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This shows what a terrible technology nuclear power is in terms of security. Everything from fuel to waste is a potential target in times of war or terrorist at

This shows what a terrible technology nuclear power is in terms of security. Everything from fuel to waste is a potential target in times of war or terrorist attacks. So even opponents without nuclear weapons of their own can turn a conflict into a nuclear one.

dimitrios1 5y ago
So what is the argument here? We shouldn't have nice things that could greatly benefit society because terrorists or war-mongering dictators might come after them? What if a warring nation destroyed a hydroelectric dam and it flooded an entire town? Does this mean we should give up on hydro power? What would happen if a terrorist gained access to your city's water treatment facility and contaminated it with a bioweapon resistant to chlorine? Does this mean we shouldn't have water delivery for our cities? What would happen if a terrorist or warring nation gained access to your country's institute of virology where you are performing gain-of-function research, and they unleash a superbug you didn't intend into the population? Should we not perform medical science then? What would happen if you built a really tall building and a terrorist decided to fly an airplane into it? Should we not build tall buildings anymore?
- ahelwer 5y ago
  None of your analogies are applicable. Nuclear power stations require extraordinary stability in a world that cannot provide it. Earthquakes, tsunamis, war, or another failure mode nobody’s even thought of yet can lead to entire states becoming uninhabitable. We should desire that the consequences of failure draw from the domain of the normal distribution. Nuclear power draws its failure consequences from the exponential distribution. And failures will always happen eventually.
  - dimitrios1 5y ago
    Nuclear power stations on 1970s or older technology* The newer technologies, with the much smaller reactor cores can greatly limit the destructive capabilities even to the point where a meltdown caused by some unforseen event will be entirely containable.
  - catchclose8919 5y ago
    > desire that the consequences of failure draw from the domain of the normal distribution Almost all interesting tech we're playing with lately does not fall in this category... and there's nothing we can do about it, that's the evolution of tech. When interstellar-spaceships will be built, they'll practically be equivalent to "planet destroying nukes" and pretty sure accidents will happen (eg. fully scortching a planet inhabited by a few billions). AI if something ~human-level gets capable of a stretch of exponential self-improvement will be similar, but that will probably be the end of bio-humans and nothing we can do about it so no need to worry (just focus on making sure important human knowledge gets passed on to our non-human descendants). Only way to mitigate this is to DISPERSE (establish colonies on multiple planets) and MULTIPLY (so that an accident with eg. a 99% lethality thing still leaves enough humans around to maintain a technological civilization preserving the knowledge of our ancestors). We're a bloody virus, so better embrace our nature and start to act like an effective one. There's genocide in our pasts, and there's likely exponentially more genocide in our future, we need to be resilient and accept (mass) death as part of our techno-evolution...
- CaptArmchair 5y ago
  The argument is that nuclear pollution scorches the earth for centuries if not longer. Any of the examples you've mentioned has - relatively speaking - as short term impact. A nuclear plant shedding a plume of radioactive elements? All you can do is set up an exclusion zone. That doesn't mean nuclear technology doesn't have advantages. It very much has. Arguably, it's both the cleanest and most consistent way of energy production at the same time. The trade-off is security, as mentioned by the commenter, is security. If society decides to invest in nuclear energy, it has to be willing to accept the consequences of that choice. The technology isn't "bad" in and of itself. It's context and intentions leveraging said technology which shifts perceptions towards "good" or "bad". If the Russians would clearly recognize the challenges associated with securing a captured nuclear power plant, and take them to heart, the conversation would steer into a different direction.
