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Nuclear power is advocated principally by the current energy industry regime because it maintains their existing distribution model. A model that is disrupted b

Nuclear power is advocated principally by the current energy industry regime because it maintains their existing distribution model. A model that is disrupted by wind and solar power generated locally or even individually. I know some people honestly believe that it's a good option. But for every one of them there are three industry lobbyists and social media bots who are working directly for the industry making drastically short sighted arguments. Don't tell me it's safe when other options will never ever make whole parts of the world a toxic wasteland for the rest of human history.

acidburnNSA 4y ago
I'm a nuclear power advocate. I am on social media making arguments in support of massive expansions of nuclear power to reduce air pollution and fight climate change. I have a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering and a professional engineering license in my state. I chose nuclear engineering at age 19 because I wanted to fight climate change, not because I wanted to become an industry lobbyist. There are hundreds of nuclear advocates just like me. While nuclear power is commonly perceived as unduly dangerous, if you're interested in the numbers of it all in context, I highly recommend this page: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy The whole wasteland argument falls apart quickly when you take a look at e.g. a worst case scenario like Chernobyl and compare it to the fact that fossil and biofuel cause 7 million premature deaths per year from particulate emissions (according to the WHO) and cause global climate change. https://thoughtscapism.com/2019/05/08/what-about-radioactive-wastelands-a-look-at-chernobyls-effects-on-nature/ https://thoughtscapism.com/2019/05/08/what-about-radioactive...
- coldtea 4y ago
  Upton Sinclair — 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.'
  - acidburnNSA 4y ago
    Counterargument: I am readily employable in other related industries and could likely get a significant raise switching. Every time I make an offer to a software engineer who asks for >$50k more than our peak salary, I'm reminded of this fact. Again, I chose nuclear specifically to fight climate change, not to make the most money.
  - abecedarius 4y ago
    This phenomenon cuts both ways. Ralph Nader in the 70s kept telling falsehoods about the health hazards of nuclear power, seemed immune to correction, and had a platform with the press uncritically propagating his claims. (Documented in Petr Beckmann's book at that time.) In retrospect this seems like a hinge point in history leading to our current energy problems. Someone's incentive towards some point of view is not evidence either way about an object-level claim. It's only useful for questions like attention allocation, or like how someone could be so wrong after you've established they're probably wrong.
- 323 4y ago
  How many of the safety assessments take into account the fact that the nuclear waste is almost never buried away and in a dispersed matter and instead it's kept near the nuclear power plant in dry/wet pools because of NIMBY? This has the effect turning the nuclear power plant into a giant dirty bomb. Almost all the problems at Fukushima were caused exactly by these used fuel pools, and not by the nuclear material in the plant itself. And then you have Ukraine where dry storage is shelled with artillery.
- locallost 4y ago
  I chose to be a software developer because I was interested in creating things, but now I am just a cog in a machine trying to generate income. I don't doubt your motives, but what is the situation we are currently in? Nuclear has failed to make a dent in emissions for 60 years now. Whatever the reason might be, rationally it's time to at least ask "can it ever make an impact"? But this question is almost never asked. I honestly believe there is a symbiotic relationship between nuclear and fossil fuel industry. Nuclear cannot survive without the threat of fossil fuels, but it cannot or at least has not for decades prevented fossil fuels dominating electricity production worldwide. So it's a guarantee for keeping the status quo. It's time for something else. Not merely another technology, but another way of thinking.
  - belorn 4y ago
    I remember seeing that question for quite a long time, and the answer was that as long there is cheap access to fossil fuels and the population do not vote for carbon taxes and similar policies, then the answer is no. We will never see alternative technologies unless they can beat fossil fuel on price alone. The bet that the previous governments in EU made the last decades was to switch generation to wind and solar when weather condition makes it cheaper than natural gas, and then use natural gas (primarily bought from Russia) for everything else. When green hydrogen become cheaper than natural gas (estimated 2050-2080) we can start replace that natural gas with hydrogen. The big event that changed that was the invasion of Ukraine and the climbing prices of natural gas. The other way of thinking would be to consider other aspect than price. Those could be geopolitical, global warming, or pollution. I am however doubtful, and the events in EU this winter demonstrated how much citizen demanded government subsidizes and intervention when prices of energy went up. Energy prices are also tied to economic stability and growth, which makes changing the way people think difficult.
  - houseinthesky 4y ago
    > Whatever the reason might be, rationally it's time to at least ask "can it ever make an impact"? The reason is because it's been denied a chance by government regulation, due to a mixture of fossil fuel lobbyists and people's irrational fears stoked by propaganda designed to make it seem scary. The answer to "can it ever make an impact" is yes, it can, using existing technology, right now. We just have to get rid of the regulations designed to destroy it.
- Kon5ole 4y ago
