds of years. Again: no sane person wants to do that or would blame them. Meanwhile there is renewable energy getting better and better with every year and decade. This whole story is a no-brainer. Nuclear is dead. Renewables is the way to go.

roenxi 7y ago
> People don't want a potential bomb in their neighbourhood in the same way they don't want a nuclear waste dump in their neighbourhood. No sane person would blame them and that's the whole story. The stubbornness of people like that has cost thousands if not tens of thousands of lives to air pollution, caused the destruction due to coal mining of big swathes of land and increases the risk of a resource war or other difficult geopolitical situation arising. They are also causing tens of thousands of people to waste their lives working unproductively in energy-producing industries when they could have been doing something useful instead. Sane or otherwise, they are just people who don't understand statistics or how energy works. They are symptoms of the general problem that society has with implementing evidence-based policies.
- godelski 7y ago
  > The stubbornness of people like that has cost thousands if not tens of thousands of lives to air pollution Considering that the research suggests 7,500 and 52,000 people in the US each year[0], I think you could safely say "hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost due to this argument" (considering that less than 30k lives have been lost to nuclear, including future deaths from disasters). I want to make this abundantly clear. We're pro-nuclear because we want to save lives. Because we want to save the environment. And because we are listening to the scientists. No one is saying "nuclear vs renewables", but rather "keep nuclear on the table". We're on the same team as those that advocate for renewables (I myself strongly advocate for renewables!). [0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-other-reason-to-shift-away-from-coal-air-pollution-that-kills-thousands-every-year/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-other-reason-...
- Krasnol 7y ago
  Yeah statistics look so great...on paper. In reality A SINGLE overdue French reactor could wipe out a whole country (Luxembourg) leaving us with a nuclear wasteland right in the middle of Europe. A beautiful picture you can't draw with numbers. To make my point even clearer and because I have the feeling like I'm talking to Americans who have never even took a look at an European map. This is it: https://i.imgur.com/SVom3rl.jpg https://i.imgur.com/SVom3rl.jpg Yes, there are people all over the place. This stuff is being kept alive for political reasons (hey here is your favourite reason for nuclear "mistakes": human error again) while it rots from within. So how it may be surprising that people do not trust the energy and those who are responsible for it politically and technically, is beyond me. All that money wasted for this technology could have been invested into renewables which would have brought us much farther than we are today but it didn't happen because: hey nuclear lobby. Throwing even more money on it now is beyond stupid (https://www.reddit.com/r/de/comments/emc2ne/quelle_surprise_frankreich_verzichtet_vorerst/fdoxtt3/ https://www.reddit.com/r/de/comments/emc2ne/quelle_surprise_...) and I really hope the lobby money for this artificially kept alive propaganda train finally runs out just like the technology did.
  - roenxi 7y ago
    The only INES 7 disaster in the last 30 years involved Fukushima being hit by an earthquake that was out of design spec and then a literal 14 meter high tsunami. I think it was something like a 1 in 600 year event. Even then they had to be negligent on their safety standards for it to cause a bad meltdown. That was what it took to fail a 1970s designed (pre-Chernobyl, pre-computer-aided-design) nuclear reactor with upgrades. Standards haven't gotten lower since then. Luxembourg will be fine. Don't panic. Unless they migrate to the coast with global warming. Which can be mitigated by more nuclear use!
    - varjag 7y ago
      It was hit by tsunami because it was built in a tsunami-prone, seismically vulnerable area. A "1 in 1000 year" tsunami hitting it in first 40 years of operation sounds like a planning and engineering failure, and is why people tend to be super sceptical about safe nuclear.
- adrianN 7y ago
  In many situations people prefer choices with worse expected value when they also have a lower variance. That's the whole point of insurances for example. Choosing more expected deaths from air pollution over lower expected deaths from nuclear accidents (but with a very large variance compared to pollution) can be rational. It just depends on your valuation function.
  - roenxi 7y ago
    It can be rational. However, in this context, it is not. It is pretty clearly people who just don't understand what 6 orders of magnitude improvement of fuel density implies for pollution and efficiency. Or how rare a 1 in 30 disaster is on a global scale. COVID-19 just dropped on us one day and everything shut down. That is a pretty good example of how scary the world is. The tiny odds of a nuclear disaster (that can still be walked away from!) is nothing compared to the baseline risks of being alive. We'd be a lot better off right now if the anti-nuclear protests in the 80s had been anti-aeroplane-travel instead; because disease from having fast transport links has done a lot more damage than nuclear power could. Nuclear weapons notwithstanding.
