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> technology is still extremely complicated and dangerous That's a common fallacy. If you look at mortality rate by terawatt-hour for each energy source, nucl

by hbrn 4y ago

> technology is still extremely complicated and dangerous That's a common fallacy. If you look at mortality rate by terawatt-hour for each energy source, nuclear is going to be orders of magnitude below coal/gas/oil. Same thing with planes: people are afraid to fly them, but driving the same distance by car is way more dangerous.

hinkley 4y ago
Precautionary Principle doesn't work that way. Also you're assigning a terawatt value for a human life. We do that anyway often enough, but when you do it consciously it's ghoulish.
- hbrn 4y ago
  If you're willing to look at it from a different lens, I'm actually increasing value of a human life that has already been assigned naturally.
- pjscott 4y ago
  Ignoring the tradeoff doesn't make it go away, and if you don't consciously put a value on a human life, you'll probably wind up far from the Pareto frontier. In this case, for instance, thinking in terms of deaths-per-TWh is exactly what you want in order to fulfill our energy needs with as few people dying as possible. If a little "ghoulishness" saves lives, then I'll happily be a ghoul.
- kaba0 4y ago
  Like, how else should we talk about the topic in any other objective way? Sure, the death of any person is said and tragic. But true zero and true one probability simply doesn’t exist in reality. And we require energy, otherwise hospitals could not operate killing much much more people. So simply by that logic, one can minimize the amount of human suffering by nuclear. And it is a fact, that non-nuclear, non-renewable energy sources kill a shitton of more people per unit energy, release orders of magnitude more radiation, let alone other carcinogenic gases.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    Humanity isn't a process of talking about things in an objective way. You're talking about people as if they are numbers. > And it is a fact, that non-nuclear, non-renewable energy sources kill a shitton of more people per unit energy I once heard the circus of Congressional, reactionary policies described as thus: "Something has to be done. This is something, so we will do it." Yes, that's all perfectly true, and something absolutely has to be done. Many things actually. We're making good progress on a number of them. And turning off coal fired plants at a steady clip. It matters what you replace it with. One of the things missing here is that when humans are involved, choices and the illusion of choice apply a multiplier on the risks. People volunteer for risks all the time, and they are happy to do so. Which is effectively what this is saying: > Same thing with planes: people are afraid to fly them, but driving the same distance by car is way more dangerous. If we only cared about traffic numbers we'd ban automobiles and force everyone to take public transit and airplanes to go anywhere. We'd save more people than we would by replacing coal with nuclear, and banning the cars would also reduce death by pollution by something like 10%.
    - kaba0 4y ago
      Do you count deaths caused by mining rare minerals which is needed for the production of renewables? Re your car example: And that’s why everything should be talked about in context. Cars are essential for our modern lives and it would be close to impossible the negative impact of its disappearance. And the relevant such context for energetics is the deaths per unit energy.
- otikik 4y ago
  The point of the "Nuclear waste" is that it is perceived as dangerous. If someone gives a numerical argument to rebate a perception and your comeback is that "using numbers like that is ghoulish", then I know who is winning the argument.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    We know who’s already won that argument, yes, but we also spend a lot of time here talking about the dystopian mess created by reducing everything to a number. This is the same exact situation. I didn’t make an accusation to win the argument. I made the accusation to make the accusation.
7952 4y ago
Some risk and complexity is just intrinsic. Flying is risky because of hitting the ground. Nuclear power is risky because of the nature of radioactive material. Mitigating those risks add complexity and cost. You need more redundancy, higher quality materials, better QA, more pro-active maintenance, more security, etc. And many of your staff will need to be very highly trained and expensive. This all adds up in terms of expense and timescales. Flying may be cheaper but we all still drive!
- 8note 4y ago
  We still tolerate much less flying risk than driving risk -- driving makes much more deaths than flying, and coal makes for worse health than nuclear, but we hold flying and nuclear to higher standards than driving and coal
  - cesarb 4y ago
    > We still tolerate much less flying risk than driving risk -- driving makes much more deaths than flying, and coal makes for worse health than nuclear, but we hold flying and nuclear to higher standards than driving and coal Driving has more deaths than flying because we hold flying to higher standards than driving. If both were held to the same standard, there would be more deaths flying. That's because flying is inherently less forgiving: the energy involved is higher (both kinetic and potential energy), and you cannot "just stop" like a land vehicle can. The same applies to nuclear: if we built nuclear power plants the same way we build coal power plants, the health consequences would be worse than coal.
  - 7952 4y ago
    But we should be holding driving and coal to a higher standard. And many people are trying to do exactly that. I think an interesting part of this question is consent. People have a reasonable understanding of the road and are implicitly consenting to that risk. And as a society we make a conscious choice to balance safety and convenience. But that is just not true with flying, nuclear or even coal power. People don't understand and they absolutely don't consent to the risk. As professionals and scientists that does change things. As a hypothetical example imagine a lab testing the cold virus. It needs expensive safety equipment and an ethics review board. A scientist who just has a cold just needs a box of tissues. It is ethically different. I think a problem we have is that some historical things have managed to escape the ethics review board because people are used to them. Cars cause cancer and yet people are presumed to consent to that. A solar farm with no real impact has to spend years getting consent. It is unbalanced. Maybe the biggets problem with nuclear is that it is mostly driven by careful responsible professional people. In renewables society can cut corners (relative to nuclear) and get away with it because risk is just so much lower.

