7 ms·

The availability of uranium really isn't the problem. And I know the tech community loves thinking of themselves as supremely rational scientists immune to the

The availability of uranium really isn't the problem. And I know the tech community loves thinking of themselves as supremely rational scientists immune to the follies of emotions. But no actual physicist (or physician) thinks a fear of radioactivity is something that needs to be overcome. Those that work with such material respect the inherent danger. They try to overcome the danger, using a bit of fear to stay concentrated (and get the funding). Declaring your willingness to install a mini-reactor in your garden shed, as sometimes happens in these discussions, is the hallmark of scientism. Really the whole debate is mostly scientism: nuclear power didn't lose because it was too dangerous. It lost because it is too expensive. These days, it's still too expensive, but now it also just takes too long for it to be useful for the climate emergency. Actual scientists and competent tech people have driven the costs of solar and wind power, as well as storage, down by several orders of magnitude. But tech bros are emotional: they consider those technologies to be girly, and therefore still bring up big hairy nuclear reactors whenever anyone fails at avoiding them at parties. Nuclear power is not a technology of the future, it is just a technology of a future, specifically the future of the 1960s or so. It's funny how your forward-looking worldview can turn all retro on you within just a few decades.

eldaisfish 5y ago
This argument sounds rational but isn't. It ignores some huge problems - fossil fuels have been subsidised for decades. They will obviously appear to be cheaper than nuclear which is one of the few industries that designs for the worst case scenario. Wind and solar are also subsidised - by electricity consumers. Their volatility has a price that is currently absorbed by the grid and is ultimately paid for by you and I.
mbbutler 5y ago
This is the best comment in the thread and it's somehow being downvoted. Physics grad student here and I agree with this comment whole-heartedly. I love the idea of nuclear power but I also understand that it requires enormous CapEx and that the time to get a reactor up, running, and carbon neutral is much too long to address the climate crisis. We absolutely shouldn't be shutting down nuclear plants but any money spent on new plants is money that could otherwise be spent generating lower cost Wind/Solar in a shorter period of time.
- eldaisfish 5y ago
  have you noticed how the mythical future where the bulk of energy is supplied by wind and solar is always at an indeterminate point in the future? There is currently no gigawatt scale power grid anywhere in the world that supplies more than 20-30% of annual energy from variable energy sources like wind and solar. Meanwhile, France enjoys a low carbon grid together with low energy prices as do many parts of Canada, parts of eastern europe and so on. It is wrong to frame the argument as wind/solar versus everything else. The argument should be carbon versus no carbon. Period.
  - cellshade 5y ago
    Ireland is gigawatt-scale, over 36% wind energy, and growing rapidly. Well beyond your stated 20-30% figure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Ireland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Ireland
    - eldaisfish 5y ago
      >. Well beyond Is it? This adds nothing to the discussion. If it were actually 50% and i claimed 30%, that would be a distinction worth pointing out. Since we are being pedantic, you should really look up the figures for energy share from wind in 2021 in Ireland. It fell to 29% which completely negates your claim of it growing rapidly.
  - mbbutler 5y ago
    > It is wrong to frame the argument as wind/solar versus everything else. The argument should be carbon versus no carbon. Period. I am framing it as carbon vs no carbon. A new nuclear plant's timeline to carbon-neutrality compared to the counterfactual where an equal capital investment is made in solar/wind is well over a decade. Given the time crunch we are on to lower emissions, I simply do not think we have the time to waste building new plants. That said, we should not be decommissioning plants that are still operable.
    - fomine3 5y ago
IMTDb 5y ago
> Actual scientists and competent tech people have driven the costs of solar and wind power, as well as storage, down by several orders of magnitude Yet have been incapable of offering a way to power my oven on a cold windless night without burning something. Virtually all solar and wind installation are accompanied by a thermal power plant (usually gas) that's supposed to takeover when renewable can't be trusted. Yet the eco crowd refuses to factor in the cost of these - otherwise completely useless - backup power plants in the cost of their magical solution. They also conveniently refuse to look at the CO2 produced when using those. In short, renewables are cheap (if you forget that you also have to create a full backup system) and produce no CO2 (if you forget to measure what's produced by the backup system). Selective memory at it's finest. Yes, I know, batteries are coming. There is a new breakthrough that will made this practical every 5 year. We have been hearing that same song for the past 4 decades. In reality, energy storage is quite close to optimal. There are some improvements made here and there, but nothing that will be a game changer: if it does not work now (it doesn't), it probably won't in a near future.
- Karunamon 5y ago
  >...the CO2 produced when using those. Isn't that still a net win? If you're burning N tons of CO2 now, you're burning N-Y during the hours when you don't have to be running the fossil plant. Bonus points if your new backup plant is cleaner (say, NG vs coal)
  - IMTDb 5y ago