    - Krasnol 7y ago
      Yeah it's funny how it goes with those "tiny odds" eh? Today nuclear technicians need to sleep and life in their plants because of one of these tiny odds actually happening. I don't see any solar panel technicians having to sleep at their solar panel fields. And how about those odds of a salt mine that was perfectly good a few decades ago to store the tons of waste suddenly getting a nasty groundwater inflow and becoming a risk for groundwater? It's happening right now in Germany and has been for a few years now. All that money wasted for pumping out and clearing out this mine could be invested into REALLY clean energy but it's not. It's dumped into radioactive waste "management". Funny how those odds go eh?
godelski 7y ago
There's a few issue with this though. 1) There's no equivalence between a bomb and nuclear waste. 2) The waste is actually REALLY REALLY small. We're talking about a coke can per person per year. That's total waste, which only 3% of that is high level waste and needs to be buried. There's a deep misconception about the amount of waste we're talking about here. And this is before we talk about recycling, like France does (see above comment), or using waste in medicine. 3) The cost for nuclear is more similar to why the postal service costs so much/isn't profitable. This cost is manufactured. 4) No pro nuclear person is saying "nuclear vs renewables". They may say "nuclear vs fossil fuels" or "let's not remove it from the options because there's places where nuclear is a better alternative". (e.g. renewables work great in southern california and the southwest. Not always in areas where it is cloudy like the northern coasts). All pro nuclear people want is nuclear to not be removed from the portfolio of technologies. No one is denying renewables are the way to go. The argument is "are renewables enough to kill coal and gas?" There's significant evidence to suggest no. Even if you don't believe that, that's not a good reason to remove nuclear from the table (mind you, just being on the table doesn't mean you have to use it). I'll even note that a significant number of climate researchers advocate for expansion of nuclear, including the IPCC.
- Krasnol 7y ago
  1) Yeah, the bomb is the reactor. Waste is waste. 2) https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/inland/probleme-bei-bergung-atommuell-muss-womoeglich-in-der-asse-bleiben-13595392/drunter-und-drueber-geht-es-in-13595409.html https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/inland/probleme-bei-berg... This is what Germany is dealing with. It's just one room. Tons and tons are stored above ground near the reactors (15.075,6 t just fuel in Germany) https://www.atommuellreport.de/themen/atommuell/einzelansicht/radioaktive-abfaelle-mengenuebersicht.html https://www.atommuellreport.de/themen/atommuell/einzelansich... 3) Costs are IMMENSE. Here somebody took their time to write it up: https://www.reddit.com/r/de/comments/emc2ne/quelle_surprise_frankreich_verzichtet_vorerst/fdoxtt3/ https://www.reddit.com/r/de/comments/emc2ne/quelle_surprise_... (fixed link to english version) 4) No anti-nuclear person is saying "nuclear vs. coal" it's still such a prominent argument. Weird eh? And it's not even real. It's a huge straw man set up by the lobbyists of a dead technology picked up by some misguided fans. Here is a read up for the baseload theory that comes up at this moment in a discussion so you can save yourself a few useless lines: https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=374 https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=374
simias 7y ago
Chernobyl is probably the most damaging thing to come out of the Soviet Union long-term. The design of Chernobyl was crazy. I dug fairly deep into the many, many issues the reactor had when that HBO mini series aired, if anything it only made me massively more confident in our modern designs. Chernobyl's design was deeply flawed and they knew it yet did nothing, not even tell the people operating the reactor. Then it took these operators doing everything wrong, including consciously putting the reactor in an unstable state (removing nearly all control rods way beyond regulation) and keep pushing the reactor for absolutely no rational reason to create the explosion. And even then, had the reactor had a proper concrete enclosure like western reactors do, the fallout of the explosion would probably have been severely dimnished and mostly contained on-premise. It still would've been the worst catastrophe in the history of nuclear power generation but only a fraction of what we've had to deal with. It would've been Fukushima-like, probably (i.e. pretty damn bad, but not apocalyptic).
- Krasnol 7y ago
  There is always something and that time, it was in some remote area in the Ukraine. Now imagine that something happening in one of those overdue rotting reactors in Frace. Right in the middle of Europe. What sane person would want that to happen? And you just don't know what might happen. A few months ago you wouldn't dream of coming up with the idea that nuclear technicians need to life there now because of some pandemic. Some Chinese satellite may fall down on one of those things tomorrow. Why bother with the risk when the alternatives are there, get better, are cheaper and won't leave you with their waste to pay for for the next hundreds and hundreds of years?

