8 ms·

I'm going to posit the closest modern analogue to coal is not wind and solar but rather nuclear. People hear nuclear and immediately think "no thanks" despite i

by fny 4y ago

I'm going to posit the closest modern analogue to coal is not wind and solar but rather nuclear. People hear nuclear and immediately think "no thanks" despite it solving energy scarcity and cleanliness in one shot.

edent 4y ago
Where do you get the uranium from? It doesn't magically fall out of the sky. It comes from heavy extractive of industry. What's the reasonable worst case scenario with a nuclear plant failing? Is that particularly clean? What happens to the waste? Does it have to be stored and protected long term? Nuclear can be great at eliminating scarcity. And it can be clean in use (if you ignore extracting and refining the fuel. And ignore contamination. And ignore waste storage. And ignore decommissioning).
- nix0n 4y ago
  It's not perfect, but it's a lot more clean than fossil fuels.
- jvanderbot 4y ago
  I suppose these hypothetical, rhetorical questions are convincing to some, but the data on Nuclear power is pretty good. How do you define "Clean"? Deaths per watt? https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy Maybe there's no where to store waste? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r... Radiation from the waste though? "The current analysis indicates that the repository will cause less than 1 mrem/year public dose for 1,000,000 years" Or maybe we're worried about a meltdown? Perhaps we could read up on Fukushima? Well there, one person died from radiation, and 2000 from the evacuation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster_casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... The most at-risk individuals experienced a lifetime 1% increase chance of cancer. The rest were less that 0.5%. COVID had a bigger fatality rate initially. let's compare that to the 20,000 people the wave killed. (The one that caused the meltdown). These are good questions to ask, but there are, what, three total nuclear disasters to consider in modern history? And of those, only the one in Russia caused deaths (plural) and true disaster. And of the horrific conditions, incompetent design, and complete mismanagement and deliberate lying, 30 people died total. Fossil fuel pollution is responsible for (by some figures) 1 in 5 deaths worldwide. Enough.
  - jvanderbot 4y ago
    Oh I forgot. Let's talk about transport danger. Uranium is 16,000 as energy dense as Coal (and coal is the densest) . That means you'd need ONE tanker sized craft to transport way, way more fuel than all the tankers of the world. https://www.statista.com/statistics/468405/global-oil-tanker-fleet-by-type/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/468405/global-oil-tanker...
    - BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
      And just imagine how many miles nuclear powered Aircraft Carriers have traversed without significant incident since the 1960’s.
      - ok_dad 4y ago
        Navy nuclear safety is the result of planning and engineering and obscene amounts of money. There is no way commercial energy plants could profit if they spent the resources the navy does.
        arrosenberg 4y ago
        Maybe energy production shouldn’t be viewed as a profit center? Socializing the thing modern civilization depends on makes sense - with unlimited energy there would be plenty of other ways to make money.
        windows2020 4y ago
        If it wasn't a profit center we may still be burning wood.
        arrosenberg 4y ago
        Maybe, but since its not 1715 any more, I’m going to focus on what makes sense currently.
        4y ago
- lordnacho 4y ago
  The mining and waste are much smaller scale due to the incredible energy density of nuclear. Look at how ugly coal gets, for the same amount of energy. Kids down in the mines, miner's strikes when it ended, people dying of smog. All sorts of terrible things derived from coal need to be included in this comparison. The only thing nuclear really has against it is that when it goes wrong it can go really wrong. And people have thought about those modes of failure quite a bit, so why don't we see if they've come up with something? We should try nuclear and see where it goes.
  - salty_biscuits 4y ago
    There is also the nuclear weapons proliferation bit. I'm honestly more concerned about that than accidents.
    - smackeyacky 4y ago
      It doesn't have to be that way. I'm no great fan of Nuclear power (although mostly because we know it will be privatised and the private company running it will suddenly be bankrupt when it comes to the clean up) but the US and Russia hid a lot of their weapons development behind "too cheap to meter" nuclear power stations. I wouldn't guarantee they would not do that again, but the incentives are very different this time around, so the design of the power stations shouldn't produce material suitable for modern nuclear weapons as a side effect.
      - throwaway894345 4y ago
        Regarding privatization, we could easily require private companies to put up a bond/insurance for the cleanup so they pay for it ahead of time thus preventing issues if they go bankrupt. I say “easily” because passing anti-nuclear regulation seems to be the one thing the US federal government can get done effectively.
- orangecat 4y ago
