6 ms·

Yeah I've never heard of it, either. I haven't even really seen hippies in the opposition. They're just normal people who, as soon as they hear the word "nuclea

Yeah I've never heard of it, either. I haven't even really seen hippies in the opposition. They're just normal people who, as soon as they hear the word "nuclear", panic really hard and refuse to receive any new information that would actually address their concerns.

Arnt 4y ago
Try it. Say my concern is that the relevant nuclear operators are organisationally similar to TEPCO. Give me some new information that either explains how they are different, or explains that an organisation like TEPCO is well suited to run a nuclear reactor safely.
- marmetio 4y ago
  You're kind of proving my point here. Your concern is that an operator can be unsafe, which is valid and will always be true. So no, I won't argue against your contrived framing. The only true fix would be a reactor and fuel design that can't melt down. A walk-away safe design that, even if you intentionally induced the worst disaster, still wouldn't pose a real threat to the public. Then it wouldn't matter if the operator was a cartoon villain determined to destroy the city. This is the part that people still don't want to hear. They can't accept that their pet concern can be eliminated by approaching the problem differently and breaking their assumptions. They look for new concerns, but educating them doesn't help because when they run out of unaddressed concerns, they just circle back to old concerns that were already addressed. Their concern was never more than an excuse. They just want the answer to fit their preconceived notions. For nuclear to be accepted, it needs better public messaging, because ultimately people are reacting emotionally rather than thinking critically.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    > For nuclear to be accepted, it needs better public messaging, because ultimately people are reacting emotionally rather than thinking critically. A great start would be not consistently lying about everything until the lies are indisputably proven and then pretending it never happened every single time about everything for over 70 years. Demonstrate a walkaway safe pebble bed reactor or similar that doesn't break down constantly or start leaking unsustainable levels of Kr-85. Remediate the hundreds of contaminated mines, spills and processing sites that the buck is being passed on. Stop demanding unlimited indemnity from any accident exceeding a pittance. Actually tell the truth about contamination events and levels entailed in standard practise ahead of time. Allow actually independent third parties rather than industry bodies to confirm claims on site, and estimate costs that are somewhere in the ballpark of reality with no backroom 'service' contracts. Stop pretending you've 'solved' waste by gathering a quarter of the money required and saying "we'll probably bury the SNF somewhere", don't worry about all the low level and intermediate waste. Demonstrate the existence of a viable fuel source or breeding program that isn't walking a tight rope on the edge of prompt criticality. Demonstrate a reprocessing process that doesn't push an entire continent's coastlines to 5% of safe limits whilst producing barely enough fuel to run about 2GW of reactors. Then it's worth considering as something that isn't just another scam. Until that point the oligopily of the nuclear industry should be rightly treated as a bunch of craven ghouls who are having a tantrum because they were held to account and didn't get to hoard billions whilst killing millions of people like the coal barons did.
    - marmetio 4y ago
      I'm not a marketing person. I have no idea how they'll address past bad behavior, dispel common myths, or educate about fundamentally new technologies that eliminate old problems. I'm just saying they'll eventually have to do it.
      - Schroedingersat 4y ago
        The alternative is we ignore the entire cesspit and acknowledge that accepting 2-5% of energy being provided by fossil fuels in a small minority of countries until storage matures is better than putting everything on hold and hoping that gifting a few trillion dollars to people who have done nothing but scam will work better.
        marmetio 4y ago
        You've lost me.
        Schroedingersat 4y ago
        There's a much better solution than sitting and pretending nuclear is going to save the day. Let's use that.
        marmetio 4y ago
        Is this another tactic to reject nuclear, or are you just wandering off-topic?
        Schroedingersat 4y ago
        You're pretending the option is fossil fuels or nuclear like every other concern troll. Never has been because nuclear is incapable of solving the problem.
        4y ago
  - Arnt 4y ago
    You're not giving new information about my concern, you're trying to stay on another topic. You're answering the question you think I should have instead of the one I have. Some of the relevant German organisations discarded dangerous waste at a construction site and then shredded the paperwork. That happened due to organisational traits, nothing to do with nuclear physics, but if my concern is that organisations with those organisational traits shouldn't be doing things with potential catastrophic effects, then you can't just answer with physics. Shredding paperwork is real, and my concern about is a concern to answer, not to ignore. If you ignore it, blame yourself for ignorance, not me for refusing to listen to "new information that addresses my concern". This is similar to the Challenger space shuttle. NASA had organisational traits that led to powerpoint slides with seven different font sizes, and "the shuttle might burn" was in the smallest font size. The shuttle eventually did, and partly because organisation's culture was one to suppress risks using the smallest of seven font sizes. TEPCO did similar things at Fukushima — there was more emphasis on how to document that all requirements had been fulfilled than on maintenance. Sometimes that led to low costs and discrepancy between documentation and reality.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - marmetio 4y ago
      Risk has two components: severity and likelihood. Typically on a scale of 1-5 each. Fukushima has severity 5 risks, and some people are willing to accept them as long as they think the likelihood is 1. But not you, and that's fine. Me neither, btw. This is the problem that new technology is trying to address. Eliminate the severity 5 risks. But a lot of people are resistant to taking stock of what's been eliminated so far and what hasn't. That's the problem with the public discourse. That's the new information that people reject. They only think along the likelihood axis and can't recognize when the severity has been reduced. Going back to your concern. TEPCO is an operator. They can only affect the likelihood, not the severity. That's why I don't want to debate you about them. I don't want to convince you to accept a severity 5. I want to ask you where you think we are in eliminating the severity 5s.

