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My biggest problem with many of the people that warn of global warming is they proclaim we need to take serious action and then ignore the most plausible soluti

by cdash 13y ago

My biggest problem with many of the people that warn of global warming is they proclaim we need to take serious action and then ignore the most plausible solution which is nuclear power. I know not everyone is against using nuclear power but if global warming is a serious issue and I think it is plausible that it is thats where we should be heading, as a bonus nuclear power is great anyways.

threeseed 13y ago
Because nuclear power comes with plenty of short/medium term problems as we are seeing today in Fukushima. Much better to exhaust every ounce of potential out of safe, clean renewable sources first.
- waps 13y ago
  I thought the point was to reduce carbon emissions ?("renewable" sources, due to the fact that the equipment must be made and transported and maintained, are still using more fossil fuels than they save) And please skip the "but this one version now in the lab ..." speech.
  - eru 13y ago
    > ("renewable" sources, due to the fact that the equipment must be made and transported and maintained, are still using more fossil fuels than they save) I don't think that's true. Do you have anything to substantiate that claim?
- jamesaguilar 13y ago
  Compared to nuclear, far more people die because of renewable energy per megawatt. It is not better to exhaust the potential of renewable sources, since they lead to more excess deaths. There are a lot of sources that demonstrate this, so I just searched for one: http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Magazines/Bulletin/Bull211/21104091117.pdf http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Magazines/Bulletin/Bull211/...
  - grannyg00se 13y ago
    That article is written by a scientific adviser to the Atomic Energy Control Board, Ottawa, Canada. If that doesn't bother you, consider that the facts cited come from a "recent" report published in 1978.
    - jamesaguilar 13y ago
      Considering that is only one of many different articles I have seen on the occasion, yeah, it doesn't bother me. If you wanted to bother me, you'd post something that debunks the claim. I made a search (albeit, a brief one) for the same and didn't find anything.
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  Fukushima used a more than 50 year old reactor design, it has very little bearing on either the risk or feasability of building new nuclear plants. Moreover, even factoring in the risk of extremely outdated or outrageously unsafe by design reactors and the accidents that have occurred at them such as Fukushima and Chernobyl the overall damage caused by nuclear power plants is still far, far lower than that of coal, oil, or even hydropower. The Tohoku earthquake caused the failure of a dam which killed 4 people, more than have died due to the Fukushima disaster. Overall dam failures have killed hundreds of thousands, which is well above even the upper limits of early deaths due to cancer related to the Chernobyl accident. Meanwhile, the world health organization estimates that coal burning causes as much as a million excess deaths per year worldwide. If CO2 emissions are truly an existential threat to humanity then we should be building nuclear plants like crazy. People who reject the idea of nuclear power but embrace the idea of man made climate change as a catastrophic threat to mankind are either incapable of sane risk assessment or do not truly believe their own claims.
  - andrewflnr 13y ago
    I'm with you on nuclear, but we still don't know how many people are going to die, or rather have their deaths somewhat accelerated or quality of life strongly affected, because of Fukushima. Are we going to be able to get reliable information about an uptick in cancer rates in Japan?
    - InclinedPlane 13y ago
