8 ms·

This disaster has caused me to revisit my concerns regarding nuclear energy. # One of the most challenging technologies ever developed, is under the control of

This disaster has caused me to revisit my concerns regarding nuclear energy. # One of the most challenging technologies ever developed, is under the control of politicians and bankers. A recipe in itself for technical disaster. # Public concerns, under this regime, end up being counter-productive. "No new nukes" means extending the life of the oldest, most vulnerable technology. # Human society has demonstrated no stability, sociologically, technologically, nor otherwise, approaching even vaguely the time frames required to safely utilize this technology. It is a huge bet, and burden, on future society -- on the entire planet, actually. # Nuclear resources on this planet are limited, and unique in their performance profile. There may come a time when we need them for better uses, e.g. early space travel. Forgoing e.g. renewable energy resources for the sake of this "quick fix" is, in the long term, squandering an irreplaceable resource. (Call me when someone finally gets fusion to work.)

InclinedPlane 16y ago
On the other hand it's important to weigh the risks of nuclear power fairly, relative to other power sources. These reactor accidents are novel, noteworthy, and dramatic, but how serious are these accidents in proper context? Jumbo jet crashes are similarly dramatic and noteworthy, yet air travel remains one of the safest forms of transportation available, by a significant margin. Is the same bias for flashy and scary events happening with nuclear power? Fukushima and Chernobyl are notable, but so is the failure of Fujinuma Dam (also due to the Tohoku earthquake), and the failure of Banqiao dam, and the Texas City disaster. So far the record of the non-Soviet civilian nuclear power industry compares favorably with that of other industries and power sources, even including extrapolating some rather severe further evolutions of the Fukushima reactor disaster factored in.
- Tichy 16y ago
  "yet air travel remains one of the safest forms of transportation available" Doesn't that depend on how you measure it, like accidents per miles or accidents per hours? Even if it would be safest by miles, I don't think it would follow that the safest way to get to work every morning would be by plane. It only works because airplanes go long distances, and accidents most frequently happen during starting or landing. In short, the comparison is not even very useful. The question is also do we have to fly so much/do we need so much energy. If there were no airplanes, would people just travel the same distances by car? I doubt it.
  - InclinedPlane 16y ago
    Whether you measure by hour or by mile air travel is still comparatively safe (1/4th as many fatalities per hour and 1/60th as many fatalities per mile, compared to automobiles).
    - borism 16y ago
      this is a testament to safety measures in aviation, not to some inherent safety of air travel. inherently, 99.9% of people will die if plane was to collide with another plane or ground. That number is inherently much lower for car collisions. so if we talk about nuclear safety, yes it is very safe compared to some other energy sources. But it also so much more dangerous when nuclear accidents happen than anything else.
      - InclinedPlane 16y ago
        "But it also so much more dangerous when nuclear accidents happen than anything else." This is a facile assumption but it's almost certainly false. The Banqiao dam disaster killed 25,000 people directly, and destroyed 6 million buildings (it caused 145,000 further deaths due to famine). Such a disaster far outstrips even Chernobyl, which was about as maximally bad as any nuclear reactor accident can be (runaway fission reaction generating massive amounts of radionuclides; no worthwhile reactor containment structures; the reactor core melting down, catching on fire, and spewing huge amounts of radiation into the wind).
        borism 16y ago
        now please factor in duration and affected area and population into account when talking about severity of nuclear accidents, the same way you factored in hours and miles when you wrote about aviation safety.
        iuytghyjuyh 16y ago
        But do you factor in the deaths in Iraq into the cost of oil fired power stations? And flooding in Bangladesh and sea level rises as part of the CO2 cost of coal?
- pasbesoin 16y ago
  Oh, I agree. The amount of mercury that coal consumption puts out is horrendous -- and a permanent blight. And coal ash is one of the nastier industrial waste products we've managed to create. (I won't start down the C02 discussion, here, but of course it's another huge factor.) That's one reason I specifically cited renewable energy (and I'm skeptical that geo-thermal really applies in this regard, long term). If you want nuclear energy, we have the solar system's biggest fusion reactor at our disposal. Just divert some of its output on its way to becoming kinetic (including heat) and chemical energy, to do what we need. Yes, there are problems, but progress -- even in the face of meager funding -- has demonstrated that they are solvable.
throwaway40m 16y ago
