
Is Nuclear Power Worth the Risk? - melling
https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/is-nuclear-power-worth-the-risk
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AngryData
Nuclear power is the only surefire way to provide for all of our current and
future energy needs, especially if you factor in carbon sequestering. On top
of all that, per megawatt produced it is the safest form of energy production.
Yeah there have been accidents, but they were all preventable if people
weren't purposefully kept ignorant of nuclear power and politicians weren't
afraid to properly fund and manage it. Fukushima design was made using 50s
nuclear technology that's like 15 years past it's first invention. It should
have been either decommissioned or rebuilt to modern designs, but of course no
one was willing to fund or support such a thing. It's like driving around in a
Model-T then being surprised that it doesn't have airbags and seat belts when
something goes wrong.

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redis_mlc
> there have been accidents, but they were all preventable if people

You can always spot the nuclear apologist because they gloss over the
intractable people issues with managing reactors for literally decades without
a single lapse.

I think nuclear history has amply shown that people cannot be trusted to
manage reactors.

The horrible reality we're now facing is that once you build a reactor,
political forces force re-certification decades beyond their original design -
regardless of the interior condition of the reactor.

At the moment of reckoning when a reactor must finally be shutdown, you can
bet a swift bankruptcy followed by skyrocketing local electricity rates.

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iforgotpassword
Exactly. The hn crowd is probably especially biased here since it's a lot of
geeks with a very idealistic view of the world, where every single individual
on this planet is driven by the highest of moral values exclusively. Let me
just copy and paste part of a comment I made on the recycling post yesterday:

Look at nuclear power. Might be the greatest and cleanest solution in theory.
In practice, look at the revelations after Fukushima. Mismanagement,
dramatically negligent maintenance, corruption. Would proper management have
prevented the incident? Probably not, but it wouldn't have been nearly as bad.
Without the tsunami, this might have continued for years to come and who knows
how and when shit would've hit the fan in this alternate reality. Then the
shitshow that is storing nuclear waste here in Germany. Again instead of
listening to scientists and engineers in the end they dumped the metal
containers inside an old salt mine. Big surprise, salt water lead to rapid
corrosion and now they have to get them out again, but thankfully the tax
payer cover that bullshit.

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mrpopo
I don't have an idealistic view of the world. Rather the opposite. Nuclear
power can provide for part of the growing energy needs of the ever-growing
human population, while petrol supplies will start declining at some point in
this century for geological reasons. It might be hard to swallow, but a few
nuclear accidents are worth mitigating the worst consequences of climate
change and energy peak. Without adequate access to energy, humans in multi-
million cities will not be able to survive.

EROI on Solar and Wind power is good, but obviously almost 100% of the energy
invested is from fossil fuels. We still spend more energy building solar
panels than we receive from it. Which, in a way, is a good sign (it means the
solar industry is growing). But no storage technology has been deployed at
scale yet (which would reduce the EROI even more). Will it scale enough before
a potential energy peak? Will nuclear?

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friendlybus
Nuclear power plants can be used as weapons. The explosion of Chernobyl could
have taken out half of Europe with radioactivity had it not been dealt with.

If we elect another Kim jong/Stalin, or a neighbouring country does, they
could blow up their own reactors to achieve destructive means. Solar and wind
don't have that problem. The nuclear accidents are bad enough. Imagine the
fallout from a plant in mexico takes out half of Texas, is that an acceptable
risk in the pursuit of cheap electricity? Do you want to place the future of
international political stability on the ability to regulate and police an
industry? Both america and japan, two trustworthy and competent nations have
had problems with nukes. Trading one bad scenario for another is not going to
help.

Space based solar is a safer bet than nukes.

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CameronNemo
Would be great to see a fossil fuels article with the same perspective. Too
many people fail to apply the same standards to the status quo as they do to
alternatives.

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LatteLazy
Risk isn't a single unified, fungible, quantifiable thing. We can't properly
consider it or make decisions including it without understanding that.

A one in a million change of killing one million people is fundamentally
different to a 100% chance of killing one person, even though the average
outcome is the same.

You also can't get an honest assessment of risk without asking people to put
their money where their mouth is: everyone considers themselves above average
drivers, yet insurance companies won't touch some people (often those most
convinced they're the lowest risk).

There are major economic and political concerns around any large project too,
those add risks not present in the technology itself, and they don't just add
new, clean, quantifiable risks, they also multiple (or reduce) existing risks
in ways no one can predict or understand.

Before we can try to talk seriously about nuclear (or any other large project
with a complex risk profile), we need a better understanding of risk itself.
Any article that doesn't start at that point is (at best) uninformed chatter
or (at worst) clickbait designed to start arguments.

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Iv
Here is what a clean and safe energy source looks like:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure#List_of_major_dam_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure#List_of_major_dam_failures)

Here is what nuclear energy wants to replace:
[https://endcoal.org/health/](https://endcoal.org/health/)

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nickik
The failure of our society to turn into a nuclear based society will be looked
laughed at in the future.

People in a 100 years will say 'they had invented everything they needed in
the 1950-60 but failed to do anything'.

Its embarrassing for the human project and in time everybody will realize
this.

Many a doctoral thesis will be written about how a whole society can be so
dumb an short sighted.

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esotericn
Is the risk of nuclear higher than that of fossil fuel usage?

Climate change is a thing, right now, and we're exacerbating its' effects on
an ongoing basis.

Is living worth the risk of dying?

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ryanmercer
Is radioactive coal ash (and other pollutants), from currently operating coal
plants, falling from the skies worth it?

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wruza
What is the answer to this risk?

( _Cough_ coal _cough_.)

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rad_gruchalski
As proven by Hambach Forest in Germany already.

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Jamwinner
This fear mongering puts us back decades.

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lm28469
I see it that way: state of the art fossil fuel based energy production is
harmful, no matter what. State of the art nuclear based energy production is
extremely safe [0]. In a perfect world we'd use 100% clean renewable energy,
but we're not living in a perfect world and nuclear is the 2nd best option.

We're literally the proverbial frog being slowly boiled alive.

[0] just don't run shady tests under dubious communistic governments and don't
build it next to an ocean over an active seismic zone.

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kumarvvr
At this point, there is no long teem alternative to baseload power apart from
Nuclear.

Inless battery technology allows us to use renewable power as a baseload
plant.

