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The Disneyfication of Atomic Power
- gandalfian 5y agoPay a large upfront cost now and get rewarded/stuck with moderate priced electricity for fifty years, while you watch renewable electricity getting ever cheaper and then in fifty years pay an even larger cost for the cleanup (currently over £100 billion pounds in the UK and rising). A vote for nuclear now is a vote for a large bill due just when you want to retire... I like the theory but it may be they have just missed their window...
- noja 5y agoDoes anyone have any real numbers for nuclear power station risk? It's all very well and good saying how great it is, but what do the numbers say? Let's assume the newest technology. Chance of a meltdown per year per power station, multiplied by number of stations, multiplied by years of service. Then factors in the cost of the meltdown (health, unusable land, lost infrastructure) versus the benefits somehow.
- korantu 5y agoThis is indeed very important question. Nevermind newest technology, if we take existing and dated nuclear technology, and calculate safety in deaths per TWH generated, nuclear is in the same ballpark as Solar and considerably better than Wind [1] ... Gas/Oil and others are disasterous in comparison, let alone Coal. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
- throwaway894345 5y agoTo put a fine point on your comment, your figure also includes deaths from Fukushima and Chernobyl. Also, the newer reactor designs are really impressive with respect to safety and economics.
- korantu 5y agoExactly, thank you for bringing this up; Comparison stays true even if we include quite outlandish estimates for Chernobyl.
- cycomanic 5y agoWell insurance companies are typically quite good with numbers and do not want to insure against a nuclear disaster
- olivermarks 5y agoIMO Small Nuclear Reactors (local units to serve communities) are increasingly viable if we are to continue on the path of an all electric society. Last century big reactors are v old tech and a risk at failure. Small is much better and doesn't require transporting electricity long distances.
- michaelt 5y agoWell, that's partly a matter of scale. The largest insurer in the world has assets of $1,190 billion [1] and the cost of Fukushima cleanup could be as high as $660 billion [2] or even $1 trillion [3] (estimates of this vary wildly). Insuring such a large risk would be like playing russian roulette with the company. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_insurance_companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_insurance_comp... [2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/clearing-the-radioactive-rubble-heap-that-was-fukushima-daiichi-7-years-on/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/clearing-the-radi... [3] https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-will-approach-one-trillion-dollars-just-for-nuclear-disaster/ https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-...
- cycomanic 5y agoSo is it not playing russian roulette when we do it as a society?
- fsflover 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nuclear_power#Safety https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nuclear_power#Saf...
- Koshkin 5y agoThe biggest problem with nuclear power plants seems to me the apparent need for them to be located near natural water sources. If they could build one in the middle of a desert, wouldn't that be the answer to most environmental concerns?
- duped 5y agoIt would be safer and more efficient to have a higher number of smaller nuclear plants closer to populations than a small number of large plants further away.
- Koshkin 5y ago> a higher number of smaller nuclear plants closer to populations Efficient - maybe, but safer??
- korantu 5y ago'Safer' comes from 'Smaller' here; It is possible to have smaller reactor which is completely underground and user passive cooling, so won't meltdown. TBH, modern big nuclear power stations are already very safe.
- topkai22 5y agoShort answer is no- see Yucca mountain. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste...
- monjohn 5y agoOne key fact is number of people killed by US commercial power plants: 0 If you want a take very different than the anti-nuclear one, I would recommend this interview of Mark Nelson: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2vlG1Ouf001owUMwOBCfVG?si=NwDahDDsTcGHSWdcbNKhmg&context=spotify%3Ashow%3A2VJXcgRBLEkXuJmWBFyn6p&dl_branch=1&nd=1 https://open.spotify.com/episode/2vlG1Ouf001owUMwOBCfVG?si=N...
- throwaway894345 5y ago> US commercial nuclear plants To be clear, US coal and natural gas plants kill a lot of people regularly.
- monjohn 5y agoThanks for the correction!
- pvaldes 5y ago> One key fact is number of people killed by US commercial power plants: 0 One key fact about nuclear is that everything that we see from here to the horizon is a layer of lies. All nuclear plants have commercial uses, some also make bombs in the weekends and holidays that never, ever killed anybody. Very nice bombs. But I imagine that we talk about nuclear plants for civil uses. I guess that the Radium Girls don't qualify as people in that list of "zero" people killed by radioactivity in US. If we talk about people killed "by" the building, yes we have five workers killed, but we could forget all about those also. Last was from 2013 so is a really old history. Nothing to see here, lets move on. In fact if we forget all about Slotin and Daghlian and about the other 56 nuclear accidents in US we could have a list of zero accidents!. A very desirable goal!. All that we need is to discard the bad parts of the history. All depends on how you circumnavigate and define accident in a nuclear plant.
