17 ms·

There’s a statistic that floats around the internet claiming more radioactivity harm from coal power than from nuclear power, based on the principle that coal p

by fwlr 4y ago

There’s a statistic that floats around the internet claiming more radioactivity harm from coal power than from nuclear power, based on the principle that coal power is essentially aerosolizing tons of particles with ever-so-slightly-higher-than-background radioactivity and there’s a lot more coal than nuclear. One could probably derive a similar statistic for how much harm nuclear over-regulation has caused. Perhaps of the form “Chernobyl killed 60 people directly through acute radiation, killed 60,000 indirectly through elevated cancer rates due to spread of radioactive material, and killed 6,000,000* with its second-order effects of supporting nuclear over-regulation that caused increased use of coal and gas energy”. (* This number is completely made up) It seems to me that changing over-regulation is nearly impossible, as it requires making suicidally unpopular arguments: “we shouldn’t weigh the risks”, “we should care less about safety”, “don’t think of the children”, etc. The workable solution is to find or make a receptive regulatory environment (perhaps in a small country with large reserves of nuclear fuel and large unpopulated areas to isolate reactors in, like say Australia), use massive banks of nuclear power to power commensurately massive carbon capture plants that turn airborne CO2 back into synthetic coal and synthetic gasoline, and then export these “completely clean conventional fuels” to the rest of the world. Using synthetic coal to run a coal power plant is essentially a zero-capital plant retrofit achieving guaranteed zero emissions. Putting synthetic gasoline in a gas station is essentially an over-the-air upgrade to any conventional ICE vehicle making it guaranteed zero emissions. It’s sort of like carbon offset credits except it bakes the carbon offset directly into the product instead of relying on fragile and game-able links like “we planted a tree to offset this pound of coal”. A potent offering and one that’s hopefully hard to regulate against as well.