      It's almost certainly not going to matter. Go back and read my post above and ask yourself whether there is any chance whatsoever that the Fukushima disaster could possibly cause 50 million deaths. That's fifty million deaths. Why 50 million? Because that's about how many excess deaths have been caused by coal power over the lifetime of nuclear power. If Fukushima fails to cause 50 million deaths then the entire nuclear industry will be that much behind in the category of ending human lives. Are new buildouts of fission power plant capacity likely to cause enough deaths to even the balance scales between fission and coal? Extremely unlikely. Even if people build irresponsibly outdated designs like the Fukushima daichi plants or even criminally unsafe designs like the Chernobyl plants it's extraordinarily unlikely that the reduction in threat to human lives caused by being able to shut down coal plants will more than make up for the much smaller risk added due to operating nuclear plants. Edit: a much fairer assessment of relative risk of coal vs. nuclear would delve into deaths and injuries per kw-h, and it would also compare modern first world coal or gas plants vs. modern first world nuclear plants. But that math has already been done and shows that nuclear power is overwhelmingly one of the safest methods of producing power that has ever been created by mankind. And that remains unchanged even if you factor in Chernobyl and Fukushima (which in many ways are equivalent to allowing Chinese unfiltered coal plants into the equation on the other side). And even if you imagine some speculatively high number of deaths, even as many as tens of thousands, as the potential impact of the Fukushima daichi disaster there is just no way that the track record of the fission power industry to date could fall below the level of any other major power source that could potentially serve as base load power for a large industrialized country. It would take multiple Fukushima disasters happening every few years for the fission power industry to finally become as hazardous as gas or coal.
cup 13y ago
Why bother with Nuclear power when renewable energy is already capable of providing many of our energy needs (and efficiency will only improve in the future). I know tech heads love Nuclear and love to go on about how safe it is in this day and age but it still leaves us with significant and dangerous waste which our great great great grand children will inherit.
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  No non-CO2 emitting energy system is currently a credible source for base load electrical power except for nuclear. Everything else, even hydroelectric, is not capable of providing the amount of power needed everywhere and everytime it's needed. Solar and wind could be, but it would require building new power storage facilities, and so many of them that it would match or exceed the cost of building out the solar/wind capacity to start with. That's the reality. If it were different it wouldn't require subsidies to encourage people to build solar or wind power, they would do so spontaneously.
  - Canada 13y ago
    > Everything else, even hydroelectric, is not capable of providing the amount of power needed at the time it's needed. Not in every case. BC Hydro powers BC and sells excess to US Markets.
    - InclinedPlane 13y ago
      I updated my post to make it even more clear. Hydropower is for the most part great when it's available, but it's not available everywhere and it also doesn't come without significant environmental cost. It would not be a net benefit for the world if every country developed a crash program to become as dependent on hydropower as possible.
- smsm42 13y ago
  What "renewable energy" is that? Solar and wind are barely scratching single-digit percentages of energy needs, and this is only because of massive government push to do it, otherwise on pure economic efficiency they'd be below even single digits (so basically now they're just burning money). Hydro can provide tons of energy, but at huge ecological cost which dwarfs nuclear. What else is there? And many of them are quite expensive and need expensive resources like rare earths which also require significant energy to extract and produce.
MichaelSalib 13y ago
The primary public policy that people who care about climate change have advocated are carbon taxes. Nuclear power proponents insist that these carbon taxes would benefit them significantly. So what more do you want? In many countries, the nuclear power industry already gets a free ride on liability and special government loans that other industries don't get. How much more do we have to tilt the playing field to favor nuclear power before it is enough?

