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For the uninitiated, nuclear power is actually much, much safer than it was in the previous century, and fossil fuel power plants have killed exponentially more
by notRobot 6y ago
For the uninitiated, nuclear power is actually much, much safer than it was in the previous century, and fossil fuel power plants have killed exponentially more people through pollution than all nuclear power accidents combined – it's just not something that happens all at once so it doesn't seem like a big deal to most people.
We will not be able to "defeat" climate change and keep this planet inhabitable for future generations without mass adoption of nuclear power.
> Nuclear energy is by far the safest energy source in this comparison – it results in more than 442 times fewer deaths than the 'dirtiest' forms of coal; 330 times fewer than coal; 250 times less than oil; and 38 times fewer than gas.
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
- melling 6y agoNow we just need to make it affordable. Cost overruns seem to be a big problem in the industry. The US recently canceled 2 plants, and we’re struggling to finish the other 2.
- manfredo 6y agoNuclear is much cheaper when built at scale. Often 3-5x cheaper. Most of the plants built during the nuclear boom in the 1960s and 1970s were built at a cost of ~$2.5 billion per gigawatt of capacity. Note that this capacity is put out 24/7, so it's equivalent to about 4 times as much solar capacity (which typically has a capacity factor of ~25%). Solar and wind are cheap in terms of watts per day, but become drastically more expensive one you need to start adding storage. Storage costs are typically in the $200-400 per KWh range for battery storage, and $100 - $200 per KWh range for hydroelectric storage, but the latter is geographically limited.
- tomatotomato37 6y agoI also haven't really seen anyone discuss the cost of nuclear in human labor costs. No matter what method or design you use you still need educated workers to babysit both the reactor and the standard turbine infrastructure, whose salary dwarfs whatever costs come from fuel or safety countermeasures. In contrast, solar and wind tend to be very manpower efficient due to the logistical pain of maintaining something spread over 10 sq. miles forcing investments in reliability and autonomy. Edit: Messed up wording
- delecti 6y agoI'm not quite sure I follow. Doesn't the "logistical pain to maintain something spread over 10 sq. miles" have a human labor cost too?
- tomatotomato37 6y agoI meant to imply that the pain of such caused those technologies to invest in autonomy to mitigate needless human labor, but I lost the point when revising the comment. I'll fix it.
- formercoder 6y agoLabor costs have to be figured into $/KwH by convention right? They’re not zero for solar.
- reincarnate0x14 6y agoBuilding it makes it affordable. Giant one-off projects have endemic problems with perverse bidding incentives, cost overruns, and engineering problems. Economy of scale production absolutely dominates most industrial supply chains and engineering. The US and other modern economies got the political will together to subsidize solar when it rarely made sense on a MW/$ basis and now it's dropped to by far the cheapest source (if you can live with intermittent power).
- legulere 6y agoWhat drives nuclear costs is generally rising construction costs. You can’t bring that down with building more nuclear power plants. PV got so much cheaper because it’s a mass producible product.
- Ericson2314 6y agoIf all the designs were the same you could start prefabbing components, that will do just fine for construction costs.
- corty 6y agoPV is also cheaper because the possibly polluting production is outsourced to china.
- imtringued 6y agoThe reality is that there is an entire supporting industry that needs to be built to make nuclear power plants economical. Nuclear power plants have special requirements that are rarely met by conventional industry. A lot of nuclear power plant designs involve manufacturing via the largest hydraulic presses we have ever built. There are not many of them and building more of them is expensive so it will raise costs in the short term (10-20 years). The design philosophies have to change considerably if nuclear power wants to be cost effective. The monolithic nuclear power plant is a dead end.
- StreamBright 6y agoLet's move it out from government oversight. Anything gov touches gets super expensive, especially in the US. Best example is the Obamacare website. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-09-24/obamacare-website-costs-exceed-2-billion-study-finds https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-09-24/obamacare... Imagine how much cheaper you could have built that website with the same functionality. Now apply the same mental process to nuclear power plants.
- laurent92 6y agoYes. The government should only set the safety expectations and procedures, and let the market decide how they do it. Innovation in nuclear power is broken because of the difficulty to access uranium and use it safely, but if we had innovated, it might have been made safe by now. There has been pilot projects such as a sealed 1m3 cuve, which, by sealing it, solved a lot of problems about safety and human operation.
- Ancapistani 6y agoI agree, but the argument is a non-starter here and equally so with the general public. Reducing regulation is a lot more palatable to people than eliminating it.