pfdietz 4y ago
Nuclear liberates more uranium decay products into the environment than coal does per unit of electrical energy produced, if you include those liberated in uranium mining.
- defrost 4y ago
  I think you'll find that vast tracts of granite across the planet relese more uranium decay products into the environment by several orders of magnitude than uranium mining does. You can work this out for yourself by downloading and working through the raw 256 channel data of an entire continent aquired across 40 years and > 600 surveys. https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/disciplines/geophysics/radiometrics https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/disciplines/geophysi... https://www.publish.csiro.au/EG/EG09025 https://www.publish.csiro.au/EG/EG09025
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    Which is entirely beside the point, because (1) decay products locked in a rock are not liberated, and (2) we were comparing nuclear and coal, not nuclear and granite.
    - defrost 4y ago
      Of course uranium decay products "locked" in granite are liberated .. that's what's measured 80m above the ground by geophysical survey aircraft - the radiation from liberated decay products of uranium, potassium, and thorium - I'm sure you must have heard of radon gas (if not, go look it up) - it's a by-product of uranium decay products and seeps up out of the ground on a daily basis and "fills" up valleys in granite regions in a measurable way, gets blown away when the wind picks up and then fills them again. You were comparing nuclear and coal - which is like comparing a pea against a couple of super cargo ships packed with vegetables .. and really should provide a source for your claims.
Gwypaas 4y ago
Why use nuclear energy when renewables do it without any radiation or 3rd party hazard for 1/5th the cost? That sounds awfully close to a solution looking for a problem. https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-levelized-cost-of-storage-and-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
- scrlk 4y ago
  Is it still a 1/5th of the cost if you have to factor in storage?
  - Gwypaas 4y ago
    No need to factor in storage when creating synthetic fuels like the GP suggests.
    - loeg 4y ago
      You would instead need to factor in the inefficiencies of creating and burning those fuels.
  - pydry 4y ago
    If you synthesize windgas and burn that for electricity (which is probably the most expensive, inefficient way to store and use that energy) it's still about 4/5ths the cost of nuclear power. If you combined pumped storage and batteries with solar and wind it's roughly between 2/5ths and 3/5ths. This ignores taxpayer shouldered insurance for nuclear power. If you price that accurately the cost of nuclear power balloons still further. It's never been particularly cost effective but compared to dirt cheap renewables it's a veritable financial black hole. This is why EDF is currently imploding. It's why only countries that have nukes or really want the option to have nukes build civilian nuclear power plants.
    - akvadrako 4y ago
      windgas? That's not a word I've ever heard or sound like a well established source of energy.
Krasnol 4y ago
I wonder how one measures "over-regulation" in a serious way here. The examples I've seen either come from opinions of certain individuals and the accompanying lobby groups or by setting it next to other regulations from countries which are famous for infrastructural disasters (see China).
- fwlr 4y ago
  It’s extraordinarily hard! Often in trying to analyze some complex system I have found it’s much more tractable to implement the system and analyze the results (e.g. a montecarlo sim of dice-rolling rather than trying to do the math). Likewise, a tractable way to measure over-regulation might be to simply do nuclear in a limited low-regulation area and draw conclusions from that.
- nukeman 4y ago
  Like fwir said, it’s difficult to determine what regulations are and aren’t needed. But one example: in the U.S., automatic load following equipment for nuclear power plants are prohibited, so load following needs to be done manually. Whereas in France, this equipment is allowed, and very important, given nuclear makes up a much larger proportion of their grid (and tends to load follow more).
jMyles 4y ago
> and then export these “completely clean conventional fuels” to the rest of the world. ...not where I thought you were going with this argument. Aren't we looking for ways to take the CO2 out of the air? Rather than to sell it so that it gets put back in?
- anon84873628 4y ago
  Using synthetic hydrocarbons for energy storage seems inevitable to me. Can we really electrify all the vehicles on the planet? How many two stroke engines are in use throughout Southeast Asia alone? Batteries and electric motor technology is just so much more complicated than the internal combustion engine. Then you have airplanes, ocean vessels, military and emergency vehicles... I'm not an expert in this. But swapping fossil fuels for synthetic petroleum made with nuclear or renewable energy seems like the cleanest refactor without rewriting the interface. If feasible. And we'd still want to optimize the whole stack and sequester carbon wherever possible.
  - jMyles 4y ago
    OK yeah, sounds totally reasonable when you put it that way.
- fwlr 4y ago
  Think of the current coal power industry as essentially “digging a lot of pre-sequestered CO2 out of the ground and putting it into the air”. This plan limits the coal industry to only using what’s already in the air, while we build parallel systems to actively sequester air CO2. Building massive carbon capture plants for this purpose also brings economies of scale to other carbon sequestration projects. Finally, you can imagine making a commitment to permanently burying 5% of the output of the synthetic plants, so every round trip the CO2 makes reduces it by 5%.
