5 ms·

I wish Transatomic all the best but they have an uphill battle :( to convince a populace for whom unfortunately "nuclear power" brings up an image Homer Simpson

by yc1010 11y ago

I wish Transatomic all the best but they have an uphill battle :( to convince a populace for whom unfortunately "nuclear power" brings up an image Homer Simpson. aside: I think Greenpeace also has a lot to answer for with their campaign against nuclear power. Thanks to them my children can look forward to a world where a coal plant is build every week and fossil fuel fueled climate change is a certainty.

pavlov 11y ago
Homer Simpson and the three-eyed fish graced TV screens in 1989. In the preceding ten years, the world had seen a sequence of serious nuclear accidents: Three Mile Island, Sellafield, Chernobyl... The smear campaign was accomplished by the companies and nations that built and maintained those shoddy, dangerous plants. Blaming Greenpeace makes as much sense as blaming them for climate change.
- opo 11y ago
  >...In the preceding ten years, the world had seen a sequence of serious nuclear accidents: Three Mile Island, Sellafield, Chernobyl... Considering that it would be illegal to build a Chernobyl style plant in any other country rather than the Soviet Union, it probably shouldn't be on your list. >...The smear campaign was accomplished by the companies and nations that built and maintained those shoddy, dangerous plants. But even including the deaths from Chernobyl, nuclear power has been safer over the last 60 years than all other types of mass energy production: coal, natural gas or hydroelectric. >...Blaming Greenpeace makes as much sense as blaming them for climate change. I think the point the OP was making was that by smearing nuclear (a power source that doesn't put CO2 into the atmosphere from generating power) the alternative has usually been to build a natural gas or coal plant that does put CO2 into the atmosphere when it generates power.
  - justatdotin 11y ago
    if only there was like, some alternative to coal and uranium ...
    - vidarh 11y ago
      If only those alternatives were actually safer than nuclear. People die in installation and operational accidents for wind and solar at a higher rate relative to amount of electricity provided than all deaths attributable to nuclear. And hydro has a quite horrible track record thanks to construction accidents and dam failures (even if you exclude the single worst incident - the Banqiao dam failure that killed an estimated 171,000 people).
trhway 11y ago
>I think Greenpeace also has a lot to answer for with their campaign against nuclear power. Thanks to them my children can look forward to a world where a coal plant is build every week and fossil fuel fueled climate change is a certainty at least your children can look using 2 eyes. If not for Greenpeace the expected value would be uniformly distributed anywhere between 0 and 4 or 5...
- vidarh 11y ago
  Coal contributes vastly more to radioactive environmental contamination than nuclear does, by hurling radioactive particles into the atmosphere. So on the contrary, the fear over nuclear has done far more to increase our exposure to radiation that what we would have if coal plants had been replaced by nuclear.
  - trhway 11y ago
    i don't know a coal plant that would have a 30 km dead zone around it like Chernobyl does.
    - vidarh 11y ago
      How is that relevant? That coal plants deaths are spread over the entire world does not make them less lethal. The deaths caused by Chernobyl is a tiny blip compared to coal no matter whose estimates you pick. In 2010 alone, estimated deaths from US coal power plants alone was 13,000, with a huge number of other bad health effect (20,000 heart attacks for example) [1] In the 3 decades from Chernobyl we can extrapolate to maybe ~350k-400k deaths from US coal plants alone. The number of deaths due to Chernobyl on the other hand, is rarely estimated higher than the low tens of thousands. The number of cancer incidents attributable to Chernobyl is likely far higher. E.g. estimates of an excess 7k thyroid cancer incidents in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia by 2005. But only a small number of those have died of cancer so far (the number will likely increase, but the reduction in overall life expectancy is still modest). In 2005, the UN predicted 4,000 deaths due to Chernobyl [2]. Greenpeace countered with a claim of up to ~300k deaths total[3] (based on a combination of an estimated 93k deaths in Belarus and 60k deaths in Russia due to cancers, and an additional estimate of potentially another 140k premature deaths in the following/coming years). Even if we accepts the Greenpeace claims, as the upper boundary, more people have likely died due to US coal plants alone than due to Chernobyl in the years since Chernobyl. And the US is not the biggest consumer of coal. Already well before 2000, China had surpassed US coal consumption. Tack on India and Russia, and the US coal consumption is only 1/3 of that used by the top 4 countries. Go to the top 10, and the US coal consumption made up ~25% by 2000, and as far as I know dropping as a percentage of overall consumption due to dramatic continued growth in places like China. So even just looking at the top 10, it would not be unreasonable to quadruple the estimates of excess deaths from coal from the above to 1.4-1.6 million in the 3 decades from Chernobyl. But of course these plants were going for decades before that, and will continue for decades to come, and many of these countries have far more lax rules than the US when it comes to emissions. The reality is that worldwide deaths from coal likely are equivalent to Greenpeace's idea of Chernobyl every 2-5 years. On the other hand, if the UN predictions are right, US plants alone are as lethal as 3 Chernobyl's every year, and coal worldwide is equivalent to somewhere well above 12 Chernobyl's every year. Now, it is reasonable to bring up that Chernobyl is only one plant, but the point is the difference is damage scenarios: Nuclear plants kill when something goes wrong, and something goes wrong exceedingly rarely, leaving us able to name the ones attributable to 90%+ of nuclear power related deaths. Coal plants, on the other hand, silently kills every day, around the clock, during normal operation. Chernobyl, even accepting the worst case estimates, does not lift nuclear even into the same league. Even if we replaced coal with Chernobyl type reactors, with the same lax safety procedures as at Chernobyl, rather than opt for the much safer designs and processes that were the norm even back in 1986, we'd still kill far fewer people. [1] http://www.rmi.org/RFGraph-health_effects_from_US_power_plant_emissions http://www.rmi.org/RFGraph-health_effects_from_US_power_plan... [2] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/explainer/2013/04/chernobyl_death_toll_how_many_cancer_cases_are_caused_by_low_level_radiation.html http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/explainer/2... [3] http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/features/chernobyl-deaths-180406/ http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/features/che...
paulsutter 11y ago
United States is only 25% of the market for electricity production. There are 185 other countries that use electricity. I don't think Transatomic will have trouble finding countries that are willing to move sooner.
xorcist 11y ago
That's not fair criticism. Greenpeace has been one of the strongest campaigners against coal plants since the 80s. They do campaigning against nuclear power as well, for example open pit uranium mining and waste disposal processes, which might be the source of the confusion.
7952 11y ago
I am sure the industry has been held back in part due to public anxiety, but that is hardly the whole story. Whilst nuclear power maybe acceptably safe, that comes at a huge cost in terms of time, money, and complexity. If you need to acuire grid capacity in the short term these are major issues. In the longer term all we hear are new unproven designs that require massive investment just to prove a concept.

