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Worked in nuclear power for five years and wish people could divorce themselves of bias when considering power. When you plug things in it has a cost greater th
by robviren 3y ago
Worked in nuclear power for five years and wish people could divorce themselves of bias when considering power. When you plug things in it has a cost greater than the dollars you are paying. In raw deaths per megawatt nuclear wins above all else. I'm not saying we should avoid solar and wind. I'm saying we should dive headlong into every form of power that seems a reasonable risk to human life and the environment before 1000+ human death wildfires, starvation, and every other natural disaster becomes common place. Belching coal exhaust or gas turbine exhaust into the air seems a careless act when I have personally sat inside, on top of, under, and to the side of nuclear reactors and have yet to fall over dead. Spent fuel can be handled and most import you don't need to breath it and it doesn't warm the planet. Everything has a cost and I would gladly bare the cost of nuclear for a world worth living in.
- midoridensha 3y ago>In raw deaths per megawatt nuclear wins above all else. Just a quibble here: your post is obviously pro-nuclear-power, however this sentence seems to claim that nuclear power causes more deaths than any other power source, which is not what I think you meant.
- mcronce 3y agoI think that depends on your perspective - specifically, whether you think more deaths or fewer deaths is winning:)
- robviren 3y agoDeath, the heavy metal solution to climate change.
- arcticbull 3y agoI believe the OP is saying that it "wins" by having the fewest deaths per TWh, and it does - it's the same as solar and wind. [1] By far the worst is coal which [1] has conservatively at 25 deaths per TWh vs nuclear at 0.04. The worst nuclear incident of all time killed 4000 people, and Fukushima killed exactly 1 person. The third-worst, Three Mile Island killed 0. This isn't even low sample size. Nuclear has generated 20% of the entire US power demand for decades. Even if you attribute all the deaths from the bungled evacuation of Fukushima to nuclear power (2300), 10X more people would have died in the normal course of operating a coal power plant at the site over the course of the reactor's life (1485TWh from 1979 to 2011 @ 25 deaths/TWh = 37,000). [1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
- bilbo0s 3y agoThe problem is not deaths per megawatt. Nor bias. Look at the economic disaster that is Vogtie. People need to be reasonable. If we want nuclear, the government will need to pay for it. Right now everyone's waiting for energy investors and the financial engineering that backs them to throw money into nuclear. It won't happen. We want rich people to throw their billions at nuclear for a return years and years from now, instead of spending it just slapping up some windmills and getting a return next month. T Boone Pickens was one of the most conservative energy investors that ever lived, and he was slapping up windmills left and right. That won't stop until the tax payer agrees to insulate investors from any losses. Everyone's saying, "We want nuclear." But when we give them the financial consequences of nuclear like we did at Vogtie, they get pissed. You can't have it both ways. You want it? Cool. Don't complain about being told you have to pay off your region's reactors. A little more cooperation from everyone on the finances would go a long way here.
- TheDudeMan 3y agoGet rid of the red tape and nuclear becomes much cheaper (over time).
- bamboozled 3y agoFukushima is what happens when you get rid of the red tape, go look at the cause of the accident and you will see why the red tape exists [1]. The Japanese tax payer is still paying for this disaster, and the environment is paying in more ways imaginable, all of the cleanup operation so far has been running on fossil fuels and it's an significant amount of cleanup still going onto this day, hundreds of thousands of tons of top soil have been moved around the country and stored in disintegrating plastic bags which end up in rivers, for example. People avoid buying produce and seafood from the area too which has had enormous impact on the economy and tens of thousands of people have been displaced with little to no compensation or anywhere to go. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_disaster#2000_and_2008:_Tsunami_studies_ignored https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_disaster#200...
- 3y ago
- FunnyLookinHat 3y agoCannot recommend this podcast enough: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/nuclear-power-isnt-perfect-is-it-good-enough/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/nuclear-power-isnt-perfect-... It goes into detail about the argument you are proposing.
- dv_dt 3y agoI treat public industry estimates of death from nuclear power which the same integrity I treat the fossil fuel industry reports on climate change. They are both intrinsically motivated to systematically deny the ill effects. And if you dig into the deaths you’ll find that basically any plausibly deniable cancer death is discounted. And accounting for disasters like Fukushima will try to discount deaths due to evacuation afterwards to bad policy arguing that somehow we should have let everyone to stay in the area be irradiated. The estimates also suffer from minimization from bad human intuition - as there will be years of future deaths from Chernobyl and Fukushima but because they are both difficult to peg and small at any single point in time they get discounted. In general the strategy is very similar in deniability effectiveness to the chemical industry in cancers and other illnesses from exposures from everything like pesticides to PFAs.