  - jMyles 4y ago
    Yeah, makes sense. Burying 5% of the output... maybe that's what some civilization did 60 million years ago?
whiddershins 4y ago
If changing over regulation is impossible, our civilization is likely doomed.
bitwize 4y ago
Renewables are cheap and pose zero risk of nuclear exposure. We should be looking at 100% renewable solutions.
hanniabu 4y ago
> nuclear over-regulation Ah yes, the classic too much regulation. I'll just leave you with this. There's too much to quote from here, but here's just one excerpt. The post has numerous examples of very concerning issues. > When valves leaked, more leakage was allowed — up to 20 times the original limit. When rampant cracking caused radioactive leaks from steam generator tubing, an easier test of the tubes was devised, so plants could meet standards. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna43455859 https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna43455859 > The proposal comes as most of the nation’s nuclear power plants, which were designed and built in the 1960s or 1970s, are reaching the end of their original 40- to 50-year operating licenses. Many plant operators have sought licenses to extend the operating life of their plants past the original deadlines, even as experts have warned that aging plants come with heightened concerns about safety. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/climate/nrc-nuclear-inspection-weakening.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/climate/nrc-nuclear-inspe... > The nuclear industry is also pushing the NRC to cut down on safety inspections and rely instead on plants to police themselves. The NRC “is listening” to this advice, the Associated Press reported last month. “Annie Caputo, a former nuclear-energy lobbyist now serving as one of four board members appointed or reappointed by President Donald Trump, told an industry meeting this week that she was ‘open to self-assessments’ by nuclear plant operators, who are proposing that self-reporting by operators take the place of some NRC inspections.” https://newrepublic.com/article/153465/its-not-just-pork-trump-also-letting-nuclear-plants-regulate-safety https://newrepublic.com/article/153465/its-not-just-pork-tru...
- fwlr 4y ago
  De-regulation of existing 1960s era nuclear tech is bad and shouldn’t happen, I agree.
peteradio 4y ago
> The workable solution is to find or make a receptive regulatory environment (perhaps in a small country with large reserves of nuclear fuel and large unpopulated areas to isolate reactors in, like say Australia), use massive banks of nuclear power to power commensurately massive carbon capture plants that turn airborne CO2 back into synthetic coal and synthetic gasoline, and then export these “completely clean conventional fuels” to the rest of the world. Any idea how massively inefficient this would be? > A potent offering and one that’s hopefully hard to regulate against as well. You don't need to regulate against something that cannot possibly turn a profit.
m463 4y ago
> One could probably derive a similar statistic for how much harm nuclear over-regulation has caused. That reminds me of bicycle helmet regulation, which can deter exercising. the paper that tries to figure out if helmet laws might deter people from exercising, which could inadvertently increase mortality: https://nacto.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/2012_de-Jong_Health-Impacts-of-Mandatory-Bicycle-Helmet-Laws.pdf https://nacto.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/2012_de-Jong_He...
- bmitc 4y ago
  I read the abstract and first part of the introduction. It seems that it is accepted as a foregone conclusion that helmet laws reduce cycling. Is that true? If so, is it because cyclists are less excited about cycling or over worry of the dangers because someone said it's dangerous enough that they need a helmet? I can't imagine making policy (such as removing helmet laws) due to such flighty sentiments. As a motorcyclist, bicyclists remain a mystery to me in their approach to safety.
  - stefan_ 4y ago
    That's curious, seeing how motorcyclists are much more frequently seriously injured, and more often as the result of their own actions. I'm not sure there is much to emulate here.
    - bmitc 4y ago
      I'm thinking in a city environment. Motorcyclists ride in much more varied environments at much higher speeds with the other vehicles at higher speeds. Motorcycling is very dangerous, period. But in city riding, motorcycles, cars, and bicycles are effectively bound to the same speed limits, such as between 0-45mph. Obviously, bicycles will be slower at the top end, but for the most part in congested city riding, all three vehicles will be within some range of each other. In my experience and observations, the common motorcyclist will still be far better equipped in safety equipment, including helmets, gloves, jackets, boots, etc. despite having superior protection from the motorcycle itself compared to a bicycle, breaks, and acceleration. And also in my experience, bicyclists are much more willing to break traffic laws in city environments. Maybe the comparison isn't appropriate or too heavily biased with my own safety approaches and experience, but in my experience with serious motorcyclists, anything less than a full-face helmet is viewed as complete folly. The highest percentage of hit in a motorcycle crash is in the front. (There is a famous safety graphic that shows the percentages of where on the helmet a crash occurs.) If I decided to start riding bicycles again, on the street or elsewhere, a helmet will absolutely be used, and I would even consider going further than the typical bicycle helmet. My real point is that I find it extremely strange that some bicyclists would choose simply not to ride at all just because a helmet is required. > and more often as the result of their own actions That is not a blanket truth.
mullingitover 4y ago