"# Human society has demonstrated no stability, sociologically, technologically, nor otherwise, approaching even vaguely the time frames required to safely utilize this technology." This is the key observation, imo, addressing this issue and a broad set of other hot and timely topics, most fundamentally 'globalization' and the utopian yearning for a unified planetary governance (being quite generous and assuming idealism is mixed with the obvious hunger for global power among the promoters and actors). Many things make sense on paper. Applying them to human society, at its current level of progress, is not a given and we need to exercise caution. The main issue with nuclear technology is that it is not fail-safe. That by itself is not an indictment (as many have pointed out nearly everything we rely on is not fail-safe). So clearly we need to focus on recovery from catastrophe as an input to our decision making process. An airplane may indeed crash and kill N human beings. But it is a relatively scoped and finite event. People, generally, do not continue to die because an airplane crashed x years ago in their vicinity. Ditto trains, cars, etc. Nuclear technology disfigures nature as we know it. That is the key issue. This disfigurement is non-reversible (per our technological reach). This lack of room from recovery from error, regardless of the probabilities involved, is what is fundamentally "evil" about nuclear technology as practiced by the human species as of now.
ChuckMcM 16y ago
Sigh, its not 'one of the most challenging technologies' its actually rather simple which is why it was developed in the 1940's, a 'challenging' technology would be genetically engineered life forms, only recently managed [1]. Not only are synthetic life forms more technologically challenging, if they escape from the lab the planet is designed to provide them with an environment that allows them to replace all existing lifeforms if they adapt better. Public concerns, are just that, concerns. While its extremely important to have an open and informed public conversation around complex policy issues, they don't actually inform the policy they inform the public. If the national energy policy is to have 30% of our power provided by nuclear sources, we will have 30% of our power provided by nuclear sources. Human society ... yeah collectively we've been unable to keep a stable form of government for more than about 300 years (I realize that both the Chinese and Egyptians would dispute this given their emperor pasts but I don't accept that a series of emperors represents a 'continuous' government in the same way that a constitutional (or institutional) government exists with people merely filling rolls in the institutions) Nuclear resources on this planet are limited ... Uh no. You see the two most often discussed forms of nuclear processes for energy generation are fission and fusion. There using simply U235 and D3 we've got plenty. Successful implementation in space craft would extend that basically forever [2] You know how when you see Doctors in an operating room on TV you might think to yourself "Wow, that is very realistic" and then when you see them using a computer you say "That is so lame! You can't zoom in 2000x on a traffic camera photograph no matter how good your image processing software is." Basically we tend to give credence to things we aren't personally aware of the details of, and we instantly recognize the flaws in the the things we know intimately. However, everything has those same flaws, and if you happen to be sitting next to a surgeon they could tell you all the silly things wrong about the OR in a House episode and you could tell them about all the silly computer things they claim to do in a CSI episode. ABC news ran a story on coal ash [3] where they talked about cancer and asthma. I'm surprised they didn't run a radiation counter on the coal dust, if they had they would probably have found it to be more radioactive then the area outside the Fukushima plant. What is worse, the mercury and arsenic they were worried about are stable, which means that unlike plutonium they never go away ever. And if you ingest mercury? it kills you way faster than plutonium. ABC News could have taken a moment to talk about how if instead of the coal fired plants that had been built in Oklahoma they had instead built a single nuclear plant, statistics say that nobody in the town would have cancer due to the power plants. As it is, ABC News makes it look like everybody in the town has cancer. Not rational. [1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/may/20/craig-venter-synthetic-life-form http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/may/20/craig-venter-s... [2] The sun will eventually go red-giant and that will be the end of the planet so 'forever' in this context is the period of time between now and when the Sun causes the planet to be uninhabitable (more than a billion years) [3] http://abcnews.go.com/US/oklahoma-town-fears-cancer-asthma-linked-dump-site/story?id=13240312 http://abcnews.go.com/US/oklahoma-town-fears-cancer-asthma-l...
joeburke 16y ago
Please, let's keep the fear mongering down. This is the first incident of this kind in 40 years and the number of casualties will probably not exceed a few hundreds. Coal alone killed over 100,000 people over the past century.
- caf 16y ago
  Three Mile Island was 32 years ago.
  - orangecat 16y ago
    Three Mile Island was 32 years ago. Which killed how many people?
    - caf 16y ago
      Irrelevant, TMI was an incident of precisely this kind.
jpr 16y ago
Agreed. I believe that nuclear energy is safe and nice and dandy when properly managed, but the humankind has demonstrated with 100% certainty that it can't properly manage anything, ever. I don't want anyone to make decisions that can directly affect the health of many, many generations to come.
CWuestefeld 16y ago
Your point about the counter-productive nature of "no new nukes" is spot-on. However: Nuclear resources on this planet are limited, and unique in their performance profile. There may come a time when we need them... You're falling prey to the Malthusian fallacy (read up about him and Paul Ehrlich). This logic is constantly being invoked, but history shows that it simply doesn't work this way. The best way to guarantee our future is to ensure that there are plenty of minds around to work on it, and to be sure that the "invisible hand" will guide them so that their greed will be rewarded when they put their effort into solving our problems.