- imperfectcats 3y agoDitto - and the same with the claims of solar and wind companies because of - [Goodhart's Law - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law - "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" But even if we take that view, how many deaths would nuclear have to have caused to break even with fossil fuels? https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p... puts nuclear at 0.03 and hydropower at 1.3. So it is ~50 times less than hydro. That's a lot of wiggle room!
- fnord77 3y agobig oil astroturfed a campaign against nuclear in the 70s. It was framed as hippies warning nuclear would mean certain death for everyone. that perception stuck
- JamesBarney 3y agoIt was not big oil that pushed the anti-nuclear campaign. It was environmentalists. And they're still active today, sometimes pushing for solar. Sometimes fighting solar and windmills to protect wildlife. Now I'm sure some oil and gas companies decided to fund some of these groups because they saw these people could be useful, but that doesn't mean the movement was astroturfing.
- Gud 3y agoIt was both. And in addition, some of these so called environmental organizations were funded by big oil.
- JamesBarney 3y agoIf big oil writes an environmental organization a check that doesn't make it astro turfing. Astroturfing is pretending their is a movement when there isn't. The anti-nuclear movement was real, big oil just wrote some of them checks because they realized what was bad for nuclear was good for them.
- Gud 3y agoI agree.
- odiroot 3y agoKremlin also played a role in this.
- asynchronous 3y agoPlus then we could get more Fallout themed public places which IMO is a huge plus
- jayd16 3y agoWhat is the major cause of solar death? Roofing falls?
- brucethemoose2 3y agoOpportunity cost in locations solar isn't so efficient. Nuclear is a good "filler" for environments that aren't conducive to other renewables.
- gcanyon 3y agoAmazingly enough, yes: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2021/07/2020-fatalities-for-us-roofers-increased-15-as-solar-roof-installations-increase.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2021/07/2020-fatalities-for-us...
- jandrese 3y agoYep, and the major killer with Wind is people falling off of the turbines. Hydro is extremely safe except for a handful mass casualty incidents that completely skew the numbers. Nuclear is in the same boat, with really just 1 significant incident.
- jayd16 3y agoI think if we're honest, it's obvious what the average voter is scared of. If you separate these deaths into workplace and bystander deaths it paints a different picture.
- kevincox 3y agoIt's still clear that any form of fossil fuel is the loser. Sure, maybe in terms of bystander deaths solar or wind are slightly better than nuclear but both are orders of magnitude better than anything that involves burning. The amount of pollution and radiation that burning fossil fuels emits is orders of magnitude more harmful to the general public than anything that solar, wind or nuclear does.
- Ekaros 3y ago
- noogle 3y agoWe need to shift from thinking of solar/wind as "electricity sources" to thinking of them as "fuel sources". The marginal cost of producing a transferrable fuel from solar/wind is already lower than current electricity prices. The challenge is the capital expenses on equipment (hydrolyzers, fuel cell etc.)
- AtlasBarfed 3y agoOf course the article is just a puff public opinion piece. It doesn't change the economics: Point ONE: nuclear is more expensive CURRENTLY that solar/wind. SOlar/Wind is currently the cheapest by far, and here's the scary thing for gas turbine: solar + storage is very close to druopping under gas combined cycle generation. Look up Lazard 2023 LCOE study. Solar/Wind have dropped to 24$ per MWHr. The cheapest nuclear produces is $141/MWHr. That's right, nuclear is almost 600% more expensive. Point TWO: Say you miraculously got 100 billion dollars through congress for new plants to start immediate projects. Not a single reactor will come online for 10 years. Now, look at the cost improvement rate of solar, wind, and storage for the last 10 years. 10% year-on-year improvements or more. Even if we had half of that for the next 10 years (and there will be 10 more years of cost improvement), solar / wind very likely will be HALF the current cost. So you'd have 100s of nuclear plants come online in 10 years generating electricity that costs 10-20x more than electricity from wind/solar. That simply is not a viable national power strategy. If we had these plants already because construction started in the year 2000, that would probably be a different story. The only hope for nuclear is probably in about 15-20 years where the cost improvement curves finally stabilize for wind/solar, and then a stable price point can be targeted with new nuclear designs. I personally think that only something like a novel MSR/LFTR which can scale down to mass producable sizes, uses all the fuel, breeds. doesn't have solid fuel rod reprocessing and waste transport/storage, and can use the Brayton cycle for more efficiency has a chance of competing with mature solar/wind. Puff pieces like this are really about the current nuclear plants and keeping them on funding life support, which I generally support for now. The industry sees that Lazard LCOE curve just like any other person would: do you want to pay solar/wind costs for electricity, or 6x that for nuclear? The existing nuclear industry can't survive without subsidies.
- 3y ago