roenxi 7y ago

> People don't want a potential bomb in their neighbourhood in the same way they don't want a nuclear waste dump in their neighbourhood. No sane person would blame them and that's the whole story. The stubbornness of people like that has cost thousands if not tens of thousands of lives to air pollution, caused the destruction due to coal mining of big swathes of land and increases the risk of a resource war or other difficult geopolitical situation arising. They are also causing tens of thousands of people to waste their lives working unproductively in energy-producing industries when they could have been doing something useful instead. Sane or otherwise, they are just people who don't understand statistics or how energy works. They are symptoms of the general problem that society has with implementing evidence-based policies.

godelski 7y ago
> The stubbornness of people like that has cost thousands if not tens of thousands of lives to air pollution Considering that the research suggests 7,500 and 52,000 people in the US each year[0], I think you could safely say "hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost due to this argument" (considering that less than 30k lives have been lost to nuclear, including future deaths from disasters). I want to make this abundantly clear. We're pro-nuclear because we want to save lives. Because we want to save the environment. And because we are listening to the scientists. No one is saying "nuclear vs renewables", but rather "keep nuclear on the table". We're on the same team as those that advocate for renewables (I myself strongly advocate for renewables!). [0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-other-reason-to-shift-away-from-coal-air-pollution-that-kills-thousands-every-year/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-other-reason-...
Krasnol 7y ago
Yeah statistics look so great...on paper. In reality A SINGLE overdue French reactor could wipe out a whole country (Luxembourg) leaving us with a nuclear wasteland right in the middle of Europe. A beautiful picture you can't draw with numbers. To make my point even clearer and because I have the feeling like I'm talking to Americans who have never even took a look at an European map. This is it: https://i.imgur.com/SVom3rl.jpg https://i.imgur.com/SVom3rl.jpg Yes, there are people all over the place. This stuff is being kept alive for political reasons (hey here is your favourite reason for nuclear "mistakes": human error again) while it rots from within. So how it may be surprising that people do not trust the energy and those who are responsible for it politically and technically, is beyond me. All that money wasted for this technology could have been invested into renewables which would have brought us much farther than we are today but it didn't happen because: hey nuclear lobby. Throwing even more money on it now is beyond stupid (https://www.reddit.com/r/de/comments/emc2ne/quelle_surprise_frankreich_verzichtet_vorerst/fdoxtt3/ https://www.reddit.com/r/de/comments/emc2ne/quelle_surprise_...) and I really hope the lobby money for this artificially kept alive propaganda train finally runs out just like the technology did.
- roenxi 7y ago
  The only INES 7 disaster in the last 30 years involved Fukushima being hit by an earthquake that was out of design spec and then a literal 14 meter high tsunami. I think it was something like a 1 in 600 year event. Even then they had to be negligent on their safety standards for it to cause a bad meltdown. That was what it took to fail a 1970s designed (pre-Chernobyl, pre-computer-aided-design) nuclear reactor with upgrades. Standards haven't gotten lower since then. Luxembourg will be fine. Don't panic. Unless they migrate to the coast with global warming. Which can be mitigated by more nuclear use!
  - varjag 7y ago
    It was hit by tsunami because it was built in a tsunami-prone, seismically vulnerable area. A "1 in 1000 year" tsunami hitting it in first 40 years of operation sounds like a planning and engineering failure, and is why people tend to be super sceptical about safe nuclear.
adrianN 7y ago
In many situations people prefer choices with worse expected value when they also have a lower variance. That's the whole point of insurances for example. Choosing more expected deaths from air pollution over lower expected deaths from nuclear accidents (but with a very large variance compared to pollution) can be rational. It just depends on your valuation function.
- roenxi 7y ago
  It can be rational. However, in this context, it is not. It is pretty clearly people who just don't understand what 6 orders of magnitude improvement of fuel density implies for pollution and efficiency. Or how rare a 1 in 30 disaster is on a global scale. COVID-19 just dropped on us one day and everything shut down. That is a pretty good example of how scary the world is. The tiny odds of a nuclear disaster (that can still be walked away from!) is nothing compared to the baseline risks of being alive. We'd be a lot better off right now if the anti-nuclear protests in the 80s had been anti-aeroplane-travel instead; because disease from having fast transport links has done a lot more damage than nuclear power could. Nuclear weapons notwithstanding.
  - Krasnol 7y ago
    Yeah it's funny how it goes with those "tiny odds" eh? Today nuclear technicians need to sleep and life in their plants because of one of these tiny odds actually happening. I don't see any solar panel technicians having to sleep at their solar panel fields. And how about those odds of a salt mine that was perfectly good a few decades ago to store the tons of waste suddenly getting a nasty groundwater inflow and becoming a risk for groundwater? It's happening right now in Germany and has been for a few years now. All that money wasted for pumping out and clearing out this mine could be invested into REALLY clean energy but it's not. It's dumped into radioactive waste "management". Funny how those odds go eh?