  >a worst case scenario like Chernobyl Chernobyl was not a worst-case scenario, it is just the worst scenario that has happened so far. If it hadn't been handled by humans sacrificing their lives to stop the chain of events, it could have been much, much worse. Had the fire continued it could indeed have been a "wasteland" scenario. The site you recommend makes claims about safety that are logically broken. Things are not safe based on what has happened so far, they are safe or unsafe based on what could happen in the future. Surely you realize this. The claim this site makes is equivalent to saying that a gun is safe if it hasn't been used yet. I frankly find it to be a very dishonest argument, it seems designed to mislead rather than enlighten.
  - acidburnNSA 4y ago
    The fact that it was: a) an unstable reactor b) without a containment structure c) that was put through a dangerous experiment overriding safety systems means to me that it's very likely to be the worst commercial nuclear power scenario we'll see. Compare with Fukushima where a whole area was inundated by a tsunami and a triple meltdown, leading to very few, if any, people receiving more than the minimum dose known to cause measurable harm. And again keep in mind that we're comparing against fossil and biofuel, which power over 80% of the planet and cause 7 million premature deaths from particulate emissions every single year just operating normally. I guess the term 'worst case scenario' isn't really useful since there's always someone who can come up with something else, regardless of how unlikely it is. Fair point on that.
    - Gwypaas 4y ago
      Now try get private insurance for a nuclear power plant. The alternative is not burning things, it is renewables. Stop creating a strawman to argue against.
      - acidburnNSA 4y ago
        Try to get private insurance against climate change and air pollution and blackouts. Fossil and biofuel make 80% of our energy. This is not a straw man argument.
- Maursault 4y ago
  > While nuclear power is commonly perceived as unduly dangerous That isn't the issue, which is solely economics. Don't waste your time advocating and persuading. Bring the power of your nuclear engineering Ph.D. to bear towards making nuclear power profitable. There is nothing else is stopping nuclear power other than the economics. It's a deal-breaker. But make it profitable, and there is nothing on this Earth that could stop the proliferation of nuclear power plants. They'd literally be everywhere.
  - acidburnNSA 4y ago
    My PhD research was focused on reactor economics optimizations.
- natmaka 4y ago
  Nuclear: there are many ways to estimate the amount of victims (long-term, all ailments...), leading to a huge interval of values. "Fossil fuel or nuclear" is obsolete since renewables became pertinent. Moreover our current capacity to deploy useful nuclear reactors isn't convincing. 'Our world in data' retains the Banqiao case. It is somewhat debatable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32492422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32492422
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
physPop 4y ago
The problem with your argument is that renewables aren't readily deployable in all situations and we still haven't solved grid level storgae to even out baseload generation. Instead, the uneducated, anti nuclear sentiment that you and your kind spread activley leads to MORE polution, climate damage and (most ironically) release of radioactive and carcinogenic by-products as governemtns instead need to turn to natural gas and coal generation, both of which have significanlty worse polluting and safety profiles than nuclear. People don't understand how tightly nuclear is regulated. If we had anywhere near these same regulations in other industries we'd never have a SVB or Lehman failure. We wouldn't have airplanes crash from lack of maintinence. We wouldn't have oil spils from rigs detaching or drilling too agressively.
Georgelemental 4y ago
> Nuclear power is advocated principally by the current energy industry regime because it maintains their existing distribution model. In what world? Yes, nuclear could cleanly replace existing fossil fuel plants, which is exactly why the fossil fuel industry tries to stop it! In contrast, intermittent solar and wind aren't viable full replacements to fossil fuel electricity, so Exxon-Mobil and co are comfortable investing in it.
parineum 4y ago
As if giant solar and wind farms don't work on the exact same model... That happens for a really good reason, it's cheaper. It's less durable than a distributed system but distributed systems don't get the benefit of scale. People choose to not have solar panels on their houses and windmills in their back yards because the power from the power company is often cheaper and comes with out initial investment or personal intervention. All thought is taken out of the process and customers like that. Dollars converted to energy with the least amount of intermediary steps is preferred.
- enslavedrobot 4y ago
  Regulation is the reason that it's not cheaper. In Australia solar on your roof is 40 cents a watt installed because they deregulated the industry. In reality grid maintenance and transmission costs are 80 to 90% of your electricity bill. Our existing electricity system is a lot like the old world of mainframe computing, rooftop solar and storage is like the introduction of the PC. We all know how that worked out.
  - illusivefeline 4y ago
    Yes...we have these huge installations called Datacenters, that consume 1% of the global electricity and are behind all these internet services people like to boast so much about. Even this website is being hosted in a huge datacenter somewhere. Not on a distributed p2p network, even though those technologies have been around for a long time. Pretty much everything serious people do online is offloaded to one of these places. You probably don't store your emails or messages on your PC. You store them on the cloud. You also likely don't maintain a movie collection anymore, you use Netflix or Youtube. Your digital devices are mostly useless without an internet connection and strongly depends on an ecosystem of centralized data services stored and processed in datacenters. An old estimate put the energy consumption of an Iphone as comparable to a fridge once you took the data services into perspective. [1] Even the actual connectivity infrastructure behind the internet is very centralized. We have a handful of optical fiber cables at the bottom of the seven seas connecting large routing centers that makes the internet tick. [1] https://science.time.com/2013/08/14/power-drain-the-digital-cloud-is-using-more-energy-than-you-think/ https://science.time.com/2013/08/14/power-drain-the-digital-...