> There’s a statistic that floats around the internet claiming more radioactivity harm from coal power than from nuclear power, based on the principle that coal power is essentially aerosolizing tons of particles with ever-so-slightly-higher-than-background radioactivity and there’s a lot more coal than nuclear. Fun fact, it would be a very easy engineering lift to convert coal plants to nuclear (you already have the steam turbines built and ready to go!). However, the moment they switch from a coal plant to a nuclear plant, the existing radioactivity left over from the coal burning operation would immediately get a nuclear plant shut down.
oatmeal1 4y ago
> It seems to me that changing over-regulation is nearly impossible, as it requires making suicidally unpopular arguments: “we shouldn’t weigh the risks”, “we should care less about safety”, “don’t think of the children”, etc. The arguments you list are straw man arguments, but doubtless they would be levied against nuclear energy supporters.
donny2018 4y ago
>Putting synthetic gasoline in a gas station is essentially an over-the-air upgrade to any conventional ICE vehicle making it guaranteed zero emissions. Prometheus (a startup) promises to deliver exactly on that. I believe something commercially viable should be coming in a year or so. I like this overall idea of synthesizing coal and fuels out of atmospheric carbon instead of just burying it somewhere. This could be the easiest and even ROI-able way to implement carbon capture globally, without causing much technological friction and disruption to economies in developing countries.
- fwlr 4y ago
  Yes. The case for synthesizing carbon fuels from atmospheric carbon is immensely strong - we need to do carbon capture of some kind, and investing in this method will also retrofit the entire world to zero emissions. Other plans for reaching zero emissions worldwide have multi-trillion-dollar price tags and require political pressure on sovereign nations. With this method you can forcibly zero out a recalcitrant country’s emissions by simply subsidising synthetic coal and fuel so that it’s cheaper than regular coal and crude oil, and they will go to zero emissions while getting an economic boost. Arguably, it’s such a strong case that I’m trying to hitch my pet project of nuclear power to its wagon.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    This is a terrible plan. If you want to subsidize another country's power, far better to price dump solar from $13/MWh to $0 than make synthetic coal from $200/MWh nuclear energy at 50% efficiency with an added overhead of $20/MWh for creating it and another $10/MWh to transport it. Merely matching the price of coal will cost you enough that you could just offer to replace all their gas and coal generation for free with no strings. It has the added bonus of only needing to subsidize enough solar to send their fossil fuels into a death spiral of lower load factors and higher costs to compensate. After which supplimenting with wind and storage will be far cheaper for them.
patientplatypus 4y ago
Yeah, except...your Australian idea of putting massive power plants in the Outback and de-carbonizing the atmosphere by shipping fossil fuels into the atmosphere is incredibly inefficient. Just put in small scale nuclear power plants at all the limiting bandwidth areas of every nations' power grids. From there electricity would be essentially be free and you could power cars, trains, buses and everything else from electricity. You could have nuclear powered cargo container vessels. There wouldn't be any need for coal or oil. Why do half measures that would be worse for the environment, when you could just stop using goal and gas entirely? By the time all of the useful plutonium and uranium runs out for making power plants we'll have fusion power (within the next 100-200 years). You're not wrong, and the market may mandate doing this anyway, but if you were going to play benevolent dictator and find the most utilitarian way to maximize the world's happiness you would just make energy free.
- fwlr 4y ago
  Unfortunately we cannot simply play dictator and insist people who don’t like or trust nuclear power must put up with “a Chernobyl next door to every school” (or similar charged rhetoric). The Outback is one of the few places I can imagine just enough people tolerating for it to happen, where there’s also enough infrastructure and capability to keep it running. The fact that Australia also has the largest reserves of nuclear fuel in the world and a significant investment in mining capability certainly doesn’t hurt either. So that’s kinda where it has to be. Once it’s there, how do you make it affect the rest of the world? The longest HVDC cable in operation is 750km at 1.4GW, and the longest being built is 4 x 3,800km cables at 1.8GW each. The undersea internet cable that connects Australia to America goes through Hawaii and is 14,000km long. And you need to get something like 60GW through to power the western region of the US grid, even assuming big advances it’s still like 12 x 14,000km. Impractical. You need to make it transportable. Batteries don’t have energy density to make it work shipping them en masse, especially since they need a return trip. You know what does have high enough energy density to make it worth transporting? Coal and oil, we already do it. Added benefit: it’s a drop-in replacement for existing power systems, no need to rebuild any power systems anywhere. How can we turn nuclear power into coal and oil? Carbon capture synthesis of hydrocarbons. Another added bonus: fights climate change. The previous two bonuses synergise immensely well: they take existing ICE engines and coal power plants and make them zero emissions. The drawback of inefficiency sucks, but it’s more than outweighed by all those benefits. I’m not trying to use nuclear as efficiently as possible. I’m trying to find a place for nuclear in the energy economy.