by hbrn 4y ago

hinkley 4y ago

Precautionary Principle doesn't work that way. Also you're assigning a terawatt value for a human life. We do that anyway often enough, but when you do it consciously it's ghoulish.

hbrn 4y ago
If you're willing to look at it from a different lens, I'm actually increasing value of a human life that has already been assigned naturally.
pjscott 4y ago
Ignoring the tradeoff doesn't make it go away, and if you don't consciously put a value on a human life, you'll probably wind up far from the Pareto frontier. In this case, for instance, thinking in terms of deaths-per-TWh is exactly what you want in order to fulfill our energy needs with as few people dying as possible. If a little "ghoulishness" saves lives, then I'll happily be a ghoul.
kaba0 4y ago
Like, how else should we talk about the topic in any other objective way? Sure, the death of any person is said and tragic. But true zero and true one probability simply doesn’t exist in reality. And we require energy, otherwise hospitals could not operate killing much much more people. So simply by that logic, one can minimize the amount of human suffering by nuclear. And it is a fact, that non-nuclear, non-renewable energy sources kill a shitton of more people per unit energy, release orders of magnitude more radiation, let alone other carcinogenic gases.
- hinkley 4y ago
  Humanity isn't a process of talking about things in an objective way. You're talking about people as if they are numbers. > And it is a fact, that non-nuclear, non-renewable energy sources kill a shitton of more people per unit energy I once heard the circus of Congressional, reactionary policies described as thus: "Something has to be done. This is something, so we will do it." Yes, that's all perfectly true, and something absolutely has to be done. Many things actually. We're making good progress on a number of them. And turning off coal fired plants at a steady clip. It matters what you replace it with. One of the things missing here is that when humans are involved, choices and the illusion of choice apply a multiplier on the risks. People volunteer for risks all the time, and they are happy to do so. Which is effectively what this is saying: > Same thing with planes: people are afraid to fly them, but driving the same distance by car is way more dangerous. If we only cared about traffic numbers we'd ban automobiles and force everyone to take public transit and airplanes to go anywhere. We'd save more people than we would by replacing coal with nuclear, and banning the cars would also reduce death by pollution by something like 10%.
  - kaba0 4y ago
    Do you count deaths caused by mining rare minerals which is needed for the production of renewables? Re your car example: And that’s why everything should be talked about in context. Cars are essential for our modern lives and it would be close to impossible the negative impact of its disappearance. And the relevant such context for energetics is the deaths per unit energy.
otikik 4y ago
The point of the "Nuclear waste" is that it is perceived as dangerous. If someone gives a numerical argument to rebate a perception and your comeback is that "using numbers like that is ghoulish", then I know who is winning the argument.
- hinkley 4y ago
  We know who’s already won that argument, yes, but we also spend a lot of time here talking about the dystopian mess created by reducing everything to a number. This is the same exact situation. I didn’t make an accusation to win the argument. I made the accusation to make the accusation.

7952 4y ago

Some risk and complexity is just intrinsic. Flying is risky because of hitting the ground. Nuclear power is risky because of the nature of radioactive material. Mitigating those risks add complexity and cost. You need more redundancy, higher quality materials, better QA, more pro-active maintenance, more security, etc. And many of your staff will need to be very highly trained and expensive. This all adds up in terms of expense and timescales. Flying may be cheaper but we all still drive!

8note 4y ago
We still tolerate much less flying risk than driving risk -- driving makes much more deaths than flying, and coal makes for worse health than nuclear, but we hold flying and nuclear to higher standards than driving and coal
- cesarb 4y ago
  > We still tolerate much less flying risk than driving risk -- driving makes much more deaths than flying, and coal makes for worse health than nuclear, but we hold flying and nuclear to higher standards than driving and coal Driving has more deaths than flying because we hold flying to higher standards than driving. If both were held to the same standard, there would be more deaths flying. That's because flying is inherently less forgiving: the energy involved is higher (both kinetic and potential energy), and you cannot "just stop" like a land vehicle can. The same applies to nuclear: if we built nuclear power plants the same way we build coal power plants, the health consequences would be worse than coal.
- 7952 4y ago
  But we should be holding driving and coal to a higher standard. And many people are trying to do exactly that. I think an interesting part of this question is consent. People have a reasonable understanding of the road and are implicitly consenting to that risk. And as a society we make a conscious choice to balance safety and convenience. But that is just not true with flying, nuclear or even coal power. People don't understand and they absolutely don't consent to the risk. As professionals and scientists that does change things. As a hypothetical example imagine a lab testing the cold virus. It needs expensive safety equipment and an ethics review board. A scientist who just has a cold just needs a box of tissues. It is ethically different. I think a problem we have is that some historical things have managed to escape the ethics review board because people are used to them. Cars cause cancer and yet people are presumed to consent to that. A solar farm with no real impact has to spend years getting consent. It is unbalanced. Maybe the biggets problem with nuclear is that it is mostly driven by careful responsible professional people. In renewables society can cut corners (relative to nuclear) and get away with it because risk is just so much lower.