    It's absolutely a net gain when compared to running gas/coal only. But unfair to say that this produces 0 CO2, like it's often claimed. And this backup CO2 production is very far from negligible. Similarly, the cost of running gas only should be computed as: cost of gas power plant + cost of gas. And the cost of the renewable option should be computed as : cost of renewable power plan + cost of backup gas power plant + cost of backup gas. You can't magically exclude the backup from the calculation. And suddenly the renewable option sounds way more expensive.
- ZetaZero 5y ago
  Batteries were $2,152 per KWh as of 2015, and now go for $137 KWh. That's a 15x improvement in 7 years.
bliteben 5y ago
Exponential growth is the true problem and most of the technologies we are currently looking towards will only be temporary solutions. Even Fusion could only solve the problems exponential growth will throw at us in both population increases and energy usage increases.
- ch4s3 5y ago
  Population isn't growing exponentially and is expected to peak around 9.7 billion in the 2060s and declined by about 0.9 billion in the subsequent 40 years.
  - bliteben 5y ago
    Just because the growth rate isn't constant, does not make it not exponential. I do acknowledge that there are smart people forecasting the end of exponential growth, but who is to say a cultural or technological phenomena will not change this path? It is currently exponential, anything else is a lie, and I don't even know what the intentions would be of someone perpetuating such nonsense. Now there will easily be at least a whole generational period in which we don't really know for sure if we have leveled off, that is just the nature of human reproduction, seems safer to wait at least 1 generation before we have declared victory on our biggest enemy.
    - ch4s3 5y ago
      The current population growth rate globally is 1%[1], which is definitionally not exponential. World population has doubled since 1970, but the rate has been declining since. [1]https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/population-growth-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/population-g...
      - bliteben 5y ago
        It would be exponential if the net growth rate was 0.1%. If your savings account produces 0.1% interest that is still exponential growth. According to the rule of 70 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_72 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_72) it would double in 700 years. That is exponential!
inapis 5y ago
>Really the whole debate is mostly scientism: nuclear power didn't lose because it was too dangerous. It lost because it is too expensive. These days, it's still too expensive, but now it also just takes too long for it to be useful for the climate emergency. It's expensive because Chernobyl caused the whole world to develop cold feet. Innovation stopped and funding for nuclear dried up after 2-3 accidents. Solar and wind were super expensive (vis-a-vis coal or gas) in 2010 and before compared to 2022 and people were railing against solar for that reason alone. But only a decade later, the cost has fallen by an order of a magnitude, making it far more practical and a valuable source of energy because society invested money and resources to bring the cost down. Imagine having 3 children and lavishing all your attention and resources on two of them, leaving one to fend for itself and then turning around and saying that the aloof one has no talent, skills and is basically a burden on the society. Nuclear is not a panacea but railing against the technology because humans goofed up, then refused to pay more attention and do things correctly in the future is an irrational stance.
- iforgotpassword 5y ago
  > Nuclear is not a panacea but railing against the technology because humans goofed up, then refused to pay more attention and do things correctly in the future is an irrational stance. But we didn't even become more careful with existing reactors. The companies running them kept being textbook capitalists and cut costs wherever possible. Outsource maintenance to questionable Eastern European workers. Inspections reveal unexplainable micro fractures near the reactor core? Just declare it safe and carry on. Workers on-site monitoring the operations are retrained electricians, because well, both things have something to do with electricity right? I'm not afraid the technology is inherently unsafe. I'm worried because it's run by companies maximizing profit, and regulated (indirectly) by politicians caring about getting re-elected, and maybe about their hometown/electoral district.
  - inapis 5y ago
    Fair point but I am not sure how it is any different from other risky industries. Aviation became safer (current Boeing fiascos not withstanding) over the past 2-3 decades where today an airliner crash makes global news. Humans being terrible at something, at some time in the past, is not a sole reason to write off the technology. The response should be to rather focus on improving the process and policy rather than shrugging off nuclear which IPCC has admitted is necessary to meet our climate goals. Most American's are very worried about dying from terrorism while most are actually being killed by heart attacks. At a certain point it is a matter of what people want to believe and what is actually happening on the ground.
catskul2 5y ago
> they consider those technologies to be girly, and therefore still bring up big hairy nuclear reactors whenever anyone fails at avoiding them at parties. I don't think this is really a thing, and I suspect this appeal to ridicule is being made in bad faith. My impression is that there's currently an active and honest debate going on right now on whether nuclear is necessary or not. https://www.factcheck.org/2019/11/what-does-science-say-about-the-need-for-nuclear/ https://www.factcheck.org/2019/11/what-does-science-say-abou... Every argument I've heard about nuclear was about getting to carbon neutral or negative fast enough to avert climate disaster, and providing a stable base load in light of generation fluctuation of solar and wind, and current lack of sufficient storage to smooth load - generation curves.
