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Reading Voices from Chernobyl changed my opinion on nuclear. The potential human cost is so great it doesn’t seem worth it. One other way of thinking about the

Reading Voices from Chernobyl changed my opinion on nuclear. The potential human cost is so great it doesn’t seem worth it. One other way of thinking about the issue is this: what would you consider a safe power plant? How about one that has a probability of failing once every ten thousand years. That sounds pretty safe, doesn’t it? Well with hundreds of power plants, the probability of a single one failing starts to get quite high on any given year. And that matches reality: three mile island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, among many others: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accide... The potential downside is that large swaths of the planet become uninhabitable. Is that really a wise bet to make in the face of climate change?

funklute 5y ago
> The potential downside is that large swaths of the planet become uninhabitable. Modern reactor designs cannot explode high into the atmosphere the way that Chernobyl did. That is, their contamination will never be as far-reaching as Chernobyl was. With modern designs, it's really a question of local contamination. Pit this against the global impact of climate change and it's pretty clear which issue is the more serious one. The potential impact of climate change is big enough that we shouldn't let potential local contamination be an obstacle to building out nuclear power.
- halpert 5y ago
  So why did they evacuate Fukushima, and why were people concerned about ocean contamination? It’s undeniable that there are failure scenarios that are unknown with any design.
  - funklute 5y ago
    > So why did they evacuate Fukushima, and why were people concerned about ocean contamination? Well, for a start that doesn't contradict what I said above. Overall, the impact from Fukushima was really not that bad, all things considered. Compare for example to pollution and deaths attributed to coal power plants around the world. Pollution and deaths due to nuclear have a tendency to get vastly more media exposure though. Second, they didn't evacuate all of Japan. They evacuated locally. And finally, Japan is arguably the worst possible place you could build a bunch of nuclear power plants. On top of that, Fukushima was under-engineered. The fact that it didn't go worse than it did is actually a good example of how harmless nuclear power can be. But of course, that's no reason not to have stringent safety measures in place. I'm by no means advocating a wild west of nuclear power.
    - halpert 5y ago
      This isn’t convincing, sorry. While Fukushima wasn’t that bad, it could have been terrible. It had the potential to make a large region of Japan uninhabitable and poison the food supply. That is super serious. Just because nothing bad happened this time, doesn’t mean that we’ll be so lucky in the future. The biggest issue with your argument is that you have inadequate explanations for the failures that have happened. Chernobyl: bad reactor design. Fukushima: under engineered. Obviously people don’t set out to poorly design or under engineer a nuclear power plant. How do we know that we haven’t missed anything significant and crucial to long term safe operation? Such a thing is unknowable, so all we can do is look at the evidence, and the evidence is that there is a history of poor design choices leading to events that border on calamity. Humans are fallible. Choosing a strategy that can go horribly wrong due to human error is not wise in my opinion.
      - funklute 5y ago
        > Obviously people don’t set out to poorly design or under engineer a nuclear power plant. But quite importantly, in both of those cases the failure scenarios were not unknown (though the risk was deemed acceptable, for whatever reasons). Unknown failure scenarios don't really happen in this space -- such a thing is neither acceptable nor expected. > Humans are fallible. But of course, this I can't argue with. Nor that Chernobyl and Fukushima did in fact happen. > Choosing a strategy that can go horribly wrong due to human error is not wise in my opinion. So what it boils down to, in my mind, is a numbers game. We know that climate change has the potential for killing hundreds of millions of people, if not more. We know that coal power plants routinely and completely expectedly kill a bunch of people (the numbers really are staggering for something so common). So the point I'm making is that Chernobyl, Fukushima, and the general risk with nuclear, should not on its own stop us from building out nuclear. It has to be a balance with the risks of the other options. (large-scale battery capacity and the economics of nuclear are additional jokers in this debate, but let's not get into that) > While Fukushima wasn’t that bad, it could have been terrible. It had the potential... Finally -- while I understand where you're coming from -- this particular argument doesn't sit that well with me. It's a little too easy to use this as a "slippery slope" style appeal to emotions, rather than objective evidence. To turn it around: climate change has the potential to wipe out humanity. We should shut down literally all coal power plants tomorrow, and start building thousands of nuclear power plants. This is of course not a reasonable argument, and nor is it reasonable of me to completely denounce your concern here. So this is where the details of the risk/benefits analysis matters, and above all it has to be an evidence-based argument. I don't think emotive arguments about how bad Fukushima or Chernobyl was or could have been, have a place in this debate.
epistasis 5y ago
While most of the nuclear debate focuses on this concern, I think it misses an even earlier concern: we do not have the capability to build nuclear at the scale needed for it to deal with the problem. We would need to start and complete ~100 reactors in the next 20 years just to keep our current level of nuclear. Back in 2008, we started 4, have abandoned two due to construction incompetence, and the other two are taking 2-3x as long as expected, and cost 2-3x as much. This is with only four reactors. If we tried to scale this 25-50x, our problems would multiply, not get easier. And that's just to keep our current level of nuclear, not switch to a high level of nuclear like we would need to do in order for nuclear to be a significant part of our energy interchange. We have far better routes to a carbon-free energy economy than paying contractors Thai have no clue what they are doing.