by yc1010 11y ago

pavlov 11y ago

Homer Simpson and the three-eyed fish graced TV screens in 1989. In the preceding ten years, the world had seen a sequence of serious nuclear accidents: Three Mile Island, Sellafield, Chernobyl... The smear campaign was accomplished by the companies and nations that built and maintained those shoddy, dangerous plants. Blaming Greenpeace makes as much sense as blaming them for climate change.

opo 11y ago
>...In the preceding ten years, the world had seen a sequence of serious nuclear accidents: Three Mile Island, Sellafield, Chernobyl... Considering that it would be illegal to build a Chernobyl style plant in any other country rather than the Soviet Union, it probably shouldn't be on your list. >...The smear campaign was accomplished by the companies and nations that built and maintained those shoddy, dangerous plants. But even including the deaths from Chernobyl, nuclear power has been safer over the last 60 years than all other types of mass energy production: coal, natural gas or hydroelectric. >...Blaming Greenpeace makes as much sense as blaming them for climate change. I think the point the OP was making was that by smearing nuclear (a power source that doesn't put CO2 into the atmosphere from generating power) the alternative has usually been to build a natural gas or coal plant that does put CO2 into the atmosphere when it generates power.
- justatdotin 11y ago
  if only there was like, some alternative to coal and uranium ...
  - vidarh 11y ago
    If only those alternatives were actually safer than nuclear. People die in installation and operational accidents for wind and solar at a higher rate relative to amount of electricity provided than all deaths attributable to nuclear. And hydro has a quite horrible track record thanks to construction accidents and dam failures (even if you exclude the single worst incident - the Banqiao dam failure that killed an estimated 171,000 people).

trhway 11y ago

>I think Greenpeace also has a lot to answer for with their campaign against nuclear power. Thanks to them my children can look forward to a world where a coal plant is build every week and fossil fuel fueled climate change is a certainty at least your children can look using 2 eyes. If not for Greenpeace the expected value would be uniformly distributed anywhere between 0 and 4 or 5...