  Where do you get the uranium from? It doesn't magically fall out of the sky. It comes from heavy extractive of industry. As opposed to the Windmill Fairy? What's the reasonable worst case scenario with a nuclear plant failing? Using Fukushima as an example, the worst case is that fewer people died as a result of the meltdown than died from the hasty reaction of shutting down all of Japan's other nuclear plants (https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2019/10/31/shutting-down-japans-nuclear-plants-after-fukushima-was-a-bad-idea/?sh=7aebdf4c19a4 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2019/10/31/shutting-...). What happens to the waste? It's contained, which is a large improvement over spewing it into the atmosphere. These clever questions you're asking have been studied extensively, and nuclear comes out far ahead of fossil fuels on every conceivable metric. You can try to make the argument that we don't need to build any more nuclear plants because wind and solar will provide everything we need in 10 years, although you'll need to explain why this is true now when people have been incorrectly claiming it for 40+ years. But if you're shutting down nuclear plants and burning more coal as a result (hello Germany), you've taken a very wrong turn.
  - grey-area 4y ago
    At this point the cost of Fukushima in yen and in lives blighted by evacuations will be far far above any positive contribution from the plant.
    - arcticbull 4y ago
      Literally zero people died in the immediate aftermath, and in the years since one person who worked at the plant has died. The data is clear, in terms of deaths per TWh of generated power, nuclear is the safest, cleanest form of power we have. [1] Coal power kills between 24 and 100 people per TWh generated (100 for brown coal). Nuclear is 0.03 - between industrial solar and wind, and significantly lower than rooftop solar. It also has a lower carbon impact than both wind and solar. Yes people were evacuated. But they'd have been evacuated anyways whatever kind of plant was there. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
      - 4y ago
- arcticbull 4y ago
  There's four billion tons dissolved in the ocean. But even if you weren't interested, switching to breeder reactors would make the terrestrial supply last 100x longer. And of course there's thorium cycle which dramatically expands the supply too. Supply is not an issue.
  - doctor_eval 4y ago
    But last time I looked, nobody's ever built a commercial thorium reactor. Solar is here right now. Every time I hear people push nuclear I get a sense of "perfect is the enemy of good". Sure, nuclear is better in some dimensions. But along the "short term deployability" dimension, it's just not in the running.
    - Gibbon1 4y ago
      What I notice is pro nuclear people talk in superlatives. Wind and solar people talk in terms of scale and economics.
      - skohan 4y ago
        Are wind and solar viable at scale? My understanding was that you would need a non-existant storage solution to accommodate inconsistent production capacity.
      - vkou 4y ago
        > Wind and solar people talk in terms of scale and economics. Until you ask them about energy storage, and then they start talking in superlatives.
        Gibbon1 4y ago
        People that claim storage is a problem don't offer numbers either.
        arcticbull 4y ago
- omginternets 4y ago
  >Nuclear can be great at eliminating scarcity. And it can be clean in use (if you ignore extracting and refining the fuel. And ignore contamination. And ignore waste storage. And ignore decommissioning). Now apply the same analysis to the manufacture of solar panels and lithium batteries.
- VoodooJuJu 4y ago
  Shame on everyone down-voting this. These are real grievances that real people have about nuclear, and silencing those people and the questions they raise does great harm to a potentially nuclear-powered future.
- TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
  The consensus on nuclear waste seems to be, largely: store it in dry casks on site. One great thing about nuclear waste is that there really is fuck all of it. Clean up those 20,000 barrels of DDT off the coast of California and dump all the nuclear dry casks of all nuclear waste there instead and the world would be much better place. https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2021-04-30/barrels-leaking-insecticide-ddt-la-coast-dumping-ground/100100912 https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2021-04-30/barrels-leaki...
oldjavacoder 4y ago
I'd be for it except for the fact where Uranium mostly comes from. Like it or not, coal remains the energy reserve that potentially can keep the Us free.
- wbl 4y ago
  There is a vast uranium deposit in the southwestern US that was mined in the 1950's.
- Fargoan 4y ago
  Saskatchewan?
- brutusborn 4y ago
  Australia?
8bitsrule 4y ago
Coal was filthy but very cheap. Not as cheap as the sunlight that made it, but cheap. Uranium isn't cheap. Sunlight (=> wind) is free. Safe nuclear plants (hypothetically) are very, very expensive. (And have to be shut down regularly for weeks for servicing.) Nukes are much, much more expensive than windmills ($10B/GW vs $1B) and solar panels (which retain 93% efficiency after 20+ years). Then there's safe storage of dangerous waste vs. little (non-dangerus) waste.
- hoseja 4y ago
  Of course, collecting sunlight and wind has no cost nor externality.
  - 8bitsrule 4y ago
    Gosh, looks like I mentioned both in my comparison. If you could get that far.
    - hoseja 4y ago
      Sure, windmills may cost less to build (debatable) but what is the total cost of intermittent production, decimated bird and bat populations, defaced landscape and stunted technological progress? If sun and wind are "free", so is nuclear, so is coal. It's the getting them to be useful that's costly.