by cdash 13y ago

threeseed 13y ago

Because nuclear power comes with plenty of short/medium term problems as we are seeing today in Fukushima. Much better to exhaust every ounce of potential out of safe, clean renewable sources first.

waps 13y ago
I thought the point was to reduce carbon emissions ?("renewable" sources, due to the fact that the equipment must be made and transported and maintained, are still using more fossil fuels than they save) And please skip the "but this one version now in the lab ..." speech.
- eru 13y ago
  > ("renewable" sources, due to the fact that the equipment must be made and transported and maintained, are still using more fossil fuels than they save) I don't think that's true. Do you have anything to substantiate that claim?
jamesaguilar 13y ago
Compared to nuclear, far more people die because of renewable energy per megawatt. It is not better to exhaust the potential of renewable sources, since they lead to more excess deaths. There are a lot of sources that demonstrate this, so I just searched for one: http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Magazines/Bulletin/Bull211/21104091117.pdf http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Magazines/Bulletin/Bull211/...
- grannyg00se 13y ago
  That article is written by a scientific adviser to the Atomic Energy Control Board, Ottawa, Canada. If that doesn't bother you, consider that the facts cited come from a "recent" report published in 1978.
  - jamesaguilar 13y ago
    Considering that is only one of many different articles I have seen on the occasion, yeah, it doesn't bother me. If you wanted to bother me, you'd post something that debunks the claim. I made a search (albeit, a brief one) for the same and didn't find anything.
InclinedPlane 13y ago
Fukushima used a more than 50 year old reactor design, it has very little bearing on either the risk or feasability of building new nuclear plants. Moreover, even factoring in the risk of extremely outdated or outrageously unsafe by design reactors and the accidents that have occurred at them such as Fukushima and Chernobyl the overall damage caused by nuclear power plants is still far, far lower than that of coal, oil, or even hydropower. The Tohoku earthquake caused the failure of a dam which killed 4 people, more than have died due to the Fukushima disaster. Overall dam failures have killed hundreds of thousands, which is well above even the upper limits of early deaths due to cancer related to the Chernobyl accident. Meanwhile, the world health organization estimates that coal burning causes as much as a million excess deaths per year worldwide. If CO2 emissions are truly an existential threat to humanity then we should be building nuclear plants like crazy. People who reject the idea of nuclear power but embrace the idea of man made climate change as a catastrophic threat to mankind are either incapable of sane risk assessment or do not truly believe their own claims.
- andrewflnr 13y ago
  I'm with you on nuclear, but we still don't know how many people are going to die, or rather have their deaths somewhat accelerated or quality of life strongly affected, because of Fukushima. Are we going to be able to get reliable information about an uptick in cancer rates in Japan?
  - InclinedPlane 13y ago
    It's almost certainly not going to matter. Go back and read my post above and ask yourself whether there is any chance whatsoever that the Fukushima disaster could possibly cause 50 million deaths. That's fifty million deaths. Why 50 million? Because that's about how many excess deaths have been caused by coal power over the lifetime of nuclear power. If Fukushima fails to cause 50 million deaths then the entire nuclear industry will be that much behind in the category of ending human lives. Are new buildouts of fission power plant capacity likely to cause enough deaths to even the balance scales between fission and coal? Extremely unlikely. Even if people build irresponsibly outdated designs like the Fukushima daichi plants or even criminally unsafe designs like the Chernobyl plants it's extraordinarily unlikely that the reduction in threat to human lives caused by being able to shut down coal plants will more than make up for the much smaller risk added due to operating nuclear plants. Edit: a much fairer assessment of relative risk of coal vs. nuclear would delve into deaths and injuries per kw-h, and it would also compare modern first world coal or gas plants vs. modern first world nuclear plants. But that math has already been done and shows that nuclear power is overwhelmingly one of the safest methods of producing power that has ever been created by mankind. And that remains unchanged even if you factor in Chernobyl and Fukushima (which in many ways are equivalent to allowing Chinese unfiltered coal plants into the equation on the other side). And even if you imagine some speculatively high number of deaths, even as many as tens of thousands, as the potential impact of the Fukushima daichi disaster there is just no way that the track record of the fission power industry to date could fall below the level of any other major power source that could potentially serve as base load power for a large industrialized country. It would take multiple Fukushima disasters happening every few years for the fission power industry to finally become as hazardous as gas or coal.

cup 13y ago

Why bother with Nuclear power when renewable energy is already capable of providing many of our energy needs (and efficiency will only improve in the future). I know tech heads love Nuclear and love to go on about how safe it is in this day and age but it still leaves us with significant and dangerous waste which our great great great grand children will inherit.

InclinedPlane 13y ago
No non-CO2 emitting energy system is currently a credible source for base load electrical power except for nuclear. Everything else, even hydroelectric, is not capable of providing the amount of power needed everywhere and everytime it's needed. Solar and wind could be, but it would require building new power storage facilities, and so many of them that it would match or exceed the cost of building out the solar/wind capacity to start with. That's the reality. If it were different it wouldn't require subsidies to encourage people to build solar or wind power, they would do so spontaneously.
- Canada 13y ago
  > Everything else, even hydroelectric, is not capable of providing the amount of power needed at the time it's needed. Not in every case. BC Hydro powers BC and sells excess to US Markets.
  - InclinedPlane 13y ago
    I updated my post to make it even more clear. Hydropower is for the most part great when it's available, but it's not available everywhere and it also doesn't come without significant environmental cost. It would not be a net benefit for the world if every country developed a crash program to become as dependent on hydropower as possible.
smsm42 13y ago
What "renewable energy" is that? Solar and wind are barely scratching single-digit percentages of energy needs, and this is only because of massive government push to do it, otherwise on pure economic efficiency they'd be below even single digits (so basically now they're just burning money). Hydro can provide tons of energy, but at huge ecological cost which dwarfs nuclear. What else is there? And many of them are quite expensive and need expensive resources like rare earths which also require significant energy to extract and produce.

MichaelSalib 13y ago

The primary public policy that people who care about climate change have advocated are carbon taxes. Nuclear power proponents insist that these carbon taxes would benefit them significantly. So what more do you want? In many countries, the nuclear power industry already gets a free ride on liability and special government loans that other industries don't get. How much more do we have to tilt the playing field to favor nuclear power before it is enough?