Not to say I don't appreciate how safe modern nuclear is, but if you're writing an article about the over-dramatization of the Chernobyl disaster, I think it hurts your argument when you neglect to mention the hundreds of thousands who were forced to permanently relocate and the thousand-square mile Exclusion Zone that is still uninhabitable 30 years later. If the disaster were at the nuclear plant in Plymouth, Massachusetts, the Exclusion Zone would include all of Eastern Massachusetts, including the cities of Boston, Providence, and Worcester.
Reiterating your point, the area is uninhabitable on a timescale of thousands of years. Some estimates are at 20,000 years. The timeline of that region being poisonous extends so far beyond our current history that it's effectively permanent.
There are actual risks of creating permanent dead zones on the map. It shows incredible arrogance and a complete lack of foresight.
What happens when the Chernobyl confinement deteriorates every hundred years or so, and eventually nobody is around to maintain it anymore.
> What happens when the Chernobyl confinement deteriorates every hundred years or so, and eventually nobody is around to maintain it anymore.
Well, nothing - because if there aren't people around to maintain it, there also aren't people around for it to affect. Couple that with the fact that the intensity of the radiation will have significantly decreased within a century and that cancer is a more serious concern in longer lived species and I think you'll find the impact on nature from any future leakage to be minimal.
Yes the impact of nuclear fallout is minimal. Hence why we bury spent fuel miles underground and as far away from people as possible... because its so innocuous.
You don't think not mentioning any of the other problems with nuclear energy hurts the argument? Are we really going to ignore the problem of containing spent fuel?
People down voting this comment, care to add a comment about why you are down voting it? Surely, it's not because you believe spent fuel is not a problem? I hope not because it is a HUGE problem perhaps bigger even than dumping CO2 into the air if you ask me.
Dumping CO2 into the air kills ~6 million a year, ~1 million from particulate pollution alone. Burning coal is dumping spent fuel into the air, including uranium and mercury particulates.
You say that as if you can predict what will happen over the course of the next 10 thousand years. What happens when we run out of places to put the spent fuel? We dig another hole in a another mountain?? What if there is an earth quake 10k years from now and all that spent fuel goes tumbling into the local drinking water? Are you under them impression that stuff like that can't happen or doesn't ever happen? Sounds like a pretty ignorant point of view to me. What if the American government falls and the security details guarding these storage facilities go away and unscrupulous agents have free access to it. They then build thousands of dirty bombs and send the Earth into chaos? You think that's impossible? Sounds to me like you are counting your chickens 10k years before they hatch.
Edit: I read the article, its bias untruthful trash... should I have expect more from Mara Hvistendahl author of such classics as: 'The Vibrator' and 'Origins: The Start of Everything (Where do rainbows come from? What about flying cars, love and LSD?)'
Eventually we'll want to build breeder reactors to burn up almost all the "spent" fuel and leave behind waste that has a much shorter half life than Uranium.
> You say that as if you can predict what will happen over the course of the next 10 thousand years. What happens when we run out of places to put the spent fuel?
You're missing something - coal power ALSO produces radioactive waste. We just seem to be fine with dumping it into the atmosphere.
I am definitely not advocating coal power that's an assumption you made all on your own. The options aren't coal or nuclear, the options are limited, but they are not limited to just two.
The dramatic death added is of course fiction. But the economic damage of Chernobyl is still very hard to measure. For example, 20% of reindeer slaughtered in Sweden (of 50-75k per year) had to be discarded because of radiation for years after the incident.
This wasn’t in Ukraine, or even in the Soviet Union. It was in Sweden.
We talked about CS137 and radiation levels of meat and other things for many years even though we were never of course in any risk of suddenly bleeding from our skin or having an increased rate of birth defects. The levels were low but still very much there. You were fine so long as you didn’t overconsume. A lot of things had too high levels to be sold, which affected a lot of companies (the reindeer industry is just one example.)
Gorbachev is on record as accrediting the cost of cleaning up Chernobyl/preventing something much worse as being one of the reasons for the collapse of the soviet union.
A conservative estimate would put over 1% of the working population of the USSR on site at some point in the cleanup/sarcophagus construction - and bear in mind the EU had to fund the construction of the second sarcophagus.
So ignore the human cost, which has vanished behind propaganda at the moment, just add up the energy it produced, and put that against the economic cost. Then hypothetically take all that effort, and research, and put it into alternative forms of clean fuel production....
The "BfS" is "the federal government office for radiation protection".
So even today they still have measures in place introduced after Chernobyl. Measurements have gone down of course, but it will take a long time before they can stop maintaining that webpage.
To add some anecdotes; the local hunter organisation in my village (south bavaria) has to dispose almost 50% of the killed boars due to the radioactive contamination, many of those over 10 times the legal safety limit. And that's only the boars that are measured, there is likely a huge dark number of radioactive boars being consumed or hunted.
As the article mentions it seems like the show "Chernobyl" is a dream come true for the anti-nuclear crowd. Its dramatization of the event is truly horrific and actually had me questioning my support of nuclear power as a sensible alternative.
Watching it has me wondering a lot about how bad the accident actually was. I've done a little research and the number of fatalities seem to vary wildly depending on the source.
Does anyone have any reasonably good un-biased sources of information about the accident?
Estimating the health impact of the disaster is very difficult because we don't have a robust model for the damage that low radiation exposure causes.
Ultimately, it's a problem of statistical power. High doses - large effect sizes - are relatively easy to work with and we can see effects without too much issue. But small effect sizes require large samples for suitable statistical power to avoid type II error, and perhaps more importantly, observational studies become extremely prone to even small confounding factors. In the case of studying radiation, or any number of drugs, diets, or environmental risks, you can't ethically perform experiments. "Natural" experiments like Chernobyl, Hiroshima, etc. are still beset by confounding factors.
So the best we can do is take the data from higher exposures and extrapolate that data back to the origin. But then you run into the issue of whether the regression comes back to meet the origin (linear no threshold - LNT), curves and sits along the x-axis for a while (threshold effects), or even dips below (hormesis). The truth is that we don't really know what happens at lower levels of exposure. The conservative approach is to assume the worst case, and thus LNT tends to get the most play in the literature. Hormesis has also picked up an air of woo and psuedoscience over time, but the idea isn't altogether unreasonable.
Calculations of 'how bad' Chernobyl was all depend on what model you assume, so there's plenty of room for variation in that, in addition to the spotty historical evidence.
I used to be pro-nuclear power but I've long since come to the conclusion that there are three fundamental problems that basically make nuclear power a non-starter:
1. While average deaths per kWh might be relatively low (compared to other forms of power generation) the worst case scenario is much, much worse. A coal plant just isn't capable of making a thousand square miles uninhabitable for centuries.
2. Companies just can't be trusted to run nuclear power plants. This requires long-term thinking way beyond quarterly profits. Because catastrophes are so unlikely but profit hits are so short term there is inevitable pressure to cut corners.
3. Governments have generally been pretty terrible at overseeing nuclear power industries. There are the dangers of regulatory capture and the temptation for politicians to kick the can down the street for the next guy to deal with. Political expediency is a powerful motivator. In the US, for example, the entire election/voting process has been politicized. Why is a Supervisor of Elections a political office? This is something fundamental to the function of our democracy and politicians are happy to throw it under the bus to get some short term political goal.
Just look at the politics of climate change. That can't trump (pardon the pun) politics. What makes you think the safety and oversight of nuclear power generation will?
4. Nuclear waste. We still have no large-scale long-term plan for how to dispose of nuclear waste. What's more, governments seem to bear the cost for this rather than the corporations that profit from the power generated. The issues here range from making areas around sites uninhabitable (eg nuclear waste leaking into the water table) to human threats (eg certain isotopes make for great dirty bombs).
Unless you have some solution for these problems, honestly I feel like you're wasting your time advocating for certainly fission power generation (and I'm not yet convinced nuclear fusion power generation is commercially viable).
