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Its sadder everyday that somehow humanity has failed to become a nuclear society. All our problems could have been solved decades ago but we are still nowhere n

Its sadder everyday that somehow humanity has failed to become a nuclear society. All our problems could have been solved decades ago but we are still nowhere near a solution.

axiosgunnar 5y ago
Yesterday in Berlin pro-nuclear climate activists got attacked by the no-nuclear climate mob…
- thriftwy 5y ago
  I can never understand why attacks by "activists" do not result in dozens of arrests and convictions for multiple years of prison every time they happen. Isn't it basically what any sovereign law says?
  - ChrisKnott 5y ago
    In most Western countries you won't go to prison at all, let alone for several years, for common assault. Maybe if you caused serious injury.
    - MichaelZuo 5y ago
      This is the first time I’ve heard of that. Which countries specifically won’t prosecute for randomly attacking and lightly injuring someone standing on the sidewalk or in a public park or some other gathering place?
      - rndgermandude 5y ago
        It's not about not prosecuting at all[0]. The sentences just are either fines or suspended prison sentences, so people stay out of prison, which I remarked about in my sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28653514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28653514 [0] Which may happen if the state thinks it cannot prove the allegation or the act was so minor, it would be a waste of everybody's time. But the "case dropped because too minor" doesn't usually happen in assaults, but more for non-violent things like riding the bus without a valid ticket or illegally downloading a few songs.
        thriftwy 5y ago
        Suspended prison sentence should turn into a real one on repeated offence by the same "activist".
    - rndgermandude 5y ago
      Yeah. In Germany it starts with regular assault/battery ("Körperverletzung"). This is a fine up to 5 years imprisonment. But if you do the assault in a group or with a weapon or really any tool or it's a "sneaky" attack or the way you do it life-threatening it them becomes a "dangerous" assault ("gefährliche Körperverletzung") which has a prison sentence of 6 months to 10 years (3 months to 5 years for "less severe" cases) but it never ends in a fine. If you slap somebody, you'll likely get a fine, which is issued as "so and so many day's rates" (Tagessätze), which means e.g. you can get a fine of "20 day's rates" i.e. you'll have to pay the equivalent of 20 days worth of income, calculated based on your monthly net income divided by 30 days and capped at 1 EUR to 30000 EUR per day. A prison sentence can be issued as a suspended sentence if it is 24 months or less, which is up to the discretion of the judge(s). You only have to go to prison if you receive another prison sentence for another crime in a time frame specified by the judge, or if you violate any of the additional requirements a judge may issue. If I remember correctly about 70-80% of all prison sentences below 24 months are issued as suspended sentences, and only a tiny fraction of people end up going to prison because the suspension is lifted later for some reason. However realistically even the "dangerous" variant quite often ends in a light sentence of a couple of months which is then usually issued as a suspended sentence. This depends on what happened, the level of involvement and previous criminal history if any and whether you confess and show remorse. However, the suspension of a sentence is usually contiguous on you paying everything you owe, from damages for pain and suffering to the court fees.
  - bserge 5y ago
    Usually that's called oppression and leads to bigger protests and riots.
    - thriftwy 5y ago
      Protests are okay. Riots should just cause more arrests and sentences. It's got to have some cutoff, isn't it? You can't just get away with attacking people.
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    It should be considered terrorism automatically and carry such penalties.
    - lrae 5y ago
      https://youtu.be/kZRg0_B0XX4 https://youtu.be/kZRg0_B0XX4 - Yeah this absolutely looks like an act of terrorism! (Actually, on a serious note, the person going there with the sole goal of stirring up the protest is more likely the one to be the terrorist, no? I'd say taking away that sign and even potentially removing the person is actually de-escalating. But you should obviously let the police do that.)
