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A salient quote from TFA, "there have been a total of over 17,000 reactor-years (where one nuclear reactor operating for a year equals one reactor-year) spannin

• TameAntelope 6y ago
  Right, but I'm familiar with each of them, because of the devastating impact each had (or could have had). I'm not saying we don't do it, but "there were only 3" doesn't feel like an honest argument.
  • krupan 6y ago
    "or could have had" And that sums up most opposition to nuclear right there. Fear of what maybe might could happen.
    • TameAntelope 6y ago
      Oh for sure, but I guess my overarching point that I think us pro-nuclear people need to keep in mind is that it only takes one, and that (possibly irrationally) scares people.
      • Aachen 6y ago
        I think everyone is well aware that it takes only one disaster to paint a picture, no matter whether it's still possible today, proportional to deaths caused by other energy sources, or otherwise based on misinformation and emotional reasons. This is exactly the fallacy everyone should be arguing against. Yes, also people who think nuclear is a bad option for other (rational) reasons. Otherwise you're lying about your motivations and pushing a different point under false pretenses.
    • pvaldes 6y ago
      When "what maybe could have happened but didn't, ha-haa!" is making half of European continent uninhabitable for several generations in 1986... fear is fully justified. Our brain evolved the capability to explore hypothetical undesirable outcomes and feel fear of it to keep us alive, and it serves us well since millions of years. The fools that never are afraid of anything tend to have very short lives.
      • Aachen 6y ago
        > making half of European continent uninhabitable In what remotely plausible scenario would that have happened? Feel free to involve the USSR, reactor safety of the time, etc. Because from what I know, the fallout was definitely not making anything nearly that large "uninhabitable". Deaths would go up, but so did they from the coal plants that were subsequently built (we're at 3 million deaths a year, if memory serves; that's the number you have to beat to make nuclear less attractive than coal from a more sciency perspective than "what maybe could have happened but didn't, ha-haa!").
        • pvaldes 6y ago
          > In what remotely plausible scenario would that have happened? If all people would just have run and quit the area letting the reaction finish. > we're at 3 million deaths a year Lets assume that this number is real, the comparison would be still wrong. 1) There are much more coal plants in the planet than nuclear plants so this is like saying than a car contaminates less than 1,000 bicycles. Yes, can be true but it does not mean that replacing all bicycles by cars would reduce contamination. Replacing all coal plants by nuclear plants would increase and equilibrate really fast the death-count in both groups. Absolute numbers are useless here. 2) When talking about coal plants, the short term, middle and long term effects of contamination are included. With nuclear just the first 90 days were taken. This is a shady and dishonest way to do statistics
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
• rbanffy 6y ago
  The article forgot a couple dozen accidents that leaked radioactive material to the environment, that killed someone and that cost multiple million dollar to fix or contain.
  • sjwright 6y ago
    I’m sure that in the list of substances which have leaked into the environment and caused one or more deaths, nuclear material is certainly one of them—possibly even in the top 1,000.
  • aeternum 6y ago
    Yes, but we also do not generally count the radiation that coal plants leak into the environment nor the animal deaths caused by windmills.
    • walshemj 6y ago
      Or accidents like Aberfan where a coal waste tip collapsed onto a school killing 116 Children and 28 Adults - the anniversary was a couple of days ago.
    • wp381640 6y ago
      The whole animal deaths from windmills is a misinformation campaign Cats kill 900M birds a year, windows 200M a year, cell towers 7M a year, oil fields 1M a year Windmills kill ~300k a year and that can be reduced 70% by painting one blade black And you know what else kills birds and animals more? Climate change ..
      • aeternum 6y ago
        But how many birds does nuclear kill?
        • imtringued 6y ago
          Depending on the coolant method it can kill a lot of fish. A single plant may kill thousands per day. It's worse than coal in that regard.
• epistasis 6y ago
  What about the financial disasters? Especially in all attempts within the last 30 years? Nuclear has long had a reputation as a tech that could bankrupt a utility, which is why utilities stopped building it in the 1980s. In the mid-2000s, in an attempt to revitalize the industry, we had an attempt to build nuclear in highly supportive communities with high levels of support from the Nuclear Regulatory Committee. This attempt ended in yet more financial disaster. South Carolina residents pay an average of $20/month on their electricity bill for a failed project that will never produce energy (Vogtle). In order to convince the utility to take on the massive financial risk of a nuclear construction project, the nuclear industry pushed through a special bill in the state legislature that lets the utility charge ratepayers whether or not a nuclear construction project completes. The UK started attempts at building nuclear at the same time, and though it started construction at Hinckley C, a project far behind schedule and far over budget, it has not even been able to find somebody to build at Wylfa. Hitachi pulled out. Similarly, France, who is often an example of "good nuclear," is abandoning new nuclear because their attempts at building again have all ended in financial disaster and blown schedules. Chernobyl, TMI, and Fukushima are not the nuclear failures that scare those who would build it. It's the financial risk that scares away investors, and it should scare us all. Dumping such high capital costs in a 50-year investment, at a time when alternatives are dropping in cost exponentially, is just foolish. It's like buying 50 years of lock-in to 386 Intel processors in 1990. Just foolish.
