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> But due to historical accidents, lack of imagination, government bungling and regulation, incompetent engineering and operation leading to a small number of h
by Tade0 3y ago
> But due to historical accidents, lack of imagination, government bungling and regulation, incompetent engineering and operation leading to a small number of highly-visible accidents, fear mongering by media and ignorant advocates of other technologies or abandonment of our energy-intensive modern civilisation, nuclear fission power never achieved the ambitious goals (“too cheap to meter”) it originally seemed to promise.
Perhaps that promise was empty?
Blaming government regulation is especially a red flag to me here. It didn't prevent aviation from proliferating, even though the laws are, to put it mildly, draconian. With all that it's the safest mode on transportation by a wide margin.
China is currently in the process of realizing nuclear power's potential and it appears that in terms of energy delivered it can't actually keep up with renewables - despite no systemic obstacles like in the west.
Eventually everyone is going to just build renewable capacity and storage because that's simply the fastest, cheapest way to get energy.
Developing countries especially have an interesting approach to renewables, because grids there are notoriously unreliable, so there's no expectation of having power 24/7. For this reason they opt for renewables instead of waiting for that nuclear power plant to happen.
- roenxi 3y ago> It didn't prevent aviation from proliferating Planes still crash from time to time. The regulations on the aviation industry are the ant version of regulations compared to the elephants that the nuclear industry has to put up with. planes are only 600x safer than driving by death toll [0]. That would be a shut-the-industry-down safety stat for nuclear plants. That is why people are pointing out the nuclear safety rules are stupid. There is no comparable regulation on any industry. If nuclear plants were regulated to airline safety levels I would just be saying "meh, too expensive" in HN debates on the subject. The fact that it is still in the running despite crazy regulatory requirements is why there is reason to think it'd be a new age of energy if the technology was regulated sensibly. [0] https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/deaths-by-transportation-mode/ https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...
- gmerc 3y agoSurely a nuclear accident will affect 600x more people than a plane crash…
- roenxi 3y agoIt'll kill a lot less people than a plane crash.
- brazzy 3y agoIt could very, very easily kill a thousand times more. That we haven't seen anything like a worst case scenario for a unclear accident does not mean those are impossible.
- roenxi 3y agoWhat do you think that worst case is, and how are you estimating it?
- oneshtein 3y agoWorst case is a continent wide Red Forest.
- ttfkam 3y agoChernobyl was a perfect storm of bad design, political corruption, and reckless behavior. No Western nuclear plant has ever run without a containment dome, has excluded basic plant design info from its operators, or put in incentives to run a reckless spin down experiment while also cutting all cooling and raising all control rods. Three Mile Island was close to worst possible in a Western design, and those aspects that led to that accident were fixed 45 years ago. Worst case isn't a nuclear accident at this point; it's continued reliance on fossil fuels and the accelerating effects from warming the planet. Huge swaths of land near the equator that will be rendered uninhabitable for large scale human habitation due to extreme heat events. We have already seen 129 degrees in those areas with a real heat index (due to humidity) of 142. These areas are already at their absolute limit. That's your continent-wide Red Forest.
- TheLoafOfBread 3y agoIf nuclear safety rules would be applied to dams, we would need to tear them all down, because those devilish things killed thousand times more people than nuclear ever did. Also a big chemical plant failure has potential to kill more people than all nuclear failures combined - See Bhopal disaster