by fwlr 4y ago

pfdietz 4y ago

Nuclear liberates more uranium decay products into the environment than coal does per unit of electrical energy produced, if you include those liberated in uranium mining.

defrost 4y ago
I think you'll find that vast tracts of granite across the planet relese more uranium decay products into the environment by several orders of magnitude than uranium mining does. You can work this out for yourself by downloading and working through the raw 256 channel data of an entire continent aquired across 40 years and > 600 surveys. https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/disciplines/geophysics/radiometrics https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/disciplines/geophysi... https://www.publish.csiro.au/EG/EG09025 https://www.publish.csiro.au/EG/EG09025
- pfdietz 4y ago
  Which is entirely beside the point, because (1) decay products locked in a rock are not liberated, and (2) we were comparing nuclear and coal, not nuclear and granite.
  - defrost 4y ago
    Of course uranium decay products "locked" in granite are liberated .. that's what's measured 80m above the ground by geophysical survey aircraft - the radiation from liberated decay products of uranium, potassium, and thorium - I'm sure you must have heard of radon gas (if not, go look it up) - it's a by-product of uranium decay products and seeps up out of the ground on a daily basis and "fills" up valleys in granite regions in a measurable way, gets blown away when the wind picks up and then fills them again. You were comparing nuclear and coal - which is like comparing a pea against a couple of super cargo ships packed with vegetables .. and really should provide a source for your claims.

Gwypaas 4y ago

Why use nuclear energy when renewables do it without any radiation or 3rd party hazard for 1/5th the cost? That sounds awfully close to a solution looking for a problem. https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-levelized-cost-of-storage-and-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

scrlk 4y ago
Is it still a 1/5th of the cost if you have to factor in storage?
- Gwypaas 4y ago
  No need to factor in storage when creating synthetic fuels like the GP suggests.
  - loeg 4y ago
    You would instead need to factor in the inefficiencies of creating and burning those fuels.
- pydry 4y ago
  If you synthesize windgas and burn that for electricity (which is probably the most expensive, inefficient way to store and use that energy) it's still about 4/5ths the cost of nuclear power. If you combined pumped storage and batteries with solar and wind it's roughly between 2/5ths and 3/5ths. This ignores taxpayer shouldered insurance for nuclear power. If you price that accurately the cost of nuclear power balloons still further. It's never been particularly cost effective but compared to dirt cheap renewables it's a veritable financial black hole. This is why EDF is currently imploding. It's why only countries that have nukes or really want the option to have nukes build civilian nuclear power plants.
  - akvadrako 4y ago
    windgas? That's not a word I've ever heard or sound like a well established source of energy.