>A coal plant just isn't capable of making a thousand square miles uninhabitable for centuries.
Neither is a nuclear plant. Cleaning up within a century seems feasible. A lot of Chernobyl exclusion zone is completely safe, it just hasn't been revised in decades. Just compare to how fast Fukushima exclusion zone is shrinking. And you're ignoring loss of land due to rising sea levels.
>Companies just can't be trusted to run nuclear power plants.
If companies can be trusted to run hydroelectric plants, which have a capability to drown everyone downstream, then they can be trusted to run nuclear. I've never seen anyone campaigning to end hydro even though potential for disaster is much bigger (and hydro disasters with more casualties than Chernobyl happened several times).
>We still have no large-scale long-term plan for how to dispose of nuclear waste
Given the amount of nuclear waste that is produces this seems a weak concern. Anything that's heavily radioactive is just an energy source to be reused (and there's a lot of research being done on this). And the alternative is a lot (and I mean a lot) of solar panels and batteries, and these need to be disposed of as well.
The Fukushima exclusion zone should never have existed in the first place. More people died in the evacuation than if everyone had just stayed put.
And the waste is a political issue, not a scientific one. Reprocess it to recover the fuel and useful isotopes. What's left decays to ambient in 10,000 years--and even if we used nuclear power forever it would never amount to more than one year's worth of fly ash from coal plants. And that fly ash is nasty stuff. A nuclear plant that emitted radiation like a coal plant would be shut down pronto.
> 1. While average deaths per kWh might be relatively low (compared to other forms of power generation) the worst case scenario is much, much worse. A coal plant just isn't capable of making a thousand square miles uninhabitable for centuries.
Climate change is causing massive loss of land in the form of shifting climate and rising sea levels. And coal power's contribution to that lost land is far greater than the lost land at Chernobyl and Fukushima. Perhaps you deny climate change, but if you don't then you need to do a comparison of the portion of that climate change land loss attributable to each unit (GWh) of coal generation vs the portion of exclusion zone land lost per each unit of nuclear generation.
Then think about the fact that in the coming decades we'll apparently need about another 100GW per year in new generating capacity for the developing world. They want reliable constant power, and a large portion of that is going to be coal if they don't have other options.
> 2. Companies just can't be trusted to run nuclear power plants. This requires long-term thinking way beyond quarterly profits. Because catastrophes are so unlikely but profit hits are so short term there is inevitable pressure to cut corners.
Few problems with this thinking. First this is why nuclear power plants are regulated. Second, we've actually been running an experiment on this for the past 50+ years, the results are in, and they're described in terms of land loss and deaths, which are less than other forms.
There are also a number of walk away safe nuclear plant designs that have never been developed because we turned away from nuclear.
> 3. Governments have generally been pretty terrible at overseeing nuclear power industries...
This is just a continuation of 2.
> 4. Nuclear waste.
Nuclear waste is so damn small compared to waste from any other source. We do know how to dispose of it. Put it in a deep hole. Or burn it more in a breeder.
> (eg certain isotopes make for great dirty bombs).
Yikes. Please go visit a nuclear power plant and see if you can get your hands on it. I think if your goal is terrorism there are a few hundred easier ways to go about it. You're more likely to find materials for a dirty bomb from nuclear medicine sources.
>Climate change is causing massive loss of land in the form of shifting climate and rising sea levels. And coal power's contribution to that lost land is far greater than the lost land at Chernobyl and Fukushima.
False equivalency, as you are measuring the total land mass, to two specific accidents.
This is a perfect example as to why no-body trusts Nuclear power advocacy, because it twists and turns facts into a mush with the aim of pushing the agenda.
Building nuclear plants, & Uranium extraction and processing both release high amounts of CO2 gasses, to build nuclear plants isnt a magic wand that will fix global warming, it is an upfront cost, in the tens of billions of USD per plant, and after that comes the economic costs of constant subsidies. After all, nuclear power is the single most expensive way to produce energy after coal.
>They want reliable constant power, and a large portion of that is going to be coal if they don't have other options.
"They want reliable constant power", except you can deliver that with a matrix of solar+natural gas, or solar+wind+natural gas, or solar+gas+batteries.
Again, you show yourself to not be discussing in good faith. Coal just like nuclear energy is simply not an economic endeavor anymore, it is all in gas, solar and wind. And energy matrices composed out of those can be highly reliable.
>Few problems with this thinking. First this is why nuclear power plants are regulated.
I mean, Fukushima, 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl where all "regulated". "Known knowns, Known unknowns and Unknown unknowns". The risk costs of the Unknown unknowns for nuclear are simply stratospheric.
Also, going once again back to price, the safer you make the nuclear plants, the more the cost, and the higher the subsidies they need to receive from consumers and governments.
Also n2, as other people have mentioned in the thread, nuclear plants are always built by the lowest bidder, same with the staffing, same with the handling of nuclear waste. When you build a nuclear plant, you arent "trusting the best", you will always be trusting the cheapest guys in the business.
>We do know how to dispose of it. Put it in a deep hole. Or burn it more in a breeder.
Except.... We dont, Yuka Mountain isnt really operating, there are like 2 nuclear waste disposal in Europe, Onkalo and another site in Germany, and in the past there have been serious claims of dilapidation and abandonment [0]
When it comes to breeders, again, there's not a single one really working in the entire planet[1]. Spent nuclear fuel usually sits idly bye in rusting tanks [2, 3, 4], barrels, or besides the working reactors in the pools.
If you want people to actually believe what you say, you need to speak truthfully of how things actually work, not lie and give a rose tinted version of the facts
> False equivalency, as you are measuring the total land mass, to two specific accidents.
I really don't understand how this is false equivalency? You're saying you're only allowed to consider land loss due to nuclear. All other forms of power generation are to be exempted from this side effect? That seems plainly wrong.
> This is a perfect example as to why no-body trusts Nuclear power advocacy, because it twists and turns facts into a mush with the aim of pushing the agenda.
I'm not twisting or turning here. It seems to me the opposite, you're carving out exemptions for your favored sources and ignoring history.
> Building nuclear plants, & Uranium extraction and processing both release high amounts of CO2 gasses...
It is fair to do a complete life cycle CO2 emissions comparison for the different generation sources. Nobody who is a proponent of nuclear power would ever dispute that since it's a core component of why they end up in favor of nuclear. When you do that what do you come up with?
> to build nuclear plants isnt a magic wand that will fix global warming, it is an upfront cost, in the tens of billions of USD per plant,
I don't see why the costs of not including nuclear in the mix aren't factored in your calculation wrt global warming.
> "They want reliable constant power", except you can deliver that with a matrix of solar+natural gas, or solar+wind+natural gas, or solar+gas+batteries.
Huh? Natural gas is CO2 emitting. It's 50% less than coal, but that's hardly a good argument in it's favor over nuclear.
> Again, you show yourself to not be discussing in good faith. Coal just like nuclear energy is simply not an economic endeavor anymore, it is all in gas, solar and wind. And energy matrices composed out of those can be highly reliable.
I'm here in good faith. But here you demonstrate you're arguing from a purely economic perspective, this is the difference we seem to have. You want whatever is the cheapest source of power regardless of it's emissions.
> I mean, Fukushima, 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl where all "regulated". "Known knowns, Known unknowns and Unknown unknowns". The risk costs of the Unknown unknowns for nuclear are simply stratospheric.
You accuse me of not arguing in good faith, and yet here you are just ignoring my point. Yes these were regulated. And yes they had accidents. But still the central point is that those accidents are less damaging than the alternative.
> Also, going once again back to price, the safer you make the nuclear plants, the more the cost, and the higher the subsidies they need to receive from consumers and governments.
> Also n2, as other people have mentioned in the thread, nuclear plants are always built by the lowest bidder, same with the staffing, same with the handling of nuclear waste. When you build a nuclear plant, you arent "trusting the best", you will always be trusting the cheapest guys in the business.