by fny 4y ago

edent 4y ago

Where do you get the uranium from? It doesn't magically fall out of the sky. It comes from heavy extractive of industry. What's the reasonable worst case scenario with a nuclear plant failing? Is that particularly clean? What happens to the waste? Does it have to be stored and protected long term? Nuclear can be great at eliminating scarcity. And it can be clean in use (if you ignore extracting and refining the fuel. And ignore contamination. And ignore waste storage. And ignore decommissioning).

nix0n 4y ago
It's not perfect, but it's a lot more clean than fossil fuels.
jvanderbot 4y ago
I suppose these hypothetical, rhetorical questions are convincing to some, but the data on Nuclear power is pretty good. How do you define "Clean"? Deaths per watt? https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy Maybe there's no where to store waste? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r... Radiation from the waste though? "The current analysis indicates that the repository will cause less than 1 mrem/year public dose for 1,000,000 years" Or maybe we're worried about a meltdown? Perhaps we could read up on Fukushima? Well there, one person died from radiation, and 2000 from the evacuation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster_casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... The most at-risk individuals experienced a lifetime 1% increase chance of cancer. The rest were less that 0.5%. COVID had a bigger fatality rate initially. let's compare that to the 20,000 people the wave killed. (The one that caused the meltdown). These are good questions to ask, but there are, what, three total nuclear disasters to consider in modern history? And of those, only the one in Russia caused deaths (plural) and true disaster. And of the horrific conditions, incompetent design, and complete mismanagement and deliberate lying, 30 people died total. Fossil fuel pollution is responsible for (by some figures) 1 in 5 deaths worldwide. Enough.
- jvanderbot 4y ago
  Oh I forgot. Let's talk about transport danger. Uranium is 16,000 as energy dense as Coal (and coal is the densest) . That means you'd need ONE tanker sized craft to transport way, way more fuel than all the tankers of the world. https://www.statista.com/statistics/468405/global-oil-tanker-fleet-by-type/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/468405/global-oil-tanker...
  - BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
    And just imagine how many miles nuclear powered Aircraft Carriers have traversed without significant incident since the 1960’s.
    - ok_dad 4y ago
      Navy nuclear safety is the result of planning and engineering and obscene amounts of money. There is no way commercial energy plants could profit if they spent the resources the navy does.
      - arrosenberg 4y ago
        Maybe energy production shouldn’t be viewed as a profit center? Socializing the thing modern civilization depends on makes sense - with unlimited energy there would be plenty of other ways to make money.
        windows2020 4y ago
        If it wasn't a profit center we may still be burning wood.
        arrosenberg 4y ago
        Maybe, but since its not 1715 any more, I’m going to focus on what makes sense currently.
      - 4y ago
lordnacho 4y ago
The mining and waste are much smaller scale due to the incredible energy density of nuclear. Look at how ugly coal gets, for the same amount of energy. Kids down in the mines, miner's strikes when it ended, people dying of smog. All sorts of terrible things derived from coal need to be included in this comparison. The only thing nuclear really has against it is that when it goes wrong it can go really wrong. And people have thought about those modes of failure quite a bit, so why don't we see if they've come up with something? We should try nuclear and see where it goes.
- salty_biscuits 4y ago
  There is also the nuclear weapons proliferation bit. I'm honestly more concerned about that than accidents.
  - smackeyacky 4y ago
    It doesn't have to be that way. I'm no great fan of Nuclear power (although mostly because we know it will be privatised and the private company running it will suddenly be bankrupt when it comes to the clean up) but the US and Russia hid a lot of their weapons development behind "too cheap to meter" nuclear power stations. I wouldn't guarantee they would not do that again, but the incentives are very different this time around, so the design of the power stations shouldn't produce material suitable for modern nuclear weapons as a side effect.
    - throwaway894345 4y ago
      Regarding privatization, we could easily require private companies to put up a bond/insurance for the cleanup so they pay for it ahead of time thus preventing issues if they go bankrupt. I say “easily” because passing anti-nuclear regulation seems to be the one thing the US federal government can get done effectively.
orangecat 4y ago
Where do you get the uranium from? It doesn't magically fall out of the sky. It comes from heavy extractive of industry. As opposed to the Windmill Fairy? What's the reasonable worst case scenario with a nuclear plant failing? Using Fukushima as an example, the worst case is that fewer people died as a result of the meltdown than died from the hasty reaction of shutting down all of Japan's other nuclear plants (https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2019/10/31/shutting-down-japans-nuclear-plants-after-fukushima-was-a-bad-idea/?sh=7aebdf4c19a4 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2019/10/31/shutting-...). What happens to the waste? It's contained, which is a large improvement over spewing it into the atmosphere. These clever questions you're asking have been studied extensively, and nuclear comes out far ahead of fossil fuels on every conceivable metric. You can try to make the argument that we don't need to build any more nuclear plants because wind and solar will provide everything we need in 10 years, although you'll need to explain why this is true now when people have been incorrectly claiming it for 40+ years. But if you're shutting down nuclear plants and burning more coal as a result (hello Germany), you've taken a very wrong turn.
- grey-area 4y ago
  At this point the cost of Fukushima in yen and in lives blighted by evacuations will be far far above any positive contribution from the plant.
  - arcticbull 4y ago
    Literally zero people died in the immediate aftermath, and in the years since one person who worked at the plant has died. The data is clear, in terms of deaths per TWh of generated power, nuclear is the safest, cleanest form of power we have. [1] Coal power kills between 24 and 100 people per TWh generated (100 for brown coal). Nuclear is 0.03 - between industrial solar and wind, and significantly lower than rooftop solar. It also has a lower carbon impact than both wind and solar. Yes people were evacuated. But they'd have been evacuated anyways whatever kind of plant was there. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
    - 4y ago
arcticbull 4y ago
There's four billion tons dissolved in the ocean. But even if you weren't interested, switching to breeder reactors would make the terrestrial supply last 100x longer. And of course there's thorium cycle which dramatically expands the supply too. Supply is not an issue.
- doctor_eval 4y ago
  But last time I looked, nobody's ever built a commercial thorium reactor. Solar is here right now. Every time I hear people push nuclear I get a sense of "perfect is the enemy of good". Sure, nuclear is better in some dimensions. But along the "short term deployability" dimension, it's just not in the running.
  - Gibbon1 4y ago
    What I notice is pro nuclear people talk in superlatives. Wind and solar people talk in terms of scale and economics.
    - skohan 4y ago
      Are wind and solar viable at scale? My understanding was that you would need a non-existant storage solution to accommodate inconsistent production capacity.
    - vkou 4y ago
      > Wind and solar people talk in terms of scale and economics. Until you ask them about energy storage, and then they start talking in superlatives.
      - Gibbon1 4y ago
        People that claim storage is a problem don't offer numbers either.
        arcticbull 4y ago
omginternets 4y ago
>Nuclear can be great at eliminating scarcity. And it can be clean in use (if you ignore extracting and refining the fuel. And ignore contamination. And ignore waste storage. And ignore decommissioning). Now apply the same analysis to the manufacture of solar panels and lithium batteries.
VoodooJuJu 4y ago
Shame on everyone down-voting this. These are real grievances that real people have about nuclear, and silencing those people and the questions they raise does great harm to a potentially nuclear-powered future.
TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
The consensus on nuclear waste seems to be, largely: store it in dry casks on site. One great thing about nuclear waste is that there really is fuck all of it. Clean up those 20,000 barrels of DDT off the coast of California and dump all the nuclear dry casks of all nuclear waste there instead and the world would be much better place. https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2021-04-30/barrels-leaking-insecticide-ddt-la-coast-dumping-ground/100100912 https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2021-04-30/barrels-leaki...