Krasnol 4y ago

I wonder how one measures "over-regulation" in a serious way here. The examples I've seen either come from opinions of certain individuals and the accompanying lobby groups or by setting it next to other regulations from countries which are famous for infrastructural disasters (see China).

fwlr 4y ago
It’s extraordinarily hard! Often in trying to analyze some complex system I have found it’s much more tractable to implement the system and analyze the results (e.g. a montecarlo sim of dice-rolling rather than trying to do the math). Likewise, a tractable way to measure over-regulation might be to simply do nuclear in a limited low-regulation area and draw conclusions from that.
nukeman 4y ago
Like fwir said, it’s difficult to determine what regulations are and aren’t needed. But one example: in the U.S., automatic load following equipment for nuclear power plants are prohibited, so load following needs to be done manually. Whereas in France, this equipment is allowed, and very important, given nuclear makes up a much larger proportion of their grid (and tends to load follow more).

jMyles 4y ago

> and then export these “completely clean conventional fuels” to the rest of the world. ...not where I thought you were going with this argument. Aren't we looking for ways to take the CO2 out of the air? Rather than to sell it so that it gets put back in?

anon84873628 4y ago
Using synthetic hydrocarbons for energy storage seems inevitable to me. Can we really electrify all the vehicles on the planet? How many two stroke engines are in use throughout Southeast Asia alone? Batteries and electric motor technology is just so much more complicated than the internal combustion engine. Then you have airplanes, ocean vessels, military and emergency vehicles... I'm not an expert in this. But swapping fossil fuels for synthetic petroleum made with nuclear or renewable energy seems like the cleanest refactor without rewriting the interface. If feasible. And we'd still want to optimize the whole stack and sequester carbon wherever possible.
- jMyles 4y ago
  OK yeah, sounds totally reasonable when you put it that way.
fwlr 4y ago
Think of the current coal power industry as essentially “digging a lot of pre-sequestered CO2 out of the ground and putting it into the air”. This plan limits the coal industry to only using what’s already in the air, while we build parallel systems to actively sequester air CO2. Building massive carbon capture plants for this purpose also brings economies of scale to other carbon sequestration projects. Finally, you can imagine making a commitment to permanently burying 5% of the output of the synthetic plants, so every round trip the CO2 makes reduces it by 5%.
- jMyles 4y ago
  Yeah, makes sense. Burying 5% of the output... maybe that's what some civilization did 60 million years ago?

whiddershins 4y ago

If changing over regulation is impossible, our civilization is likely doomed.

bitwize 4y ago

Renewables are cheap and pose zero risk of nuclear exposure. We should be looking at 100% renewable solutions.

hanniabu 4y ago

> nuclear over-regulation Ah yes, the classic too much regulation. I'll just leave you with this. There's too much to quote from here, but here's just one excerpt. The post has numerous examples of very concerning issues. > When valves leaked, more leakage was allowed — up to 20 times the original limit. When rampant cracking caused radioactive leaks from steam generator tubing, an easier test of the tubes was devised, so plants could meet standards. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna43455859 https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna43455859 > The proposal comes as most of the nation’s nuclear power plants, which were designed and built in the 1960s or 1970s, are reaching the end of their original 40- to 50-year operating licenses. Many plant operators have sought licenses to extend the operating life of their plants past the original deadlines, even as experts have warned that aging plants come with heightened concerns about safety. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/climate/nrc-nuclear-inspection-weakening.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/climate/nrc-nuclear-inspe... > The nuclear industry is also pushing the NRC to cut down on safety inspections and rely instead on plants to police themselves. The NRC “is listening” to this advice, the Associated Press reported last month. “Annie Caputo, a former nuclear-energy lobbyist now serving as one of four board members appointed or reappointed by President Donald Trump, told an industry meeting this week that she was ‘open to self-assessments’ by nuclear plant operators, who are proposing that self-reporting by operators take the place of some NRC inspections.” https://newrepublic.com/article/153465/its-not-just-pork-trump-also-letting-nuclear-plants-regulate-safety https://newrepublic.com/article/153465/its-not-just-pork-tru...

fwlr 4y ago
De-regulation of existing 1960s era nuclear tech is bad and shouldn’t happen, I agree.