acidburnNSA 4y ago

I'm a nuclear power advocate. I am on social media making arguments in support of massive expansions of nuclear power to reduce air pollution and fight climate change. I have a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering and a professional engineering license in my state. I chose nuclear engineering at age 19 because I wanted to fight climate change, not because I wanted to become an industry lobbyist. There are hundreds of nuclear advocates just like me. While nuclear power is commonly perceived as unduly dangerous, if you're interested in the numbers of it all in context, I highly recommend this page: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy The whole wasteland argument falls apart quickly when you take a look at e.g. a worst case scenario like Chernobyl and compare it to the fact that fossil and biofuel cause 7 million premature deaths per year from particulate emissions (according to the WHO) and cause global climate change. https://thoughtscapism.com/2019/05/08/what-about-radioactive-wastelands-a-look-at-chernobyls-effects-on-nature/ https://thoughtscapism.com/2019/05/08/what-about-radioactive...

coldtea 4y ago
Upton Sinclair — 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.'
- acidburnNSA 4y ago
  Counterargument: I am readily employable in other related industries and could likely get a significant raise switching. Every time I make an offer to a software engineer who asks for >$50k more than our peak salary, I'm reminded of this fact. Again, I chose nuclear specifically to fight climate change, not to make the most money.
- abecedarius 4y ago
  This phenomenon cuts both ways. Ralph Nader in the 70s kept telling falsehoods about the health hazards of nuclear power, seemed immune to correction, and had a platform with the press uncritically propagating his claims. (Documented in Petr Beckmann's book at that time.) In retrospect this seems like a hinge point in history leading to our current energy problems. Someone's incentive towards some point of view is not evidence either way about an object-level claim. It's only useful for questions like attention allocation, or like how someone could be so wrong after you've established they're probably wrong.
323 4y ago
How many of the safety assessments take into account the fact that the nuclear waste is almost never buried away and in a dispersed matter and instead it's kept near the nuclear power plant in dry/wet pools because of NIMBY? This has the effect turning the nuclear power plant into a giant dirty bomb. Almost all the problems at Fukushima were caused exactly by these used fuel pools, and not by the nuclear material in the plant itself. And then you have Ukraine where dry storage is shelled with artillery.
locallost 4y ago
I chose to be a software developer because I was interested in creating things, but now I am just a cog in a machine trying to generate income. I don't doubt your motives, but what is the situation we are currently in? Nuclear has failed to make a dent in emissions for 60 years now. Whatever the reason might be, rationally it's time to at least ask "can it ever make an impact"? But this question is almost never asked. I honestly believe there is a symbiotic relationship between nuclear and fossil fuel industry. Nuclear cannot survive without the threat of fossil fuels, but it cannot or at least has not for decades prevented fossil fuels dominating electricity production worldwide. So it's a guarantee for keeping the status quo. It's time for something else. Not merely another technology, but another way of thinking.
- belorn 4y ago
