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Surely a nuclear accident will affect 600x more people than a plane crash…

by gmerc 3y ago

roenxi 3y ago
It'll kill a lot less people than a plane crash.
- brazzy 3y ago
  It 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 ago
    What do you think that worst case is, and how are you estimating it?
    - oneshtein 3y ago
      Worst case is a continent wide Red Forest.
      - ttfkam 3y ago
        Chernobyl 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.
        Zigurd 3y ago
        Renewables capex already outstrips fossil fuels. Complete that transition and get all the power we need for less money, sooner, and you can buy private insurance at low rates to cover any risks.
        ttfkam 3y ago
        How well do solar and wind infrastructures handle tornados and hurricanes? Also, consistent wind resources are notably absent in the South/Southeast. There are no Hoover Dam-like sites available there. Do you honestly expect to tell tens of millions of people that they should just be content with a single hurricane knocking out their electricity grid for a month? That's not realistic. You cannot plan an electrical future on the hope that the weather is always pleasant and consistent. This is one of the reasons why fossil fuel dominance continues in those regions. Go ahead and draw a map of those places where hurricanes and tornados are most prevalent and their large scale adoption of solar and wind. They're not stupid. They're not just political. There are real concerns you are handwaving away because you (likely) like in a region that does not have these same concerns. What works for California will not work for Georgia, Florida, or Nebraska as-is. Baseball-size hail destroys huge solar arrays let alone softball-size [0]. Nuclear plants laugh at hail and would handle and have(!) weathered tornados and hurricanes just fine. Check the numbers. Even accounting for nuclear disasters outside the US like Chernobyl and Fukushima, the number of deaths attributed to nuclear power per unit of electricity is lower than any fossil fuel, lower than wind, and about equal to solar. Just imagine if we put the same R&D force behind nuclear that we've done for solar. You think solar's cheap? It wasn't ten years ago. It was intense investment that made it so. We have the same potential for nuclear. At the very least, we should be aggressively working toward fast neutron reactors so that we don't have spent fuel that will remain dangerously radioactive for 100,000+ years. We can "burn" that "waste" and supply the entire current need for US electrical production for the next 150 years without mining a single new kilogram of uranium [1]. [0] https://cowboystatedaily.com/2023/06/27/baseball-sized-hail-smashing-into-panels-at-150-mph-destroys-scottsbluff-solar-farm/ https://cowboystatedaily.com/2023/06/27/baseball-sized-hail-... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzQ3gFRj0Bc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzQ3gFRj0Bc
    - brazzy 3y ago
      Core meltdown and containment failure in (or near and upwind of) a megacity would be the obvious one. Another exciting option: unnoticed containment failure of waste storage, which contaminates huge amounts of groundwater over weeks and months before the contaminated water starts reaching a densely populated area. And don't tell me these things can't happen outside the Soviet Union. Greed and complacenty can always find a way.
      - aeternum 3y ago
        Nuclear radiation is much harder to hide compared to other forms of contamination.
    - urinotherapist 3y ago
      If Russia will blow up Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant in Ukraine, then huge area of productive land and sea can be heavily contaminated, which can lead to global famine, which can kill millions.
      - roenxi 3y ago
        This might be news to you, but Russia has the world's largest stockpile of nuclear weapons and can kill billions of people, if it wanted to. They get to pick the amount of damage that they want to cause and then do that much damage. Anything from no damage to possible end of humanity. Similarly then can contaminate whatever area they want to. Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant doesn't really factor in to that picture.
    - pfdietz 3y ago
      This whole thread is about breeder reactors. The worst case (for a fast reactor) is the reactor rearranging in a meltdown and going prompt fast supercritical, resulting in a honest-to-god nuclear explosion. And remember a fast breeder is going to have tonnes of plutonium in that core, not the kilograms of a fission weapon.
  - krupan 3y ago
    We haven't seen anything like a worst case scenario for [insert any energy source here]. So? Covering too much land in solar panels could have dire long-term effects that we don't even know. Sucking too much energy out of the air with windmills could too. All energy sources have risks.
    - brazzy 3y ago
      We absolutely have seen worst case failures for everything except perhaps dam failures. Your solar and windmill speculations are completely implausible, relying on nebulous things "we don't know". But we know exactly how badly nuclear reactors can fail, we know exactly how widely nuclear contamination can spread, and we know exactly what it can do to people. The results if those things happened on a large scale in a densely populated area are not speculative at all.
- throwbadubadu 3y ago
  Kill is anyway a very bad metric for something that (if at all) will only manifest in some dice rolls of many dice probabilities involved in the cancer and other illnesses rolling game. In that sense, always surprised that deaths by coal exhaust get fully overattributed, but that this is completely ignored (e.g. when also claiming that Tschernobyl caused only few deaths, while we see a lot of young people still suffering today). Hard to take it serious then :/
ajuc 3y ago
Less people died in Fukushima accident than dies yearly because of coal powerplants pumping radioactive materials into atmosphere. If you calculate radioactive materials released per energy produced - nuclear is below coal, even including all the accidents. It's irrational to avoid nuclear powerplants.
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  Have you seen the economic costs of the cleanup operation though? It's absolutely astronomical (for various reasons). That money is not money going to new nuclear plants or renewables, but going to nowhere. This effects people too. Edit: Really don't get the down vote here. It's costing the Japanese anywhere from $200-$800 billion? (Depending on how you look at it) Is this controversial or something? Is that not a lot of money and an unaccounted for cost of nuclear?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - roenxi 3y ago
    > Edit: Really don't get the down vote here. It's costing the Japanese anywhere from $200-$800 billion? 1) That isn't an astronomical number. It is $2,000-$8,000 per Japanese person. For a freak accident. Put that in $/kWh terms and you might find that nuclear was reasonably cost effective even in one of the worst nuclear disasters in history, let alone under normal conditions. 2) I don't know if it is controversial; although if the people demanding the cleanup are the same lunatics who regulate the industry in the west I want to see what the justification is for spending $100s of billions of dollars. 3) The cleanup cost should be considered. When we multiply probability by cost it will be a short consideration. There is no way it is as bad as what everyone is currently already doing with coal. It is likely that it will also be better than renewables once waste is factored in, just because the volumes of material involved.
    - ttfkam 3y ago
      Pretty sure the cleanup costs for continued use of coal, oil, and natural gas due to global climate change far exceed any from nuclear, including even Chernobyl. Entire nations are disappearing under the rising seas [0]. So far they are relatively poor and lack political influence. Bangladesh is soon for the chopping block. Louisiana and Florida are not far behind. Folks really don't get how close to sea level massive portions of these very large areas are. Far larger than the Fukushima exclusion zone, that's for sure. [0] https://www.reuters.com/business/cop/tuvalu-turns-metaverse-rising-seas-threaten-existence-2022-11-15/ https://www.reuters.com/business/cop/tuvalu-turns-metaverse-...