- pjc50 6y agoThe government could never build an important highly advanced technical project in a hurry; the atomic bomb project should have been put out to the private sector. /S
- formercoder 6y agoThe incentives were different.
- belltaco 6y agoAnything the private sector touches has safety issues. Best example is the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster Imagine how much safer it would have been under govt regulations. Now apply the same mental process to nuclear power plants exploding.
- tomp 6y agoIan the same argument for renewables? Subsidize solar panels to make them affordable... the only difference is, solar panels are smaller so we can iterate faster. Maybe that’s what we need to improve about nuclear...
- p_l 6y agoLots of Small Modular Reactors waiting for political will and funding around. Personally I'm really interested in Soviet-originated SVBR series, but politically it's even more problematic than other designs right now :-(
- lazyjones 6y ago> We will not be able to "defeat" climate change and keep this planet inhabitable for future generations without mass adoption of nuclear power. I wish we could discuss such topics without the much-abused climate scare argument. Most debatable, technology-related issues have many other implications worth taking into account. Like grid stability, cost of energy etc. in this case. But if all you've got is a hammer...
- bob29 6y agoThere is a difference between safety history and risk.
- jayd16 6y agoI'm all for nuclear but the safety record talk always seems disingenuous or at least obtuse to me when the stats focus on day to day operations but the fears are about worst case scenarios. I also feel like the industry would do better if it rallied behind specific new technologies so politicians could rally behind molten salt reactors (or what have you) and placate fears about "old nuclear" designs.
- rriepe 6y agoI wish one person who mentioned the long game would also mention that nuclear accidents can make a place uninhabitable for thousands of years. If I had a dollar for every time a pro-nuclear person (not that I'm not) ignored that, or peak uranium...
- rectang 6y agoEvery time I've seen one of these threads on HN asserting that nuclear is safer than the alternatives and I've looked more closely into the claims, I've wound up unconvinced because of omissions like the one you've identified. It's gotten to the point that I tend to tune out pro-nuclear arguments on HN. :( I'm sure there are good arguments in there somewhere, but I don't have the bandwidth to sort them out from the misleading ones.
- eecc 6y agoI still haven't heard a convincing protocol for long term storage of spent fuel. That's even worse than a remotely possible nuclear disaster: because unless a solution is found, it's a certainty.
- burfog 6y agoThe real answer is mostly "don't do that". Spent fuel rods can't be used anymore because about 5% of the uranium has been converted into elements that slow down the reaction. The remaining uranium is still good. Due to a presidential order by Carter, we waste that uranium. The process for recovering the unused uranium (called "reprocessing") is vaguely similar to the process for making bombs. We'd rather not have lots of countries making bombs. The idea was that by not reprocessing our own fuel, we could set an example and hope that somehow that would keep other countries from making bombs. Yes, that is terrible logic. Japan does the reprocessing. We could do it too, and it wouldn't suddenly arm the world with nukes. If the fuel is reprocessed, we could cut our need to mine uranium and cut our need to store radioactive material. It's about a 95% reduction. The uranium itself is the long-lived portion, so we'd clear up that problem too. We could also recover rare-earth elements from the spent fuel. This is the only practical way to create rare-earth elements. Of course, that doesn't get rid of 100% of the waste. We don't really have a shortage of great places to store it. The worries about burial are blown way out of proportion. All of the proposed facilities for burial are ridiculous overkill.
- notJim 6y agoPartly I think nuclear triggers a cognitive bias where humans will tolerate ongoing low-level shittiness, but really struggle with large catastrophes, even if the catastrophe is far less damaging than the ongoing low-level damage. However, I think the resistance is also because the nature of the catastrophe is different. Have coal or gas plants ever created a Chernobyl-style exclusion zone? I know that mining/drilling are incredibly damaging to the environment, but theoretically work is done to mitigate/restore the areas. Of course, they're essentially turning the entire planet (or large, currently-inhabited swaths of it anyway) into an exclusion zone, but unfortunately there is another cognitive bias humans have where we under-rate long-term risks. I've been a nuclear skeptic, but gradually I'm coming around to it. At this point the main questions I have are whether it can be done cheap enough. It seems like price is really driving renewable adoption at this point, so maybe green policies should focus on subsidizing storage and nuclear instead?
- khuey 6y agoExisting already-operating nuclear plants can barely compete with cheap fracked gas in the United States. Capital investment in new nuclear is never going to pencil for a private operator without carbon taxes or enormous price drops.