      - Ekaros 5y ago
        Clearly violent attack that should not be tolerated in our society run by political goal of causing fear and terror in others. I hope the perpetrator rots in jail for years...
- junon 5y ago
  I live here and didn't hear about this. Have a link?
  - danhor 5y ago
    This is the least bad source I have found: https://www.bz-berlin.de/berlin/mitte/bei-fridays-for-future-demo-in-berlin-atomkraft-aktivistin-attackiert https://www.bz-berlin.de/berlin/mitte/bei-fridays-for-future...
  - ushakov 5y ago
    Bild Video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kZRg0_B0XX4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kZRg0_B0XX4
- lrae 5y ago
  "attacked" Disclaimer first: Me = Pro nuclear. But if you try to take over a mainly also anti-nuclear demonstration with your messaging and stir up "the mob" with that, you probably should not call somebody taking away your "Nuclear against climate-change" sign an "attack by a no-nuclear climate mob"
  - axiosgunnar 5y ago
    The demonstration is pro-climate protection. If the majority of the attendants is too dumb to see that nuclear mist be one of the pillars to protect the climate, that does not make it „anti-nuclear“.
- lwkl 5y ago
  What mob? It's one guy that violently took a sign from a woman (at least that's what can be seen in the video) and broke the sign. Nobody was hurt and the victim didn't even press charges. Most people seem to be minding their own business and getting out of the way. So not much to see there. Except a way for people that disagree with the protestors to reinforce their stereotypes or the daily fix of anger over nothing for tabloid readers?
  - axiosgunnar 5y ago
    Are you out of your mind? Somebody violently grabbing the banner of a peaceful protestor is just one step away from physically assaulting that protestor. If you don't see the obvious red line crossed there, you are completely detached from reality and want to protecter the attacker just because he happens to claim to be green (but hypocritically so, if he is also against nuclear energy). Incredible, really. Finally, yes it is a mob as nobody from the bystanders did anything to stop the attacker, tacitly agreeing with what he did.
    - lwkl 5y ago
      I guess I must be out of my mind. I didn‘t realize I implied all of that in my previous. Now to the part of your comment that is on-topic: > Finally, yes it is a mob as nobody from the bystanders did anything to stop the attacker, tacitly agreeing with what he did. The bystanders did exactly what bystanders do. They stood by. That doesn‘t make them agree with the attacker. What would you habe done if you were there? I know I don‘t have the reflexes and fighting skills to stop this from happening. And I bet she had her friends helping her afterwards so there wouldn‘t have been any need to get involved.
willis936 5y ago
Green Parties the world over are anti-nuclear and have been since the 80s. Considering how much harm to the environment has come by the hand of green parties, I'm beginning to wonder if they aren't lobbied by fossil fuel companies.
- masklinn 5y ago
  Dunno about parties, but multiple eco-focused organisations are paid at least in part by oil & gas. Greenpeace actually founded a gas-providing energy utility in Germany (Greenpeace Energy, recently renamed Green Planet Energy to… avoid headlines about Greenpeace selling gas, despite those headlines being true). Other orgs got more direct funding from oil & gas players e.g. FoEI was literally founded with an oil baron's donation, and Sierra Club got millions recently from drilling & fracking company Chesapeake Energy. Both Greenpeace and FoEI were actually founded by Sierra Club members who thought Sierra was not anti-nuclear enough. After a while, Sierra's platform changed to be more anti-nuclear (its current position). And don't discount funding from Russia, that goes really well with both Russia's destabilisation goals and anti-coal campaigns leading to higher dependence on Russian natural gas.
  - estaseuropano 5y ago
    Sorry but that's a lot of hogwash. The green parties mostly came from, or were closely associated with, the anti-war movements. Anti nuclear and green overlap to a large degree due to (a) the close link between nuclsar power and nuclear weapons, and (b) at least in Europe also the fallout of Chernobyl, which is now barely remembered but at the time was gigantic - e.g. enormous amounts of food had to be scrapped, people had to keep their windows closed for months, etc.