oldjavacoder 4y ago

I'd be for it except for the fact where Uranium mostly comes from. Like it or not, coal remains the energy reserve that potentially can keep the Us free.

wbl 4y ago
There is a vast uranium deposit in the southwestern US that was mined in the 1950's.
Fargoan 4y ago
Saskatchewan?
brutusborn 4y ago
Australia?

8bitsrule 4y ago

Coal was filthy but very cheap. Not as cheap as the sunlight that made it, but cheap. Uranium isn't cheap. Sunlight (=> wind) is free. Safe nuclear plants (hypothetically) are very, very expensive. (And have to be shut down regularly for weeks for servicing.) Nukes are much, much more expensive than windmills ($10B/GW vs $1B) and solar panels (which retain 93% efficiency after 20+ years). Then there's safe storage of dangerous waste vs. little (non-dangerus) waste.

hoseja 4y ago
Of course, collecting sunlight and wind has no cost nor externality.
- 8bitsrule 4y ago
  Gosh, looks like I mentioned both in my comparison. If you could get that far.
  - hoseja 4y ago
    Sure, windmills may cost less to build (debatable) but what is the total cost of intermittent production, decimated bird and bat populations, defaced landscape and stunted technological progress? If sun and wind are "free", so is nuclear, so is coal. It's the getting them to be useful that's costly.