5 ms·

> as it turns out nuclear power plants require long regular maintenance periods. That's because everyone has been operating their PWRs/BWRs way beyond the desi

> as it turns out nuclear power plants require long regular maintenance periods. That's because everyone has been operating their PWRs/BWRs way beyond the design lifespan, which would be fine if we didn't just stop building new ones in the past 20-40 years (depending on country) to prevent too many of them needing regular maintenance at once.

godelski 4y ago
This is something I never understand about the anti-nuclear crowd. There are plenty of good arguments against nuclear but most often the ones used are not that great.[0] I mean we could talk about the expense of them and that they require long-term investments, making them not attractive to bureaucrats and political leaders, which led to the situation of extending lifetimes, losing knowledge, and increasing maintenance periods. Which let's be real, that's a critical flaw if it requires humans to act in ways that aren't what humans typically do. But maybe that's why we always fight. I mean the pro nuclear camp isn't that much better as there are plenty of people arguing for it that don't know the difference between a beta+ and beta- particle. Then again, the parent says all these things and goes to the culture war. Feels a bit all over the place to me. Though it does seem that a lot of these issues are all caused by us trying to act more intelligent than we are and social signaling. But I don't think that's what the parent was saying. [0] You could also easily make the argument that we wouldn't be in this mess if Germany didn't shut down their nuclear plants early because doing so increased their dependence on France and Russia for power. But this also isn't that great of an argument.
- adventured 4y ago
  Expense is also not a good argument. Nuclear power should be subsidized as necessary for the exact same reason healthcare is: energy security is a critical matter. A nation like Germany for example could easily afford to have many more nuclear power plants and be pushing that much more energy over the borders to the rest of the EU in exports. They could do a lot to further the EU's energy security, given their fiscal and engineering capabilities. Their main reason for not doing it (fear) is heavy in emotionalism, irrationality.
  - godelski 4y ago
    > Nuclear power should be subsidized as necessary for the exact same reason healthcare is: energy security is a critical matter. Not that I disagree, but money is not an infinite resource. So yeah, it does matter. Maybe I'm interpreting your comment as more dismissive than it actually is.
    - janef0421 4y ago
      Money is not infinite, at least for practical purposes, but it is socially constructed, and consequently not a hard constraint. If a nation has the means to obtain the necessary resources and labour, it will be able to build and run nuclear power plants.
      - godelski 4y ago
        This seems a bit naive. While money is a social construct it is also a proxy for resources. Also, to be clear, just because things are socially constructed doesn't mean they aren't useful. Most things are social constructs.
        janef0421 4y ago
        Money is a useful proxy when used to allocate resources to individual economic agents, but is not useful when analysing and coordinating an entire economy. In fact, the loss of fine-grained information and introduction of social subjectivity is often highly counter-productive.
        godelski 4y ago
        I think I understand what you're saying? That money isn't a good proxy for issues of things like shared resources. A la tragedy of the commons types of issues? If that's what you're saying then I fully agree. Money has been a great tool for proxying local economic effects and facilitating trade but it is not nuanced enough to capture more long range phenomena like ToC. But I do feel like this is where governments are supposed to step in. While I'm pretty critical of authority I do see this aspect as part of the need for strong governments and limitations to pure democracies, as we have yet to find a structure where large swaths of the population can either be accurately informed or where we can have sufficient reliance upon experts. Obviously too much in the other direction (authoritarianism) comes with its own slew of problems (ones I think are worse). (I do think a wide distribution of ideas that we can sample from, with a fairly normal-ish looking distribution, creates a powerful framework to build democracies. You do need anarchists, nationalists, and extremists, but not in large potions. When the mean shifts to any of these I think the system becomes unstable. But neither should we truncate the distribution.)