Arnt 4y ago

Try it. Say my concern is that the relevant nuclear operators are organisationally similar to TEPCO. Give me some new information that either explains how they are different, or explains that an organisation like TEPCO is well suited to run a nuclear reactor safely.

marmetio 4y ago
You're kind of proving my point here. Your concern is that an operator can be unsafe, which is valid and will always be true. So no, I won't argue against your contrived framing. The only true fix would be a reactor and fuel design that can't melt down. A walk-away safe design that, even if you intentionally induced the worst disaster, still wouldn't pose a real threat to the public. Then it wouldn't matter if the operator was a cartoon villain determined to destroy the city. This is the part that people still don't want to hear. They can't accept that their pet concern can be eliminated by approaching the problem differently and breaking their assumptions. They look for new concerns, but educating them doesn't help because when they run out of unaddressed concerns, they just circle back to old concerns that were already addressed. Their concern was never more than an excuse. They just want the answer to fit their preconceived notions. For nuclear to be accepted, it needs better public messaging, because ultimately people are reacting emotionally rather than thinking critically.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  > For nuclear to be accepted, it needs better public messaging, because ultimately people are reacting emotionally rather than thinking critically. A great start would be not consistently lying about everything until the lies are indisputably proven and then pretending it never happened every single time about everything for over 70 years. Demonstrate a walkaway safe pebble bed reactor or similar that doesn't break down constantly or start leaking unsustainable levels of Kr-85. Remediate the hundreds of contaminated mines, spills and processing sites that the buck is being passed on. Stop demanding unlimited indemnity from any accident exceeding a pittance. Actually tell the truth about contamination events and levels entailed in standard practise ahead of time. Allow actually independent third parties rather than industry bodies to confirm claims on site, and estimate costs that are somewhere in the ballpark of reality with no backroom 'service' contracts. Stop pretending you've 'solved' waste by gathering a quarter of the money required and saying "we'll probably bury the SNF somewhere", don't worry about all the low level and intermediate waste. Demonstrate the existence of a viable fuel source or breeding program that isn't walking a tight rope on the edge of prompt criticality. Demonstrate a reprocessing process that doesn't push an entire continent's coastlines to 5% of safe limits whilst producing barely enough fuel to run about 2GW of reactors. Then it's worth considering as something that isn't just another scam. Until that point the oligopily of the nuclear industry should be rightly treated as a bunch of craven ghouls who are having a tantrum because they were held to account and didn't get to hoard billions whilst killing millions of people like the coal barons did.
  - marmetio 4y ago
    I'm not a marketing person. I have no idea how they'll address past bad behavior, dispel common myths, or educate about fundamentally new technologies that eliminate old problems. I'm just saying they'll eventually have to do it.
    - Schroedingersat 4y ago
      The alternative is we ignore the entire cesspit and acknowledge that accepting 2-5% of energy being provided by fossil fuels in a small minority of countries until storage matures is better than putting everything on hold and hoping that gifting a few trillion dollars to people who have done nothing but scam will work better.
      - marmetio 4y ago
        You've lost me.
        Schroedingersat 4y ago
        There's a much better solution than sitting and pretending nuclear is going to save the day. Let's use that.
        marmetio 4y ago
        Is this another tactic to reject nuclear, or are you just wandering off-topic?
        Schroedingersat 4y ago
        You're pretending the option is fossil fuels or nuclear like every other concern troll. Never has been because nuclear is incapable of solving the problem.
        4y ago
- Arnt 4y ago
  You're not giving new information about my concern, you're trying to stay on another topic. You're answering the question you think I should have instead of the one I have. Some of the relevant German organisations discarded dangerous waste at a construction site and then shredded the paperwork. That happened due to organisational traits, nothing to do with nuclear physics, but if my concern is that organisations with those organisational traits shouldn't be doing things with potential catastrophic effects, then you can't just answer with physics. Shredding paperwork is real, and my concern about is a concern to answer, not to ignore. If you ignore it, blame yourself for ignorance, not me for refusing to listen to "new information that addresses my concern". This is similar to the Challenger space shuttle. NASA had organisational traits that led to powerpoint slides with seven different font sizes, and "the shuttle might burn" was in the smallest font size. The shuttle eventually did, and partly because organisation's culture was one to suppress risks using the smallest of seven font sizes. TEPCO did similar things at Fukushima — there was more emphasis on how to document that all requirements had been fulfilled than on maintenance. Sometimes that led to low costs and discrepancy between documentation and reality.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - marmetio 4y ago
    Risk has two components: severity and likelihood. Typically on a scale of 1-5 each. Fukushima has severity 5 risks, and some people are willing to accept them as long as they think the likelihood is 1. But not you, and that's fine. Me neither, btw. This is the problem that new technology is trying to address. Eliminate the severity 5 risks. But a lot of people are resistant to taking stock of what's been eliminated so far and what hasn't. That's the problem with the public discourse. That's the new information that people reject. They only think along the likelihood axis and can't recognize when the severity has been reduced. Going back to your concern. TEPCO is an operator. They can only affect the likelihood, not the severity. That's why I don't want to debate you about them. I don't want to convince you to accept a severity 5. I want to ask you where you think we are in eliminating the severity 5s.