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I wonder why nuclear gets so much hate and fearmongering. Its a marvel of engineering and long term energy solutions lie just within our grasp. I don't get the

I wonder why nuclear gets so much hate and fearmongering. Its a marvel of engineering and long term energy solutions lie just within our grasp. I don't get the fear. Any anti-nuclear POV, however casual, is welcome.

ltbarcly3 4y ago
Large coal interests have funded a large, decades long FUD campaign against nuclear via so called "environmental" groups.
- u_1f4a9 4y ago
  can you give some examples where this happened? i had a hard time googleing it without knowing what to search for
  - weberer 4y ago
    https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-fossil-fuel-interests-bankrolling-the-anti-nuclear-energy-movement https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-f... https://atomicinsights.com/smoking-gun/ https://atomicinsights.com/smoking-gun/
- moloch-hai 4y ago
  Coal interests are nukes' biggest boosters now. They know coal is doomed. But each nuke start guarantees a decade's extension on the coal contract. It furthermore burns capital that could build out several times as much wind and solar generating capacity, that would start displacing all that coal almost immediately. Big coal loves nukes.
  - jpgvm 4y ago
    Nope. They love solar and wind because both result in a grid that for the forseeable future requires peaker plants. Usually LNG which they see as their greenwashed future. They hate hydro for the same reason they hate nukes, they are too damn stable, entirely removing the possible need for fossil fuel based plants in base load generation or grid stability. Lets build solar, wind, hydro and nuclear. If you can't build hydro though nukes really are the best alternative and the sooner people come around to that idea the sooner fossil fuels die.
    - moloch-hai 4y ago
      Hint: peaker plants do not burn coal. Hydro is moot. There is noplace left to build hydro generation (storage is completely different), so there is no reason to mention it, except to note that an existing reservoir is an excellent place to float a solar farm.
      - jpgvm 4y ago
        Yeah they don't burn coal, they are hoping to transition to natural gas and we shouldn't stand for that shit. That is literally the whole point of my comment.
        moloch-hai 4y ago
        NG will be displaced by cheaper synthetic fuel, in time. Demand for NG will fall off relentlessly as it is displaced by renewables and storage, and finally be pinched off by synthetics generated from renewables' surpluses.
        ltbarcly3 4y ago
        Citation needed* This is just pure speculation based on nothing.
        moloch-hai 4y ago
        You are maybe unaware of exponential growth of renewables deployment, worldwide, with no expectation it will slow? Each installation displaces coal, oil, and NG generation in direct proportion. Probably you should read up a bit.
        ltbarcly3 4y ago
        I obviously meant the nonsense about synthetic natural gas. Who do you think you are fooling with these lazy debate tactics?
Gwypaas 4y ago
Because nuclear is enormously expensive and has always been subsidized by taxes or ratepayers. Subsidizing nuclear made sense when we were in the first R&D and commercialization phase 60 years ago. The idea to keep shoveling money into that black hole stopped making sense decades ago. Coal and nuclear are uncompetitive simply from the cost of the steam side. Today you can just about give a steam plant free energy, and it still makes a loss. Solar or wind does not have this limitation. CCGT gas plants get around it by having a turbine giving raw mechanical power and then utilizing the same awful steam side to get the last percentage points of efficiency at a much smaller required scale. Coal still gets built where gas infrastructure does not exist, but that's about it.
- vagrantJin 4y ago
  > Because it is enormously expensive and have always been subsidized by taxes or ratepayers. I don't understand what this means. Are you suggesting there are utilities not funded by taxes? Power generation will always be expensive and heavily subsidized by the state along with Water and agriculture. Coal is the next best thing. Plentiful, cheap, super polluting. I'm not sure a grid can rely on solar and wind. They are getting cheaper ofcourse but they need a lot of land, high maintenance, and not exactly the most reliable. We wil figure it out eventually.
  - Gwypaas 4y ago
    Usually electricity transmission is funded by taxes since that is centralized infrastructure. Production is often a commercial endeavor where energy is trade by the hour, or through longer contracts, on open markets. This depends on the country though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Pool https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Pool
- Ajedi32 4y ago
  Are you sure we aren't still in that "first R&D and commercialization phase"? One might argue that we never moved beyond that point, after disasters caused by early reactor designs killed any interest in further advancements.
TheCleric 4y ago
I'm not anti-nuclear, but here's how I see it. It has many upsides, but it has two major downsides: 1) You have to handle the spent fuel (either by storage or recycling, neither of which is easy). 2) When it goes wrong, it goes WRONG. See Chernobyl and Fukushima.
- sgjohnson 4y ago
  1. Is not a real problem because it doesn't take up much space. 2. The total death toll from the Fukushima incident is 1 (so far). For comparision, the tsunami & earthquake that caused Fukushima to meltdown killed 20000 and injured 6000 more. And Chernobyl doesn't really count, as no reactor worldwide is capable of Chernobyling, and hasn't been for the past 25 years at least. Chernobyl is a horror story that can be told to childen about Soviet/Russian incompetence, not as a valid example about the dangers of nuclear energy. Likewise, Fukushima can be used as an example about how safe a worst case scenario actually is.
  - clnq 4y ago