Again it seems to come down to economics for you and lack of trust in regulation. I wish we had put half as much regulation into coal, gas, hydro, and solar generation over the past 50 years as we had put into nuclear -- it would've saved a lot of lives and damage to the environment. Instead those source got a largely free ride and still do. How about we do that going forward with an adequate carbon tax to cover the damage of the gas generation you favor and a recycling tax on all solar and see how that changes the economics.
> Except.... We dont, Yuka Mountain isnt really operating, there are like 2 nuclear waste disposal in Europe, Onkalo and another site in Germany, and in the past there have been serious claims of dilapidation and abandonment [0]
I think a big difference between us is that we see the dangers of nuclear waste vs the dangers posed by a world that didn't have nuclear very differently. One is clearly very present and real to you, and the other less so. I find the problem of nuclear waste pretty easy to deal with and wrap my head around. Is it unpretty in some cases as you cite? Sure. Is it worse than the equivalent tonnage of CO2 having been pumped into the atmosphere? Or the equivalent tonnes of radioactive waste from coal mining and burning being disperse everywhere? A heck of a lot less so.
Your response had an unnecessarily nasty edge and you seem to think me a nuclear power industry shill. I am not. I'm a person still young enough that I'll live through the start of much of the effects of climate change, and I care very deeply about the damage that will bring to the planet and the hundreds of millions of people worldwide that will be displaced and worse by it. I care deeply about those people and my planet.
> 1. While average deaths per kWh might be relatively low (compared to other forms of power generation) the worst case scenario is much, much worse. A coal plant just isn't capable of making a thousand square miles uninhabitable for centuries.
This is one of the main issues with nuclear technology in general. We just don't have a good 'training data set' for many of the energy applications.
With weapons, we have a very good suspicion that 'tatical' uses of the technology will cause the end of the world. The probabilities are well-enough known and the outcomes are dire enough that we've been living in 'pax-nuclei' for nearly 80 years now.
With medicine, we know how nuclear based medtech works and we have a 'good enough' idea that the benefits outweight the costs. Yes, the contrast dye is not good for you, but it'll give us a really good idea where the blockage is. Yes, the radiation chemo is not fun, but the cancer will kill you before the radiation does. The probabilities are well known and the expected values are understood.
However, with nuclear energy, we do not have a good understanding of the expected values. Sure, the French run nuclear plants fairly well. But we thought that the Japanese did too, and look what happened when a 'black swan' came along. Deaths/KW-hr may be less for now, but we have a farily good suspicion that they could go up by a whole heck of a lot. Chernobyl was a disaster, but via the heroics of the people there, it was somewhat contained. What would have happened if they only had 90% of the heroes that were there? 80%? That fault-tree contains a lot of very bad situations. As such, it is not unreasonable to say that we need more information on nuclear energy before deciding on our energy future.
The premise of the entire article seems to rely on this one fallacy.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, especially in a case like this where the effects are extraordinarily difficult (if not impossible) to measure AND there were extraordinary efforts made to suppress all the evidence.
I read the article and just thought about the big tobacco "merchants of doubt" strategy... causality is pretty hard in general; ascribing certain causality to a disease 20 years after radiation exposure is way harder.
And I think one point the series makes that he tries to make the opposite, is that people at Chernobyl and adjacencies had "the friendly atom", they didn't had much fear of radiation. Even someone as Akimov, who had a lifetime exposure in another accident before Chernobyl, were "chasing the dragon tail" of radiation. Vodka clears it up, right?
The thing is, like quantum behavior in general, chance is pretty much high when we talk radiation. The chance of DNA or cellular damage being significant and leading to something, when you just perchance aspire a few particles of some isotope "grows" with time and how strong and the type of the source. Up to acute exposure it is just a very hard multi-causal probabilistic situation.
Normally we understand that a few times background radiation wouldn't harm you, when even the sun and background radiation are in fact always harming us, mostly, of course, in ways our body can USUALLY cope with. So, any increase in magnitude, is an increase in probable suffering, and we are talking millennia here, with some isotopes.
So, nuclear energy may have its uses, sure. Particularly, we have a lot of reactors working now, and perhaps we should let them take their course. But not to fear radiation with extreme prejudice is just to be careless about it. This is an industry tied with the defense department. The dejects are strategic and must be guarded and watched -- and don't come with thorium and new ways of recycling... it might be less so, but it is always a pretty dirty business, with the military and defense, and human errors, and "acts of god".
I believe when the Chernobyl series guy said "it couldn't have happened in the US", well... that exact way, not. But capitalism has, as we all so painfully know now, it's own incentives for disinformation and lies. Also, I live in Brazil, where they are always trying to revive some dated German project to build reactors. And if the Japanese had "issues", anyone can.
We in Brazil can't even contain common dirt, so it doesn't come upon us and kill hundreds... don't believe engineers will save us, believe human incompetence and greed may take longer, but always find a crack and blow the whole thing up -- no matter the economic system.
edit: tried to fix convoluted sentence in the third paragraph, and a few misspellings.
Fellow Brazilian here. Many if not most of our energy comes from hydroelectricity. We just had two catastrophic dam failures in the last few years, causing hundreds of deaths. (mining residue dams unrelated to hydroelectricity). The worldwide death toll record for dam failure is in the hundreds of thousands, long ago in China.
The risks of nuclear power are large on themselves, but they have to be compared with the risks of other types of energy.
A rooftop solar panel installer that falls and dies will make the local news if as much.
I live in Uruguay and a shudder runs by my spine to even think of what might happen if Brazil government and companies where to get their hands in a working reactor/plant.
Brazilian companies can't be trusted to handle measly mining residue pools, what makes you even dream that the government and companies would be able to handle nuclear plants? Brazil is the absolute perfect example of a country where corruption is so high that it shouldn't be allowed to own nuclear plants.
The Brazilian dictatorship government planned to have ~100 reactors going by 2000. Thankfully, Brazilian incompetence and the Goiania accident helped us a lot here.
Many Brazilians still use things like electric showers, at 5000w. So you are there, cleaning your body everyday, or more than once a day -- Brazilians are crazy about showers, for some reason --, even in hot dry climate, and you still have the water heated. Then you create nuclear residue for thousands of years just to keep the Brazilians taste for dry skin and the fervent attachment to the cleanliness of soap.
Any discussion on energy has to take into consideration Limits of Growth and similar studies. The idea is always to have a bigger economy e more energy, and more data centers to foster the next big addictive social network. The reflection should be in alternatives to very polluting energy, sure, but also to drop the focus on growth and economic indicators.
The fellow Brazilian there talks about deaths. Deaths, and horrible deaths, and deaths of pets, are to be considered. But also drops in quality of life, dead zones, geopolitical defense, economics (as well, because, everything added, nuclear is quite a bit more expensive than anything else), and long-term thinking (more than 100 or 200 years).
Mostly, countries like Brazil wish to have nuclear power for the technology, for when it is needed for geopolitical advance. Even if we have non-belic agreements, in the long run, sovereignty depends on such technology. But Angra is enough, plenty and too much already.
We also have to consider the risks of the various results, and weight them against our priors.
If we think something is fairly unlikely (1% chance of being true), and as yet has no evidence to support or refute it, but would cause the total destruction of the earth, reason would dictate that we assume that it is true until we have evidence that it is not.
This is obviously quite sensitive to what our individual priors are about something in a world where we don't yet have any evidence. This will naturally produce different conclusions for different people (you may assess the world-destroying event to only have a .000000001% chance of occurring, in which case it's pretty reasonable for you to assume it's false until we have evidence that it's true). But, for any individual, I don't believe the situation should not be as simple as your suggestion.
Edit: of course, this presumes self-preservation as a goal which is not something which can be determined by reason. Of course, it's a goal shared by a vast majority of humans, so I feel it's a reasonable assumption here. As reason/logic are used as a tool to support our goals, I feel it's fair to include such a goal as part of our reasoning consideration.