- KarlKemp 5y ago
  To counteract fluctuating loads, you do not need a "stable base load". You need generation power that happily fluctuates at just about the same rate as the renewables do, but on command. That is not nuclear power, it is (currently) natural gas.
R0b0t1 5y ago
It was made too expensive due to people who don't understand of it and are scared of it.
NumberWangMan 5y ago
Hmm, my understanding was that when you dig into why nuclear is expensive, it can be roughly broken into two parts. One part is the intrinsic costs of building a functional power plant. The other part is making things safe, and that's where we've pushed our regulation far past "safe enough" (compared to other sources of power) and into the realm of absurdity, because we're looking at absolute safety and not relative safety. I found the post where I originally read about this (https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop) -- basically, nuclear power is required to be "as safe as possible", implying that if you have money left in your budget and you could have spent it on improving safety, you've failed, even if it's already far, far safer than any other thing humans build. Which, according to the author of the article, means that you can never try to build a more cost-efficient nuclear plant, you always have to blow all your money on safety, and that's why costs keep rising. I found it pretty convincing. That said, it's likely we can't fix our regulation AND build new plants in time to fix climate change, so I agree with you there. I don't have any agenda about what tech we use to solve this problem -- I'm perfectly happy with solar, wind, or flower power if that's what it takes :)
- KarlKemp 5y ago
  The cost of doing something safely isn't distinct from "intrinsic costs". If you kill everyone in the county, maybe that's an acceptable risk and statistically, you are right. But you are also dead, and the reactor isn't running (or: is running decentralized, in the cloud). The idea that some safety costs are entirely frivolous, obviously so, with no serious argument against that notion, just doesn't strike me as believable. Yes, government projects (and private industry projects) tend to run over budgets. The saying is "work expands to meet the budget provided", but that's intended to be cynical snark, not descriptive of reality. There are plenty of governments that care less for safety than the nations of the global north, yet they haven't found this holy sweet spot of safe efficiency, as far as I can tell.
  - NumberWangMan 5y ago
    Ok sure, I know what you mean, you can't separate out costs. But imagine we could say -- how much would it cost to produce nuclear power that killed as many people yearly as natural gas plants do, per unit of energy produced? Everything on top of that is extra safety. But really, it wouldn't even be expensive to be much safer than that. When you look at the deaths per unit of energy produced, nuclear is right down there with wind and solar: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy The reason we still have to run coal and natural gas plants is to cover the times that wind and solar aren't producing. Nuclear is a substitute for coal and natural gas, not wind and solar. Because we're shutting down old nuclear plants and not building new ones, coal plants are still going up in many parts of the world. Even if nuclear was ten times as dangerous, it would still be a net win on safety compared to natural gas and especially coal. But also, my understanding is that a whole bunch of these deaths were at Chernobyl. From the article I linked: The deaths from Chernobyl, 35 years ago, were due to unforgivably bad reactor design that we‘ve advanced far beyond now. There were zero deaths from radiation at Three Mile Island or at Fukushima. (The only deaths from the Fukushima disaster were caused by the unnecessary evacuation of 160,000 people, including seniors in nursing homes.) Did you check out the article from my original comment? It does explain things much better than I can. And about your last point of the sweet spot of safe efficiency -- Jack Devaney, the author of the book that the article is about, is currently partnering with the government of Indonesia to produce nuclear power that's cheaper than coal: https://thorconpower.com/ https://thorconpower.com/ The website is pretty generous with info, and doesn't set off my bullshit/vaporware detector. Maybe it's already happening.
thingification 5y ago
> Really the whole debate is mostly scientism: nuclear power didn't lose because it was too dangerous. It lost because it is too expensive. If I understand correctly, in saying that this is scientism, you're saying something like that people on the other side of this debate think science and technology are the only relevant things going on here? Another possibility is that they do think other things are relevant (cost, political considerations, ...) but that they think that the expense is not intrinsic to the technology. While I'm sure you've heard the "but it's expensive because of the anti-nuke people!" claim many times and have your own well-considered reasons to think that mistaken in some sense -- if I'm wrong and it turns out that it being expensive has nothing very much to do with anti-nuke protests, does that really make me a scientist? "Scientist", the way you're using it, is a statement about somebody's epistemelogical beliefs, I think? > It's funny how your forward-looking worldview can turn all retro on you within just a few decades. This could be seen as ad hominem and could usefully have been omitted I think