- Ancapistani 6y agoThe existing regulatory structure for nuclear power was designed for the previous generation of reactors. I don’t have deep knowledge in this area, but it’s clear to me that more modern designs have very different risk profiles, and the regulatory structure should change to reflect that. This should reduce the compliance cost, which is a very large portion of the initial and operational costs of nuclear power. In short - nukes are expensive now because they’re an extremely regulated industry. New designs are much safer and new regulation for them should therefore have much lower compliance costs.
- burfog 6y agoIt's not just that "The existing regulatory structure for nuclear power was designed for the previous generation of reactors." It was designed specifically to bankrupt them. It was designed to make them unprofitable. Just changing an ordinary light bulb in a nuclear power plant is all sorts of certification and paperwork. There was a ratchet effect on regulations. You could always add more, but nobody would take responsibility for removing regulations. The existence of regulations makes the reactors seem even more terrifying (because why else need the regulations) and then the resulting terror was used to justify more regulations.
- morsch 6y agoBy far the safest, if you rely on articles written by the nuclear industry; specifically references 31 and 32 which estimate the fatalities from nuclear energy, in the linked articles primary source, https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(07)61253-7/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(07)61253-7/full....
- dan-robertson 6y agoWhat does it mean to say that fossil fuel plants killed exponentially more people? Isn’t this just the triviality that any two points (with different y values) are exponentially related?
- umanwizard 6y agoIt’s the common colloquial usage of “exponential” to mean “a lot”, rather than its technical meaning.
- gautamcgoel 6y agoYeah, usage of the phrase "exponentially more" is widespread and always almost meaningless. It drives me crazy, especially as a CS theory person, where this phrase has a precise meaning.
- yissp 6y agoIt's gone the way of "literally"
- ComputerGuru 6y agoI believe the intended meaning is “orders of magnitude more.”
- spfzero 6y agoLet’s just say it means many, many, many more deaths.
- archgoon 6y agoIt basically is used in the same way "only a fraction of the populace supports the measure" just in the opposite direction of meaning. Both expressions have technical shortcomings; but are idiomatically understood.
- legulere 6y agoNuclear also got much, much more expensive than it was in the previous century, making it economically completely unreasonable in the west. Nuclear is also the only energy source where people get displaced from their homes in thousands of square kilometers in catastrophic events.
- retrac 6y agoDam failures would like a word.
- Dahoon 6y agoYou can live on that land unlike on radioactive wasteland.
- Nimitz14 6y ago> Nuclear also got much, much more expensive than it was in the previous century, making it economically completely unreasonable in the west. Because we stopped building them. Of course costs are going to explode when every time you do it the people on the project are doing it for the first time.
- qayxc 6y agoTo be fair, increased reliability and safety also comes at a cost. But I agree - loss of expertise and lack of economy of scale are a major factor.
- beders 6y agoWith a failure rate of 1% for commercial reactors, calling something 'safe' is - frankly - ridiculous. You wouldn't fly planes if they had that failure rate. It's not just the death count for which, btw, we still don't even have reliable numbers! What we do have is: Uninhabitable regions, radioactive boars decades after Chernobyl roaming Bavaria (google it), countless cases of cancer, highly radioactive waste we don't know what to do with, billions and billions of tax payer dollars spent on clean-ups, not just for accidents, but for decommissioning plants, plants on fault lines that are ticking time bombs. Nuclear power plants rank first in the amount of economic damage done. And you are seriously calling for mass adoption? The engineers and scientists who built Fukushima and Chernobyl thought: Yup, perfectly safe and clean. It makes me mad hearing younger people falling for the propaganda of nuclear power lobbyists who didn't have to live through these accidents. We have plenty of space and money to turn our grid into 100% renewables, that are safe and cheap. All it would take is the political will to do so. The times to propose an outdated, dangerous and hard-to-control technology for commercial power generation are over.
- fouronnes3 6y agoSource for "1% failure rate"?
- cbmuser 6y agoDoesn't exist. If we had a 1% failure rate, we'd have a nuclear catastrophe every year since we have over 400 active reactors world-wide.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago"on average"
- nl 6y agoI don't believe the 1% number is accurate, but it's a lot higher than people might believe. From 2016: our range of models suggests that there is presently a 50% chance that (i) a Fukushima event (or larger) occurs every 60–150 years, and (ii) that a Three Mile Island event (or larger) occurs every 10–20 years. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/risa.12587 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/risa.12587 Summary: https://mtec.ethz.ch/news/d-mtec-news/2016/07/a-rethink-of-nuclear-risk-assessment.html https://mtec.ethz.ch/news/d-mtec-news/2016/07/a-rethink-of-n...