I guess it's about how you interpret the burden of proof. If you always expect the other guy to present evidence regardless of who made the proposition then OP is perfectly right.
But if you choose the sensitive approach and expect evidence from the party who proposed the theory then starting from the article's premise that there's no reliable evidence (if true) is a perfectly valid argument to support the title.
Consider this: I am the Always-Right-All-Knower-and-All-Seer. Now what is more reasonable, to expect evidence from my side supporting my premise, or for you to provide evidence against it and assume the premise true until you do that?
I'll answer your hypothetical, but then I would appreciate if you answered one of mine.
> I am the All-Knower-and-All-Seer.
My prior that this is true is extraordinarily low. I put this at a 0.000000001% chance of likely to be true. Suppose you provide me a theory that Iraq possess Weapons of Mass Destruction, and must be invaded in order to prevent the destruction of a major city.
I would assign an extremely-high negative consequence to that outcome. I would assign a low-ish probability to the outcome based on my inherit disbelief that you are Always-Right-All-Knower-and-All-Seer, and that you have not furnished any evidence.
If your proposed solution is to invade the country, I would assign a very-high negative consequence to the outcome. As such, I would ask you to provide quite compelling evidence that your claim was true, before supporting such a rash action.
If, instead, your proposed solution was to propose international monitoring to the country of Iraq I would assign a quite-low negative consequence to the outcome (probably even a slightly positive consequence). As such, before backing your proposed solution I would require a much lower bar of evidence.
But I believe you about the WMDs in either scenario to the same degree. Your proposal changes how much I need to accept your premise about the WMDs to accept your solution.
So, I think accepting decision D based on belief X is a far far more complicated question that "do you believe X"?
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Let me also look at this from the other side. Let's say I, for some reason, conclusively believe you to be an All-Knower-and-All-Seer. My belief in this is 100%. Perhaps I am easily convinced, or perhaps you made 1,000,000,000,000 predictions of fully stochastic events, and I have assigned a 10-sigma confidence that you are some kind of All-Knower-and-All-Seer. Let's also assume that I have 100% confidence that you are honest, and that I have some way of gaining that confidence. However I got there, it's somewhat irrelevant at this point.
If I have 100% confidence that you are truly an All-Knower-and-All-Seer, and you suggested a particular course of action was strictly beneficial to me, I would almost certainly follow that course of action without requiring further evidence from you.
I would argue that, in such a scenario (and such a scenario is quite contrived, I believe, for anyone who is truly skeptical) it would be irrational for me to ask you for more evidence before acting. After all, at that point we've already moved by belief threshold high enough for me to take actions in the world to further my goals.
This all assumes that we are an actor in the world with goals (which, I again assert that goals cannot be defined rationally, but rather that rationality serves as a tool to achieve goals). If you have no goals, then I agree that pure reason would require you to ask for more evidence.
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My return hypothetical is to ask you this question:
You are a key decision maker for a scientific body. You are deciding whether you should run an experiment code-named Alpha. There is a low-likelihood but not preposterous theory (say, accepted by 10-15% of the scientific community), but lacks any solid experimental support. This theory says that running the Alpha will destroy the planet. The gain from running the experiment will be furthering scientific knowledge in quite useful, but not ground-breaking ways.
Again, this "Destruction Hypothesis" seems like it's not super likely to be correct, but it's not a crackpot-theory.
Do you run Alpha today without delay, or do you order more investigation of the Destruction Hypothesis to conclusively rule it out before running Alpha?
My example was meant to highlight the principle and it stands because it's a simple straight-forward example that covers almost all if not all the cases. The burden of proof stands with the party making the claim.
You're free to believe an unsubstantiated theory but you can't expect others to prove it wrong in order to make their point.
Now coming back to your hypothesis, it's too complex and contains way too little data to assist in a decision. A random answer would be just as good and proves nothing. I would probably consider performing the experiment on another planet. Or even on this one. Or wait a little longer (which is equivalent to not doing it). What I would definitely not do is say "The premise of your entire [theory] seems to rely on this one fallacy" [approximate quote from OP]. It's only a fallacy after you prove it.
P.S. Is experiment Alpha the detonation of a thermonuclear bomb that might set the atmosphere on fire? Because we know how that decision went :).
I guess my point is who carries the burden is irrelevant if you have to make a decision based on your state of knowledge.
You have a decision to make, and Bob makes a claim which could influence that decision.
Does it matter where the burden lies? You have to make the decision, and Bob has presented new information but doesn't well substantiate it.
My point is this: From a pure reason standpoint, I think it's fair to always assume the negative when there is not evidence for a positive claim. But in the real world where you have to achieve real goals based on partial knowledge, reason would dictate that you sometimes evaluate and consider claims that are not yet well substantiated, and you might have to do the legwork to substantiate the claim yourself (if you decide there is enough merit and value in doing that substantiation).
My point is the burden of proof is, practically, often on the person who needs to make a decision based on information and not on the person who makes a claim with related information.
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For Alpha, I didn't have something specific in mind but some kind of combination of "light the atmosphere on fire" and more crackpot "your particle accelerator will create a black-hole" were definitely both in the back of my mind.
Reason never dictates we assume a negative because a positive is unprovable. We may consider a negative, but we would need evidence of it before believing the claim.
Couldn't agree more. Take Harold McCluskey [1] - "The Atomic Man" - who was involved with a pretty horrendous accident at Hanford, WA - and ended up with radioactive Americium-241 [2] embedded in his face/hands etc. - continuously irradiating him with a-particles.
You would think - "That's it for that guy"... Well, he ended up dying of pre-existing coronary artery disease - nothing to do with radiation or cancer, despite having massive amounts of radioactive material in his body, post-mortem.
The guy lived for ten years after the accident. He spent the first four or five years undergoing chelation therapy daily to remove the radioisotopes from his body tissues. At the time of his death, the dose model suggested he would have about a 12% chance of not having cancer. He didn't have cancer.
So, he rolled a 1 on an 8-sided die and didn't get cancer in that time. If he had lived longer, cancer would be a near certainty, though it still might not have been what killed him.
Cancer is not caused by longevity. It's statistically more likely the longer you live. So your second sentence is true, but your first sentence is false.
No. It's a case study that shows that a worst case exposure to radioactive material is not a death sentence.
Are you familiar with the term "Case study" or "Case report"? It it is a medical/other study that follows a single individual over time. These are published daily in many medical journals.
I am familiar with case studies. A single case study is often a curiosity that might motivate someone to do a proper study, but not something from which you can conclude that having Americium in your body is not as dangerous as commonly claimed.
Which is precisely why you don't want them inside your body, every alpha particle emitted by the delay will hit and be absorbed inside you, it is the worst. That's why the Russian chose Polonium to kill Litvinenko.
There are alpha particles of different energies, and products of decay of emitters may well not be good for your health either. Polonium besides being acutely toxic itself, decays into lead for example.
for more samples go to the villages in the 30 km zone around Chernobyl- few people refused to evacuate and still live there at the very old age. Though I doubt they were ever exposed to such high levels of radiation as mentioned in the parent.
Or the "radioactive gold" incident in NY State, when someone melted down gold radiotherapy seeds, and that's how the regional jewelry gold supply became contaminated. The government even issued public advisory posters, it was bad: https://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/hpposters/goldjewelry.ht...
You blatantly ignore the others who did in fact die from radiation exposure.. The case study you were referring to is not grounds for "radiation isn't all that bad.." It poses a significant risk, and since it can mutate/destroy DNA, I am willing to bet it did indeed play a part in at least the acceleration of the heart disease. You're body is a full system made up of very complex sub-systems, and each system influences the behavior of the others..
This argument is equivalent to "vaccines are bad because a soccer mom said their son died because of it."
You're statement of "its no big deal" implies you can just walk into Chernobyl and come out feeling great. If you think that is the case, you should visit the radioactive site and find out..