    Looking at Wikipedia, there are still a few RBMK reactors in Russia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK#List_of_RBMK_reactors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK#List_of_RBMK_reactors. Some of the design flaws of RBMK were retroactively addressed in existing reactors post-Chornobyl. In particular, the flawed control rod mechanism was addressed. It would cause power excursions/criticality when the rods were inserted. However, neither the high positive void coefficient nor the lack of containment buildings was addressed in RBMK. These unsafe features of the reactors led to the shutdown of the only two RBMKs that were ever in the EU (in Ignalina NPP). While it is difficult to argue the idea that no reactor is capable of "Chernobyling", as "Chernobyling" is a very particular scenario, RBMKs are generally considered unsafe. The lack of containment buildings is particularly concerning because, without containment failure, we would not have had either the Chornobyl or the Fukushima Daiichi disaster. While RBMKs are not built anymore, and the new Russian VVER reactors are much safer, they still don't meet EU safety requirements. A future evolution of VVER-1200 called MIR-1200 should, although it is difficult to find much information about this. Overall, I am saying that "Chernobyling" can mean different things as several design and operation faults needed to align for that disaster to happen. Some design faults in Russian NPP reactors have been addressed, some not. Overall, VVERs look very safe as they address all major RBMK design faults, but for some reason still don't meet EU safety requirements. So I wonder what design faults persist. I do agree that Gen 3+ reactor designs look very safe.
wasmitnetzen 4y ago
I'm very anti-nuclear, but not for technological reasons. It's purely political, but I'll try to be as neutral as possible. The baseline is that the probability of failure is so low, but the effects are devastating, which gives a company (or a state, for that matter) all the incentive to focus on short-term savings, while increasing the tiny probabilities, because in all likelihood, the people taking the decisions today will never see the effects of it. Yes, from a technological standpoint, we could build safe nuclear, but we haven't found a political system to do it yet.
- user_7832 4y ago
  I'm extremely uninformed about this, but isn't it the purpose of international atomic energy boards to physically review all plants frequently to reduce this? I'm not suggesting it's a perfect solution, and I suppose Fukushima proves that, but the incentives are a much lesser issue than otherwise.
- jmull 4y ago
  I don't think this should get downvoted. We all get that Fukushima was preventable... but it wasn't prevented. A lot of pro-nuclear people just blow off Fukushima, which tells me you just aren't really engaging seriously. (BTW, I lean pro-nuclear... but a lot of the pro-nuclear comments here on the risks amount to "don't worry about it" and whaddaboutism. This is not remotely compelling.)
  - chris_va 4y ago
    It was one of the worst accidents in nuclear history. ... that killed ~1 person. I think the disconnect here is that the "whaddaboutism" type arguments are actually relevant for once. Arguing against nuclear (or anything else) is implicitly an argument to use alternative sources of power, as society isn't generally leaving people in the dark with no electricity. If the Fukushima reactor hadn't been there, then it would have bean a coal or natural gas plant. Both would have killed far more people over the lifetime of the plant. I think people have an allergic reaction to nuclear power that goes beyond rational, given the underlying statistics deaths/TWh. Having a single terrifying moment certainly imprints a lot more heavily on people's minds, though, than distributed deaths.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
SuoDuanDao 4y ago
My disillusionment with the promises of nuclear actually came from hearing a professor of nuclear energy speak. He himself was brilliant and staunchly pro-nuclear, but his rhetoric turned me off it, probably forever. Here's what happened: He was holding a presentation on nuclear power and mentioned safety, claiming that according to the best models there would be one large nuclear accident every million years. This was shortly after Fukishima, and counting that along with three mile island and Chernobyl, it's clear that the actual number is closer to every twenty years. To have someone with a higher IQ than me talk about a model off by a factor of 50 000 and indicate no need to update it tells me this is an industry with way too much kool-aid. My low opinion was solidified when in the same year I overheard a nuclear proponent criticizing Japanese 'housewives' who had the temerity to get their own Geiger counters after Fukishima and note when radiation levels passed the official guidelines in their area. I'm sorry, but if you're against a citizenry informing itself you're against democracy, and the industry you advocate for is going to take a hit by association with you. You might say that these two examples aren't representative of the industry as a whole, but they're the representatives I met and I've yet to see a good counterexample. A couple other criticisms: -Refining nuclear material for peaceful purposes does make it easier to refine it for less peaceful ones. This is probably the source of the 'fear' you're referring to. -Nuclear is nonrenewable, fissionable material will run out in time like fossil fuels -focusing on EROI hides the cost of capital, which is substantial. Investing in nuclear requires a huge concentration of capital and risk. Capital isn't free, something the economic arguments for Nuclear tend to gloss over. -I don't see how that much concentration of capital and hence payback can avoid increasing wealth inequality. With solar there's a plausible and peaceful way for the poorest people to eventually own the means of production - not a share where their votes don't count but the physical tool that creates energy. That can't happen with a nuclear economy, it will always be owned by an elite, managed by an elite, and leave most people as unimportant economic actors. -Pro-nuclear arguments frequently insult the opposition. It gives a bad impression.
- z3c0 4y ago
  So your critique of nuclear energy (a position) is somebody who over-zealously evangelized the technology (their character)? This is about as ad hominem as stances come.
dale_glass 4y ago
I think the tech is fine, but obsolete at this point. It's just won't work economically or politically. Economically speaking it's too expensive to build. It doesn't compete well with renewables and is a very long term plan, which is bad news if you're on shaky ground to start with. It may never pay off if you build it today. So nobody is rushing to build them on their own. Now maybe with government help, but... Politically, it takes way too long to build. So even if you expend the political effort on making it happen, you likely won't be around to reap the benefits, which makes it a bad political project. It also tends to be late, and more expensive than planned.

