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Safety of Nuclear Energy

tuatoru 5y ago
Conclusion: failing to convert coal-fired power stations to nuclear has killed tens of millions of people since 1970.
- cratermoon 5y ago
  I wonder how many lives would have been saved by converting to clean renewables. At least tens of millions.
  - tuatoru 5y ago
    Using the figures on the ourworldindata page, not many more than with nuclear. Nuclear, hydro, wind and PV all have fatality rates two orders of magnitude below fossil fuels' (per TWh generated). Renewables are about three times as safe on the evidence - the difference between one fatality every 14 years vs 1 every 50-odd years, compared to tens every year for fossils (again, per TWh each year).
  - throw0101a 5y ago
    > I wonder how many lives would have been saved by converting to clean renewables. At least tens of millions. Clean renewables were only really viable in the last 10, maybe 20, years. We could have been building nuclear plants for the last 50.
    - AtlasBarfed 5y ago
      Do you really think windmills were fundamentally restricted by a lack of technology in the 50s/60s/70s? And that aggressive early solar investment wouldn't have produced what we have now back in the 1980s? Or that battery chemistry wouldn't have been substantially advanced with aggressive funding? But I do agree we should have made a lot more LFTR style ORNL reactors. Nuclear killed itself with PWR solid rod designs and ignoring the Oak Ridge designs, all so they could have weapons grade isotopes. Oil has owned our military, political, and industrial landscape. Our "defense department" has force projected all over the globe to enable access to oil, we've fought wars at the behest of oil companies and oil states for a trillion dollars, topped democratically elected regimes to keep oilmen happy, repressed the effects of oil/coal for the oilmen.
      - WithinReason 5y ago
        If you're going to argue for aggressive funding, you should probably include fusion: https://i.imgur.com/3vYLQmm.png https://i.imgur.com/3vYLQmm.png
      - cinquemb 5y ago
        > But I do agree we should have made a lot more LFTR style ORNL reactors. Its fascinating reading about all the research online into molten salt designs in the 60's wrt nuclear and its promise that just went ignored (if you take the word of people who worked on it on their blogs) because of things that sounded very much like: > Oil has owned our military, political, and industrial landscape. I'm just glad that the rest of the world is not limited to build out for large scale renewable systems (i.e. freaking chile has +200MW and 17.5h molten salt storage sans direct solar radiation CPVCSP plant bidding for under 4 cents/kwh in 2021 and the US has nothing, what a joke the US is for renewable despite all the past research in related fields, but good on other countries taking advantage of it). I suspect even the sCO2 turbine research will go nowhere towards broad commercialization/utilization in the US and get broad adoption outside of it despite its applicability to nearly every system that converts heat into electricity now. Sadly, I think nuclear will still go nowhere outside a few places as long as fears around weaponization remain (even the thorium stuff has its downsides from the protactinium -> u233 route, and i've at least seen this stuff pursed for awhile in few EM's leveraging US researchers/companies/consultants).
      - throw0101a 5y ago
        > Do you really think windmills were fundamentally restricted by a lack of technology in the 50s/60s/70s? And that aggressive early solar investment wouldn't have produced what we have now back in the 1980s? Or that battery chemistry wouldn't have been substantially advanced with aggressive funding? To a certain extent, yes. Control electronics and especially HVDC use in offshore turbines, where all the economies of scale are happening, were not as advanced as they are now. No. Solar technology is based on semiconductor technology to a certain extent, and we weren't as far long as we are now in that. Funding is no guarantee of discovery in research. Yes you can throw more money at the problem to have more people looking at things, but there's an element of creativity in deciding which pathways to go down for experimentation. Discovery is also often (usually?) random and serendipitous: see James Burkes' television series Connections. In material science and chemistry there is a finite number of paths, because of the finite number of elements involved, but it's still a grind to go through, and people may prioritize/try the wrong ones initially. More research is more better, but there needs to be a societal base that is fertile for the change in question. Once that base is there, there is often the same/similar discovery popping up from multiple places 'spontaneously': * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discoveries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discoveries > Oil has owned our military, political, and industrial landscape. Oil has not: cheap, convenient energy has. This is because cheap, convenient energy allowed us to get beyond mere sustenance living and industrialize and mechanize work. Oil just happens to be that for the last century or so (after surpassing coal in the Industrial Revolution which kicked things off). Would you have us completely stop modern society? > Our "defense department" has force projected all over the globe to enable access to oil, we've fought wars at the behest of oil companies […] The US has been running the globe well before oil companies were a major influence. The US went after Mexico and Texas before oil was discovered there. There was no oil in Cuba or the Philippines. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny
