3 ms·
That’s ok. They can be wrong :-) Nuclear power has almost unlimited downsides and fairly limited upsides. It’s at least as expensive (and mostly more) to mai
by lifeisstillgood 2y ago
That’s ok. They can be wrong :-)
Nuclear power has almost unlimited downsides
and fairly limited upsides.
It’s at least as expensive (and mostly more) to maintain a nuclear power station
As any other form of (non-carbon) power generation - and the costs of catastrophic failure and orders of magnitude higher.
This is just back of the envelope maths. Cost to maintain a power station of X GW for 100 years is X, cost to maintain solar panels of X GW for 100 years is Y. Cost of total catastrophic failure in fifty years of solar panels because the country fell apart is small y. Cost of total catastrophic failure of fission reactor is huge great X.
The simplest analysis just comes up with huge downsides.
Look I take the train past Battersea powerstation most days. It was built 100 years ago at the height (?) of the British Empire. It became disused as Britain fell into bankruptcy in the 70s and was left to fester for decades before people realised a vast shopping centre in the middle of London was quite nice.
If it was nuclear it would still be sealed off, any slacking of maintenance, any cost saving too far, would fuck up the world’s greatest city .
And if you think the worlds most powerful and richest country could always afford the very best maintenance - let me introduce you to political decision making in the 1960s, industrial policy in the 1970s and human beings who tend to hope as a strategy.
It’s not hard to pretend the obvious won’t happen, and if you take the risk sometimes you will be right. And the cautious man will look silly.
But in the end Warren Buffet looks more sensible than Dick Fuld.
And even Warren is aware he pays far less tax relative to his maid.
But it’s upto us to fix that just as it’s upto us to not make bad investment choices as a society that we will pay costly annual fees for centuries to come.
- anon84873628 2y agoThe designers of new reactors (the one in this article specifically, and others too) claim that the design is inherently safe and has no possibility of catastrophic meltdown. If this is true, then you are greatly overestimating the downside costs. The result of a failed system won't be as inert and benign as a failed solar panel, but it is also unlikely to be "fuck up the entire city", especially when considering the smaller modular deployment.
- lifeisstillgood 2y ago>>> If this is true, The cheque is in the post, I will still respect you in the morning, Come on. I’m not saying new designs are Rube Goldberg machines flinging radioactive waste around, but “perfectly safe for the next hundred or five hundred years” is complete rubbish. There is no such thing. This is not about engineering - this is about humans, how humans react in the face of profitable deals, and the history of engineering safe systems (one death or catastrophe at a time)