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There is a bad stigma associated with nuclear energy that I just don’t understand - Nuclear less impact to the environment when compared to other energy sources
by pinacarlos90 6y ago
There is a bad stigma associated with nuclear energy that I just don’t understand - Nuclear less impact to the environment when compared to other energy sources. What is is the problem with nuclear? Is it the cost of maintaining these power plants ?
- blacksmith_tb 6y agoUnfortunately I think it's mostly the association with nuclear weapons. That has added to the not-totally-unreasonable fear of accidents like Chernobyl, but without actually evaluating whether other existing power stations are equally at risk, or if building new (and especially smaller / different designs) would be safe.
- ceejayoz 6y agoThe average lay person knows "radiation is bad" and that Chernobyl blew up. That'll be about it. People will be genuinely surprised when you tell them it's usually the same old mechanism of most other power plants - heat boils water, which generates steam, which powers a turbine. They're also really surprised to find out a coal plant puts out more radioactivity. Same phenomenon as vaccines - people know very little about the mechanism, but have very strong opinions anyways.
- glogla 6y ago"Anti-nuclear people are the utility version of antivaxxers" has not just nice ring to it but quite a bite. I like it.
- effie 6y agoThere is a pretty important difference though. Vaccine is and should be a matter of personal/parent choice, because getting the vaccine is a per-person action and its benefits and risks concern only their health, not health of other people. The benefit/cost analysis is very different for different people, for some it is in favour of getting the vaccine, for some it is against. Vaccination program can and should respect individual peoples' wishes. While building more nuclear energy is a strategic country-scale decision that cannot respect all people wishes, only the majority's.
- ceejayoz 6y ago> getting the vaccine is a per-person action and its benefits and risks concern only their health, not health of other people This is definitively not true.
- effie 6y agoHow so? If a man gets vaccinated, he can still catch the virus and he can still transmit the virus. Vaccine helps the immune system to fight the infection, but does not stop the body from getting infected and we do not know how efficient it is in preventing spreading the infection.
- ceejayoz 6y agoIt does stop infection. New data out just a few days ago. https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/p0329-COVID-19-Vaccines.html https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/p0329-COVID-19-Vacci... > Results showed that following the second dose of vaccine (the recommended number of doses), risk of infection was reduced by 90 percent two or more weeks after vaccination. Following a single dose of either vaccine, the participants’ risk of infection with SARS-CoV-2 was reduced by 80 percent two or more weeks after vaccination. Immunocompromised people, folks who have allergies to the vaccines, etc. rely on others getting vaccinated to be protected via herd immunity.
- savant_penguin 6y agoThe problem is what to do with the nuclear waste you constantly produce. And the risks associated with having a new Fukushima in your hands. And the proliferation of nuclear technology. That said it still seems better than many alternatives
- ceejayoz 6y ago> The problem is what to do with the nuclear waste you constantly produce. We know what to do with it. Bury it, deep and somewhere remote. The US already has such a place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
- pbak 6y agoIndeed, but then how long does your moral responsibility last. Will the United State exist in a thousand year ? Will there still be an organization to monitor the place for leaks ? How deep is deep enough ? Also, what about Not the United States ? It seems everybody is synchronizing policies, if you hear the rumblings out of the European Commission. Where are they gonna store the wast ?
- ceejayoz 6y agoEurope has similarly suitable sites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo... The stuff stored in these facilities is not magic. It doesn't get up and run around. The sites are selected to be deep enough and to be resilient to leaks. I'm more concerned with our culpability for melting the world's glaciers and ice caps than the risk of someone digging up barrels miles deep a thousand years from now.