peteradio 4y ago

> The workable solution is to find or make a receptive regulatory environment (perhaps in a small country with large reserves of nuclear fuel and large unpopulated areas to isolate reactors in, like say Australia), use massive banks of nuclear power to power commensurately massive carbon capture plants that turn airborne CO2 back into synthetic coal and synthetic gasoline, and then export these “completely clean conventional fuels” to the rest of the world. Any idea how massively inefficient this would be? > A potent offering and one that’s hopefully hard to regulate against as well. You don't need to regulate against something that cannot possibly turn a profit.

m463 4y ago

> One could probably derive a similar statistic for how much harm nuclear over-regulation has caused. That reminds me of bicycle helmet regulation, which can deter exercising. the paper that tries to figure out if helmet laws might deter people from exercising, which could inadvertently increase mortality: https://nacto.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/2012_de-Jong_Health-Impacts-of-Mandatory-Bicycle-Helmet-Laws.pdf https://nacto.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/2012_de-Jong_He...

bmitc 4y ago
I read the abstract and first part of the introduction. It seems that it is accepted as a foregone conclusion that helmet laws reduce cycling. Is that true? If so, is it because cyclists are less excited about cycling or over worry of the dangers because someone said it's dangerous enough that they need a helmet? I can't imagine making policy (such as removing helmet laws) due to such flighty sentiments. As a motorcyclist, bicyclists remain a mystery to me in their approach to safety.
- stefan_ 4y ago
  That's curious, seeing how motorcyclists are much more frequently seriously injured, and more often as the result of their own actions. I'm not sure there is much to emulate here.
  - bmitc 4y ago
    I'm thinking in a city environment. Motorcyclists ride in much more varied environments at much higher speeds with the other vehicles at higher speeds. Motorcycling is very dangerous, period. But in city riding, motorcycles, cars, and bicycles are effectively bound to the same speed limits, such as between 0-45mph. Obviously, bicycles will be slower at the top end, but for the most part in congested city riding, all three vehicles will be within some range of each other. In my experience and observations, the common motorcyclist will still be far better equipped in safety equipment, including helmets, gloves, jackets, boots, etc. despite having superior protection from the motorcycle itself compared to a bicycle, breaks, and acceleration. And also in my experience, bicyclists are much more willing to break traffic laws in city environments. Maybe the comparison isn't appropriate or too heavily biased with my own safety approaches and experience, but in my experience with serious motorcyclists, anything less than a full-face helmet is viewed as complete folly. The highest percentage of hit in a motorcycle crash is in the front. (There is a famous safety graphic that shows the percentages of where on the helmet a crash occurs.) If I decided to start riding bicycles again, on the street or elsewhere, a helmet will absolutely be used, and I would even consider going further than the typical bicycle helmet. My real point is that I find it extremely strange that some bicyclists would choose simply not to ride at all just because a helmet is required. > and more often as the result of their own actions That is not a blanket truth.

mullingitover 4y ago

> There’s a statistic that floats around the internet claiming more radioactivity harm from coal power than from nuclear power, based on the principle that coal power is essentially aerosolizing tons of particles with ever-so-slightly-higher-than-background radioactivity and there’s a lot more coal than nuclear. Fun fact, it would be a very easy engineering lift to convert coal plants to nuclear (you already have the steam turbines built and ready to go!). However, the moment they switch from a coal plant to a nuclear plant, the existing radioactivity left over from the coal burning operation would immediately get a nuclear plant shut down.

oatmeal1 4y ago

> It seems to me that changing over-regulation is nearly impossible, as it requires making suicidally unpopular arguments: “we shouldn’t weigh the risks”, “we should care less about safety”, “don’t think of the children”, etc. The arguments you list are straw man arguments, but doubtless they would be levied against nuclear energy supporters.

