3 ms·

The potential for it to go horribly wrong gives me great pause. Sure, if we do everything right, it might be fine. But people make mistakes. People get greedy a

by adamc 6y ago

The potential for it to go horribly wrong gives me great pause. Sure, if we do everything right, it might be fine. But people make mistakes. People get greedy and lazy. The worst case is pretty "worst" here.

mpweiher 6y ago
It goes completely against what most believe, but out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy And that's including the worst-case accidents.
- Aachen 6y ago
  We all seem to get that airplanes are safe and that being afraid to fly is something to overcome. We also know how disastrously it can go wrong if the plane crashes into flats (I'm thinking of the Bijlmer disaster, not a terrorist attack): it's not a theoretical risk, it's just exceedingly unlikely to happen to you. How come this is communicated differently for fission energy? Looking at the data it's a similar situation.
  - StillBored 6y ago
    Planes are massively more dangerous too. How many actual deaths are a result of nuke accidents? Depending on how you count its possible more people died in a single airplane crashes than have died in all the nuke related energy production incidents, ever. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_by_death_toll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Airlines_Flight_123 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Airlines_Flight_123 If you want to include ground based deaths 911 was close to 3k people dead.
- adamc 6y ago
  My father, who used to testify at various hearings (he was a physicist) used to make this argument. I think it kind of misses a key point: People would much rather deal with N deaths a year than deal with a range with an average of N - k, but a much, much higher possible number (thicker tail to the distribution). Just because math says it's better doesn't mean that is how people experience the risk.
  - mpweiher 6y ago
    Right, and that's part of it. However, it doesn't capture all of it, because people vastly overestimate the risk of the bad case. Nuclear is dramatically safer than fossil fuels even if you only count the years with accidents.
StillBored 6y ago
Whats the worse case? We end up with a exclusion zone for a hundred years? I'm beginning to think that is a feature. The world needs more exclusion zones that can be left to nature. In the last 50 years we have pretty much encroached our shit into every single square inch of the planet. The only areas that aren't shoulder to shoulder humans destroying the environment, are the ones to inhospitable to live in and don't have any obvious natural wealth to exploit. Maybe we wouldn't be going through one of the largest extinction events in the planets history if we irradiated half the land mass enough to scare people away.
hindsightbias 6y ago
Perhaps being a little radioactive isn’t as bad as the billions that could die from climate change. In the 90’s I shared a long cab ride between airports with a nuclear engineer who said he specialized in “cleanups”. I asked what he thought about the next generation of plant design. He spent the rest of the ride recounting a half dozen horror stories about how nothing about the hardware or design was easy but human factors could turn perfectly safe processes into accidents. He said you could never engineer out human error, panic behavior and blindspots.
Mrdarknezz 6y ago
France is absolutly filled to the brim with Nuclear power and have not had any problems. No one is building RBMK reactors so unless you build a NPP in an area which is at risk of tsunamis any accidents wouldn't really cause any major damage due to modern safety protocols. The alternative is the continued dependence on Natural gas and that would lead to the extinction of mankind.

by adamc 6y ago

mpweiher 6y ago

It goes completely against what most believe, but out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy And that's including the worst-case accidents.

Aachen 6y ago
We all seem to get that airplanes are safe and that being afraid to fly is something to overcome. We also know how disastrously it can go wrong if the plane crashes into flats (I'm thinking of the Bijlmer disaster, not a terrorist attack): it's not a theoretical risk, it's just exceedingly unlikely to happen to you. How come this is communicated differently for fission energy? Looking at the data it's a similar situation.
- StillBored 6y ago
  Planes are massively more dangerous too. How many actual deaths are a result of nuke accidents? Depending on how you count its possible more people died in a single airplane crashes than have died in all the nuke related energy production incidents, ever. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_by_death_toll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Airlines_Flight_123 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Airlines_Flight_123 If you want to include ground based deaths 911 was close to 3k people dead.
adamc 6y ago
My father, who used to testify at various hearings (he was a physicist) used to make this argument. I think it kind of misses a key point: People would much rather deal with N deaths a year than deal with a range with an average of N - k, but a much, much higher possible number (thicker tail to the distribution). Just because math says it's better doesn't mean that is how people experience the risk.
- mpweiher 6y ago
  Right, and that's part of it. However, it doesn't capture all of it, because people vastly overestimate the risk of the bad case. Nuclear is dramatically safer than fossil fuels even if you only count the years with accidents.

StillBored 6y ago

Whats the worse case? We end up with a exclusion zone for a hundred years? I'm beginning to think that is a feature. The world needs more exclusion zones that can be left to nature. In the last 50 years we have pretty much encroached our shit into every single square inch of the planet. The only areas that aren't shoulder to shoulder humans destroying the environment, are the ones to inhospitable to live in and don't have any obvious natural wealth to exploit. Maybe we wouldn't be going through one of the largest extinction events in the planets history if we irradiated half the land mass enough to scare people away.

hindsightbias 6y ago

Perhaps being a little radioactive isn’t as bad as the billions that could die from climate change. In the 90’s I shared a long cab ride between airports with a nuclear engineer who said he specialized in “cleanups”. I asked what he thought about the next generation of plant design. He spent the rest of the ride recounting a half dozen horror stories about how nothing about the hardware or design was easy but human factors could turn perfectly safe processes into accidents. He said you could never engineer out human error, panic behavior and blindspots.

Mrdarknezz 6y ago

France is absolutly filled to the brim with Nuclear power and have not had any problems. No one is building RBMK reactors so unless you build a NPP in an area which is at risk of tsunamis any accidents wouldn't really cause any major damage due to modern safety protocols. The alternative is the continued dependence on Natural gas and that would lead to the extinction of mankind.