OK, simple question: would you be willing to get yourself contaminated with Americium-241 in the same way as the Atomic Man (for example, to proof how harmless a-particles in the body are, or, lets say for money)?
If not, what is the point of your contribution to the discussion?
This is a false dilemma. It is possible for something to be less deadly than people generally think, but still not safe enought that anyone would be accept unneccessary exposure to that thing.
Yes, exactly. And for a discussion about the pros and cons of Nuclear Energy the important factor is not, if it is less deadly than people generally think, but if it is safe enough that anyone (or at least a democratic majority) would accept the risks.
What is the point of a discussion with the topic "it is deadly, but not as deadly as people generally think, but still unacceptably deadly"? I don't get it.
On why we fear radiation
>nuclear accidents remind us of nuclear bombs and our vulnerability to them.
I disagree. I think we fear radiation because we know there is a lethal threat present but we can't individually detect it, like nerve gas or perhaps something like Ebola. It triggers our threat response without giving us a clear source for the danger, which causes the generalized fear.
Punch line, you definitely wanna stay away from ciggarettes if you don't like radiation.
There's also this crazy woman (I think she's German?) who likes to go play with radiation sources. She has the most dead pan voice that barely changes except to possibly register some excitement when she finds a particularly hot source of radiation. She has a bunch of videos exploring Chernobyl. It's quite interesting for example to watch her pick apart dirt to find the single hot particle: https://youtu.be/C9npqRJ_9P8?t=150
It just makes me very angry that Chernobyl and Three Mile Island occurred, and the public was whipped into such an ignorantly self-destructive fervor to lobby against nuclear power and make it so expensive to develop. We've lost a good fifty years of additional experience and improvements and iterations on design, and meanwhile we have burned billions of tons of coal in the interim, releasing pollution and exhaust particles that contain more radioactive material than all the nuclear accidents ever, and even all the military atomic munitions testing.
Such a pyrrhic victory for the environmentalists, and a catastrophic disaster for the rest of us.
+1. It's a very little-known fact that coal energy produces radiation for all practical purposes. It does so by digging up naturally radioactive particles that would otherwise remain locked deep into the Earth, and putting them in the atmosphere.
It's worth mentioning that the lead Chernobyl investigator committed suicide [0] over his feelings of guilt in not being more forthright about the inherent dangers of the RBMK design.
Three anti-science lobbies dragging our world back into the dark ages:
1) anti-vaxxers
2) anti-nuclear
3) anti-GMO
Let’s have a better public education before it is to late.
I grew up near Chernobyl and my parents still work there. While no one denies it was a huge disaster in which people died; they way nuclear is portrayed in (most) of the Western world is disgusting.
As of today (accounting for all past death) nuclear is the safest form of power generation (statistically even safer than solar, measured in deaths/mwt).
Do we want to stop climate change? If yes - nuclear is an essential part of the solution.
Please, never say "safer than solar". Even if technically correct from a certain perspective, it sounds like an "argue to win" point, and just alienates the very people you want to win to your side - environmentally-minded folks who might be convinced of the benefits of nuclear power.
From a less narrow perspective, it shows a total ignorance of how risk analysis works. It's not how many people have been harmed, it's how many people could be harmed. This is intuitively obvious to the people you're trying to impress with this line. So don't use it.
Also there is a huge difference between workers installing solar panels dying on the job from falling of roofs and citizens getting killed by exploding nuclear plants. The former is a risk they were very aware of, had some control over and were payed to accept. The latter is a risk imposed on them outside of their control and without compensation (and if they vote to get rid of that risk HN viciously attacts them).
And the latter (killed by exploding nuclear power plants) is historically zero.
All nuclear related fatalities are due to radiation exposure, and the immediate deaths are rather small numbers, with the lingering effects of the fallout (i.e. cancer) only pushing the numbers into the 10's of thousands.
The power plants aren't exploding - that's my point. Calling a meltdown an explosion is factually incorrect, and furthers misconceptions about what happens when a nuclear power plant goes critical.
Factually there was a hydrogen explosion in Fukushima due to things doing wrong in the nuclear part. And it produced fall out. That is was not a prompt critical nuclear explosion is semantics. You just want to push nuclear instead of being honest.
> "That is was not a prompt critical nuclear explosion is semantics."
In a world where nuclear weapons are a thing and the public is generally aware of their horrific effects, the distinction between a meltdown and a 'nuclear explosion' is not semantics.
It's a religious argument. The "death per MW" is a red herring.
A nuclear advocate will tell you that on a per-MW basis nuclear is safer from a "death from radiation" POV because your installer may fall off a roof or you might get knocked on the head by a loose panel. Conveniently, these "death per-MV" claims exclude the construction of the nuclear plants, the potentially thousands of years of waste containment and human labor associated with it.
You also need to price risk higher with nuclear because safety depends heavily on competent administration. That's expensive, and human failure is very common.
End of the day, the economics of nuclear are the problem. We would be building nuclear if they made money. In my state, nuclear plants need direct government subsidy (to the tune of billions) as they are unable to sell their electricity at a rate that sustains the plant. The capital costs are extreme and the plant needs to operate at capacity to work financially.
I'm certainly opposed to God forbids opening new nuclear plants, but I'm also opposed to closing existing ones, those are different arguments and should be treated as such. Nuclear fission is a relic of early 50's, but we already paid the co2 cost of building said plants, therefore should continue operating to reduce further damage to the biosphere by releasing more co2/methane. But we don't need to build new nuclear plants, as they are overly expensive and the safer you try to make them the more expensive they get, not to mention that they take a huge amount of time to actually get built and in the meantime release ungodly amounts of co2 with the colossal amounts of steel and concrete needed for the construction, a co2 budget that will take a long time to be recovered
They only take that long due to red tape, not due to any intrinsic reason. France did not have this problem. The U.S. could do like them, create the one standardized design for a nuclear plant, build them all the same way, which of course will help with construction, safety and maintenance.
A lot of that depends on what the energy medium is. Is the other 40% gas for cars and natural gas for heating? It's very easy to do 100% of electricity from solar in the Bay Area in a home that still drives gas cars, has gas heat and no AC.
I coughed up the money to go as solar as I can, (heat pumps, electric vehicles, ect,) but my state's financing had its limits; and then Mother Nature sent me an unusually cloudy April. I'm probably going to be somewhere between 70-85% solar after I have a few years of data.
Anyway, when it comes to reducing CO2, celebrate the partial victories. Rooftop solar can take a huge dent in emissions, but it's not a complete solution. There is no silver bullet for this problem.
The RBMK design was very safe, too. And it exploded due to a combination of design flaw and dangerous operation. Sure, the rest of them were fixed after that, but.
Fukushima was a very safe design, too, and well regulated. Three Mile Island was a very safe design. And let's not even get into the history of lesser-known accidents with less-safe designs, in the hands of paranoid military operators and secretive, embarrassment-shy governments.
Of the well-known accidents, all of them were unexpected. And all of them could have gone far worse, were it not for heroic actions and some luck on the part of the operators. And all of them involved a degree of government coverup and the public distrust that causes. So it's not only expected that the public would distrust nuclear power more than is maybe absolutely needed, it's very reasonable for them to do so. The safety of nuclear power worldwide is the safety of the worst design with the worst crew, built by the lowest bidder.
Don't just react as if the public is stupid, or there's no risk involved. Those things are the reason the public doesn't take pro-nuclear activists seriously.
All sorts of accidents are expected. We take them into account. For example, if you operate a large data center, you simply assume that a certain number of drives and motherboards will fail, and build it into the plan.
No one planned for Fukushima to be flooded. No on planned for one of Chernobyl's reactor cores to explode. (The phrase "impossible" was tossed around a lot; it took a good deal of thinking to finally recognize the design flaw.)
Decades after the Chernobyl disaster, a worst case scenario, and the total number of people's health negatively impacted is well under 100k. I think it's safe to say that, regardless of the choice between "could" or "have", the number of lives impacted is relatively small (in the scale of power-generation related injuries and deaths).