Surely a nuclear accident will affect 600x more people than a plane crash…

by gmerc 3y ago

Surely a nuclear accident will affect 600x more people than a plane crash…

roenxi 3y ago

It'll kill a lot less people than a plane crash.

brazzy 3y ago
It 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 ago
  What do you think that worst case is, and how are you estimating it?
  - oneshtein 3y ago
    Worst case is a continent wide Red Forest.
    - ttfkam 3y ago
      Chernobyl 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.
      - Zigurd 3y ago
        Renewables capex already outstrips fossil fuels. Complete that transition and get all the power we need for less money, sooner, and you can buy private insurance at low rates to cover any risks.
        ttfkam 3y ago
        How well do solar and wind infrastructures handle tornados and hurricanes? Also, consistent wind resources are notably absent in the South/Southeast. There are no Hoover Dam-like sites available there. Do you honestly expect to tell tens of millions of people that they should just be content with a single hurricane knocking out their electricity grid for a month? That's not realistic. You cannot plan an electrical future on the hope that the weather is always pleasant and consistent. This is one of the reasons why fossil fuel dominance continues in those regions. Go ahead and draw a map of those places where hurricanes and tornados are most prevalent and their large scale adoption of solar and wind. They're not stupid. They're not just political. There are real concerns you are handwaving away because you (likely) like in a region that does not have these same concerns. What works for California will not work for Georgia, Florida, or Nebraska as-is. Baseball-size hail destroys huge solar arrays let alone softball-size [0]. Nuclear plants laugh at hail and would handle and have(!) weathered tornados and hurricanes just fine. Check the numbers. Even accounting for nuclear disasters outside the US like Chernobyl and Fukushima, the number of deaths attributed to nuclear power per unit of electricity is lower than any fossil fuel, lower than wind, and about equal to solar. Just imagine if we put the same R&D force behind nuclear that we've done for solar. You think solar's cheap? It wasn't ten years ago. It was intense investment that made it so. We have the same potential for nuclear. At the very least, we should be aggressively working toward fast neutron reactors so that we don't have spent fuel that will remain dangerously radioactive for 100,000+ years. We can "burn" that "waste" and supply the entire current need for US electrical production for the next 150 years without mining a single new kilogram of uranium [1]. [0] https://cowboystatedaily.com/2023/06/27/baseball-sized-hail-smashing-into-panels-at-150-mph-destroys-scottsbluff-solar-farm/ https://cowboystatedaily.com/2023/06/27/baseball-sized-hail-... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzQ3gFRj0Bc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzQ3gFRj0Bc
  - brazzy 3y ago
    Core meltdown and containment failure in (or near and upwind of) a megacity would be the obvious one. Another exciting option: unnoticed containment failure of waste storage, which contaminates huge amounts of groundwater over weeks and months before the contaminated water starts reaching a densely populated area. And don't tell me these things can't happen outside the Soviet Union. Greed and complacenty can always find a way.
    - aeternum 3y ago
      Nuclear radiation is much harder to hide compared to other forms of contamination.
  - urinotherapist 3y ago
    If Russia will blow up Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant in Ukraine, then huge area of productive land and sea can be heavily contaminated, which can lead to global famine, which can kill millions.
    - roenxi 3y ago
      This might be news to you, but Russia has the world's largest stockpile of nuclear weapons and can kill billions of people, if it wanted to. They get to pick the amount of damage that they want to cause and then do that much damage. Anything from no damage to possible end of humanity. Similarly then can contaminate whatever area they want to. Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant doesn't really factor in to that picture.