- dogman144 5y ago
  I think the argument is more focused around we shouldn't have nice things that could greatly benefit society because nuke plants haven't displayed a great success rate with securing their premises. The NNSA (nuke nsa) seems to be pretty strong in cyber, so I'll limit this to just physical security. But the difference between hydro, tall buildings, etc is the critical physical security aspect nuke plants have. I agree with the point that the nuke plants seem to be capable of pretty safe operations. But, using the 40 years of activism from the Plowshares movement[0] as one example, doesn't seem like we're capable of securing the plants from "terrorists" with the no-fail rate that I'd somewhat want for nuke physical security. As recently as '12, Oak Ridge of all places was broken into via Plowshares activists. So if we can't track a known activist group that does this, what are our long term odds of tracking an unknown terror group with good opsec (signal, decentralized org, etc), with 100% success rate? Your comparison to virology fits here, and the two (nuke vs. dangerous medicine) seem to be treated differently in this regard, and that scares me, for one. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plowshares_movementhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plowshares_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plowshares_movementhttps://en....
bmitc 5y ago
Everything and anything is a target for a country that cares negatively about the environment or anything really.
gregwebs 5y ago
During this war there has not been legitimate danger of nuclear accidents, just a lot of concern about this hypothetical situation. To me it seems that Ukraine is trying to use nuclear concerns to stall the war and gain more international support. Arguably the only reason this war is possible is because Germany shutdown all their nuclear plants (there are a few plants left slated to be closed this year) and now rely on Russia for oil & gas. The existing sanctions are hurting, but Russia is still collecting hundreds of millions of dollars a day in oil & gas revenue. That revenue has actually gone up dramatically during the war due to increased gas & oil prices. Your concern is real, and we should do more to secure our nuclear power from accidents, but in practice energy dependence seems a greater threat to global security than nuclear power plant terrorism (also consider that there is some relation between Iraq exporting oil and wars occurring there). Similarly, the use of coal (which would be unnecessary with more nuclear production) is responsible for a much greater reduction of life span than terrorist attacks and nuclear accidents.
- retrac 5y ago
  > During this war there has not been legitimate danger of nuclear accidents By all accounts, the Russian forces fired missiles at the Zaporizhzhia power plant, and there was a fire on site. I too was somewhat dismissive of the "omg Chernobyl 2.0" rhetoric. It's a PWR, much newer design, quite like most Western PWR designs, with containment, and a lot more passive safety features than something like the RBMKs at Chernobyl. The likely outcome of a missile hitting the containment building itself is a wasted missile, and something hitting the cooling or support facilities would lead most likely to a power cut, not a meltdown, and even if there was a meltdown, it would likely be largely contained. Still. I do think it's fair to say that firing missiles and causing explosions and/or fires at an operating nuclear power plant has some degree of very real risk of causing a nuclear accident.
  - gregwebs 5y ago
    They didn't actually fire missiles at the power plant. Instead a building on the premises that is not near the reactors was hit. If this was due to the Russians firing carelessly at the Ukranians then I agree there is some danger the projectile could have landed somewhere else and created actual risk of a nuclear accident.