The worst case scenario would have rendered large parts of Europe uninhabitable.
That worst case scenario was only avoided through a combination of luck and suicidal - not always informed and voluntary - heroism.
And its disingenuous to reduce this to "lives affected." Even ignoring the deaths, the economic opportunity costs in all affected countries absolutely overshadow the economic value of all of the electricity ever generated by the plant.
Chernobyl went prompt critical, that's about as bad as it can get. Chernobyl basically disproved the China Syndrome fears--everything that was supposed to cause a China Syndrome accident happened--but it only managed to burn it's way into the basement. The core doesn't stay in one blob, it responds to what it's eating through, changes shape and ceases to be critical.
But Chernobyl was not a worst case scenario. It was bad but the Soviet government did respond to it seriously. It could've been much worse had they not.
In fact, that's what this article gets entirely wrong about the film. The most disturbing thing the film highlights is not the gruesome deaths of a handful of individuals. It's how the disaster could've been much worse.
In the chernobyl podcast, where a lead director and producer of the show talks about it, he said a haunting line that in my opinion is nothing but the truth
>Chernobyl could only happen in the Ussr, but the Ussr was the only country with the capabilities to solve it
Only a nation with the colosal human, and natural resources such as the ussr could have "solved" the chernobyl problem
Indeed. They showed clearly that they were willing to throw near limitless resources at solving the problem before it became a worst case scenario. The worst cast scenario being the core reaching either the giant pool of water in the plant or the ground water beneath the plant which may have made a huge part of the continent uninhabitable.
How it could have been worse, and why. The layer after layer of lies and coverups going on within the Soviet government are very much at odds with the heroism of those actually on the ground.
Kinda like working IT in a big American corporation. :)
> the Soviet government did respond to it seriously
If by seriously you mean covering up the problem so the appropriate experts could be brought in to contain the problem before the fallout covered half of Europe, or in not providing proper shielding for the first responders, or by not providing proper funding and training for the staff at Chernobyl... sure, they took it very seriously.
I have read many books about the Soviet Union. The government was full of perverse incentives which encouraged fraud, deception, denial and corruption.
The dogma was so perverse it lead to a total corruption of logic and reason. To the point it essentially warped reality.
In the Soviet Union, to ask for a better tool was to imply that your managers were incompetent. Or the tool designers were. Or the manufacturers were. All of whom were appointed by the government. A government which saw itself as the manifest will of the people. To imply something wasn't good enough was to imply the Russian people themselves weren't good enough.
That horrendous logic may have been self inflicted but it none the less set the ground rules for any action taken by the government. The inadequacies you point out say nothing about how seriously the Soviet government took Chernobyl. You will find the exact same problems pervade almost every single Soviet government initiative.
What happened at chernobyl WAS Not a "worse case scenario", had the entire with the other 3 reactors plant exploded in a thermal explosion. Now that would had been a worse case scenario, and today there are still RBMK reactors in operation
You wont ever hear of such a risk from a solar plant exploding...
If you want to discuss the safety of nuclear energy, then own up the risk and face the criticism, to do otherwise is misleading and cowardly
> It's not how many people have been harmed, it's how many people could be harmed.
Really? So we should take into account scenarios like 1. Solar installer falls from roof, hits car, dies 2. Car didn't have handbrake on, starts to roll down the driveway, rolling over the toddler playing in the yard, killing her too 3. Rolls into the street, causing a school bus full of children to swerve and hit a LNG tanker, causing a massive explosion killing everybody onboard.
Of course, in reality, we need to take into account realistic failure pathways and plan accordingly. Per such analysis, both solar and nuclear are both very safe.
> It's not how many people have been harmed, it's how many people could be harmed.
I don't understand. Why should there be any difference between these, unless you're saying that the safety of solar/wind is improving faster than the safety of nuclear is improving?
There is no case in which the failure of a wind farm could cause death or injury to millions of people at once.
The whole "safety" argument of solar is buried in flat-out bullshit analysis about how people fall off of roofs while installing panels. There's no safety concern to speak of with solar/wind.
The issue of falls is enough to put the death toll from solar above the death toll from nuclear. It's just the solar deaths are spread out thin enough they aren't even going to make the local news, the nuclear deaths are concentrated and make worldwide news. (And note that neither Three Mile Island nor Fukushima involved any nuclear deaths.)
I didn't claim to be any kind of expert. But I don't understand how the scenario you are describing is necessary for solar/wind to have a higher risk per MWh. What does the presence of catastrophic failure modes have to do with past versus future results?
I'm going to toss a coin, you call it. If you win, you get $5. If you lose, you pay me $1. You probably do it, right?
Next scenario. I'm going to roll a 100-sided die. If it comes up one, I'm going to shoot you in the head. Anything else, you get $100. Now, would you agree to that? Of course not. Even though you're 99% likely to get $100. It's that 1% chance of dying that stops you.
That's because "risk" isn't just one number. Even at a very basic level, we distinguish between the likelihood of the risk, and the consequences of the risk. You're only considering the likelihood, not the consequences. That's where you're going wrong.
> You're only considering the likelihood, not the consequences.
I'm considering the likelihood of the same consequence: people dying. You are describing a totally different scenario with your coin toss example. You are making it sound like I'm weighing profits against lives and that is not correct. I'm weighing lives against lives.
No, I understand what you're weighing, but you're still weighing it wrong. You're looking at individual deaths. What is the maximum number of deaths/injuries that can be caused by a solar power accident? Two, maybe? Now, what is the maximum number that can be caused by a nuclear accident? Millions.
Someone stumbling off a roof will not cause the evacuation of a city. Period.
The problem is you seem to think the bigger incident is automatically worse.
Mr. Evil is sitting in a tower. He has two weapons, a rifle and a rocket launcher.
Scenario A: He rolls a d100. If it comes up 1 he picks up the rifle and shoots at the first person he sees. He's competent, his target dies.
Scenario B: He rolls two d100s. If both come up 1 he picks up the rocket launcher and fires at the first group of people he sees. The shrapnel from the rocket will kill 10 people.
You live in the city he's in. Do you want him to roll one die or two?
Okay, let's imagine an alternative universe where home-sized nuclear reactor somehow got popular and people got used to it.
As a result, a typical city has millions of small nuclear reactors. Even though the government tries hard, it is impossible to regulate all of them to absolute safety, and every month there's a nuclear leak somewhere, in every city. As a result pretty much all mankind (well, at least the urbanites) enjoy(?) a permanently raised level of radiation and elevated rate of cancer.
Experts say millions die per year worldwide, but since nuclear is a part of our life, we have accepted it as a given and decided it's the price we're willing to pay. On the bright side, because each reactor is so small, each leak doesn't cause evacuation of a city: at worst the unit is locked down for a few months, and (because we've been so good at it) usually nobody dies as a result. At least no one's death can be conclusively linked to any particular accident.
So, in your metric, do you think this world is safer than our own Earth with large-scale nuclear plants?
...Now, note that this isn't just an idle fantasy: it's pretty much an exact mirror image of what we do with vehicular emission.
Right, that's the whole pro-nuclear argument: individual deaths are what matter, not individual incidents. What relevance do the individual incidents have when you only need 1 nuclear plant for every 500000 solar panels?[1] If we are talking about overall utility to the human race, then why shouldn't we be looking at the overall death count? I just don't see how the potential magnitude of individual incidents factors into that when the overall deaths have already been taken into account.
[1]: Based on an extremely generous estimate of 1000W per solar panel, and a fairly conservative estimate of 500MW per nuclear plant
Nuclear is not an essential part of any solution, it is more expensive than solar and wind per Mwatt, it takes far longer to build new plants, and if you want to make sure those plants are actually safe then you need to invest billions of dollars into them leading again to a higher price for electricity, the risks for said plants are still there, and unlike solar or wind they require big rivers or water bodies nearby. Uranium extraction and processing is still a dirty power hungry affair and that won't change any time soon.