    - zepto 5y ago
      Are you claiming that the parent posters comments about funding are false? You don’t actually address them.
      - 5y ago
danhor 5y ago
Part of the issues of nuclear remain the high costs, hairy security situation in many countries and very limited ability to adapt to demand. This is both in the night-and-day cycle meaning but also in the "we need more power in 10-years" meaning, since nuclear power plants take forever to build. Saying that all our problems could have been solved by nuclear is not close to the truth, especially regarding climate change. Ongoing electrification and decarbonisation isn't hard because of the electricity needs, but because technologies are just now coming close to viability in many markets and aren't even close in others. The ongoing transformation of the electricity generation market to renewables isn't failing because of technical inability, but hesitancy to invest, strong local and national (e.g. the minimum distance that wind farms need in germany, eliminating most of the possible options), opposition to new projects, strong opposition to new transmission lines, strong opposition to losing the jobs in the legacy markets (especially visible in the USA with "clean" Coal) and no burning desire to honestly consider the storage issue (both in regards to demand shifting and building of new storage facilities using hydrogen or synthetic gases and similar things). Our problems aren't solved because solving them isn't a high enough political (and thus also economical, due to the negative externality not being financially relevant) priority around the world, not because we're not using nuclear for everything.
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  I think by "nuclear society", your parent meant a united society that works together, not one powered by nuclear fission.
  - panick21 5y ago
    No, absolutely not.
- pyrale 5y ago
  > nuclear power plants take forever to build. In France, the first nuclear plants of the current production group were contracted in 1970, and connected to the network in 1977, so that's 7 years for a pilot industrial project. Later plants were built in 5-6 years. The kicker is that this work is highly scalable: France built over 6 reactors per year over its program. The current issue with new generation reactors seem to be related to loss of industrial knowledge, there is no reason to think that the next built in the series would suffer from the same issues.
mnd999 5y ago
We’re past that point for fission, no way to build new plants fast enough. It’s renewables or bust at this point.
- panick21 5y ago
  There is really no question what so ever that nuclear is a far, far faster way to scale clean energy. Compare the countries that had real phases where they build a lot of nuclear and it easily beats any renewables. If Germany had gone all out on nuclear for the last 20 years, they could easily be finishing 5-6 nuclear plants a year, and likely get the construction time down to 4-5 years even if you built old school PWRs. Germany would be shutting down coal plants and end up 100% clean far earlier then their current way of doing. If you however figure out a newer type of reactor (as we should have long ago) you could likely build 5x as many. The limiting factor in PWRs (outside of money) is the extremely complex construction of the reactor vessel. These have to be 'thicc' and are hard to weld, only few places in the world can do it. Despite that insane reactor vessel France and the US managed at reasonably high production rate. However if you go to something like a molten salt cooled reactor, or a molten salt reactor of some kind you have no pressure and thus no 'thicc' reactor vessel. These can be constructed incredibly quickly. If you actually put a challenge with a fix amount of money to produce 100GWh of 100% clean highly reliable electricity setting up a assembly line of reactor production and develop traveling build teams that set up site. Then show up with a huge truck and dump the reactor into the site. Doing that with renewables is an unsolved problem unless maybe in countries where you have a massive amount of hydro. Thank the gods, Canada has finally changed its regulations (and the US is slowly doing so too) so actual real progress has been made on commercial molten salt (and other) reactors. Terrestrial Energy, Moltex Energy and a number of other companies are deeply engaged in the process of getting these reactors threw licensing now. These reactors are often more 10x smaller for the same output of energy and thus far cheaper to build.