- cma 6y agoProliferation is a big issue, perhaps bigger than climate change. Some modern plant designs try and address that though I think.
- hymangrickover 6y agoWe have Hyman G. Rickover, Admiral in the US Navy to thank for steering nuclear energy research away from thorium to uranium. He very much wanted the Navy to be in command of nuclear wessels carrying nuclear missiles. If I can remember correctly from research in US energy policy history in college, the US had sunk about 10 years into thorium reactor research when Hyman came along. Seems rather important to not ignore the violence monopoly. Quit paying it too much serious attention for too long and it gets chippy. Let’s hope this is PTSD from a generation that was forced to go through hell, often for no reason, and it can normalize out. So long as we live long enough to test that hypothesis. On the upside, the Navy has never had a nuclear accident. We’ve proven it’s doable.
- ComputerGuru 6y agoI’m with you, but this: > On the upside, the Navy has never had a nuclear accident. We’ve proven it’s doable. can really be put down to sheer, dumb luck when you hear about all the close calls.
- Natsu 6y agoThat's why risk analysis looks at defense in depth. It's for people who believe there's no such thing as luck and every close call is a near disaster that needs to be accounted for in the plan.
- fmajid 6y agoNot the US Navy, but there was this incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalk_River_Laboratories#1952_NRX_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalk_River_Laboratories#1952_... you may have heard of the US Navy officer in charge of the cleanup. His name was Jimmy Carter. Also, the US Navy's record at Hunter's Point in San Francisco is abysmal.
- nl 6y ago> On the upside, the Navy has never had a nuclear accident. We’ve proven it’s doable. Well that's not true: "An American nuclear-powered submarine leaked radiation for more than two years, releasing the bulk of the material in its home port of Guam and at Pearl Harbor, Japanese and U.S. officials said Thursday."[1] There was also the A4 that fell off an aircraft carrier with 3 nuclear bombs on board, which were never recovered[2]. Both the USS Thresher and USS Scorpion sunk and haven't had their nuclear reactors or weapons recovered. They do appear to remain intact though. [1] https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/nuclear-subs-radiation-leak-revealed/ https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/nuclear-subs-radia... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1965_Philippine_Sea_A-4_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1965_Philippine_Sea_A-4_incide...
- AtlasBarfed 6y agoLook, I'm a stan for LFTR and thorium reactors, but the nuclear energy industry is full of old PWR reactors on life support that are dangerous and meltdown prone. But Fukushima happened, and unfortunately the management attitudes in TEPCO are not unique to that company. The fact is that solar/wind is currently running away from everything else. I believe new natural gas plants can't compete with solar/wind, and that means installed gas plants are in their crosshairs just like coal plants. Notice your article leaves out solar/wind. "We will not be able to "defeat" climate change and keep this planet inhabitable for future generations without mass adoption of nuclear power." I disagree.
- colordrops 6y agoFrom Akira Kurosawa's Dreams (1990): "They told us that nuclear plants were safe. Human accident is the danger, not the nuclear plant itself. No accidents, no danger. That's what they told us. What liars!"
- controversy 6y agoPlease stop with this. Nuclear is the only way to keep our current level of society. Our solar plants are going to lead to massive poisoned landfills due to their heavy metals. They are hard to recycle and so many are just dumping them. Modern nuclear can meet all our needs and stop global warming. If we pursued nuclear in the last century, we would be facing global warming now.
- colordrops 6y agoMore solar and wind and energy conversion and storage mechanisms can also keep our current level of society. Why can't we subsidize renewable forms of energy for trillions of dollars if our lives are truly at risk? Will these take any longer to spin up than nuclear? And are you suggesting that solar plants really create more toxins to dispose of than nuclear? Really?
- formercoder 6y agoWe shouldn’t subsidize anything, the government is bad at picking winners. We should tax carbon, let the market figure out the rest.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- colordrops 6y agoDon't get hung up on the word "subsidize". Market forces clearly did not solve our problem, so shifting the incentives won't solve it either. Many do not believe that nuclear is the answer, and a carbon tax wouldn't address that. It is indisputable that solar and wind are far cleaner than nuclear and coal, so the question is whether they can be made to work for most of our energy needs, and I've never seen a good reason why not.