  I remember seeing that question for quite a long time, and the answer was that as long there is cheap access to fossil fuels and the population do not vote for carbon taxes and similar policies, then the answer is no. We will never see alternative technologies unless they can beat fossil fuel on price alone. The bet that the previous governments in EU made the last decades was to switch generation to wind and solar when weather condition makes it cheaper than natural gas, and then use natural gas (primarily bought from Russia) for everything else. When green hydrogen become cheaper than natural gas (estimated 2050-2080) we can start replace that natural gas with hydrogen. The big event that changed that was the invasion of Ukraine and the climbing prices of natural gas. The other way of thinking would be to consider other aspect than price. Those could be geopolitical, global warming, or pollution. I am however doubtful, and the events in EU this winter demonstrated how much citizen demanded government subsidizes and intervention when prices of energy went up. Energy prices are also tied to economic stability and growth, which makes changing the way people think difficult.
- houseinthesky 4y ago
  > Whatever the reason might be, rationally it's time to at least ask "can it ever make an impact"? The reason is because it's been denied a chance by government regulation, due to a mixture of fossil fuel lobbyists and people's irrational fears stoked by propaganda designed to make it seem scary. The answer to "can it ever make an impact" is yes, it can, using existing technology, right now. We just have to get rid of the regulations designed to destroy it.
Kon5ole 4y ago
>a worst case scenario like Chernobyl Chernobyl was not a worst-case scenario, it is just the worst scenario that has happened so far. If it hadn't been handled by humans sacrificing their lives to stop the chain of events, it could have been much, much worse. Had the fire continued it could indeed have been a "wasteland" scenario. The site you recommend makes claims about safety that are logically broken. Things are not safe based on what has happened so far, they are safe or unsafe based on what could happen in the future. Surely you realize this. The claim this site makes is equivalent to saying that a gun is safe if it hasn't been used yet. I frankly find it to be a very dishonest argument, it seems designed to mislead rather than enlighten.
- acidburnNSA 4y ago
  The fact that it was: a) an unstable reactor b) without a containment structure c) that was put through a dangerous experiment overriding safety systems means to me that it's very likely to be the worst commercial nuclear power scenario we'll see. Compare with Fukushima where a whole area was inundated by a tsunami and a triple meltdown, leading to very few, if any, people receiving more than the minimum dose known to cause measurable harm. And again keep in mind that we're comparing against fossil and biofuel, which power over 80% of the planet and cause 7 million premature deaths from particulate emissions every single year just operating normally. I guess the term 'worst case scenario' isn't really useful since there's always someone who can come up with something else, regardless of how unlikely it is. Fair point on that.
  - Gwypaas 4y ago
    Now try get private insurance for a nuclear power plant. The alternative is not burning things, it is renewables. Stop creating a strawman to argue against.
    - acidburnNSA 4y ago
      Try to get private insurance against climate change and air pollution and blackouts. Fossil and biofuel make 80% of our energy. This is not a straw man argument.
Maursault 4y ago
> While nuclear power is commonly perceived as unduly dangerous That isn't the issue, which is solely economics. Don't waste your time advocating and persuading. Bring the power of your nuclear engineering Ph.D. to bear towards making nuclear power profitable. There is nothing else is stopping nuclear power other than the economics. It's a deal-breaker. But make it profitable, and there is nothing on this Earth that could stop the proliferation of nuclear power plants. They'd literally be everywhere.
- acidburnNSA 4y ago
  My PhD research was focused on reactor economics optimizations.
natmaka 4y ago
Nuclear: there are many ways to estimate the amount of victims (long-term, all ailments...), leading to a huge interval of values. "Fossil fuel or nuclear" is obsolete since renewables became pertinent. Moreover our current capacity to deploy useful nuclear reactors isn't convincing. 'Our world in data' retains the Banqiao case. It is somewhat debatable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32492422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32492422