eldaisfish 5y ago

This argument sounds rational but isn't. It ignores some huge problems - fossil fuels have been subsidised for decades. They will obviously appear to be cheaper than nuclear which is one of the few industries that designs for the worst case scenario. Wind and solar are also subsidised - by electricity consumers. Their volatility has a price that is currently absorbed by the grid and is ultimately paid for by you and I.

mbbutler 5y ago

This is the best comment in the thread and it's somehow being downvoted. Physics grad student here and I agree with this comment whole-heartedly. I love the idea of nuclear power but I also understand that it requires enormous CapEx and that the time to get a reactor up, running, and carbon neutral is much too long to address the climate crisis. We absolutely shouldn't be shutting down nuclear plants but any money spent on new plants is money that could otherwise be spent generating lower cost Wind/Solar in a shorter period of time.

eldaisfish 5y ago
have you noticed how the mythical future where the bulk of energy is supplied by wind and solar is always at an indeterminate point in the future? There is currently no gigawatt scale power grid anywhere in the world that supplies more than 20-30% of annual energy from variable energy sources like wind and solar. Meanwhile, France enjoys a low carbon grid together with low energy prices as do many parts of Canada, parts of eastern europe and so on. It is wrong to frame the argument as wind/solar versus everything else. The argument should be carbon versus no carbon. Period.
- cellshade 5y ago
  Ireland is gigawatt-scale, over 36% wind energy, and growing rapidly. Well beyond your stated 20-30% figure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Ireland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Ireland
  - eldaisfish 5y ago
    >. Well beyond Is it? This adds nothing to the discussion. If it were actually 50% and i claimed 30%, that would be a distinction worth pointing out. Since we are being pedantic, you should really look up the figures for energy share from wind in 2021 in Ireland. It fell to 29% which completely negates your claim of it growing rapidly.
- mbbutler 5y ago
  > It is wrong to frame the argument as wind/solar versus everything else. The argument should be carbon versus no carbon. Period. I am framing it as carbon vs no carbon. A new nuclear plant's timeline to carbon-neutrality compared to the counterfactual where an equal capital investment is made in solar/wind is well over a decade. Given the time crunch we are on to lower emissions, I simply do not think we have the time to waste building new plants. That said, we should not be decommissioning plants that are still operable.
  - fomine3 5y ago

IMTDb 5y ago

> Actual scientists and competent tech people have driven the costs of solar and wind power, as well as storage, down by several orders of magnitude Yet have been incapable of offering a way to power my oven on a cold windless night without burning something. Virtually all solar and wind installation are accompanied by a thermal power plant (usually gas) that's supposed to takeover when renewable can't be trusted. Yet the eco crowd refuses to factor in the cost of these - otherwise completely useless - backup power plants in the cost of their magical solution. They also conveniently refuse to look at the CO2 produced when using those. In short, renewables are cheap (if you forget that you also have to create a full backup system) and produce no CO2 (if you forget to measure what's produced by the backup system). Selective memory at it's finest. Yes, I know, batteries are coming. There is a new breakthrough that will made this practical every 5 year. We have been hearing that same song for the past 4 decades. In reality, energy storage is quite close to optimal. There are some improvements made here and there, but nothing that will be a game changer: if it does not work now (it doesn't), it probably won't in a near future.