dimitrios1 5y ago

So what is the argument here? We shouldn't have nice things that could greatly benefit society because terrorists or war-mongering dictators might come after them? What if a warring nation destroyed a hydroelectric dam and it flooded an entire town? Does this mean we should give up on hydro power? What would happen if a terrorist gained access to your city's water treatment facility and contaminated it with a bioweapon resistant to chlorine? Does this mean we shouldn't have water delivery for our cities? What would happen if a terrorist or warring nation gained access to your country's institute of virology where you are performing gain-of-function research, and they unleash a superbug you didn't intend into the population? Should we not perform medical science then? What would happen if you built a really tall building and a terrorist decided to fly an airplane into it? Should we not build tall buildings anymore?

ahelwer 5y ago
None of your analogies are applicable. Nuclear power stations require extraordinary stability in a world that cannot provide it. Earthquakes, tsunamis, war, or another failure mode nobody’s even thought of yet can lead to entire states becoming uninhabitable. We should desire that the consequences of failure draw from the domain of the normal distribution. Nuclear power draws its failure consequences from the exponential distribution. And failures will always happen eventually.
- dimitrios1 5y ago
  Nuclear power stations on 1970s or older technology* The newer technologies, with the much smaller reactor cores can greatly limit the destructive capabilities even to the point where a meltdown caused by some unforseen event will be entirely containable.
- catchclose8919 5y ago
  > desire that the consequences of failure draw from the domain of the normal distribution Almost all interesting tech we're playing with lately does not fall in this category... and there's nothing we can do about it, that's the evolution of tech. When interstellar-spaceships will be built, they'll practically be equivalent to "planet destroying nukes" and pretty sure accidents will happen (eg. fully scortching a planet inhabited by a few billions). AI if something ~human-level gets capable of a stretch of exponential self-improvement will be similar, but that will probably be the end of bio-humans and nothing we can do about it so no need to worry (just focus on making sure important human knowledge gets passed on to our non-human descendants). Only way to mitigate this is to DISPERSE (establish colonies on multiple planets) and MULTIPLY (so that an accident with eg. a 99% lethality thing still leaves enough humans around to maintain a technological civilization preserving the knowledge of our ancestors). We're a bloody virus, so better embrace our nature and start to act like an effective one. There's genocide in our pasts, and there's likely exponentially more genocide in our future, we need to be resilient and accept (mass) death as part of our techno-evolution...
CaptArmchair 5y ago
The argument is that nuclear pollution scorches the earth for centuries if not longer. Any of the examples you've mentioned has - relatively speaking - as short term impact. A nuclear plant shedding a plume of radioactive elements? All you can do is set up an exclusion zone. That doesn't mean nuclear technology doesn't have advantages. It very much has. Arguably, it's both the cleanest and most consistent way of energy production at the same time. The trade-off is security, as mentioned by the commenter, is security. If society decides to invest in nuclear energy, it has to be willing to accept the consequences of that choice. The technology isn't "bad" in and of itself. It's context and intentions leveraging said technology which shifts perceptions towards "good" or "bad". If the Russians would clearly recognize the challenges associated with securing a captured nuclear power plant, and take them to heart, the conversation would steer into a different direction.
dogman144 5y ago
I think the argument is more focused around we shouldn't have nice things that could greatly benefit society because nuke plants haven't displayed a great success rate with securing their premises. The NNSA (nuke nsa) seems to be pretty strong in cyber, so I'll limit this to just physical security. But the difference between hydro, tall buildings, etc is the critical physical security aspect nuke plants have. I agree with the point that the nuke plants seem to be capable of pretty safe operations. But, using the 40 years of activism from the Plowshares movement[0] as one example, doesn't seem like we're capable of securing the plants from "terrorists" with the no-fail rate that I'd somewhat want for nuke physical security. As recently as '12, Oak Ridge of all places was broken into via Plowshares activists. So if we can't track a known activist group that does this, what are our long term odds of tracking an unknown terror group with good opsec (signal, decentralized org, etc), with 100% success rate? Your comparison to virology fits here, and the two (nuke vs. dangerous medicine) seem to be treated differently in this regard, and that scares me, for one. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plowshares_movementhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plowshares_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plowshares_movementhttps://en....

bmitc 5y ago

Everything and anything is a target for a country that cares negatively about the environment or anything really.

gregwebs 5y ago

During this war there has not been legitimate danger of nuclear accidents, just a lot of concern about this hypothetical situation. To me it seems that Ukraine is trying to use nuclear concerns to stall the war and gain more international support. Arguably the only reason this war is possible is because Germany shutdown all their nuclear plants (there are a few plants left slated to be closed this year) and now rely on Russia for oil & gas. The existing sanctions are hurting, but Russia is still collecting hundreds of millions of dollars a day in oil & gas revenue. That revenue has actually gone up dramatically during the war due to increased gas & oil prices. Your concern is real, and we should do more to secure our nuclear power from accidents, but in practice energy dependence seems a greater threat to global security than nuclear power plant terrorism (also consider that there is some relation between Iraq exporting oil and wars occurring there). Similarly, the use of coal (which would be unnecessary with more nuclear production) is responsible for a much greater reduction of life span than terrorist attacks and nuclear accidents.

retrac 5y ago
> During this war there has not been legitimate danger of nuclear accidents By all accounts, the Russian forces fired missiles at the Zaporizhzhia power plant, and there was a fire on site. I too was somewhat dismissive of the "omg Chernobyl 2.0" rhetoric. It's a PWR, much newer design, quite like most Western PWR designs, with containment, and a lot more passive safety features than something like the RBMKs at Chernobyl. The likely outcome of a missile hitting the containment building itself is a wasted missile, and something hitting the cooling or support facilities would lead most likely to a power cut, not a meltdown, and even if there was a meltdown, it would likely be largely contained. Still. I do think it's fair to say that firing missiles and causing explosions and/or fires at an operating nuclear power plant has some degree of very real risk of causing a nuclear accident.
- gregwebs 5y ago
  They didn't actually fire missiles at the power plant. Instead a building on the premises that is not near the reactors was hit. If this was due to the Russians firing carelessly at the Ukranians then I agree there is some danger the projectile could have landed somewhere else and created actual risk of a nuclear accident.