ltbarcly3 4y ago

Large coal interests have funded a large, decades long FUD campaign against nuclear via so called "environmental" groups.

u_1f4a9 4y ago
can you give some examples where this happened? i had a hard time googleing it without knowing what to search for
- weberer 4y ago
  https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-fossil-fuel-interests-bankrolling-the-anti-nuclear-energy-movement https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-f... https://atomicinsights.com/smoking-gun/ https://atomicinsights.com/smoking-gun/
moloch-hai 4y ago
Coal interests are nukes' biggest boosters now. They know coal is doomed. But each nuke start guarantees a decade's extension on the coal contract. It furthermore burns capital that could build out several times as much wind and solar generating capacity, that would start displacing all that coal almost immediately. Big coal loves nukes.
- jpgvm 4y ago
  Nope. They love solar and wind because both result in a grid that for the forseeable future requires peaker plants. Usually LNG which they see as their greenwashed future. They hate hydro for the same reason they hate nukes, they are too damn stable, entirely removing the possible need for fossil fuel based plants in base load generation or grid stability. Lets build solar, wind, hydro and nuclear. If you can't build hydro though nukes really are the best alternative and the sooner people come around to that idea the sooner fossil fuels die.
  - moloch-hai 4y ago
    Hint: peaker plants do not burn coal. Hydro is moot. There is noplace left to build hydro generation (storage is completely different), so there is no reason to mention it, except to note that an existing reservoir is an excellent place to float a solar farm.
    - jpgvm 4y ago
      Yeah they don't burn coal, they are hoping to transition to natural gas and we shouldn't stand for that shit. That is literally the whole point of my comment.
      - moloch-hai 4y ago
        NG will be displaced by cheaper synthetic fuel, in time. Demand for NG will fall off relentlessly as it is displaced by renewables and storage, and finally be pinched off by synthetics generated from renewables' surpluses.
        ltbarcly3 4y ago
        Citation needed* This is just pure speculation based on nothing.
        moloch-hai 4y ago
        You are maybe unaware of exponential growth of renewables deployment, worldwide, with no expectation it will slow? Each installation displaces coal, oil, and NG generation in direct proportion. Probably you should read up a bit.
        ltbarcly3 4y ago
        I obviously meant the nonsense about synthetic natural gas. Who do you think you are fooling with these lazy debate tactics?