Karunamon 5y ago
>...the CO2 produced when using those. Isn't that still a net win? If you're burning N tons of CO2 now, you're burning N-Y during the hours when you don't have to be running the fossil plant. Bonus points if your new backup plant is cleaner (say, NG vs coal)
- IMTDb 5y ago
  It's absolutely a net gain when compared to running gas/coal only. But unfair to say that this produces 0 CO2, like it's often claimed. And this backup CO2 production is very far from negligible. Similarly, the cost of running gas only should be computed as: cost of gas power plant + cost of gas. And the cost of the renewable option should be computed as : cost of renewable power plan + cost of backup gas power plant + cost of backup gas. You can't magically exclude the backup from the calculation. And suddenly the renewable option sounds way more expensive.
ZetaZero 5y ago
Batteries were $2,152 per KWh as of 2015, and now go for $137 KWh. That's a 15x improvement in 7 years.

bliteben 5y ago

Exponential growth is the true problem and most of the technologies we are currently looking towards will only be temporary solutions. Even Fusion could only solve the problems exponential growth will throw at us in both population increases and energy usage increases.

ch4s3 5y ago
Population isn't growing exponentially and is expected to peak around 9.7 billion in the 2060s and declined by about 0.9 billion in the subsequent 40 years.
- bliteben 5y ago
  Just because the growth rate isn't constant, does not make it not exponential. I do acknowledge that there are smart people forecasting the end of exponential growth, but who is to say a cultural or technological phenomena will not change this path? It is currently exponential, anything else is a lie, and I don't even know what the intentions would be of someone perpetuating such nonsense. Now there will easily be at least a whole generational period in which we don't really know for sure if we have leveled off, that is just the nature of human reproduction, seems safer to wait at least 1 generation before we have declared victory on our biggest enemy.
  - ch4s3 5y ago
    The current population growth rate globally is 1%[1], which is definitionally not exponential. World population has doubled since 1970, but the rate has been declining since. [1]https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/population-growth-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/population-g...
    - bliteben 5y ago
      It would be exponential if the net growth rate was 0.1%. If your savings account produces 0.1% interest that is still exponential growth. According to the rule of 70 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_72 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_72) it would double in 700 years. That is exponential!

inapis 5y ago

>Really the whole debate is mostly scientism: nuclear power didn't lose because it was too dangerous. It lost because it is too expensive. These days, it's still too expensive, but now it also just takes too long for it to be useful for the climate emergency. It's expensive because Chernobyl caused the whole world to develop cold feet. Innovation stopped and funding for nuclear dried up after 2-3 accidents. Solar and wind were super expensive (vis-a-vis coal or gas) in 2010 and before compared to 2022 and people were railing against solar for that reason alone. But only a decade later, the cost has fallen by an order of a magnitude, making it far more practical and a valuable source of energy because society invested money and resources to bring the cost down. Imagine having 3 children and lavishing all your attention and resources on two of them, leaving one to fend for itself and then turning around and saying that the aloof one has no talent, skills and is basically a burden on the society. Nuclear is not a panacea but railing against the technology because humans goofed up, then refused to pay more attention and do things correctly in the future is an irrational stance.

iforgotpassword 5y ago
> Nuclear is not a panacea but railing against the technology because humans goofed up, then refused to pay more attention and do things correctly in the future is an irrational stance. But we didn't even become more careful with existing reactors. The companies running them kept being textbook capitalists and cut costs wherever possible. Outsource maintenance to questionable Eastern European workers. Inspections reveal unexplainable micro fractures near the reactor core? Just declare it safe and carry on. Workers on-site monitoring the operations are retrained electricians, because well, both things have something to do with electricity right? I'm not afraid the technology is inherently unsafe. I'm worried because it's run by companies maximizing profit, and regulated (indirectly) by politicians caring about getting re-elected, and maybe about their hometown/electoral district.
- inapis 5y ago
  Fair point but I am not sure how it is any different from other risky industries. Aviation became safer (current Boeing fiascos not withstanding) over the past 2-3 decades where today an airliner crash makes global news. Humans being terrible at something, at some time in the past, is not a sole reason to write off the technology. The response should be to rather focus on improving the process and policy rather than shrugging off nuclear which IPCC has admitted is necessary to meet our climate goals. Most American's are very worried about dying from terrorism while most are actually being killed by heart attacks. At a certain point it is a matter of what people want to believe and what is actually happening on the ground.

catskul2 5y ago

> they consider those technologies to be girly, and therefore still bring up big hairy nuclear reactors whenever anyone fails at avoiding them at parties. I don't think this is really a thing, and I suspect this appeal to ridicule is being made in bad faith. My impression is that there's currently an active and honest debate going on right now on whether nuclear is necessary or not. https://www.factcheck.org/2019/11/what-does-science-say-about-the-need-for-nuclear/ https://www.factcheck.org/2019/11/what-does-science-say-abou... Every argument I've heard about nuclear was about getting to carbon neutral or negative fast enough to avert climate disaster, and providing a stable base load in light of generation fluctuation of solar and wind, and current lack of sufficient storage to smooth load - generation curves.