VoodooJuJu 5y ago
I used to think nuclear was the way forward, and I kind of still do, but it's understandable why it isn't prevalent. It's all about magnitude of loss/failure. Traditional power plants are much safer and failure isn't nearly as catastrophic as with nuclear. If a nuclear plant fails, look at what can happen - you can lose an entire city indefinitely - Chernobyl. The potential for loss is much higher with nuclear power.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- gsliepen 5y ago
  There are certainly high risks with nuclear power, but accidents with a large loss of life also happen with other energy production methods. Also, a big accident like Chernobyl sounds horrible, but people forget that burning coal produces a lot of pollution (including radiation!) that over time kills much more people. To get a perspective of how nuclear accidents compare with those of other energy production methods, have a look at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    I wonder if we were to count total loss of life in maintenance and installation of solar, wind and hydro. How much worse would nuclear do. At least per energy produced. The worst case for hydro at least is immense, possibly multiple millions death in some cases.
    - masklinn 5y ago
      As of 2020, nuclear energy's death toll (including Chernobyl and Fukushima) was roughly the same as the combined death toll of solar and wind (resp. 0.07, 0.02, and 0.04 deaths per TWh): https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy Hydro is also surprisingly low at 0.02, though failures are absolutely catastrophic I guess they tend to be out of the way and fairly local: so a dam failure will take out a village at once, and do extensive geological-scale damage, but not much more.
epistasis 5y ago
We are really really close to a solution, and for the one thing that nuclear is hyped to provide--clean electricity--we have cheaper and easier and more scalable solutions than nuclear. The challenges we have now with decarbonization are not solved by cheap electricity. The challenges I'm talking about are industrial and chemical processes, transitioning transport quickly enough, freight, aviation, agriculture, etc. these all require specific new technologies beyond cheap electricity. It would have been great if nuclear had worked out, but it was always overhyped and it always underdelivered. We were told it would be cheap, but it often had ridiculously expensive construction delays, leading to financial disasters. This happened in the 1970s and even today. It's time to stop mythologizing the technology, stop blaming the false boogeymen, and realize that at its heart the technology requires an excessive amount of piping, concrete, and machinery all to generate heat to make steam to move a turbine. It's a theoretically cheap heat source, but when you add in the engineering to capture the heat to boil water, it's not so cheap in reality, and there's been no innovation on making the engineering more elegant or cheaper in decades. In fact, if anything, it's gotten less elegant, more expensive, and even harder to build.
- criley2 5y ago
  There is nothing cheaper and easier and more scalable than nuclear for baseload gigawatt generation, especially when you actually account for the insane amount of batteries required to make wind/solar/etc viable as a baseload technology. People point at solar panel progress and always conveniently stay silent on the big battery problem (the mining problem, the scalability problem, the toxicity problem, etc) Nuclear did and does work out. It was not overhyped and it has delivered as expected. I would argue that solar is overhyped and has continually underdelivered. Anyone who has installed a solar system on their house has seen the significant issues with it. Nuclear remains the best way to replace coal/gas electricity generation for baseload power, to generate enough energy to power industries and cities, and is cleaner than filling a city with atrocious rare earth batteries that are required to paper over the problems with other inconsistently generating technologies. It is what it is, but if nuclear isn't the future, then coal isn't going anywhere.
  - 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