Gwypaas 4y ago

Because nuclear is enormously expensive and has always been subsidized by taxes or ratepayers. Subsidizing nuclear made sense when we were in the first R&D and commercialization phase 60 years ago. The idea to keep shoveling money into that black hole stopped making sense decades ago. Coal and nuclear are uncompetitive simply from the cost of the steam side. Today you can just about give a steam plant free energy, and it still makes a loss. Solar or wind does not have this limitation. CCGT gas plants get around it by having a turbine giving raw mechanical power and then utilizing the same awful steam side to get the last percentage points of efficiency at a much smaller required scale. Coal still gets built where gas infrastructure does not exist, but that's about it.

vagrantJin 4y ago
> Because it is enormously expensive and have always been subsidized by taxes or ratepayers. I don't understand what this means. Are you suggesting there are utilities not funded by taxes? Power generation will always be expensive and heavily subsidized by the state along with Water and agriculture. Coal is the next best thing. Plentiful, cheap, super polluting. I'm not sure a grid can rely on solar and wind. They are getting cheaper ofcourse but they need a lot of land, high maintenance, and not exactly the most reliable. We wil figure it out eventually.
- Gwypaas 4y ago
  Usually electricity transmission is funded by taxes since that is centralized infrastructure. Production is often a commercial endeavor where energy is trade by the hour, or through longer contracts, on open markets. This depends on the country though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Pool https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Pool
Ajedi32 4y ago
Are you sure we aren't still in that "first R&D and commercialization phase"? One might argue that we never moved beyond that point, after disasters caused by early reactor designs killed any interest in further advancements.

TheCleric 4y ago

I'm not anti-nuclear, but here's how I see it. It has many upsides, but it has two major downsides: 1) You have to handle the spent fuel (either by storage or recycling, neither of which is easy). 2) When it goes wrong, it goes WRONG. See Chernobyl and Fukushima.

sgjohnson 4y ago
1. Is not a real problem because it doesn't take up much space. 2. The total death toll from the Fukushima incident is 1 (so far). For comparision, the tsunami & earthquake that caused Fukushima to meltdown killed 20000 and injured 6000 more. And Chernobyl doesn't really count, as no reactor worldwide is capable of Chernobyling, and hasn't been for the past 25 years at least. Chernobyl is a horror story that can be told to childen about Soviet/Russian incompetence, not as a valid example about the dangers of nuclear energy. Likewise, Fukushima can be used as an example about how safe a worst case scenario actually is.
- clnq 4y ago
  Looking at Wikipedia, there are still a few RBMK reactors in Russia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK#List_of_RBMK_reactors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK#List_of_RBMK_reactors. Some of the design flaws of RBMK were retroactively addressed in existing reactors post-Chornobyl. In particular, the flawed control rod mechanism was addressed. It would cause power excursions/criticality when the rods were inserted. However, neither the high positive void coefficient nor the lack of containment buildings was addressed in RBMK. These unsafe features of the reactors led to the shutdown of the only two RBMKs that were ever in the EU (in Ignalina NPP). While it is difficult to argue the idea that no reactor is capable of "Chernobyling", as "Chernobyling" is a very particular scenario, RBMKs are generally considered unsafe. The lack of containment buildings is particularly concerning because, without containment failure, we would not have had either the Chornobyl or the Fukushima Daiichi disaster. While RBMKs are not built anymore, and the new Russian VVER reactors are much safer, they still don't meet EU safety requirements. A future evolution of VVER-1200 called MIR-1200 should, although it is difficult to find much information about this. Overall, I am saying that "Chernobyling" can mean different things as several design and operation faults needed to align for that disaster to happen. Some design faults in Russian NPP reactors have been addressed, some not. Overall, VVERs look very safe as they address all major RBMK design faults, but for some reason still don't meet EU safety requirements. So I wonder what design faults persist. I do agree that Gen 3+ reactor designs look very safe.