InclinedPlane 16y ago

On the other hand it's important to weigh the risks of nuclear power fairly, relative to other power sources. These reactor accidents are novel, noteworthy, and dramatic, but how serious are these accidents in proper context? Jumbo jet crashes are similarly dramatic and noteworthy, yet air travel remains one of the safest forms of transportation available, by a significant margin. Is the same bias for flashy and scary events happening with nuclear power? Fukushima and Chernobyl are notable, but so is the failure of Fujinuma Dam (also due to the Tohoku earthquake), and the failure of Banqiao dam, and the Texas City disaster. So far the record of the non-Soviet civilian nuclear power industry compares favorably with that of other industries and power sources, even including extrapolating some rather severe further evolutions of the Fukushima reactor disaster factored in.

Tichy 16y ago
"yet air travel remains one of the safest forms of transportation available" Doesn't that depend on how you measure it, like accidents per miles or accidents per hours? Even if it would be safest by miles, I don't think it would follow that the safest way to get to work every morning would be by plane. It only works because airplanes go long distances, and accidents most frequently happen during starting or landing. In short, the comparison is not even very useful. The question is also do we have to fly so much/do we need so much energy. If there were no airplanes, would people just travel the same distances by car? I doubt it.
- InclinedPlane 16y ago
  Whether you measure by hour or by mile air travel is still comparatively safe (1/4th as many fatalities per hour and 1/60th as many fatalities per mile, compared to automobiles).
  - borism 16y ago
    this is a testament to safety measures in aviation, not to some inherent safety of air travel. inherently, 99.9% of people will die if plane was to collide with another plane or ground. That number is inherently much lower for car collisions. so if we talk about nuclear safety, yes it is very safe compared to some other energy sources. But it also so much more dangerous when nuclear accidents happen than anything else.
    - InclinedPlane 16y ago
      "But it also so much more dangerous when nuclear accidents happen than anything else." This is a facile assumption but it's almost certainly false. The Banqiao dam disaster killed 25,000 people directly, and destroyed 6 million buildings (it caused 145,000 further deaths due to famine). Such a disaster far outstrips even Chernobyl, which was about as maximally bad as any nuclear reactor accident can be (runaway fission reaction generating massive amounts of radionuclides; no worthwhile reactor containment structures; the reactor core melting down, catching on fire, and spewing huge amounts of radiation into the wind).
      - borism 16y ago
        now please factor in duration and affected area and population into account when talking about severity of nuclear accidents, the same way you factored in hours and miles when you wrote about aviation safety.
        iuytghyjuyh 16y ago
        But do you factor in the deaths in Iraq into the cost of oil fired power stations? And flooding in Bangladesh and sea level rises as part of the CO2 cost of coal?
pasbesoin 16y ago
Oh, I agree. The amount of mercury that coal consumption puts out is horrendous -- and a permanent blight. And coal ash is one of the nastier industrial waste products we've managed to create. (I won't start down the C02 discussion, here, but of course it's another huge factor.) That's one reason I specifically cited renewable energy (and I'm skeptical that geo-thermal really applies in this regard, long term). If you want nuclear energy, we have the solar system's biggest fusion reactor at our disposal. Just divert some of its output on its way to becoming kinetic (including heat) and chemical energy, to do what we need. Yes, there are problems, but progress -- even in the face of meager funding -- has demonstrated that they are solvable.

throwaway40m 16y ago

"# Human society has demonstrated no stability, sociologically, technologically, nor otherwise, approaching even vaguely the time frames required to safely utilize this technology." This is the key observation, imo, addressing this issue and a broad set of other hot and timely topics, most fundamentally 'globalization' and the utopian yearning for a unified planetary governance (being quite generous and assuming idealism is mixed with the obvious hunger for global power among the promoters and actors). Many things make sense on paper. Applying them to human society, at its current level of progress, is not a given and we need to exercise caution. The main issue with nuclear technology is that it is not fail-safe. That by itself is not an indictment (as many have pointed out nearly everything we rely on is not fail-safe). So clearly we need to focus on recovery from catastrophe as an input to our decision making process. An airplane may indeed crash and kill N human beings. But it is a relatively scoped and finite event. People, generally, do not continue to die because an airplane crashed x years ago in their vicinity. Ditto trains, cars, etc. Nuclear technology disfigures nature as we know it. That is the key issue. This disfigurement is non-reversible (per our technological reach). This lack of room from recovery from error, regardless of the probabilities involved, is what is fundamentally "evil" about nuclear technology as practiced by the human species as of now.