- DangitBobby 6y agoWould it still be considered safe in a world where flooding becomes much more commonplace in the next 50 years?
- jgalt212 6y ago> and 38 times fewer than gas. Chernobyl came close to be 10 or 100X worse. In which case, nat gas and fission are even up.
- zabhi 6y agoIt most definitely is. But the pace of nuclear development in India slowed to a crawl (no new projects) ever since it started an insurance pool with corporate liability.
- newacct583 6y ago> We will not be able to "defeat" climate change and keep this planet inhabitable for future generations without mass adoption of nuclear power. I hope not. Current nuclear technologies are outrageously expensive. It made sense in the 50's-70's only because it was being effectively subsidized by the defense industry who needed the excess breeder capacity for bombs. It's safe. It's fine. It's good that the democrats have dropped what was always effectively a luddite plank from their platform. But it's not going to save us absent some really disruptive new technology. Right now we should be putting our electricity investment into straightforward, cheap and easily scaled renewables. That is what is going to replace coal and gas in the short term. Long term? Fine. If nuclear can make the balance sheet work then let's do that. If not, meh.
- bArray 6y ago> For the uninitiated, nuclear power is actually much, much > safer than it was in the previous century, and fossil fuel > power plants have killed exponentially more people through > pollution than all nuclear power accidents combined I think that nuclear waste will be the next big problem with nuclear energy, with storing it safely for the thousands of years required just being a problem we're kicking down the road. It only needs to leak into the water supplies and suddenly you have a disaster on a scale never seen before (human & animal consumption, contaminated crops and land, etc). To be honest, renewable energy sources such as solar, wind and hydro are really the way forwards. I would favour solar and wind though, as a failure to invest in infrastructure just means they break - whilst a failure to invest in hydro has some very serious consequences (dam collapse, etc). In the next 10 years or so I want to see solar panels being recycled if they really are to play a large put of our future energy production. Otherwise there is always the method of pointing mirror arrays at a single spot to heat water.
- nl 6y agoI wish nuclear advocates would stop selectively quoting to try to hide things. Almost no one wants to continue with fossil fuels, and instead the competition is renewable. "This comparison" mentioned in that quote doesn't include renewables (it was from 2007) but from the very same page, in the very next section: > Modern renewables are about as safe as nuclear energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy#modern-renewables-are-about-as-safe-as-nuclear-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy#modern-r...
- readams 6y agoBut you cannot use 100% renewable energy without some storage technology not currently known. Nuclear is the only carbon free energy source we have that can supply power reliably.
- ZeroGravitas 6y agoNuclear has a similar problem once you get near 100%, the demand isn't actually flat (spikes during daylight and winter) andthe seasonal variation differs around the globe. Tge solutions are similar too, build nore so you can cover the peak, or build storage to buffer in the short and long term. Once you start buffering, you would choose to overbuild renewables because its cheaper. Nuclear has a very niche future around 5% of global energy, Solar and wind will be doing the heavy lifting.
- nl 6y agoThis just isn't true. With geographical redundancy, pump storage and some batteries (or alternatives) you can get the reliability of the current grid. In 2015 (before the introduction of large scale battery storage) they studied this in Texas and showed how little was required for grid stability. In this case they used natural gas (which remain an option), but nowadays there are completely renewable solutions. Note that this covers more than 10% of the entire electricity generation capacity of Texas. > In a study commissioned by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, General Electric calculated how much new reserve capacity will be required as Texas increases the amount of wind energy installed. The report found that an additional 15,000 megawatts of installed wind energy only requires an additional 18 megawatts of new flexible reserve capacity to maintain the stability of the grid. In other words, the spare capacity of one fast-ramping natural gas power plant can compensate for the variability introduced by 5,000 new average-sized wind turbines. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/renewable-energy-intermittency-explained-challenges-solutions-and-opportunities/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/renewable-en...
- IncRnd 6y ago> Nuclear energy is by far the safest energy source in this comparison – it results in more than 442 times fewer deaths than the 'dirtiest' forms of coal; 330 times fewer than coal; 250 times less than oil; and 38 times fewer than gas. If I look at the graph to the right and do the division, the numbers don't come out the same as what is quoted. This may have to do with the abominable "x times fewer than y" that makes no sense and likely has a different meaning for every reader.