KarlKemp 5y ago
To counteract fluctuating loads, you do not need a "stable base load". You need generation power that happily fluctuates at just about the same rate as the renewables do, but on command. That is not nuclear power, it is (currently) natural gas.

R0b0t1 5y ago

It was made too expensive due to people who don't understand of it and are scared of it.

NumberWangMan 5y ago

Hmm, my understanding was that when you dig into why nuclear is expensive, it can be roughly broken into two parts. One part is the intrinsic costs of building a functional power plant. The other part is making things safe, and that's where we've pushed our regulation far past "safe enough" (compared to other sources of power) and into the realm of absurdity, because we're looking at absolute safety and not relative safety. I found the post where I originally read about this (https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop) -- basically, nuclear power is required to be "as safe as possible", implying that if you have money left in your budget and you could have spent it on improving safety, you've failed, even if it's already far, far safer than any other thing humans build. Which, according to the author of the article, means that you can never try to build a more cost-efficient nuclear plant, you always have to blow all your money on safety, and that's why costs keep rising. I found it pretty convincing. That said, it's likely we can't fix our regulation AND build new plants in time to fix climate change, so I agree with you there. I don't have any agenda about what tech we use to solve this problem -- I'm perfectly happy with solar, wind, or flower power if that's what it takes :)

KarlKemp 5y ago
The cost of doing something safely isn't distinct from "intrinsic costs". If you kill everyone in the county, maybe that's an acceptable risk and statistically, you are right. But you are also dead, and the reactor isn't running (or: is running decentralized, in the cloud). The idea that some safety costs are entirely frivolous, obviously so, with no serious argument against that notion, just doesn't strike me as believable. Yes, government projects (and private industry projects) tend to run over budgets. The saying is "work expands to meet the budget provided", but that's intended to be cynical snark, not descriptive of reality. There are plenty of governments that care less for safety than the nations of the global north, yet they haven't found this holy sweet spot of safe efficiency, as far as I can tell.
- NumberWangMan 5y ago
  Ok sure, I know what you mean, you can't separate out costs. But imagine we could say -- how much would it cost to produce nuclear power that killed as many people yearly as natural gas plants do, per unit of energy produced? Everything on top of that is extra safety. But really, it wouldn't even be expensive to be much safer than that. When you look at the deaths per unit of energy produced, nuclear is right down there with wind and solar: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy The reason we still have to run coal and natural gas plants is to cover the times that wind and solar aren't producing. Nuclear is a substitute for coal and natural gas, not wind and solar. Because we're shutting down old nuclear plants and not building new ones, coal plants are still going up in many parts of the world. Even if nuclear was ten times as dangerous, it would still be a net win on safety compared to natural gas and especially coal. But also, my understanding is that a whole bunch of these deaths were at Chernobyl. From the article I linked: The deaths from Chernobyl, 35 years ago, were due to unforgivably bad reactor design that we‘ve advanced far beyond now. There were zero deaths from radiation at Three Mile Island or at Fukushima. (The only deaths from the Fukushima disaster were caused by the unnecessary evacuation of 160,000 people, including seniors in nursing homes.) Did you check out the article from my original comment? It does explain things much better than I can. And about your last point of the sweet spot of safe efficiency -- Jack Devaney, the author of the book that the article is about, is currently partnering with the government of Indonesia to produce nuclear power that's cheaper than coal: https://thorconpower.com/ https://thorconpower.com/ The website is pretty generous with info, and doesn't set off my bullshit/vaporware detector. Maybe it's already happening.

thingification 5y ago

> Really the whole debate is mostly scientism: nuclear power didn't lose because it was too dangerous. It lost because it is too expensive. If I understand correctly, in saying that this is scientism, you're saying something like that people on the other side of this debate think science and technology are the only relevant things going on here? Another possibility is that they do think other things are relevant (cost, political considerations, ...) but that they think that the expense is not intrinsic to the technology. While I'm sure you've heard the "but it's expensive because of the anti-nuke people!" claim many times and have your own well-considered reasons to think that mistaken in some sense -- if I'm wrong and it turns out that it being expensive has nothing very much to do with anti-nuke protests, does that really make me a scientist? "Scientist", the way you're using it, is a statement about somebody's epistemelogical beliefs, I think? > It's funny how your forward-looking worldview can turn all retro on you within just a few decades. This could be seen as ad hominem and could usefully have been omitted I think