- glaucon 4y ago
  >don't know the difference between a beta+ and beta- particle. I don't know the difference between a beta+ and beta- particle so please tell me, why would my, positive to some degree, views on nuclear energy be more valid if I did ?
  - godelski 4y ago
    So it is basically an example of basic knowledge. Something you'd learn in Chapter 1 of an introductory textbook. If you do not know this knowledge it is impossible for you to also know much about nuclear theory. A litmus test if you will. Now what does this specific test have to do with nuclear energy? I'll be honest that the specific example only has a little, and that's to do with waste. These particles are common forms of radiation and knowing how they interact is important in understanding safety and longevity of waste. (our decay typically comes in the form of alpha, beta, neutron, and gamma) I do want to be clear though, that this doesn't -- and shouldn't -- stop you from having an opinion. But it should note how strong those opinions should be, as it is naive to have strong opinions on topics you also do not care to learn about the details. This is more what I'm getting at. Strong opinions matched with weak knowledge is a dangerous situation. The key part being the strength of the opinion, not existence. I also don't think this disqualifies other types of opinions that you can have about nuclear (or other topics). An economist could not have any working nuclear theory knowledge but also be well qualified discussing the cost. But they may also not be well qualified to discuss the cost of decommission or waste without the support/collaboration of someone with working nuclear theory. At least we can recognize that without the combined effort that the opinion is limited in accuracy. (this is also true in the reverse direction fwiw) So for some signals that may help you navigate this space (these are not absolute, mind you, but there is a tendency). Pro-nuclear armchair experts tend to hype up thorium, ignore costs, claiming nuclear's issue is only fear, and dismissing the waste issue completely. Anti-nuclear armchair experts tend to exaggerate the waste issue, ignore developments over the last half century, and pit nuclear against renewables (a position no scientist actually has. Our opinion is that nuclear is a zero carbon energy source and should be _on the table_. Which isn't a strong stance btw). But mainly I think the issue is that in a world of ever increasing complexity we are also gaining access to large amounts of high level knowledge and internalizing that as expertise. I do think this is a recipe for disaster and we're already seeing the effects of it. We see this commonly in climate discussions. Where even the pro-green people are not always aligned with the scientists albeit substantially closer in alignment than the anti-climate people. But climate is one of the most (if not them most) complex issues humanity has ever faced. Unfortunately complex issues require substantial amounts of nuance and require complex solutions. Which ironically includes political support which is hard to garner without these same high level explanations. I'm not sure there's a good solution to all this tbh.
- wolpoli 4y ago
  > There are plenty of good arguments against nuclear but most often the ones used are not that great. I suspect that the cost-based anti-nuclear arguments aren't really meant for the crowd that understands budgeting or long term planning, since the arguments tend to highlight numbers out of context. It's really meant to create short, stand-alone soundbites that could be repeated in social media posts and news articles.
  - godelski 4y ago
    I mean the cost issues are pretty complex themselves. We've seen that estimates are unreliable because every time we build a new reactor we have to rebuild the entire tooling and supply chain. Westinghouse filed bankruptcy over exactly this issue. So are we discussing building one reactor? A few? Or a hundred? But are we also discussing rolling out a hundred and then not building many again for decades? There's also bureaucratic issues that prevent newer and cheaper reactors from being built. Some of those issues have merit and others don't. I think it is easy to oversimplify the issues here, especially when we mostly get social media soundbites and explanations from news articles that don't consult various experts. I just think it is hard to garner a strong opinion without also having deep knowledge.