- abiogenesis 6y agoThat's because we don't see more than 2 decimals in the graph. The nuclear column is probably closer to 0.074. 32.72 / 0.074 ~= 442
- andi999 6y agoI do not know the current data, but previously the catastrophy rate was by design below 1 in 10000 years. But this is per plant, we have about 400 plants, so 1 catastrophy per 25 years on average; this values agrees with experiment. About your statistics: that it is safer was pure luck. In the fukushima incident there were depending on the season two prevalent wind direction either towards the ocean or towards Tokyo. So with a high chance in the range around 50% Tokyo would have been to be evacuated. If anybody has better numbers let me know. To me not counting this in, is like crossing the street with eye closed and arguing it if not hit so far so good with dismissing close encounters. I would like to see numbers including this.
- rimliu 6y agoAnother look at Fukushima can be that the incident was pure bad luck.
- andi999 6y agoCan you elaborate? Do you mean having a Tsunami is pure bad luck in Japan? (With Tsunami actually beiing a japanese word...) I see your point though, one shouldnt go too much into 'what ifs', because all accidents are in a sense accidents/bad luck. But I still feel we can apply the what if on the outcome of the disasters, especially if it is that seasonal clear cut with high propability.
- emiliobumachar 6y agoRelated hypothetical: if a hydroelectricity dam failed when hit by an earthquake stronger than the one it was designed for, how much of a pass would we give Hydroelectricity?
- fluffything 6y agoThe problem with nuclear isn't whether you can build a safe plant, you can. The problem with nuclear is all the assumptions under which a perfectly safe plant is actually perfectly safe (proper maintenance, training, etc.). I don't believe those assumptions always hold in practice. At the end of the day, these plants are operated by people, and private companies, who have many interests beyond keeping the plant "perfectly safe" (like making money) and also operate under constraints that prevent them from actually keeping the plant "perfectly safe" even if they wanted to (like lack of money). The problem with nuclear isn't technological, but social. It allows a relatively small bunch of shitty people and companies to cause tremendous amounts of devastation. Remove people from the "nuclear energy safety equation" and I'm all in with nuclear. Telling me that new plants are perfectly safe as long as people and private companies don't do shit, reads like these plants aren't safe at all to me. --- And this is without taking into account all the unknown unknowns, like all the natural disasters we can't even predict or imagine, which all plant designs just assume cannot happen. Just claiming that modern nuclear plants are safe, for all potential world states is BS, because nobody can imagine, much less know, what all those potential world states are. Sure coal kills people, but what makes many think its safer than nuclear is that we understand how that happens, we understand where coal goes. See this John Oliver episode about nuclear waste. After 70 years, we haven't even been able to agree in a location to dispose nuclear waste, much less build one, and use it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwY2E0hjGuU&list=PLMJ9OaOo9JZipgXkisLAT9Wld8Uku7VXW https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwY2E0hjGuU&list=PLMJ9OaOo9J... All the assumptions that nuclear was safer than X over the last 70 year assumed that such a location would exist and be used.
- pvaldes 6y agoNuclear power is not safe and never will be. This ship sailed with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They are repeating that nuclear plants are safe now. "Safe" of course if some conditions meet. If your car is a parking your probability of dying in a car crash is really low, this is obvious. What really counts is their behaviour in hard times. "If all go well, and we have luck, and everybody behaves, nuclear is safe" is not enough. A natural disaster, a war, terrorism, another lunatic, sadistic, mentally ill or a psycho reaching power (look around)... and your rainbow-safe-dream will explode into a thousand pieces. And then, what? Talk me about what is your plan B in THAT conditions. Hide under the rug and deny all as in the last 50 years?
- notRobot 6y agoDid you even read my comment or click on the source I cited? Nuclear energy is the safest form of energy we have. Hiroshima and Nagasaki had nuclear weapons dropped on them. I'm talking about power plants. The same material can be used in two very different ways to achieve two very different results.
- pvaldes 6y agoYou nailed it. Is the same material. The same that killed hundred thousands of people in a second in our recent past. Is unsafe stuff by nature. The stupidity of people at charge to see the problem or to invest serious money into fixing weak points, makes it even more dangerous, but the main problem remains: They never were able to fix their s*t, and "but, but, more people die by cars" and "we destined one whole page to our emergency plan" are still the wrong answers.
- emiliobumachar 6y agoIs your argument that nuclear energy makes nuclear weapons more likely? If so, could you please elaborate? Decline of U.S. nuclear energy did not affect its capacity for building nuclear weapons, has it? Nuclear bomb decline was caused by treaties, with not a thought dedicated to "but how will they be built?", right?