  - Krssst 5y ago
    It seems to me that NREs do not allow closing that many fossil fuel plants since you need backup power (unless storage, but I have yet to see a big country use storage rather than gas). So, my impression is that they would definitely have saved lives, but not as much.
  - belorn 5y ago
    The lesson we should learn from those millions of lives killed by fossil fuels is that we need to stop burning fossil fuels. Set down a date where no more fossil fuel plants are allowed to be build and put all the remaining plants into planned obsolescence. When the energy prices goes up as a result we then put in corresponding subsidizes in a technology agnostic way and let the market and science decide how we can produce enough capacity and grid stability as cheap as possible under the circumstances of no fossil fuel. Fighting over renewables vs nuclear now is only delaying the stop of fossil fuel. It time to bring up the old slogan of the green movement: Keep It In The Ground! Everything else can addressed after that battle is won.
- mint2 5y ago
  Nuclear is a good example of how facts alone don’t win debates or make public policy.
earthboundkid 5y ago
The problem with nuclear is tail risk. This is like showing us how great the financials of Leman Bros. is circa 2007. Okay, cool, I guess, but?…
- fighterpilot 5y ago
  Chernobyl is analogous to the Lehman collapse, and so the tail risk is already inside the data that they're displaying, and actually it is exaggerated since that tail risk is getting smaller and smaller as the tech improves and becomes safer with time.
  - wingineer 5y ago
    Chernobyl may not even necessarily represent the tail risk of a nuclear catastrophe. After all, only one of the four reactors melted down. What is your evidence that the tech "becomes safer with time"?
    - heisenzombie 5y ago
      Early reactors required active safety mechanisms: You had to actively do stuff (such as pumping coolant) to keep them from melting. Modern reactors are designed to be far more "passively safe" such that failures cause the reactor to shut down safely even if the operators do nothing.
      - bg46z 5y ago
        This worked beautifully in fukushima
        tcmart14 5y ago
        Fukushima failed because power failed, failing the coolant systems. That was an active system and not a passive. Look at MSR test that were done at the Idaho National Research Laboratory. The heat transference of using molten salt shutdown the react even in the absence of power. This is a passive system.
southerntofu 5y ago
Missing from these graphs: - the human cost of (neo)colonial policies required for the flow of nuclear fuel (at least for France) - the environmental cost of nuclear waste disposal, which is a problem that is unsolved [0] (construction, maintenance) and unaccounted for from what i could see in the data sources ; it is accounted for for fossil fuel in the forms of CO2 emissions [0] Actually it is solved. Some nuclear technologies have been explored that produce less harmful (non-harmful?) byproducts, but they were from what i understood always discarded by Nation States due to having no military applications.
- belorn 5y ago
  The human cost of extracting fuel is missing from all energy sources, but it would unlikely change the full picture. Coal mining has a very long history of harvesting human lives, being one of the most deadly profession that have ever existed. Oil in turn has been in the center of wars since world war 1 and the collective number of human lives lost is hard to even imagine. Natural gas as a by-product of oil and coal would only share in the deaths caused by the others. The more closer comparison would be between rare-earth metals needed in renewables and the uranium in nuclear fuel, but which one wins is questionable. There are more children picking through e-waste than there are children picking through uranium. Mining uranium however is not that great either. Then again, mining rare earth metals aren't great either. Feel free to point to any sources that compare the two in terms of produced energy. > the environmental cost of nuclear waste disposal We can compare that to fossil fuels method of waste disposal. Nuclear could release it waste into the air over a long period of time, letting the radiation slowly spread out over a very large area through rain and weather. This is not accounted in fossil fuel as CO2 is only one kind of pollution, with coal power plants actually creating more radiation waste per watt produced than a nuclear power plant. Fossil fuels waste just happens to be released into the air and spread out over a large area/time rather than being stockpiled. Renewables should fare better but you would still need to account for e-waste and CO2 emissions from construction and waste recycling. All in all, fossil fuels would not look better in comparison to nuclear. The human cost in fossil fuel production would be humongous and the environmental cost of waste disposal would dwarf anything that nuclear create.