godelski 4y ago

This is something I never understand about the anti-nuclear crowd. There are plenty of good arguments against nuclear but most often the ones used are not that great.[0] I mean we could talk about the expense of them and that they require long-term investments, making them not attractive to bureaucrats and political leaders, which led to the situation of extending lifetimes, losing knowledge, and increasing maintenance periods. Which let's be real, that's a critical flaw if it requires humans to act in ways that aren't what humans typically do. But maybe that's why we always fight. I mean the pro nuclear camp isn't that much better as there are plenty of people arguing for it that don't know the difference between a beta+ and beta- particle. Then again, the parent says all these things and goes to the culture war. Feels a bit all over the place to me. Though it does seem that a lot of these issues are all caused by us trying to act more intelligent than we are and social signaling. But I don't think that's what the parent was saying. [0] You could also easily make the argument that we wouldn't be in this mess if Germany didn't shut down their nuclear plants early because doing so increased their dependence on France and Russia for power. But this also isn't that great of an argument.

adventured 4y ago
Expense is also not a good argument. Nuclear power should be subsidized as necessary for the exact same reason healthcare is: energy security is a critical matter. A nation like Germany for example could easily afford to have many more nuclear power plants and be pushing that much more energy over the borders to the rest of the EU in exports. They could do a lot to further the EU's energy security, given their fiscal and engineering capabilities. Their main reason for not doing it (fear) is heavy in emotionalism, irrationality.
- godelski 4y ago
  > Nuclear power should be subsidized as necessary for the exact same reason healthcare is: energy security is a critical matter. Not that I disagree, but money is not an infinite resource. So yeah, it does matter. Maybe I'm interpreting your comment as more dismissive than it actually is.
  - janef0421 4y ago
    Money is not infinite, at least for practical purposes, but it is socially constructed, and consequently not a hard constraint. If a nation has the means to obtain the necessary resources and labour, it will be able to build and run nuclear power plants.
    - godelski 4y ago
      This seems a bit naive. While money is a social construct it is also a proxy for resources. Also, to be clear, just because things are socially constructed doesn't mean they aren't useful. Most things are social constructs.
      - janef0421 4y ago
        Money is a useful proxy when used to allocate resources to individual economic agents, but is not useful when analysing and coordinating an entire economy. In fact, the loss of fine-grained information and introduction of social subjectivity is often highly counter-productive.
        godelski 4y ago
        I think I understand what you're saying? That money isn't a good proxy for issues of things like shared resources. A la tragedy of the commons types of issues? If that's what you're saying then I fully agree. Money has been a great tool for proxying local economic effects and facilitating trade but it is not nuanced enough to capture more long range phenomena like ToC. But I do feel like this is where governments are supposed to step in. While I'm pretty critical of authority I do see this aspect as part of the need for strong governments and limitations to pure democracies, as we have yet to find a structure where large swaths of the population can either be accurately informed or where we can have sufficient reliance upon experts. Obviously too much in the other direction (authoritarianism) comes with its own slew of problems (ones I think are worse). (I do think a wide distribution of ideas that we can sample from, with a fairly normal-ish looking distribution, creates a powerful framework to build democracies. You do need anarchists, nationalists, and extremists, but not in large potions. When the mean shifts to any of these I think the system becomes unstable. But neither should we truncate the distribution.)
glaucon 4y ago
>don't know the difference between a beta+ and beta- particle. I don't know the difference between a beta+ and beta- particle so please tell me, why would my, positive to some degree, views on nuclear energy be more valid if I did ?
- godelski 4y ago
  So it is basically an example of basic knowledge. Something you'd learn in Chapter 1 of an introductory textbook. If you do not know this knowledge it is impossible for you to also know much about nuclear theory. A litmus test if you will. Now what does this specific test have to do with nuclear energy? I'll be honest that the specific example only has a little, and that's to do with waste. These particles are common forms of radiation and knowing how they interact is important in understanding safety and longevity of waste. (our decay typically comes in the form of alpha, beta, neutron, and gamma) I do want to be clear though, that this doesn't -- and shouldn't -- stop you from having an opinion. But it should note how strong those opinions should be, as it is naive to have strong opinions on topics you also do not care to learn about the details. This is more what I'm getting at. Strong opinions matched with weak knowledge is a dangerous situation. The key part being the strength of the opinion, not existence. I also don't think this disqualifies other types of opinions that you can have about nuclear (or other topics). An economist could not have any working nuclear theory knowledge but also be well qualified discussing the cost. But they may also not be well qualified to discuss the cost of decommission or waste without the support/collaboration of someone with working nuclear theory. At least we can recognize that without the combined effort that the opinion is limited in accuracy. (this is also true in the reverse direction fwiw) So for some signals that may help you navigate this space (these are not absolute, mind you, but there is a tendency). Pro-nuclear armchair experts tend to hype up thorium, ignore costs, claiming nuclear's issue is only fear, and dismissing the waste issue completely. Anti-nuclear armchair experts tend to exaggerate the waste issue, ignore developments over the last half century, and pit nuclear against renewables (a position no scientist actually has. Our opinion is that nuclear is a zero carbon energy source and should be _on the table_. Which isn't a strong stance btw). But mainly I think the issue is that in a world of ever increasing complexity we are also gaining access to large amounts of high level knowledge and internalizing that as expertise. I do think this is a recipe for disaster and we're already seeing the effects of it. We see this commonly in climate discussions. Where even the pro-green people are not always aligned with the scientists albeit substantially closer in alignment than the anti-climate people. But climate is one of the most (if not them most) complex issues humanity has ever faced. Unfortunately complex issues require substantial amounts of nuance and require complex solutions. Which ironically includes political support which is hard to garner without these same high level explanations. I'm not sure there's a good solution to all this tbh.
wolpoli 4y ago
> There are plenty of good arguments against nuclear but most often the ones used are not that great. I suspect that the cost-based anti-nuclear arguments aren't really meant for the crowd that understands budgeting or long term planning, since the arguments tend to highlight numbers out of context. It's really meant to create short, stand-alone soundbites that could be repeated in social media posts and news articles.
- godelski 4y ago
  I mean the cost issues are pretty complex themselves. We've seen that estimates are unreliable because every time we build a new reactor we have to rebuild the entire tooling and supply chain. Westinghouse filed bankruptcy over exactly this issue. So are we discussing building one reactor? A few? Or a hundred? But are we also discussing rolling out a hundred and then not building many again for decades? There's also bureaucratic issues that prevent newer and cheaper reactors from being built. Some of those issues have merit and others don't. I think it is easy to oversimplify the issues here, especially when we mostly get social media soundbites and explanations from news articles that don't consult various experts. I just think it is hard to garner a strong opinion without also having deep knowledge.