- enaaem 5y agoIf we compare nuclear risk with global warming, then nuclear is local and anti-fragile, i.e. more nuclear disasters increases the safety of all other plants. Global warming is global, non-linear and has lots of unknown effects. The characteristic of risk is far more important than exact numbers. I’m not necessarily pro-nuclear and I wish renewables will be a sufficient solution. But due to the risk characteristics of global warming mentioned earlier, I think nuclear energy should always be an option. I am anti-anti-nuclear.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- sayonaraman 5y agoThe author also wrote "The Wretched Atom" and is clearly nuclear-phobic. Nuclear power is the only hope to stop climate change.
- Ambolia 5y agoBut doesn't work so well if you have a malthusian agenda.
- mrunkel 5y agoI don't understand, can you elaborate?
- legitster 5y agoMalthus wrote in the 1800s about how society was on the verge of collapse because we were all going to run out of resources. People who take a lot of stock in these types of predictions generally cannot see the value of economic growth and try to save the world by enforcing their own set of puritanical environmental restrictions.
- korantu 5y agoNot the original comment author, but will try and offer a clarification: Malthus [1] was of opinion that humanity growth/wellbeing is bound to be curbed by wars/famines due to limits of resources. He was mostly correct up until industrial revolution. There are, though, people who still subscribe to Malthus idea of impending doom. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus
- germinalphrase 5y agoIs this some kind of “the wealthy are going to leave the masses to starve” idea?
- Ambolia 5y agoWell, that sounds a bit extreme. I just see generalized policies of degrowth and basically destruction of the middle-class (whatever that means) everywhere in the western world: - Local lockdowns rather than closing borders in time for the virus - Increased tolerance of petty crime to make the cities as inhabitable as possible - Very incompetent energy policies that will make energy skyrocket in price - Policies and incentives making it harder and harder to be able to afford a car. - Deindustrialization (that's been going on for a while) and no effort to reverse it. - Basically no research or very bad research on basic health improvement treatments that don't involve medication. And small things like that adding up one by one. Would be not so strange if different countries were failing in different ways, but seems strange to see so many countries consistently "failing" in the same way.
- mrunkel 5y agoSo, from the article I gather that: General Dymanics had a marketing campaign with very nice graphics In the 1950's, a lot of people believed that the power of splitting the atom was a way to pull mankind out of the darkness and provide plenty for all. Is there something nefarious here that I'm not getting? I think that nuclear power is still the very best way of serving the ever-growing energy needs of the planet. It's a shame that the technology has been sidelined by fearmongering and endless litigation.
- mc32 5y agoPlus if they want to be chronologically correct they would say the atomic powerization of Disney marketing given Disney (the magic kingdom version) came to be in the 60s after atomic power. What's that Pizza of G(reeley)(?) rubber stamp doing there?
- eldaisfish 5y agoYou are correct. Nuclear is an excellent source for large amounts of energy. Decades of propaganda have led to people mistakenly believing that wind, solar and batteries on a large enough scale are a substitute for steady, controllable power generation from sources such as coal, natural gas and nuclear. The sad part is that while we wait for the grid transition to happen at an indeterminate point in the future, climate change is a problem from yesterday that has a very real effect today. The worse part is that the nuclear industry continues to atrophy talent and knowledge when we should instead be focussing on making nuclear power an everyday thing. Instead of playing the blame game on pollution, i really wish the West would do the one thing that has the greatest potential to supply energy to and lift millions out of poverty - build nuclear reactors and transmission grids in Africa, India and China.
- krasin 5y agoI mostly agree with the comment above, but I want to note that China does not need the US to build the reactors: they are already doing it themselves. "As of June 2021, China has a total nuclear power generation capacity of 49.6 GW from 50 reactors, with additional 17.1 GW under construction." per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China
- legitster 5y agoI hate this framing so much. "All of these major organizations were promoting the benefits of nuclear energy at the same time." As if to cast aspersions on any actual benefits as being purely fictitious. The actual merits are irrelevant - guilty by association. And notice that all of these same organizations promoted things like... breakthroughs in consumer electronics, worker safety, medicine, vaccines, solar power, space travel. And yet, there are no articles about the "propaganda" around things like seatbelts. To pull out nuclear is a lazy post hoc analysis hit job. I hate this trend in modern journalism where anytime consumers show preferences for something a journalist doesn't like, they are written about like some sort of victim in an information war.
- teddyh 5y ago> I hate this trend in modern journalism where anytime consumers show preferences for something a journalist doesn't like, they are written about like some sort of victim in an information war. That’s “victims of misinformation”.
- legitster 5y agoExcept it's hard to make a case that people who support nuclear power are misinformed.
- teddyh 5y agoThere is no need to make the case explicitly, just assume it as a given. Look at the article of this thread; it assumes nuclear power is bad merely by inference, never by explicitly arguing it.
- ZeroGravitas 5y agoI assumed this would refer to the fact that Disneyland in Florida had (has?) Permission to build a reactor of their own as a power source.
- EricE 5y agoRadiation is a tool - period. Any tool can be misused - we should throw out a tool just because it might be misused. If you really think climate change is an impending crises the fastest way to cut carbon emissions is with nuclear power - period.