funklute 5y ago

> The potential downside is that large swaths of the planet become uninhabitable. Modern reactor designs cannot explode high into the atmosphere the way that Chernobyl did. That is, their contamination will never be as far-reaching as Chernobyl was. With modern designs, it's really a question of local contamination. Pit this against the global impact of climate change and it's pretty clear which issue is the more serious one. The potential impact of climate change is big enough that we shouldn't let potential local contamination be an obstacle to building out nuclear power.

halpert 5y ago
So why did they evacuate Fukushima, and why were people concerned about ocean contamination? It’s undeniable that there are failure scenarios that are unknown with any design.
- funklute 5y ago
  > So why did they evacuate Fukushima, and why were people concerned about ocean contamination? Well, for a start that doesn't contradict what I said above. Overall, the impact from Fukushima was really not that bad, all things considered. Compare for example to pollution and deaths attributed to coal power plants around the world. Pollution and deaths due to nuclear have a tendency to get vastly more media exposure though. Second, they didn't evacuate all of Japan. They evacuated locally. And finally, Japan is arguably the worst possible place you could build a bunch of nuclear power plants. On top of that, Fukushima was under-engineered. The fact that it didn't go worse than it did is actually a good example of how harmless nuclear power can be. But of course, that's no reason not to have stringent safety measures in place. I'm by no means advocating a wild west of nuclear power.
  - halpert 5y ago
    This isn’t convincing, sorry. While Fukushima wasn’t that bad, it could have been terrible. It had the potential to make a large region of Japan uninhabitable and poison the food supply. That is super serious. Just because nothing bad happened this time, doesn’t mean that we’ll be so lucky in the future. The biggest issue with your argument is that you have inadequate explanations for the failures that have happened. Chernobyl: bad reactor design. Fukushima: under engineered. Obviously people don’t set out to poorly design or under engineer a nuclear power plant. How do we know that we haven’t missed anything significant and crucial to long term safe operation? Such a thing is unknowable, so all we can do is look at the evidence, and the evidence is that there is a history of poor design choices leading to events that border on calamity. Humans are fallible. Choosing a strategy that can go horribly wrong due to human error is not wise in my opinion.
    - funklute 5y ago
      > Obviously people don’t set out to poorly design or under engineer a nuclear power plant. But quite importantly, in both of those cases the failure scenarios were not unknown (though the risk was deemed acceptable, for whatever reasons). Unknown failure scenarios don't really happen in this space -- such a thing is neither acceptable nor expected. > Humans are fallible. But of course, this I can't argue with. Nor that Chernobyl and Fukushima did in fact happen. > Choosing a strategy that can go horribly wrong due to human error is not wise in my opinion. So what it boils down to, in my mind, is a numbers game. We know that climate change has the potential for killing hundreds of millions of people, if not more. We know that coal power plants routinely and completely expectedly kill a bunch of people (the numbers really are staggering for something so common). So the point I'm making is that Chernobyl, Fukushima, and the general risk with nuclear, should not on its own stop us from building out nuclear. It has to be a balance with the risks of the other options. (large-scale battery capacity and the economics of nuclear are additional jokers in this debate, but let's not get into that) > While Fukushima wasn’t that bad, it could have been terrible. It had the potential... Finally -- while I understand where you're coming from -- this particular argument doesn't sit that well with me. It's a little too easy to use this as a "slippery slope" style appeal to emotions, rather than objective evidence. To turn it around: climate change has the potential to wipe out humanity. We should shut down literally all coal power plants tomorrow, and start building thousands of nuclear power plants. This is of course not a reasonable argument, and nor is it reasonable of me to completely denounce your concern here. So this is where the details of the risk/benefits analysis matters, and above all it has to be an evidence-based argument. I don't think emotive arguments about how bad Fukushima or Chernobyl was or could have been, have a place in this debate.

epistasis 5y ago

While most of the nuclear debate focuses on this concern, I think it misses an even earlier concern: we do not have the capability to build nuclear at the scale needed for it to deal with the problem. We would need to start and complete ~100 reactors in the next 20 years just to keep our current level of nuclear. Back in 2008, we started 4, have abandoned two due to construction incompetence, and the other two are taking 2-3x as long as expected, and cost 2-3x as much. This is with only four reactors. If we tried to scale this 25-50x, our problems would multiply, not get easier. And that's just to keep our current level of nuclear, not switch to a high level of nuclear like we would need to do in order for nuclear to be a significant part of our energy interchange. We have far better routes to a carbon-free energy economy than paying contractors Thai have no clue what they are doing.