Having deaths/mwt is also stupidly misleading because no solar plant ever had the risk of exploding and decimating a chunk of Eastern Europe, not to mention forcing thousands out of their homes and abandoning everything behind never to return
If you want to discuss things, then don't do it by misleading statements, that only makes you look like an angsty teen that opposes the status quo simply because it is cool to do so
More expensive than solar and wind per MW comparison misses something essential.
If you can't figure it out, you are missing the big picture.
Nuclear is not full solution for all energy needs, but it has that something that makes it very effective part in the mix together with wind and solar.
You are not impressing anyone by playing the "I'm smarter than you card", you are only shaming yourself and not addressing the points of the discussion
Solar plants with natural gas backup turbines are still cheaper than nuclear plants per mwatt
I hope I do t sound too irated, but I'm indeed highly frustrated by the fact that wherever I have this discussion about nuclear power i dont see anyone who is actually ready to have the discussion, only people who believe in an ideal world where nuclear plants are all safe, where 3 mile Island "wasn't a big deal", and where the exclusion area in Fukushima "is a minor externality"
Again, if you want to argue, you will have to bring real world arguments
Yeah, it is, and that's where things get interesting such as logistics, economics trends, risk assestment
At the moment the US is going through a natural gas boom, companies many times have a serious over supply of it, and they are releasing it into the atmosphere, the Bakken Oil Fields at night are quite literally visible from the International Space Station[0] because of the colossal amounts of natural gas flares of companies burning excess natural gas. All of that is simply wasted energy, and extra CO2 and unburnt natural gas that enters into the atmosphere
One of the reasons why so many coal plants in the US are going through hard economic times is because they are being undercut by both solar, wind and stupidly cheap natural gas turbines [1].
To build nuclear plants today in the US, would be an horrendous economic decision, because those would instantly become stranded assets that would need to be bailed out by the general public via overly expensive electricity bills. In the meantime, gas is just so readily available that's being burnt on an unimaginable scale, all of that energy could be simply packaged and used as electricity.
In the meantime in the rest of the world, most countries are already divesting from big bulky centralized energy sources, simply because of how expensive they are. They just can't compete with cheaper renewables with a assistance of natural gas, and in the long as prices fall even further run those natural gas assistance plants can be replaced with batteries.
In short, what I advocate, is simply Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. If we have nuclear plants already built, use them, but dont build more, if a country is experiencing a surplus of natural gas, use it, and please dont burn it as waste.
That's a false choice, as natural gas is already being wasted and burnt as a byproduct, if that natural gas were used as an energy source, then we could better control the burning process and reduce emissions. Building nuclear plants would actually just increase the amount of natural gas that ends up being burned as a byproduct all the while not helping us in the grand scheme of things
> Building nuclear plants would actually just increase the amount of natural gas that ends up being burned as a byproduct all the while not helping us in the grand scheme of things.
I don't know where you're sourcing that argument. Seems like nuclear beats most renewables (solar specifically) in terms of carbon emissions and potential for quickly and reliably replacing our generation in a centralized way:
Solar in particular can vary wildly when it comes to the CO2/MWatt because of geography, the ratio of CO2/Mwatt in Atacama desert will be wildly different from a solar plant in Germany, but still, when averaged out, the values of the plants themselves are mostly equivalent.
Yet the problem happens when costs and other externalities are thrown into the picture, a solar plant doesnt need to worry about the storage of nuclear waste, and the mining of new facilities to store that waste, nor the extraction and refining process for Uranium which has all sorts of caveats, solar needs only worry of silica extraction, rare earths (which are needed by other industrial processes anyways) and refining and production, then simple disposal. And unlike Nuclear, the waste disposal of solar panels is comparatively super straight forward.
The big one is the economic cost, where solar and wind heavily undercuts nuclear energy production
And solar/wind can be expected to continue falling in price as technology continues to advance and economies of scale pick up the slack, same is not the case for nuclear technology, where safety requirements balloon up the price of the plants, waste management, uranium extraction, and in a competitive disrupted market such as the modern market of energy production, nuclear plants are falling by the wayside as a consequence of continued delays, ever increasing safety requirements and waste management fees increases.
Lastly, nuclear plant construction, is neither "easy, nor speedy". it is an absolutely gruesome afair which has lead to the bankrupcy of many companies
Neither is waiting 15 years until a next generation of nuclear plants are built....
Natural gas is the resource that we have right now, and as it stands, in Bakken Oil Fields, natural gas is being burnt as excess waste. That gas needs to be used, there has to be a demand for it. Because otherwise companies will continue to burn it, as they dont have a place to store it
Also, I'm not advocating for long term usage of Natural gas, in due time natural gas plants need to be phased out in favor of batteries, which will work as a way to stabilize a renewable energy based grid, but we are not there yet.
If the world were perfect, then yes, I would agree to Nuclear Fission, but alas here we are, where nuclear plants construction is constantly delayed
>>Dr Portugal Pereira said: "If we want to decarbonise our energy system, nuclear may not be the best choice for a primary strategy. Nuclear power is better late than never, but to really address climate change, it would be best if they were not late at all, as technologies like wind and solar rarely are."[0]
> Neither is waiting 15 years until a next generation of nuclear plants are built....
Well, certainly it's shameful how bad we're at doing large projects in the Western world today. That being said, even if we in the short term won't relearn how to do them on budget and schedule (as Russian, Korean, and Chinese designs appear to be doing) there's plenty we can do while waiting for such long-term projects to finish. Like, massively expanding wind, solar, high voltage grids, pumped hydro, EV's, public transport, heat pumps, energy efficiency measures, demand response and whatnot.
> Natural gas is the resource that we have right now, and as it stands, in Bakken Oil Fields, natural gas is being burnt as excess waste. That gas needs to be used, there has to be a demand for it. Because otherwise companies will continue to burn it, as they dont have a place to store it
Sure, it's better to burn the gas for power rather than just flaring it off. But, we really should think about how to ASAP scale down and eventually shutdown the fossil industry (barring a magical fairy^H CCS improvements).
> Also, I'm not advocating for long term usage of Natural gas,
As the article I linked to mentions, at this point we can't really think of gas as some kind of "bridge fuel" either. Gas infrastructure we build now will have an economic lifetime of several decades. So if we ever decide to tackle climate breakdown, those will be stranded at an enormous cost to society.
> in due time natural gas plants need to be phased out in favor of batteries
I'm skeptical batteries will ever become cheap enough for bulk storage to cover when wind/solar don't produce in an industrialized nation. I do think they will be very successful for ancillary services like frequency control or peak shaving.
Real world arguments include comparing radiation exposure from coal, gas and oil exploration to the nuclear power.
When you extract gas for the turbines from the ground, it's not just hydrocarbons. The scale of hydrocarbon use makes even relatively small amount of radioactive materials comparable.
Battery technology, be it lithium ion or one of the numerous flow chemistries, is on a continuously decreasing cost curve, while nuclear tech is on a continuously increasing cost curve, or at best stagnant.
Additionally, with nuclear, we are locking in todays prices for 60 years, without taking delivery for 10-15 years. Investing in storage tech with a 15-20 life span allows reinvesting in a cheaper tech after that.
Additionally, seasonal storage technologies, outside of the currently existing hydro dams, are likely to enter the stage, such as synthetic fuel.
And since a huge amount of our emissions come from sources that can't yet be electrified easily, we really we will likely need some sort of synthetic fuel strategy, which would also turn into a seasonal storage tech.
Electrical generation is just one part of the climate solution, and honestly renewables plus storage plus HVDC is, today, a 95% solution. Getting that last 5% also solves the other parts of the climate problem. We need to be looking beyond electrical grids to other regions of our economy, and we need to be doing it five years ago.
