4 ms·
> Nuclear is just cleaner when it's done right. The question is whether “doing it wrong” (Fukushima) outweighs the benefits of “doing it right”.
by runeks 5y ago
> Nuclear is just cleaner when it's done right.
The question is whether “doing it wrong” (Fukushima) outweighs the benefits of “doing it right”.
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y agoIt's hard to say Fukushima was a case of "doing it wrong." You can only protect against a certain level of natural disasters. Even if you get totally paranoid and put the plant deep under earth you can never be sure an earthquake doesn't damage it. We just can't be 100% sure. On the other hand, can we afford not doing it? We don't yet have clean and efficient energy storage technologies that would allow us to switch to renewables completely. So if the alternative is to burn coal and worsen our already bad situation, the nuclear risk seems much smaller.
- pvaldes 5y ago> It's hard to say Fukushima was a case of "doing it wrong." If you tsunami safety plan in a country prone to have tsunamis fits in one page and has not been updated in the last 9 years to include the new scientific data, yes, you are doing it wrong. If your plans calculate less than 6m high waves as a maximum and there is a 14m high wave event. If your calculus failed for more than 50%, not, this is not a good job. You could have done much more. Can blame the nature or the bad luck, or the constellations, but you are just lying to yourself.
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y agoA fair point. Mine is: whatever wave height you plan for, you can be sure a higher one will come. It's not a question of if, only when.
- schaefer 5y agoThere are designs that are perfectly safe. i.e. the pebble bed reactor. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble-bed_reactor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble-bed_reactor
- nobodyandproud 5y agoLooking at the link, it looks like it poses its own challenges: >The most common criticism of pebble-bed reactors is that encasing the fuel in combustible graphite poses a hazard. When the graphite burns, fuel material could be carried away in smoke from the fire. These sound like solvable engineering and process challenges, though, so perhaps in the less anti-nuclear climate we’ll have the will to actually make it work.
- Ginden 5y ago> The question is whether “doing it wrong” (Fukushima) outweighs the benefits of “doing it right”. As of 2021, nuclear powerplant accidents killed less than 2 people per year since 1970s. As of 2018, nuclear powerplants produced 10% of energy. WHO estimates that climate change causes 150000 deaths per year.
- netcan 5y agoTrue, but I don't think this invalidates OP's point. Nuclear disasters are scary in a different way.
- Galaxeblaffer 5y agoI don't know.. poisoning the very air we breathe sounds pretty scary to me, and we're doing it in an immense scale right now
- Ginden 5y agoClimate change due to CO2 emissions is not a form of poisoning. Air pollution kills an estimated seven million people worldwide every year. Fossil-fuels powerplants produce surprisingly low air pollution due to all required by law filters, technologies etc.
- robin_reala 5y ago…in the US / EU.
- MadeThisToReply 5y agoIncreasing the CO2 concentration in the air we breathe, even by the relatively small amount caused by burning fossil fuels, has been shown to lower human cognitive function. Does that count as poisoning? (Source: it's discussed in the book The Uninhabitable Earth, although I don't have a copy to hand so can't find the exact citations.)
- 5y ago
- rimliu 5y agoIf anything, Fukushima shows that even doing it wrong (not accounting for one-in-the-hundred-years disaster) is still very safe.
- midrus 5y agoProblem is that the alternatives, even done right, are worse.