Conclusion: failing to convert coal-fired power stations to nuclear has killed tens of millions of people since 1970.

cratermoon 5y ago
I wonder how many lives would have been saved by converting to clean renewables. At least tens of millions.
- tuatoru 5y ago
  Using the figures on the ourworldindata page, not many more than with nuclear. Nuclear, hydro, wind and PV all have fatality rates two orders of magnitude below fossil fuels' (per TWh generated). Renewables are about three times as safe on the evidence - the difference between one fatality every 14 years vs 1 every 50-odd years, compared to tens every year for fossils (again, per TWh each year).
- throw0101a 5y ago
  > I wonder how many lives would have been saved by converting to clean renewables. At least tens of millions. Clean renewables were only really viable in the last 10, maybe 20, years. We could have been building nuclear plants for the last 50.
  - AtlasBarfed 5y ago
    Do you really think windmills were fundamentally restricted by a lack of technology in the 50s/60s/70s? And that aggressive early solar investment wouldn't have produced what we have now back in the 1980s? Or that battery chemistry wouldn't have been substantially advanced with aggressive funding? But I do agree we should have made a lot more LFTR style ORNL reactors. Nuclear killed itself with PWR solid rod designs and ignoring the Oak Ridge designs, all so they could have weapons grade isotopes. Oil has owned our military, political, and industrial landscape. Our "defense department" has force projected all over the globe to enable access to oil, we've fought wars at the behest of oil companies and oil states for a trillion dollars, topped democratically elected regimes to keep oilmen happy, repressed the effects of oil/coal for the oilmen.
    - WithinReason 5y ago
      If you're going to argue for aggressive funding, you should probably include fusion: https://i.imgur.com/3vYLQmm.png https://i.imgur.com/3vYLQmm.png
    - cinquemb 5y ago
      > But I do agree we should have made a lot more LFTR style ORNL reactors. Its fascinating reading about all the research online into molten salt designs in the 60's wrt nuclear and its promise that just went ignored (if you take the word of people who worked on it on their blogs) because of things that sounded very much like: > Oil has owned our military, political, and industrial landscape. I'm just glad that the rest of the world is not limited to build out for large scale renewable systems (i.e. freaking chile has +200MW and 17.5h molten salt storage sans direct solar radiation CPVCSP plant bidding for under 4 cents/kwh in 2021 and the US has nothing, what a joke the US is for renewable despite all the past research in related fields, but good on other countries taking advantage of it). I suspect even the sCO2 turbine research will go nowhere towards broad commercialization/utilization in the US and get broad adoption outside of it despite its applicability to nearly every system that converts heat into electricity now. Sadly, I think nuclear will still go nowhere outside a few places as long as fears around weaponization remain (even the thorium stuff has its downsides from the protactinium -> u233 route, and i've at least seen this stuff pursed for awhile in few EM's leveraging US researchers/companies/consultants).
    - throw0101a 5y ago
      > Do you really think windmills were fundamentally restricted by a lack of technology in the 50s/60s/70s? And that aggressive early solar investment wouldn't have produced what we have now back in the 1980s? Or that battery chemistry wouldn't have been substantially advanced with aggressive funding? To a certain extent, yes. Control electronics and especially HVDC use in offshore turbines, where all the economies of scale are happening, were not as advanced as they are now. No. Solar technology is based on semiconductor technology to a certain extent, and we weren't as far long as we are now in that. Funding is no guarantee of discovery in research. Yes you can throw more money at the problem to have more people looking at things, but there's an element of creativity in deciding which pathways to go down for experimentation. Discovery is also often (usually?) random and serendipitous: see James Burkes' television series Connections. In material science and chemistry there is a finite number of paths, because of the finite number of elements involved, but it's still a grind to go through, and people may prioritize/try the wrong ones initially. More research is more better, but there needs to be a societal base that is fertile for the change in question. Once that base is there, there is often the same/similar discovery popping up from multiple places 'spontaneously': * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discoveries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discoveries > Oil has owned our military, political, and industrial landscape. Oil has not: cheap, convenient energy has. This is because cheap, convenient energy allowed us to get beyond mere sustenance living and industrialize and mechanize work. Oil just happens to be that for the last century or so (after surpassing coal in the Industrial Revolution which kicked things off). Would you have us completely stop modern society? > Our "defense department" has force projected all over the globe to enable access to oil, we've fought wars at the behest of oil companies […] The US has been running the globe well before oil companies were a major influence. The US went after Mexico and Texas before oil was discovered there. There was no oil in Cuba or the Philippines. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny
- Krssst 5y ago
  It seems to me that NREs do not allow closing that many fossil fuel plants since you need backup power (unless storage, but I have yet to see a big country use storage rather than gas). So, my impression is that they would definitely have saved lives, but not as much.
- belorn 5y ago
  The lesson we should learn from those millions of lives killed by fossil fuels is that we need to stop burning fossil fuels. Set down a date where no more fossil fuel plants are allowed to be build and put all the remaining plants into planned obsolescence. When the energy prices goes up as a result we then put in corresponding subsidizes in a technology agnostic way and let the market and science decide how we can produce enough capacity and grid stability as cheap as possible under the circumstances of no fossil fuel. Fighting over renewables vs nuclear now is only delaying the stop of fossil fuel. It time to bring up the old slogan of the green movement: Keep It In The Ground! Everything else can addressed after that battle is won.
mint2 5y ago
Nuclear is a good example of how facts alone don’t win debates or make public policy.