vidarh 11y ago
Coal contributes vastly more to radioactive environmental contamination than nuclear does, by hurling radioactive particles into the atmosphere. So on the contrary, the fear over nuclear has done far more to increase our exposure to radiation that what we would have if coal plants had been replaced by nuclear.
- trhway 11y ago
  i don't know a coal plant that would have a 30 km dead zone around it like Chernobyl does.
  - vidarh 11y ago
    How is that relevant? That coal plants deaths are spread over the entire world does not make them less lethal. The deaths caused by Chernobyl is a tiny blip compared to coal no matter whose estimates you pick. In 2010 alone, estimated deaths from US coal power plants alone was 13,000, with a huge number of other bad health effect (20,000 heart attacks for example) [1] In the 3 decades from Chernobyl we can extrapolate to maybe ~350k-400k deaths from US coal plants alone. The number of deaths due to Chernobyl on the other hand, is rarely estimated higher than the low tens of thousands. The number of cancer incidents attributable to Chernobyl is likely far higher. E.g. estimates of an excess 7k thyroid cancer incidents in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia by 2005. But only a small number of those have died of cancer so far (the number will likely increase, but the reduction in overall life expectancy is still modest). In 2005, the UN predicted 4,000 deaths due to Chernobyl [2]. Greenpeace countered with a claim of up to ~300k deaths total[3] (based on a combination of an estimated 93k deaths in Belarus and 60k deaths in Russia due to cancers, and an additional estimate of potentially another 140k premature deaths in the following/coming years). Even if we accepts the Greenpeace claims, as the upper boundary, more people have likely died due to US coal plants alone than due to Chernobyl in the years since Chernobyl. And the US is not the biggest consumer of coal. Already well before 2000, China had surpassed US coal consumption. Tack on India and Russia, and the US coal consumption is only 1/3 of that used by the top 4 countries. Go to the top 10, and the US coal consumption made up ~25% by 2000, and as far as I know dropping as a percentage of overall consumption due to dramatic continued growth in places like China. So even just looking at the top 10, it would not be unreasonable to quadruple the estimates of excess deaths from coal from the above to 1.4-1.6 million in the 3 decades from Chernobyl. But of course these plants were going for decades before that, and will continue for decades to come, and many of these countries have far more lax rules than the US when it comes to emissions. The reality is that worldwide deaths from coal likely are equivalent to Greenpeace's idea of Chernobyl every 2-5 years. On the other hand, if the UN predictions are right, US plants alone are as lethal as 3 Chernobyl's every year, and coal worldwide is equivalent to somewhere well above 12 Chernobyl's every year. Now, it is reasonable to bring up that Chernobyl is only one plant, but the point is the difference is damage scenarios: Nuclear plants kill when something goes wrong, and something goes wrong exceedingly rarely, leaving us able to name the ones attributable to 90%+ of nuclear power related deaths. Coal plants, on the other hand, silently kills every day, around the clock, during normal operation. Chernobyl, even accepting the worst case estimates, does not lift nuclear even into the same league. Even if we replaced coal with Chernobyl type reactors, with the same lax safety procedures as at Chernobyl, rather than opt for the much safer designs and processes that were the norm even back in 1986, we'd still kill far fewer people. [1] http://www.rmi.org/RFGraph-health_effects_from_US_power_plant_emissions http://www.rmi.org/RFGraph-health_effects_from_US_power_plan... [2] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/explainer/2013/04/chernobyl_death_toll_how_many_cancer_cases_are_caused_by_low_level_radiation.html http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/explainer/2... [3] http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/features/chernobyl-deaths-180406/ http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/features/che...

paulsutter 11y ago

United States is only 25% of the market for electricity production. There are 185 other countries that use electricity. I don't think Transatomic will have trouble finding countries that are willing to move sooner.

xorcist 11y ago

That's not fair criticism. Greenpeace has been one of the strongest campaigners against coal plants since the 80s. They do campaigning against nuclear power as well, for example open pit uranium mining and waste disposal processes, which might be the source of the confusion.

7952 11y ago

I am sure the industry has been held back in part due to public anxiety, but that is hardly the whole story. Whilst nuclear power maybe acceptably safe, that comes at a huge cost in terms of time, money, and complexity. If you need to acuire grid capacity in the short term these are major issues. In the longer term all we hear are new unproven designs that require massive investment just to prove a concept.