5 ms·
When we find a systemic risk across the industry, like the requirement for independent core cooling after Fukushima, we should just roll with it and accept it?
by Gwypaas 3y ago
When we find a systemic risk across the industry, like the requirement for independent core cooling after Fukushima, we should just roll with it and accept it?
Tsunamis do not happen everywhere, but the regulators found the risk to be systemic. As an example: A nuclear reactor in Sweden had a severe incident in 2006 when many of the "defense in depth" layers had been accidentally removed through freak occurrences and upgrades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsmark_Nuclear_Power_Plant#July_2006_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsmark_Nuclear_Power_Plant#J...
- concordDance 3y ago> we should just roll with it and accept it? When your "safety" regulation is costing a billion dollars per QALY then by imposing it you are killing thousands of people, because that money could have instead been spend on other things like cancer screening that would let you save a thousand times as many lives per dollar.
- Gwypaas 3y agoThe other side is, how many QALYs do you get from the at least $150 billion we are spending to clean up Fukushima?
- concordDance 3y agoVery very few indeed, it's stupidly wasteful. The vast majority of that cleanup is incredibly QALY inefficient, spending millions removing tiny bits of radiation from soil that would cause a hundredth of a cancer case. This is because the rules are that they need to return the area to the same radiation levels it used to have, not merely to a safe enough level that further action would be QALY inefficient. Even in 2012 the natural reduction in radiation meant you have only a few square kilometers[1] with exposure levels over 20uSv/h, the level at which we can actually detect a cancer increase. An area that seems to have had less than a thousand people judging by satellite photos. There is no way to justify spending $150 billion cleaning up something that would kill only a couple of people (particularly when you can just pay them the old value of the land/housing and then let them decide whether they want to accept the increased cancer risk) when even in Japan you can save a thousand lives with that money. [1] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/uploadedImages/wnn/Images/Fukushima_Radiation_map_2011_2012%201280x967.jpg https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/uploadedImages/wnn/Images...
- ZeroGravitas 3y agoOr, even if you assume no disasters, how many QALYs can you buy with the cost difference between a renewables based grid and a nuclear based grid. Enough that no one is building one of the latter (not France, not China, not South Korea), and everyone is building one of the former (including France, China and South Korea)
- concordDance 3y agoA purely renewable grid is sadly more expensive due to storage costs. Even CAES isn't enough to get below nuclear.
- ZeroGravitas 3y agoA commonly repeated (was going to say 'believed' but I'm not sure that's actually true) misconception. Why there is a large contingent of people who think nuclear doesn't need storage is a genuine mystery to me. There's been more storage built for nuclear than for any other power source.
- concordDance 3y agoI am unaware of any nuclear electricity storage needs. Wasting extra electricity is trivial, while last I calculated you'd triple electricity costs due to storage if you switched the UK to wind power.
- ZeroGravitas 3y agoSo what number did you get for nuclear when you did these calculations? With no storage you've got to be talking something like 20x for nuclear, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit... > The most important use for pumped storage has traditionally been to balance baseload powerplants, but may also be used to abate the fluctuating output of intermittent energy sources.
- peterfirefly 3y agoThat's not really "the other side", is it? Those 150 billion are just waste/Keynesian stimulus.