The problem with nuclear is tail risk. This is like showing us how great the financials of Leman Bros. is circa 2007. Okay, cool, I guess, but?…

fighterpilot 5y ago
Chernobyl is analogous to the Lehman collapse, and so the tail risk is already inside the data that they're displaying, and actually it is exaggerated since that tail risk is getting smaller and smaller as the tech improves and becomes safer with time.
- wingineer 5y ago
  Chernobyl may not even necessarily represent the tail risk of a nuclear catastrophe. After all, only one of the four reactors melted down. What is your evidence that the tech "becomes safer with time"?
  - heisenzombie 5y ago
    Early reactors required active safety mechanisms: You had to actively do stuff (such as pumping coolant) to keep them from melting. Modern reactors are designed to be far more "passively safe" such that failures cause the reactor to shut down safely even if the operators do nothing.
    - bg46z 5y ago
      This worked beautifully in fukushima
      - tcmart14 5y ago
        Fukushima failed because power failed, failing the coolant systems. That was an active system and not a passive. Look at MSR test that were done at the Idaho National Research Laboratory. The heat transference of using molten salt shutdown the react even in the absence of power. This is a passive system.

southerntofu 5y ago

Missing from these graphs: - the human cost of (neo)colonial policies required for the flow of nuclear fuel (at least for France) - the environmental cost of nuclear waste disposal, which is a problem that is unsolved [0] (construction, maintenance) and unaccounted for from what i could see in the data sources ; it is accounted for for fossil fuel in the forms of CO2 emissions [0] Actually it is solved. Some nuclear technologies have been explored that produce less harmful (non-harmful?) byproducts, but they were from what i understood always discarded by Nation States due to having no military applications.

belorn 5y ago
The human cost of extracting fuel is missing from all energy sources, but it would unlikely change the full picture. Coal mining has a very long history of harvesting human lives, being one of the most deadly profession that have ever existed. Oil in turn has been in the center of wars since world war 1 and the collective number of human lives lost is hard to even imagine. Natural gas as a by-product of oil and coal would only share in the deaths caused by the others. The more closer comparison would be between rare-earth metals needed in renewables and the uranium in nuclear fuel, but which one wins is questionable. There are more children picking through e-waste than there are children picking through uranium. Mining uranium however is not that great either. Then again, mining rare earth metals aren't great either. Feel free to point to any sources that compare the two in terms of produced energy. > the environmental cost of nuclear waste disposal We can compare that to fossil fuels method of waste disposal. Nuclear could release it waste into the air over a long period of time, letting the radiation slowly spread out over a very large area through rain and weather. This is not accounted in fossil fuel as CO2 is only one kind of pollution, with coal power plants actually creating more radiation waste per watt produced than a nuclear power plant. Fossil fuels waste just happens to be released into the air and spread out over a large area/time rather than being stockpiled. Renewables should fare better but you would still need to account for e-waste and CO2 emissions from construction and waste recycling. All in all, fossil fuels would not look better in comparison to nuclear. The human cost in fossil fuel production would be humongous and the environmental cost of waste disposal would dwarf anything that nuclear create.