9 ms·
Fukushima is what caused the setback, because it proved that, again, "risk of a fault is neglegible" turns out to be not neglegible enough. I don't care if nuc
by j-pb 6y ago
Fukushima is what caused the setback, because it proved that, again, "risk of a fault is neglegible" turns out to be not neglegible enough.
I don't care if nuclear can be made safe on paper, as long as it's build by humans it's going to be messed up somehow.
I once took a school trip to a nuclear power station in northern germany, turns out they had a direct link to their local coal plant to manage demand.
That link was unsecured radiowaves directly interacting with their safety critial systems. Their defense was "it's point to point, so you'd have to build a tower beteen." Yeah or wait 15 years and buy a drone.
And we still haven't the tech to get rid of the waste products.
The cleanup costs of ONE uranium mine alone could buy germany enough solar to replace 3 nuclear reactors.
And that's only the long term
cost of pulling it out of the ground. The costs of putting it safely away for a million literal years is not included.
- lrem 6y agoWe don't have all that many tsunamis in Germany...
- Hani1337 6y agoNo but we have a lot of terrorists
- cbmuser 6y agoModern nuclear power plants such as the German Konvoi or modern Russian VVER survive plane crashes. Some German plants even have military defense systems on site.
- kergonath 6y ago“A lot of terrorists”? In Germany? I’m not saying it is perfect, but you might want to balance a bit your news sources.
- Hani1337 6y agoI was including France in the group in that statement
- anoncake 6y agoI'm sure our nuclear plants are safe against all foreseeable dangers. So only unforeseeable dangers are a problem. I can't foresee any, so we're safe?
- acidburnNSA 6y agoNothing is perfectly safe. Hydro dams fail. Wind turbines throw ice. People fall off roofs installing solar. But 8 million people per year are killed by particulate emissions from normally-operating fossil and biofuel combustion plants. Nuclear, wind, solar, and hydro are all orders of magnitude safer ways, per TWh generated, than the dominant worldwide sources. Therefore we should replace fossil and biofuel with nuclear, wind, solar, and hydro. Conveniently, those 4 are also very low carbon, so they prevent climate change along the way. [1] https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_1 https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_1 [2] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
- anoncake 6y agoKilling a predictable number of people each year is not danger, it's damage. The danger posed by hydro is real, but entirely negligible compared to nuclear. But of course we should replace fossils by renewables and phase them out before nuclear. And if nuclear wouldn't take too long to build building new nuclear plants as a stopgap may actually make sense. Unfortunately, they do.
- acidburnNSA 6y agoFukushima was a triple meltdown after total inundation of 1960s-class reactors. The short and long-term death-toll from radiation was quite literally zero, as reaffirmed by UNSCEAR just last month [1]. I don't think the "boundlessly large nuclear accidents make the technology untenable" argument really holds water given this kind of experience. [1] https://unis.unvienna.org/unis/en/pressrels/2021/unisous419.html https://unis.unvienna.org/unis/en/pressrels/2021/unisous419....
- oblio 6y ago> The cleanup costs of ONE uranium mine alone could buy Germany enough solar to replace 3 nuclear reactors. Germany needs nuclear for base load. The current alternatives for base load are natural gas (meh, but maybe not horrible) and coal (horribly dirty, and Germany transitioned from nuclear to coal [!!!], making their energy mix dirtier than the French one, as France still uses a ton of nuclear power plants). Solar can't be used for base load at the moment.
- j-pb 6y agoYeah but wind and solar on a european power grid can. A nuclear power plant that's finished in 10 years is not gonna provide you with the baseload to stop climate change. That's only possible with expanding the existing tech we have.
- kergonath 6y agoBut gas-fired power plants will? We won’t stop climate change, we’re decades late. What we need is everything we ca have, which includes solar and wind where appropriate, but also nuclear. The fact that people pretending to care about climate change are pushing for gas is absurd.
- tpmx 6y agoI was writing a comment on how hard/impossible it is to get politicians to understand the fundamentals of what makes an electric grid work - then I saw the other comments here and despaired. It's like all the people who didn't understand grade 7-9 physics conspired to make us all miserable.
- oblio 6y agoIs it grade 7-9 physics, though? I learned about power grid structure (base load, etc.) and such at the university. To the down voters: just because you learn about electricity in secondary school, it doesn't mean that the second or third level effects are obvious and that you immediately understand what their impact on a power grid is. But hey, maybe some people were super interested in power grids or just super gifted ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- arrosenberg 6y agoYou could say the same thing about any power source though - humans have created way bigger disasters with fossil fuels than nuclear power. > The cleanup costs of ONE uranium mine alone could buy germany enough solar to replace 3 nuclear reactors. How much do those solar panels cost once you factor in environmental remediation, EOL recycling, land use, etc.? Since that's the standard nuclear is held to, it would be good to know.
- hanniabu 6y agoSites of nuclear accidents can't be remediated. They're essentially lost "forever".
- acidburnNSA 6y agoThis is highly debatable. There are places on Earth with natural radiation fields greater than large swaths of the evacuation zone around Fukushima. For Chernobyl, see [1]. https://thoughtscapism.com/2019/05/08/what-about-radioactive-wastelands-a-look-at-chernobyls-effects-on-nature/ https://thoughtscapism.com/2019/05/08/what-about-radioactive...
- arrosenberg 6y agoI don't think the evidence supports that, and even if it did, we create the same dead-zone conditions using chemical energy and fertilizers, so I'm not sure why it counts against nuclear any more than it would against petrochemicals.
- stale2002 6y agoNo, thats not true. It is only because people are mis-informed on the actual facts and dangers of nuclear reactors, that we treat them as if they are lost forever.
- Turing_Machine 6y ago> Fukushima is what caused the setback, because it proved that, again, "risk of a fault is neglegible" turns out to be not neglegible enough. The Fukushima plant was hit by: 1) Magnitude 9 (!) earthquake 2) Devastating tsunami 3) Massive fire 4) Total loss of all power to control circuitry. Even after that, it still didn't kill anybody from radioactivity (some firefighters were killed fighting the fire, not from radiation). What do you suppose would happen if a similar series of catastrophes struck a hydroelectric dam? Say, the Three Gorges Dam in China? Hint: nothing good.