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

physPop 4y ago

The problem with your argument is that renewables aren't readily deployable in all situations and we still haven't solved grid level storgae to even out baseload generation. Instead, the uneducated, anti nuclear sentiment that you and your kind spread activley leads to MORE polution, climate damage and (most ironically) release of radioactive and carcinogenic by-products as governemtns instead need to turn to natural gas and coal generation, both of which have significanlty worse polluting and safety profiles than nuclear. People don't understand how tightly nuclear is regulated. If we had anywhere near these same regulations in other industries we'd never have a SVB or Lehman failure. We wouldn't have airplanes crash from lack of maintinence. We wouldn't have oil spils from rigs detaching or drilling too agressively.

Georgelemental 4y ago

> Nuclear power is advocated principally by the current energy industry regime because it maintains their existing distribution model. In what world? Yes, nuclear could cleanly replace existing fossil fuel plants, which is exactly why the fossil fuel industry tries to stop it! In contrast, intermittent solar and wind aren't viable full replacements to fossil fuel electricity, so Exxon-Mobil and co are comfortable investing in it.

parineum 4y ago

As if giant solar and wind farms don't work on the exact same model... That happens for a really good reason, it's cheaper. It's less durable than a distributed system but distributed systems don't get the benefit of scale. People choose to not have solar panels on their houses and windmills in their back yards because the power from the power company is often cheaper and comes with out initial investment or personal intervention. All thought is taken out of the process and customers like that. Dollars converted to energy with the least amount of intermediary steps is preferred.

enslavedrobot 4y ago
Regulation is the reason that it's not cheaper. In Australia solar on your roof is 40 cents a watt installed because they deregulated the industry. In reality grid maintenance and transmission costs are 80 to 90% of your electricity bill. Our existing electricity system is a lot like the old world of mainframe computing, rooftop solar and storage is like the introduction of the PC. We all know how that worked out.
- illusivefeline 4y ago
  Yes...we have these huge installations called Datacenters, that consume 1% of the global electricity and are behind all these internet services people like to boast so much about. Even this website is being hosted in a huge datacenter somewhere. Not on a distributed p2p network, even though those technologies have been around for a long time. Pretty much everything serious people do online is offloaded to one of these places. You probably don't store your emails or messages on your PC. You store them on the cloud. You also likely don't maintain a movie collection anymore, you use Netflix or Youtube. Your digital devices are mostly useless without an internet connection and strongly depends on an ecosystem of centralized data services stored and processed in datacenters. An old estimate put the energy consumption of an Iphone as comparable to a fridge once you took the data services into perspective. [1] Even the actual connectivity infrastructure behind the internet is very centralized. We have a handful of optical fiber cables at the bottom of the seven seas connecting large routing centers that makes the internet tick. [1] https://science.time.com/2013/08/14/power-drain-the-digital-cloud-is-using-more-energy-than-you-think/ https://science.time.com/2013/08/14/power-drain-the-digital-...