wasmitnetzen 4y ago

I'm very anti-nuclear, but not for technological reasons. It's purely political, but I'll try to be as neutral as possible. The baseline is that the probability of failure is so low, but the effects are devastating, which gives a company (or a state, for that matter) all the incentive to focus on short-term savings, while increasing the tiny probabilities, because in all likelihood, the people taking the decisions today will never see the effects of it. Yes, from a technological standpoint, we could build safe nuclear, but we haven't found a political system to do it yet.

user_7832 4y ago
I'm extremely uninformed about this, but isn't it the purpose of international atomic energy boards to physically review all plants frequently to reduce this? I'm not suggesting it's a perfect solution, and I suppose Fukushima proves that, but the incentives are a much lesser issue than otherwise.
jmull 4y ago
I don't think this should get downvoted. We all get that Fukushima was preventable... but it wasn't prevented. A lot of pro-nuclear people just blow off Fukushima, which tells me you just aren't really engaging seriously. (BTW, I lean pro-nuclear... but a lot of the pro-nuclear comments here on the risks amount to "don't worry about it" and whaddaboutism. This is not remotely compelling.)
- chris_va 4y ago
  It was one of the worst accidents in nuclear history. ... that killed ~1 person. I think the disconnect here is that the "whaddaboutism" type arguments are actually relevant for once. Arguing against nuclear (or anything else) is implicitly an argument to use alternative sources of power, as society isn't generally leaving people in the dark with no electricity. If the Fukushima reactor hadn't been there, then it would have bean a coal or natural gas plant. Both would have killed far more people over the lifetime of the plant. I think people have an allergic reaction to nuclear power that goes beyond rational, given the underlying statistics deaths/TWh. Having a single terrifying moment certainly imprints a lot more heavily on people's minds, though, than distributed deaths.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

SuoDuanDao 4y ago

My disillusionment with the promises of nuclear actually came from hearing a professor of nuclear energy speak. He himself was brilliant and staunchly pro-nuclear, but his rhetoric turned me off it, probably forever. Here's what happened: He was holding a presentation on nuclear power and mentioned safety, claiming that according to the best models there would be one large nuclear accident every million years. This was shortly after Fukishima, and counting that along with three mile island and Chernobyl, it's clear that the actual number is closer to every twenty years. To have someone with a higher IQ than me talk about a model off by a factor of 50 000 and indicate no need to update it tells me this is an industry with way too much kool-aid. My low opinion was solidified when in the same year I overheard a nuclear proponent criticizing Japanese 'housewives' who had the temerity to get their own Geiger counters after Fukishima and note when radiation levels passed the official guidelines in their area. I'm sorry, but if you're against a citizenry informing itself you're against democracy, and the industry you advocate for is going to take a hit by association with you. You might say that these two examples aren't representative of the industry as a whole, but they're the representatives I met and I've yet to see a good counterexample. A couple other criticisms: -Refining nuclear material for peaceful purposes does make it easier to refine it for less peaceful ones. This is probably the source of the 'fear' you're referring to. -Nuclear is nonrenewable, fissionable material will run out in time like fossil fuels -focusing on EROI hides the cost of capital, which is substantial. Investing in nuclear requires a huge concentration of capital and risk. Capital isn't free, something the economic arguments for Nuclear tend to gloss over. -I don't see how that much concentration of capital and hence payback can avoid increasing wealth inequality. With solar there's a plausible and peaceful way for the poorest people to eventually own the means of production - not a share where their votes don't count but the physical tool that creates energy. That can't happen with a nuclear economy, it will always be owned by an elite, managed by an elite, and leave most people as unimportant economic actors. -Pro-nuclear arguments frequently insult the opposition. It gives a bad impression.

z3c0 4y ago
So your critique of nuclear energy (a position) is somebody who over-zealously evangelized the technology (their character)? This is about as ad hominem as stances come.

dale_glass 4y ago

I think the tech is fine, but obsolete at this point. It's just won't work economically or politically. Economically speaking it's too expensive to build. It doesn't compete well with renewables and is a very long term plan, which is bad news if you're on shaky ground to start with. It may never pay off if you build it today. So nobody is rushing to build them on their own. Now maybe with government help, but... Politically, it takes way too long to build. So even if you expend the political effort on making it happen, you likely won't be around to reap the benefits, which makes it a bad political project. It also tends to be late, and more expensive than planned.