Its sadder everyday that somehow humanity has failed to become a nuclear society. All our problems could have been solved decades ago but we are still nowhere near a solution.

axiosgunnar 5y ago

Yesterday in Berlin pro-nuclear climate activists got attacked by the no-nuclear climate mob…

thriftwy 5y ago
I can never understand why attacks by "activists" do not result in dozens of arrests and convictions for multiple years of prison every time they happen. Isn't it basically what any sovereign law says?
- ChrisKnott 5y ago
  In most Western countries you won't go to prison at all, let alone for several years, for common assault. Maybe if you caused serious injury.
  - MichaelZuo 5y ago
    This is the first time I’ve heard of that. Which countries specifically won’t prosecute for randomly attacking and lightly injuring someone standing on the sidewalk or in a public park or some other gathering place?
    - rndgermandude 5y ago
      It's not about not prosecuting at all[0]. The sentences just are either fines or suspended prison sentences, so people stay out of prison, which I remarked about in my sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28653514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28653514 [0] Which may happen if the state thinks it cannot prove the allegation or the act was so minor, it would be a waste of everybody's time. But the "case dropped because too minor" doesn't usually happen in assaults, but more for non-violent things like riding the bus without a valid ticket or illegally downloading a few songs.
      - thriftwy 5y ago
        Suspended prison sentence should turn into a real one on repeated offence by the same "activist".
  - rndgermandude 5y ago
    Yeah. In Germany it starts with regular assault/battery ("Körperverletzung"). This is a fine up to 5 years imprisonment. But if you do the assault in a group or with a weapon or really any tool or it's a "sneaky" attack or the way you do it life-threatening it them becomes a "dangerous" assault ("gefährliche Körperverletzung") which has a prison sentence of 6 months to 10 years (3 months to 5 years for "less severe" cases) but it never ends in a fine. If you slap somebody, you'll likely get a fine, which is issued as "so and so many day's rates" (Tagessätze), which means e.g. you can get a fine of "20 day's rates" i.e. you'll have to pay the equivalent of 20 days worth of income, calculated based on your monthly net income divided by 30 days and capped at 1 EUR to 30000 EUR per day. A prison sentence can be issued as a suspended sentence if it is 24 months or less, which is up to the discretion of the judge(s). You only have to go to prison if you receive another prison sentence for another crime in a time frame specified by the judge, or if you violate any of the additional requirements a judge may issue. If I remember correctly about 70-80% of all prison sentences below 24 months are issued as suspended sentences, and only a tiny fraction of people end up going to prison because the suspension is lifted later for some reason. However realistically even the "dangerous" variant quite often ends in a light sentence of a couple of months which is then usually issued as a suspended sentence. This depends on what happened, the level of involvement and previous criminal history if any and whether you confess and show remorse. However, the suspension of a sentence is usually contiguous on you paying everything you owe, from damages for pain and suffering to the court fees.
- bserge 5y ago
  Usually that's called oppression and leads to bigger protests and riots.
  - thriftwy 5y ago
    Protests are okay. Riots should just cause more arrests and sentences. It's got to have some cutoff, isn't it? You can't just get away with attacking people.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  It should be considered terrorism automatically and carry such penalties.
  - lrae 5y ago
    https://youtu.be/kZRg0_B0XX4 https://youtu.be/kZRg0_B0XX4 - Yeah this absolutely looks like an act of terrorism! (Actually, on a serious note, the person going there with the sole goal of stirring up the protest is more likely the one to be the terrorist, no? I'd say taking away that sign and even potentially removing the person is actually de-escalating. But you should obviously let the police do that.)
    - Ekaros 5y ago
      Clearly violent attack that should not be tolerated in our society run by political goal of causing fear and terror in others. I hope the perpetrator rots in jail for years...
junon 5y ago
I live here and didn't hear about this. Have a link?
- danhor 5y ago
  This is the least bad source I have found: https://www.bz-berlin.de/berlin/mitte/bei-fridays-for-future-demo-in-berlin-atomkraft-aktivistin-attackiert https://www.bz-berlin.de/berlin/mitte/bei-fridays-for-future...
- ushakov 5y ago
  Bild Video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kZRg0_B0XX4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kZRg0_B0XX4
lrae 5y ago
"attacked" Disclaimer first: Me = Pro nuclear. But if you try to take over a mainly also anti-nuclear demonstration with your messaging and stir up "the mob" with that, you probably should not call somebody taking away your "Nuclear against climate-change" sign an "attack by a no-nuclear climate mob"
- axiosgunnar 5y ago
  The demonstration is pro-climate protection. If the majority of the attendants is too dumb to see that nuclear mist be one of the pillars to protect the climate, that does not make it „anti-nuclear“.
lwkl 5y ago
What mob? It's one guy that violently took a sign from a woman (at least that's what can be seen in the video) and broke the sign. Nobody was hurt and the victim didn't even press charges. Most people seem to be minding their own business and getting out of the way. So not much to see there. Except a way for people that disagree with the protestors to reinforce their stereotypes or the daily fix of anger over nothing for tabloid readers?
- axiosgunnar 5y ago
  Are you out of your mind? Somebody violently grabbing the banner of a peaceful protestor is just one step away from physically assaulting that protestor. If you don't see the obvious red line crossed there, you are completely detached from reality and want to protecter the attacker just because he happens to claim to be green (but hypocritically so, if he is also against nuclear energy). Incredible, really. Finally, yes it is a mob as nobody from the bystanders did anything to stop the attacker, tacitly agreeing with what he did.
  - lwkl 5y ago
    I guess I must be out of my mind. I didn‘t realize I implied all of that in my previous. Now to the part of your comment that is on-topic: > Finally, yes it is a mob as nobody from the bystanders did anything to stop the attacker, tacitly agreeing with what he did. The bystanders did exactly what bystanders do. They stood by. That doesn‘t make them agree with the attacker. What would you habe done if you were there? I know I don‘t have the reflexes and fighting skills to stop this from happening. And I bet she had her friends helping her afterwards so there wouldn‘t have been any need to get involved.