ChuckMcM 16y ago

Sigh, its not 'one of the most challenging technologies' its actually rather simple which is why it was developed in the 1940's, a 'challenging' technology would be genetically engineered life forms, only recently managed [1]. Not only are synthetic life forms more technologically challenging, if they escape from the lab the planet is designed to provide them with an environment that allows them to replace all existing lifeforms if they adapt better. Public concerns, are just that, concerns. While its extremely important to have an open and informed public conversation around complex policy issues, they don't actually inform the policy they inform the public. If the national energy policy is to have 30% of our power provided by nuclear sources, we will have 30% of our power provided by nuclear sources. Human society ... yeah collectively we've been unable to keep a stable form of government for more than about 300 years (I realize that both the Chinese and Egyptians would dispute this given their emperor pasts but I don't accept that a series of emperors represents a 'continuous' government in the same way that a constitutional (or institutional) government exists with people merely filling rolls in the institutions) Nuclear resources on this planet are limited ... Uh no. You see the two most often discussed forms of nuclear processes for energy generation are fission and fusion. There using simply U235 and D3 we've got plenty. Successful implementation in space craft would extend that basically forever [2] You know how when you see Doctors in an operating room on TV you might think to yourself "Wow, that is very realistic" and then when you see them using a computer you say "That is so lame! You can't zoom in 2000x on a traffic camera photograph no matter how good your image processing software is." Basically we tend to give credence to things we aren't personally aware of the details of, and we instantly recognize the flaws in the the things we know intimately. However, everything has those same flaws, and if you happen to be sitting next to a surgeon they could tell you all the silly things wrong about the OR in a House episode and you could tell them about all the silly computer things they claim to do in a CSI episode. ABC news ran a story on coal ash [3] where they talked about cancer and asthma. I'm surprised they didn't run a radiation counter on the coal dust, if they had they would probably have found it to be more radioactive then the area outside the Fukushima plant. What is worse, the mercury and arsenic they were worried about are stable, which means that unlike plutonium they never go away ever. And if you ingest mercury? it kills you way faster than plutonium. ABC News could have taken a moment to talk about how if instead of the coal fired plants that had been built in Oklahoma they had instead built a single nuclear plant, statistics say that nobody in the town would have cancer due to the power plants. As it is, ABC News makes it look like everybody in the town has cancer. Not rational. [1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/may/20/craig-venter-synthetic-life-form http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/may/20/craig-venter-s... [2] The sun will eventually go red-giant and that will be the end of the planet so 'forever' in this context is the period of time between now and when the Sun causes the planet to be uninhabitable (more than a billion years) [3] http://abcnews.go.com/US/oklahoma-town-fears-cancer-asthma-linked-dump-site/story?id=13240312 http://abcnews.go.com/US/oklahoma-town-fears-cancer-asthma-l...

joeburke 16y ago

Please, let's keep the fear mongering down. This is the first incident of this kind in 40 years and the number of casualties will probably not exceed a few hundreds. Coal alone killed over 100,000 people over the past century.

caf 16y ago
Three Mile Island was 32 years ago.
- orangecat 16y ago
  Three Mile Island was 32 years ago. Which killed how many people?
  - caf 16y ago
    Irrelevant, TMI was an incident of precisely this kind.

jpr 16y ago

Agreed. I believe that nuclear energy is safe and nice and dandy when properly managed, but the humankind has demonstrated with 100% certainty that it can't properly manage anything, ever. I don't want anyone to make decisions that can directly affect the health of many, many generations to come.

CWuestefeld 16y ago

Your point about the counter-productive nature of "no new nukes" is spot-on. However: Nuclear resources on this planet are limited, and unique in their performance profile. There may come a time when we need them... You're falling prey to the Malthusian fallacy (read up about him and Paul Ehrlich). This logic is constantly being invoked, but history shows that it simply doesn't work this way. The best way to guarantee our future is to ensure that there are plenty of minds around to work on it, and to be sure that the "invisible hand" will guide them so that their greed will be rewarded when they put their effort into solving our problems.