- pbak 6y agoThank you about the Onkalo site. I didn't know about it. Do you know if Russians have anything similar planned closer to Europe, in the Oural for example (iirc the oldest geological region in Europe) ? I could only find Krasnoyarsk on the web. On your other info : I don't know about culpability. I'm passing the 40 year old mark, and I don't remember my generation, or the generations right before mine having enough influence on such matters until very recently. These choices were made much earlier, by within your framing I'd say more culpable age brackets, and which are slowly let's say "disappearing". What remains, in my opinion, for people currently in charge of affairs, and in the future, is a matter of responsibility to all future generations. We most certainly know what's what now, and the ethical and moral calculus is publicly in evidence, as a consequence of, amongst other such operations, the Greta Thundberg UN tour. Again, not arguing against nuclear. If we do it, I'd say let's not create new problems out because we're too sure of our probability projections... As pointed elsewhere, we were due for an Ice Age. That might still happen down the line, whatever happens to surface human politics. Let's make sure somebody's there to check for such leaks down the line, and that it's easy to access. Once we decide we won't make matters worse now, why stop at that ? Let's make sure we don't make them worse down the line out of some new error.
- sokoloff 6y agoPeople have 99+% irrational fears about radiation. There are actual challenges with nuclear as well (waste disposal being the primary), but those are distantly trailing the radiation fear (and not obviously-to-me worse on-balance than the fossil fuel alternatives at this point).
- ethbr0 6y agoHighly publicized 80s accidents (Three Mile Island in 79, Chernobyl in 86) coupled with late-Cold War anti-nuclear weapons proliferation protesting resulted in environmentalists lumping everything nuclear together until it reached "No" criticality. After that, the reaction has been self-sustaining. It's easy to campaign to tear something down. It's hard to be the one who has to rebuild the replacement. We need people who focus on the latter before the former.
- throwawayboise 6y ago"Believe the science" seems to be the rationale for many other things we are told to do, so why not this?
- kragen 6y agoWell, in part due to the nuclear weapons programs, the US and Soviet governments told a lot of lies about nuclear energy in the 01940s, 01950s, 01960s, and 01970s. A lot of the science on things like nuclear fuel enrichment isn't actually available publicly, even today, only to people whose families have been interviewed to make sure they will lie if the government orders to. So the US Secretary of the Navy is in a position to make an informed decision about nuclear reactors—and he's chosen to run a significant part of the US Navy on them—but the voting public is not.
- effie 6y agoI'll bite, what's up with those zero prefixes?
- radicalcentrist 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation
- cpeterso 6y agoPreparation for the Y10K problem. Five-digit years is something the Long Now Foundation started using to encourage people to think longer term: https://longnow.org/about/ https://longnow.org/about/
- mojzu 6y agoThere are a few I'm aware of: - Fear of nuclear accidents, 'not in my backyard' reactions from communities - Dealing with radioactive waste safely - Cost/time overruns building nuclear plants Although I think all of these could be resolved, and I've heard some interesting things about thorium reactors which could be even better. I do wonder whether nuclear power is a good answer to climate change in particular though (beyond keeping the current ones functioning until end of life), nuclear power station design/building often takes decades and it seems like we have a shorter amount of time than that to make a significant difference.
- kergonath 6y ago> nuclear power station design/building often takes decades and it seems like we have a shorter amount of time than that to make a significant difference. It takes decades now, but we know hot to build them quickly and more efficiently. We’ve done it in the past. Now, it is too late to avoid climate change anyway, and almost certainly too late to avoid crossing the +2 degrees threshold in a couple of decades. We are too late already. But if we want to minimise the cascading issues that are heading our way, it’s not “let us do something or something else”. We need to redirect as much as we can of our industry to decarbonised energy. This means wind and solar and nuclear fission and hydrogen, and a whole bunch of R&D into the next steps for all of that (including nuclear fusion). Also, we need to consume less. Quite a lot less, in fact.