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    This whole thread is about breeder reactors. The worst case (for a fast reactor) is the reactor rearranging in a meltdown and going prompt fast supercritical, resulting in a honest-to-god nuclear explosion. And remember a fast breeder is going to have tonnes of plutonium in that core, not the kilograms of a fission weapon.
- krupan 3y ago
  We haven't seen anything like a worst case scenario for [insert any energy source here]. So? Covering too much land in solar panels could have dire long-term effects that we don't even know. Sucking too much energy out of the air with windmills could too. All energy sources have risks.
  - brazzy 3y ago
    We absolutely have seen worst case failures for everything except perhaps dam failures. Your solar and windmill speculations are completely implausible, relying on nebulous things "we don't know". But we know exactly how badly nuclear reactors can fail, we know exactly how widely nuclear contamination can spread, and we know exactly what it can do to people. The results if those things happened on a large scale in a densely populated area are not speculative at all.
throwbadubadu 3y ago
Kill is anyway a very bad metric for something that (if at all) will only manifest in some dice rolls of many dice probabilities involved in the cancer and other illnesses rolling game. In that sense, always surprised that deaths by coal exhaust get fully overattributed, but that this is completely ignored (e.g. when also claiming that Tschernobyl caused only few deaths, while we see a lot of young people still suffering today). Hard to take it serious then :/

ajuc 3y ago

Less people died in Fukushima accident than dies yearly because of coal powerplants pumping radioactive materials into atmosphere. If you calculate radioactive materials released per energy produced - nuclear is below coal, even including all the accidents. It's irrational to avoid nuclear powerplants.

ChatGTP 3y ago
Have you seen the economic costs of the cleanup operation though? It's absolutely astronomical (for various reasons). That money is not money going to new nuclear plants or renewables, but going to nowhere. This effects people too. Edit: Really don't get the down vote here. It's costing the Japanese anywhere from $200-$800 billion? (Depending on how you look at it) Is this controversial or something? Is that not a lot of money and an unaccounted for cost of nuclear?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- roenxi 3y ago
  > Edit: Really don't get the down vote here. It's costing the Japanese anywhere from $200-$800 billion? 1) That isn't an astronomical number. It is $2,000-$8,000 per Japanese person. For a freak accident. Put that in $/kWh terms and you might find that nuclear was reasonably cost effective even in one of the worst nuclear disasters in history, let alone under normal conditions. 2) I don't know if it is controversial; although if the people demanding the cleanup are the same lunatics who regulate the industry in the west I want to see what the justification is for spending $100s of billions of dollars. 3) The cleanup cost should be considered. When we multiply probability by cost it will be a short consideration. There is no way it is as bad as what everyone is currently already doing with coal. It is likely that it will also be better than renewables once waste is factored in, just because the volumes of material involved.
  - ttfkam 3y ago
    Pretty sure the cleanup costs for continued use of coal, oil, and natural gas due to global climate change far exceed any from nuclear, including even Chernobyl. Entire nations are disappearing under the rising seas [0]. So far they are relatively poor and lack political influence. Bangladesh is soon for the chopping block. Louisiana and Florida are not far behind. Folks really don't get how close to sea level massive portions of these very large areas are. Far larger than the Fukushima exclusion zone, that's for sure. [0] https://www.reuters.com/business/cop/tuvalu-turns-metaverse-rising-seas-threaten-existence-2022-11-15/ https://www.reuters.com/business/cop/tuvalu-turns-metaverse-...