donny2018 4y ago

>Putting synthetic gasoline in a gas station is essentially an over-the-air upgrade to any conventional ICE vehicle making it guaranteed zero emissions. Prometheus (a startup) promises to deliver exactly on that. I believe something commercially viable should be coming in a year or so. I like this overall idea of synthesizing coal and fuels out of atmospheric carbon instead of just burying it somewhere. This could be the easiest and even ROI-able way to implement carbon capture globally, without causing much technological friction and disruption to economies in developing countries.

fwlr 4y ago
Yes. The case for synthesizing carbon fuels from atmospheric carbon is immensely strong - we need to do carbon capture of some kind, and investing in this method will also retrofit the entire world to zero emissions. Other plans for reaching zero emissions worldwide have multi-trillion-dollar price tags and require political pressure on sovereign nations. With this method you can forcibly zero out a recalcitrant country’s emissions by simply subsidising synthetic coal and fuel so that it’s cheaper than regular coal and crude oil, and they will go to zero emissions while getting an economic boost. Arguably, it’s such a strong case that I’m trying to hitch my pet project of nuclear power to its wagon.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  This is a terrible plan. If you want to subsidize another country's power, far better to price dump solar from $13/MWh to $0 than make synthetic coal from $200/MWh nuclear energy at 50% efficiency with an added overhead of $20/MWh for creating it and another $10/MWh to transport it. Merely matching the price of coal will cost you enough that you could just offer to replace all their gas and coal generation for free with no strings. It has the added bonus of only needing to subsidize enough solar to send their fossil fuels into a death spiral of lower load factors and higher costs to compensate. After which supplimenting with wind and storage will be far cheaper for them.

patientplatypus 4y ago

Yeah, except...your Australian idea of putting massive power plants in the Outback and de-carbonizing the atmosphere by shipping fossil fuels into the atmosphere is incredibly inefficient. Just put in small scale nuclear power plants at all the limiting bandwidth areas of every nations' power grids. From there electricity would be essentially be free and you could power cars, trains, buses and everything else from electricity. You could have nuclear powered cargo container vessels. There wouldn't be any need for coal or oil. Why do half measures that would be worse for the environment, when you could just stop using goal and gas entirely? By the time all of the useful plutonium and uranium runs out for making power plants we'll have fusion power (within the next 100-200 years). You're not wrong, and the market may mandate doing this anyway, but if you were going to play benevolent dictator and find the most utilitarian way to maximize the world's happiness you would just make energy free.

fwlr 4y ago
Unfortunately we cannot simply play dictator and insist people who don’t like or trust nuclear power must put up with “a Chernobyl next door to every school” (or similar charged rhetoric). The Outback is one of the few places I can imagine just enough people tolerating for it to happen, where there’s also enough infrastructure and capability to keep it running. The fact that Australia also has the largest reserves of nuclear fuel in the world and a significant investment in mining capability certainly doesn’t hurt either. So that’s kinda where it has to be. Once it’s there, how do you make it affect the rest of the world? The longest HVDC cable in operation is 750km at 1.4GW, and the longest being built is 4 x 3,800km cables at 1.8GW each. The undersea internet cable that connects Australia to America goes through Hawaii and is 14,000km long. And you need to get something like 60GW through to power the western region of the US grid, even assuming big advances it’s still like 12 x 14,000km. Impractical. You need to make it transportable. Batteries don’t have energy density to make it work shipping them en masse, especially since they need a return trip. You know what does have high enough energy density to make it worth transporting? Coal and oil, we already do it. Added benefit: it’s a drop-in replacement for existing power systems, no need to rebuild any power systems anywhere. How can we turn nuclear power into coal and oil? Carbon capture synthesis of hydrocarbons. Another added bonus: fights climate change. The previous two bonuses synergise immensely well: they take existing ICE engines and coal power plants and make them zero emissions. The drawback of inefficiency sucks, but it’s more than outweighed by all those benefits. I’m not trying to use nuclear as efficiently as possible. I’m trying to find a place for nuclear in the energy economy.