- Tade0 6y agoI went back and forth a few times with my opinion on nuclear over the years and some points I've gathered, good and bad are: -Nuclear is indeed a low-carbon energy source. -It's also what you would want as baseload. -The costs of storing waste properly have been underestimated - a few years ago nuclear operators reached a deal with the German government through which they paid 23bln Euros to make the waste the government's problem. The overall sentiment is that they were let off the hook easily and the total cost will be much higher. -Both nuclear plants and waste storage facilities are easy targets for terrorism - fortunately that didn't happen yet, but things like Stuxnet proved that it's entirely in the realm of possibility. My pet conspiracy theory is that this, not Fukushima was the reason Germany eventually accelerated its plans to phase out nuclear. -You can reprocess spent nuclear fuel which helps both with fuel accessibility and waste management. -It's trivially easy to use the reprocessing infrastructure to create weapons-grade plutonium. -Nuclear is generally safe. -That being said its mode of failure makes a large area inhospitable essentially forever. Topsoil radiation measurements usually don't give the full picture of the problem. -Every nuclear disaster resulted in increased safety by uncovering design flaws which were a result of cutting corners, so especially in the decade after Fukushima costs went up around 24% making nuclear the single low-carbon source to become more, not less expensive. -As it stands even China cannot deploy nuclear fast enough to compete with renewables on delivered MWh. Since 2012 wind consistently delivered more energy in China than nuclear and the gap has been widening ever since. With the cost of storage plummeting we're heading towards a future where centralised power generation may become antiquated. ---- Overall nuclear has some advantages but there aren't enough of them to break the trend of using renewables + gas and storage, which on average replace coal faster and cheaper. It's basically a textbook example of "worse is better".
- stjohnswarts 6y agoI don't agree with you and most experts don't either. Storage is a solved problem. Nuclear is a solved probem. Energy storage on the scale of 1 week+ in cases of blizzards, and other freak weather events which are only going to get worse over the next century is not viable. Nuclear is here and it's safe and it's dependable and it might be the only way to save our planet (or at least us humans, the planet would do just fine without us).
- WhompingWindows 6y agoThe problem with nuclear is that it's expensive AND that it relies on oversight and regulation to be fully safe. What to do with the waste, how to prevent accidents like Chernobyl, Fukushima, etc.: that's the problem with nuclear. Ask yourself if you want nuclear plants in all of the dysfunctional governments around the world, given the risks we know exist. Then compare to solar and wind, which are cheaper and safer, it's not hard to see why mostly solar/wind are dominating new power additions. I have no problems with nuclear personally, I think we should keep safe reactors running as long as our replacements would be LNG. I do think new-build nuclear would largely be deployed too slowly to help with climate change in the short run, but long-run I think it'll be an amazing source of huge amounts of power. Maybe we can have specialized reactors on-site which deal with the waste from our older reactors or from new reactors...not to mention new designs that are passively safe.
- elyobo 6y agoI see nuclear as insurance. Solar and wind are much cheaper, but cannot be scaled in proportion to demand. Given sufficient advances in storage and transmission they may be able to eventually, but maybe not. Building nuclear that we may not end up needing if the required advances happen means that our worst case is a vastly cleaner energy system, a much better worse case than a continuing dependence on coal and gas.
- nixass 6y ago> how to prevent accidents like Chernobyl, Fukushima Don't build 1950s design nukes in 21. century and don't build nukes sensitive to tsunamis in tsunami areas.
- zamalek 6y agoBias: I am pro-nuclear, but I try to be realistic. Nuclear is vastly better for the environment than fossil fuels are, however, it is still bad for the environment. This is why various groups have protested it in the past. Given both viewpoints, my stance is that we should have a real plan to phase out nuclear eventually. Nuclear is significantly cleaner than fossil fuels. In addition, nuclear could potentially produce a huge amount of energy per "time spent deploying" (especially once there is expertise building nuclear reactors). Finally, nuclear waste can be physically handled and even further processed (in thorium reactors), which is in stark contrast to CO2 which dissipates into the atmosphere and is extremely difficult to sequester. The problem is that nuclear isn't a perfect option, and people seem to focus on the few caveats over the numerous benefits. If there was a commitment to eventually (on the order of decades) phase it out, I'm sure many of the green energy purists would come to the nuclear party.
- josefresco 6y agoLong term safe storage of the waste. Many regions in the US are fighting attempts to store waste in their town.
- Lammy 6y agoThe people who own the newspapers and the people who own the oil companies are BFFs. See the Bohemian Club for example, organized in 1872 in the San Francisco Chronicle office.