  • zests 6y ago
    I would argue that buying anything where the cost is dropping exponentially is foolish as well. This would mean that it makes a lot more sense to invest in the economy and wait until renewable technology stops becoming cheaper/more reliable before buying. But what do we do in the meanwhile? What do we do if storage technology isn't able to match energy demand when the sun isn't out and the wind isn't blowing? What do we do in areas that don't get as much renewable energy? Many questions. Probably more than one sensible answer. Renewables might not be a magic bullet. We need a plan B. Nuclear as a long term base load power source? Not as crazy as it sounds.
    • epistasis 6y ago
• petra 6y ago
  Let's take this even further. It may be technically possible to build an inherently safe nuclear reactors. But what about Terrorism ? War ? Unstable political regimes ? All that over centuries. How do we protect ourselves against those risks ?
  • sjwright 6y ago
    There are plenty of non-nuclear materials that are significantly more dangerous. The main thing nuclear has going against it is its celebrity status.
• Retric 6y ago
  As the projected lifespan of a reactor is 50+ years and most of the current ones are quite old, that works out rather closely to 1% (17,000 / 50 / 3) of reactors with a significant issue. Building even 1,000 of them would therefore likely see a handful of Fukushima scale 100+B$ disasters. It might be worth it if there was no viable alternative, but that’s a harder sale. PS: There have also been 2 significant nuclear sub accidents, though with older designs.
• variaga 6y ago
  Yes, only 3 incidents - but in 35 years we haven't managed to clean up the mess made by the first one. Chernobyl has been a hazard now for 4x longer than the reactor was in service. That's the thing I would like to see from the pro-nuclear side - not more assurances that modern reactors are safe, but a demonstration that if something does go wrong, we could actually clean it up and it won't become another permanent blight on the landscape. Fully clean up Chernobyl (or Hanford, Washington, which wasn't an "incident" but is still a radioactive mess) and I'll support more nuclear reactors 100%. But I want a better remediation plan than "bulldoze all the radioactive stuff into a pile, pour a bunch of concrete on top and wait for a few centuries".
  • pfdietz 6y ago
    There have also been near misses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis%E2%80%93Besse_Nuclear_Power_Station#2002_reactor_head_hole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis%E2%80%93Besse_Nuclear_Po... Had that liner perforated, high pressure fluid from the core would have jetted straight up into the control rod mechanisms. (and that was just the fifth most serious event at the time since 1979, the first being the TMI accident in 1979.)
    • natmaka 6y ago
      See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsmark_Nuclear_Power_Plant#July_2006_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsmark_Nuclear_Power_Plant#J...
    • jnxx 6y ago
      From your link: > In January 2003, the plant's private network became infected with the slammer worm, which resulted in a five-hour loss of safety monitoring at the plant .... What.
  • AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    Nobody is ever going to clean up Chernobyl because it happened in a location where the surrounding land is basically forest so there is no real incentive for anybody to want to allocate resources to do anything about it. Hanford is basically the same thing except that the US actually cares enough to do something about it, just not enough to do it quickly. The cleanup for Fukushima is likely to be completed before either of them because it's a location that people actually care about cleaning up.
• whearyou 6y ago
  Each of which, had they gone very wrong, would have rendered the better part of a continent uninhabitable
  • Aachen 6y ago
    In what remotely plausible scenario would that have happened? Feel free to involve USSR-specific issues, reactor safety of the time, etc. Because from what I know, the fallout from it literally exploding is not making anything nearly that large "uninhabitable", even if we literally stand around and did nothing against it. Deaths would go up, but so did they from the coal plants that were subsequently built (we're at 3 million deaths a year, if memory serves; that's the number you have to beat to make nuclear less attractive than the technology we did build. Every year. Millions of people.). Edit: a quick search suggests 4 million now, or another source says 10k/day which works out to 3.7 million per year (from results' summaries shown on DDG) but feel free to find reliable sources.
    • whearyou 6y ago
      Uncontrolled reactor breach and explosion, spreading core material into the atmosphere at several orders of magnitude bigger level than occurred. It actually almost occurred, it’s a major drama arc in the HBO special. I think you may want to do some more googling.
  • stjohnswarts 6y ago
    This is a ridiculous statement. I bet you can't find even one source for it.
    • whearyou 6y ago
      I can find hundreds. Start with Wikipedia