willis936 5y ago

Green Parties the world over are anti-nuclear and have been since the 80s. Considering how much harm to the environment has come by the hand of green parties, I'm beginning to wonder if they aren't lobbied by fossil fuel companies.

masklinn 5y ago
Dunno about parties, but multiple eco-focused organisations are paid at least in part by oil & gas. Greenpeace actually founded a gas-providing energy utility in Germany (Greenpeace Energy, recently renamed Green Planet Energy to… avoid headlines about Greenpeace selling gas, despite those headlines being true). Other orgs got more direct funding from oil & gas players e.g. FoEI was literally founded with an oil baron's donation, and Sierra Club got millions recently from drilling & fracking company Chesapeake Energy. Both Greenpeace and FoEI were actually founded by Sierra Club members who thought Sierra was not anti-nuclear enough. After a while, Sierra's platform changed to be more anti-nuclear (its current position). And don't discount funding from Russia, that goes really well with both Russia's destabilisation goals and anti-coal campaigns leading to higher dependence on Russian natural gas.
- estaseuropano 5y ago
  Sorry but that's a lot of hogwash. The green parties mostly came from, or were closely associated with, the anti-war movements. Anti nuclear and green overlap to a large degree due to (a) the close link between nuclsar power and nuclear weapons, and (b) at least in Europe also the fallout of Chernobyl, which is now barely remembered but at the time was gigantic - e.g. enormous amounts of food had to be scrapped, people had to keep their windows closed for months, etc.
  - zepto 5y ago
    Are you claiming that the parent posters comments about funding are false? You don’t actually address them.
    - 5y ago

danhor 5y ago

Part of the issues of nuclear remain the high costs, hairy security situation in many countries and very limited ability to adapt to demand. This is both in the night-and-day cycle meaning but also in the "we need more power in 10-years" meaning, since nuclear power plants take forever to build. Saying that all our problems could have been solved by nuclear is not close to the truth, especially regarding climate change. Ongoing electrification and decarbonisation isn't hard because of the electricity needs, but because technologies are just now coming close to viability in many markets and aren't even close in others. The ongoing transformation of the electricity generation market to renewables isn't failing because of technical inability, but hesitancy to invest, strong local and national (e.g. the minimum distance that wind farms need in germany, eliminating most of the possible options), opposition to new projects, strong opposition to new transmission lines, strong opposition to losing the jobs in the legacy markets (especially visible in the USA with "clean" Coal) and no burning desire to honestly consider the storage issue (both in regards to demand shifting and building of new storage facilities using hydrogen or synthetic gases and similar things). Our problems aren't solved because solving them isn't a high enough political (and thus also economical, due to the negative externality not being financially relevant) priority around the world, not because we're not using nuclear for everything.

ChuckNorris89 5y ago
I think by "nuclear society", your parent meant a united society that works together, not one powered by nuclear fission.
- panick21 5y ago
  No, absolutely not.
pyrale 5y ago
> nuclear power plants take forever to build. In France, the first nuclear plants of the current production group were contracted in 1970, and connected to the network in 1977, so that's 7 years for a pilot industrial project. Later plants were built in 5-6 years. The kicker is that this work is highly scalable: France built over 6 reactors per year over its program. The current issue with new generation reactors seem to be related to loss of industrial knowledge, there is no reason to think that the next built in the series would suffer from the same issues.

mnd999 5y ago

We’re past that point for fission, no way to build new plants fast enough. It’s renewables or bust at this point.

