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Problem is that you don’t get to opt out of the “human bullshit”. Nuclear power comes with a massive and unavoidable cost from these matters.
by matthewmacleod 6y ago
Problem is that you don’t get to opt out of the “human bullshit”. Nuclear power comes with a massive and unavoidable cost from these matters.
- pilsetnieks 6y agoDoes it, though? A large portion can definitely be avoided with design and technology. Chernobyl happened because it was a positive feedback loop, in the West it was an obsolete design even before it was built. And Fukushima was quite literally acts of god (in the actuarial sense.)
- imtringued 6y agoIt doesn't matter if you have a new design if you don't deploy it. The Fukushima plant was older than the Chernobyl plant. One could have simply decided to replace it with a newer design. In hindsight if Japan's government didn't have to pay for the Fukushima cleanup they could have done more sensible things, like update the entire nuclear fleet. It certainly would have been cheaper to tear all nuclear plants in Japan down and build new ones when you look at the cost overruns at Fukushima.
- rjkennedy98 6y agoAs an equal analogy - why can't we design our way out of governments having lots of "human bullshit" problems? If you can answer that question, you solve a much bigger problem than energy.
- matthewmacleod 6y agoYes, it does. Humans lie and cheat and steal and misrepresent. Contractors use inappropriate materials or cut corners. Regulators demand unreasonable operational constraints because of political pressure. Insurers demand unaffordable costs. Protestors fight construction because of unfounded fears. Political stasis prevents sensible waste management strategies. And so on. I absolutely think it would be possible to build a safe future on nuclear power - in an ideal world. But the world is very very far from ideal; the impression I get is that that effort which would be required to actually deliver a modern nuclear strategy is unattainable.
- raffraffraff 6y agoWhereas with lovely coal and oil we get to ignore the problem. It's just smoke until... Catastrophic climate feedback loops, mass extinction, hundreds of millions of climate migrants escaping uninhabitable parts of earth, coral and shellfish disappear in acidic oceans, entire ecosystems collapse and etc etc. But nuclear had costs. Sure. But we could at least begin to calculate those costs.
- dv_dt 6y agoWhy does the answer always reply with coal and oil instead of Renewables and storage?
- read_if_gay_ 6y agoIf you’re German for one, then it’s justified, because Merkel has been shutting down nuclear plants which forced a switch back to more coal.
- dv_dt 6y agoThen why isn't the argument that Germany should build more solar and wind generation? Nuclear plants take decades from start to finish - if they even finish in the West. Vs months to a few years for many renewable projects.
- read_if_gay_ 6y agoBecause the plants are finished and working. They just shut them down.
- dv_dt 6y agoNuclear plants have a lifetime of 30ish years. Many are getting shutdown now because the first wave of builds was around 30-50 years ago. The risks of continuing to operate older designs gets higher if they're refurbished.
- nabla9 6y agoThose costs are negligible compared to climate change. Fukushima every 5 years for next 1000 years, or gradually leaking long term nuclear waste, are several orders of magnitude less harmful for humanity or life on earth than climate change.
- nicoburns 6y agoBut investing in wind, solar and storage would be much cheaper still. The fukushima cleanup effort has cost close to $100 billion. Imagine where we could take renewable and energy storag tech with that level of investment.
- monadic2 6y agoHow do you know that the storage investment will produce something viable? Investments still have risk and nuclear can fill that hole.
- nicoburns 6y agoIt's true that there's always risk involved. As we know, that is true for nuclear as much as any other energy technology. My view on this is that we are not particularly far away from this being viable even with 2020 technology. And that this is especially true if we are creative in how we apply technology, for example by decentralising the grid and installing storage capacity in people's homes, and by being aggressive with load shifting to reduce the storage capacity required. And there are dozens of promising new energy storage technologies. It seems unlikely that none of them pan out. I thus consider the risk of going all-in on renewables fairly low.
- monadic2 6y agoSure, but the stakes are human existence on the planet. I don't know why you would turn away from solutions we already have with boundable risk.
- 6y ago
- jojobas 6y agoYou do. US Navy had zero nuclear accidents so far, simply because one Hyman Rickover was able to convince the government that safety overrides everything else.
- IgorPartola 6y agoUnlike the Air Force which accidentally flew two nukes to the wrong state :). But that’s not nuclear power so I suppose you are correct.
- GekkePrutser 6y agoAnd dropped a couple on Spain for good measure.
- pvaldes 6y ago> US Navy had zero nuclear accidents so far and here we go again....
- DoctorOetker 6y ago"coal energy destroyed zero inhabitable planetary biospheres so far"
- jhayward 6y agoUm, are you sure about that? I can think of at least two.
- MurMan 6y agoI assume that you're referring to USS Thresher and Scorpion. These weren't nuclear accidents.
- pvaldes 6y ago> These weren't nuclear accidents. Of course they were, unless we assume that those nuclear plants were lost on purpose and not accidentally Anything related with the destruction of a damned nuclear submarine that is lost somewhere in the sea bottom is a nuclear accident, by definition.
- monadic2 6y agoMassive compared to what, though? Chernobyl was a catastrophe, but it's also like just a month of driving deaths here in america, or a couple coal plants just doing their thing. None of these are even on the same amount of destruction that climate change will wreak, up to and including possible extinction, something scarier even than a nuclear holocaust. Perhaps you might articulate what the risk you're alluding to is?
- sto_hristo 6y agoCost is massive indeed, but even in extreme cases like in Chernobyl, it will be offset to non-existence compared to the gains we will reap in the long run if we master this technology. Remember, that nuclear is still in its early stages. Newer and better designs emerge and we're even still researching fusion. Early cars were like a death sentence in Texas. But that didn't stop engineers from improving and making them better. What if they said after the first crash - "Screw it, back to horses and carts, this stuff is too dangerous."