godelski 7y ago

There's a few issue with this though. 1) There's no equivalence between a bomb and nuclear waste. 2) The waste is actually REALLY REALLY small. We're talking about a coke can per person per year. That's total waste, which only 3% of that is high level waste and needs to be buried. There's a deep misconception about the amount of waste we're talking about here. And this is before we talk about recycling, like France does (see above comment), or using waste in medicine. 3) The cost for nuclear is more similar to why the postal service costs so much/isn't profitable. This cost is manufactured. 4) No pro nuclear person is saying "nuclear vs renewables". They may say "nuclear vs fossil fuels" or "let's not remove it from the options because there's places where nuclear is a better alternative". (e.g. renewables work great in southern california and the southwest. Not always in areas where it is cloudy like the northern coasts). All pro nuclear people want is nuclear to not be removed from the portfolio of technologies. No one is denying renewables are the way to go. The argument is "are renewables enough to kill coal and gas?" There's significant evidence to suggest no. Even if you don't believe that, that's not a good reason to remove nuclear from the table (mind you, just being on the table doesn't mean you have to use it). I'll even note that a significant number of climate researchers advocate for expansion of nuclear, including the IPCC.

Krasnol 7y ago
1) Yeah, the bomb is the reactor. Waste is waste. 2) https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/inland/probleme-bei-bergung-atommuell-muss-womoeglich-in-der-asse-bleiben-13595392/drunter-und-drueber-geht-es-in-13595409.html https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/inland/probleme-bei-berg... This is what Germany is dealing with. It's just one room. Tons and tons are stored above ground near the reactors (15.075,6 t just fuel in Germany) https://www.atommuellreport.de/themen/atommuell/einzelansicht/radioaktive-abfaelle-mengenuebersicht.html https://www.atommuellreport.de/themen/atommuell/einzelansich... 3) Costs are IMMENSE. Here somebody took their time to write it up: https://www.reddit.com/r/de/comments/emc2ne/quelle_surprise_frankreich_verzichtet_vorerst/fdoxtt3/ https://www.reddit.com/r/de/comments/emc2ne/quelle_surprise_... (fixed link to english version) 4) No anti-nuclear person is saying "nuclear vs. coal" it's still such a prominent argument. Weird eh? And it's not even real. It's a huge straw man set up by the lobbyists of a dead technology picked up by some misguided fans. Here is a read up for the baseload theory that comes up at this moment in a discussion so you can save yourself a few useless lines: https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=374 https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=374

simias 7y ago

Chernobyl is probably the most damaging thing to come out of the Soviet Union long-term. The design of Chernobyl was crazy. I dug fairly deep into the many, many issues the reactor had when that HBO mini series aired, if anything it only made me massively more confident in our modern designs. Chernobyl's design was deeply flawed and they knew it yet did nothing, not even tell the people operating the reactor. Then it took these operators doing everything wrong, including consciously putting the reactor in an unstable state (removing nearly all control rods way beyond regulation) and keep pushing the reactor for absolutely no rational reason to create the explosion. And even then, had the reactor had a proper concrete enclosure like western reactors do, the fallout of the explosion would probably have been severely dimnished and mostly contained on-premise. It still would've been the worst catastrophe in the history of nuclear power generation but only a fraction of what we've had to deal with. It would've been Fukushima-like, probably (i.e. pretty damn bad, but not apocalyptic).

Krasnol 7y ago
There is always something and that time, it was in some remote area in the Ukraine. Now imagine that something happening in one of those overdue rotting reactors in Frace. Right in the middle of Europe. What sane person would want that to happen? And you just don't know what might happen. A few months ago you wouldn't dream of coming up with the idea that nuclear technicians need to life there now because of some pandemic. Some Chinese satellite may fall down on one of those things tomorrow. Why bother with the risk when the alternatives are there, get better, are cheaper and won't leave you with their waste to pay for for the next hundreds and hundreds of years?