panick21 5y ago
There is really no question what so ever that nuclear is a far, far faster way to scale clean energy. Compare the countries that had real phases where they build a lot of nuclear and it easily beats any renewables. If Germany had gone all out on nuclear for the last 20 years, they could easily be finishing 5-6 nuclear plants a year, and likely get the construction time down to 4-5 years even if you built old school PWRs. Germany would be shutting down coal plants and end up 100% clean far earlier then their current way of doing. If you however figure out a newer type of reactor (as we should have long ago) you could likely build 5x as many. The limiting factor in PWRs (outside of money) is the extremely complex construction of the reactor vessel. These have to be 'thicc' and are hard to weld, only few places in the world can do it. Despite that insane reactor vessel France and the US managed at reasonably high production rate. However if you go to something like a molten salt cooled reactor, or a molten salt reactor of some kind you have no pressure and thus no 'thicc' reactor vessel. These can be constructed incredibly quickly. If you actually put a challenge with a fix amount of money to produce 100GWh of 100% clean highly reliable electricity setting up a assembly line of reactor production and develop traveling build teams that set up site. Then show up with a huge truck and dump the reactor into the site. Doing that with renewables is an unsolved problem unless maybe in countries where you have a massive amount of hydro. Thank the gods, Canada has finally changed its regulations (and the US is slowly doing so too) so actual real progress has been made on commercial molten salt (and other) reactors. Terrestrial Energy, Moltex Energy and a number of other companies are deeply engaged in the process of getting these reactors threw licensing now. These reactors are often more 10x smaller for the same output of energy and thus far cheaper to build.

VoodooJuJu 5y ago

I used to think nuclear was the way forward, and I kind of still do, but it's understandable why it isn't prevalent. It's all about magnitude of loss/failure. Traditional power plants are much safer and failure isn't nearly as catastrophic as with nuclear. If a nuclear plant fails, look at what can happen - you can lose an entire city indefinitely - Chernobyl. The potential for loss is much higher with nuclear power.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
gsliepen 5y ago
There are certainly high risks with nuclear power, but accidents with a large loss of life also happen with other energy production methods. Also, a big accident like Chernobyl sounds horrible, but people forget that burning coal produces a lot of pollution (including radiation!) that over time kills much more people. To get a perspective of how nuclear accidents compare with those of other energy production methods, have a look at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents
- Ekaros 5y ago
  I wonder if we were to count total loss of life in maintenance and installation of solar, wind and hydro. How much worse would nuclear do. At least per energy produced. The worst case for hydro at least is immense, possibly multiple millions death in some cases.
  - masklinn 5y ago
    As of 2020, nuclear energy's death toll (including Chernobyl and Fukushima) was roughly the same as the combined death toll of solar and wind (resp. 0.07, 0.02, and 0.04 deaths per TWh): https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy Hydro is also surprisingly low at 0.02, though failures are absolutely catastrophic I guess they tend to be out of the way and fairly local: so a dam failure will take out a village at once, and do extensive geological-scale damage, but not much more.

epistasis 5y ago

We are really really close to a solution, and for the one thing that nuclear is hyped to provide--clean electricity--we have cheaper and easier and more scalable solutions than nuclear. The challenges we have now with decarbonization are not solved by cheap electricity. The challenges I'm talking about are industrial and chemical processes, transitioning transport quickly enough, freight, aviation, agriculture, etc. these all require specific new technologies beyond cheap electricity. It would have been great if nuclear had worked out, but it was always overhyped and it always underdelivered. We were told it would be cheap, but it often had ridiculously expensive construction delays, leading to financial disasters. This happened in the 1970s and even today. It's time to stop mythologizing the technology, stop blaming the false boogeymen, and realize that at its heart the technology requires an excessive amount of piping, concrete, and machinery all to generate heat to make steam to move a turbine. It's a theoretically cheap heat source, but when you add in the engineering to capture the heat to boil water, it's not so cheap in reality, and there's been no innovation on making the engineering more elegant or cheaper in decades. In fact, if anything, it's gotten less elegant, more expensive, and even harder to build.

criley2 5y ago
There is nothing cheaper and easier and more scalable than nuclear for baseload gigawatt generation, especially when you actually account for the insane amount of batteries required to make wind/solar/etc viable as a baseload technology. People point at solar panel progress and always conveniently stay silent on the big battery problem (the mining problem, the scalability problem, the toxicity problem, etc) Nuclear did and does work out. It was not overhyped and it has delivered as expected. I would argue that solar is overhyped and has continually underdelivered. Anyone who has installed a solar system on their house has seen the significant issues with it. Nuclear remains the best way to replace coal/gas electricity generation for baseload power, to generate enough energy to power industries and cities, and is cleaner than filling a city with atrocious rare earth batteries that are required to paper over the problems with other inconsistently generating technologies. It is what it is, but if nuclear isn't the future, then coal isn't going anywhere.
- 5y ago

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