If the nuclear renaissance of 2008 had delivered a desirable product, it would be deployed in far more places. Instead, it was late, and also way too expensive. Nuclear may come back in some form, such as SMR, but as it is, it's neither necessary nor desirable to tackle climate change.
I think that they're the only options that have a chance at scaling. We know how to build battery factories reliably, and we continually make them cheaper.
We don't know how to build nuclear, much less on the grand scale that would be needed, probably 50-100 reactors for the US alone.
The US already has 98 reactors. Gradually adding 50 more while wind (6.6%) and solar (1.5%) catch up would eventually provide 30% of US electricity from nuclear power. The optimal ratio depends on how alternative energy storage tech advances.
50 reactors is 50 bets, each at a cost of $5-$15B. And given our success rate, it's actually probably 75-100 bets if we want to end up with 50 reactors, each with a massive (25%-50%) chance of complete loss even before generating electricity. Even if you assume unchanging technology costs, it's unlikely that a successful build will recoup its costs. Once you account for advancing technology, it's virtually guaranteed that each of these nuclear reactors would never ever be able to compete on cost. So the upside to the bet is practically negligible.
So clearly no rational economic actor is going to undertake a build on their own, after what we've learned from Vogtle and Summer. We wouldn't be able to find a contractor or a utility or anybody that wants to take on that risk. So what's left is a massive government subsidy, of somewhere between $500B - $1T to build reactors.
What if, instead of government actors deploying $10B-$20B per year to build reactors, we spend half on well-proven technology like lithium-ion grid storage that the government owns and operates at cost, and spent the rest to buy the early products of industries that are developing, including nuclear SMR, in order to give them the chance to advance their learning curves and become more cost effective?
Nuclear technology, as it exists today, is dead in the water. Even if we eliminate all regulation and all local NIMBY opposition, we are left with the problem of finding merchants willing to construct it. This is a serious problem for the technology, and it's innately tied to the technology itself, the engineering required to build these massive reactors, and the tight construction tolerances that are required to make them work.
We need a nuclear tech revolution before it can compete with storage and renewables. Solar and storage are ultimately thin film technologies, which works great with our current manufacturing capabilities. Wind is lots of identical, smallish generators. Nuclear does not fit at all with our current construction capabilities or engineering practices and capabilities. Until it can be brought into the modern world (possibly through SMR), it is not a good technology.
Not sure why not having a current recycling program for lithium is an issue. We didn't even have economically viable lithium ion storage until recently.
What assumptions go into a 5-8x lithium price increase?
The real price of solar and wind is vastly more than the current market price.
The current system is highly subsidized by the existing power infrastructure. You use the sun when it's shining and the grid when it's not--but that means you need just as many generators, they just burn a bit less fuel.
The cost per kWh for pure solar power is something that's not discussed much, I did manage to find one figure of over $1 per kWh and the lowest (which I considered questionable as they were pushing off-grid systems) was $.40 per kWh.
Ok, so what are solar cells other than semiconductors that pretty rapidly wear out and need to be scrapped. Who is recycling these? Answer: no one. They’re going to be e-waste shipped off somewhere to seep cadmium and other harmful elements into the environment. The idea that nuclear is dirty, ignores the very real byproducts of current renewables.
At least nuclear energy centralizes waste. With renewables we’re spreading generation across a country, with little control of ensuring the materials are ever recycled in a responsible way.
About GMO, you don't need to be anti-science to be against them.
My problem is that GMO seeds are proprietary, that is you need to buy them from whoever produces them. And you don't get to use the seeds produced from the plants themselves because either they're sterile or you're legally prevented to do so. I mean, there's even a concept of "seed piracy", which to me is crazy.
The day we have "free-as-in-freedom" (and, of course, safe) GMOs is the day I won't be against them.
I'm a bit perplexed when people here go crazy because John Deere refuses to let people repair their own tractors but as soon as someone is against GMOs it's anti-science.
I don't think this is really being "against GMOs" though, what you're really against is IP law surrounding GMOs. It's like saying you're "anti-film" just because you don't support the MPAA. It's attacking the wrong target and giving people a bad taste regarding GMOs even though they have the potential to do great things for society.
> My problem is that GMO seeds are proprietary, that is you need to buy them from whoever produces them.
This is getting a bit off topic, but GMO has absolutely zero to do with this, and is a completely unrelated facet of agribusiness.
Plant patents go back long before GMOs were ever a possibility. Hybrids, which don't reproduce true, have also been a huge mainstay of farming since longe before GMOs.
It's fine to be concerned with the monetization of plant life, but GMOs are not an aspect related to that.
There are plenty of non-profits that are trying to make better products that can be freely distributed and grown by farmers, but such misleading information stymies their efforts.
The whole article reeks of politicized shaming of those stupid treehuggers falling for the lies of corrupt Hollywood. Sigh.
Meanwhile, out in the real world, the arguments for nuclear power are rapidly fading - on economic grounds, not safety grounds. Even assuming that nuclear is as safe as its most enthusiastic proponents claim, it's not a good investment anymore. Why? Because the cost/energy of storage-backed wind/solar is plummeting, and we don't know yet where the bottom is, due to rapid advances in technology and increasing economies of scale in production and deployment. The cost of nuclear plants is largely up-front - they're cheap to operate over decades, but expensive to build. If someone spends billions on new plants, and by the time they're built a decade later, solar costs half as much as nuclear, there's almost no reason to even fire the plants up.
This isn't a safety risk. This is a capital risk. Businesses care more about risking their money than risking people's lives. Building more nuclear power right now could turn into the kind of boondoggle that bankrupts utilities. Think the public is mad about nuclear disaster risk? Wait til they're being asked to pay more on their bills to bail out a utility that wasted billions on unused nuclear plants.
And the financial risk just begs the question... what's the benefit of nuclear at all, in a world where storage-backed solar/wind is clearly the future? The cost is lower, the risk is lower, it's available to nations that can't afford (or shouldn't be allowed to have) nuclear plants, etc. Barriers to entry in terms of cost and time to market are extremely low, so low that even ordinary citizens can get in on the game.
Demanding nuclear power at this point makes no economic sense. Which means the demands have other motivations, and we should think about why we think nuclear is so darn important in this day and age.
If there is no economic sense in building nuke plants, we can just stop talking about it, right? Presumably the utilities will run their analysis, and if you're right, the plants will just never get built. Is the nuclear lobby so strong that it is able to force utilities to go against the simple economics? Even the coal lobby, which I assume (perhaps incorrectly?) is larger and more entrenched, is losing that battle...
I hope you're right, because these periodic debates (on HN and elsewhere) always have the same old arguments and no one ever seems to be convinced.
When's the last time a new plant got built in the US? What's the construction rate for new plants, even in less regulated and more centrally controlled nations like Russia and China?
“With hindsight, we can say the evacuation was a mistake,” said Philip Thomas, a professor of risk management who led a recent research project on nuclear accidents. “We would have recommended that nobody be evacuated.”
Interestingly, the source given for the "fatal levels" (footnote 20) appears to be the book "Bugging In and Bugging Out", which is a survivalist guide:
Whether such a book is a reliable source for that kind of claim is certainly debatable, but even more interestingly, the cited page does not even say anything about "fatal" levels of radiation:
"Although radiation levels in Pripyat have now dropped sufficiently for tourists to be allowed to visit the city, ..."
The parent comment has had its context stripped: it was about the Fukushima evacuation which resulted, directly or indirectly, in an estimated 2100 fatalities (or "premature deaths" to be precise). Mass panic, evacuation and long-term displacement have predictable consequences.
I grew up in a city (Slavutich) ~ 35 miles from Prioyat where it was evacuated. Radiation levels there two times smaller than in Manhattan ( which is still within the norm).
Interestingly, some people refused to evacuate from nearby villages and still live there (within evacuated 30km zone) at the very old age.
Not to mention the whole groundwater incident...which, had it not been for (suicidal?) miners digging a tunnel, the water supply of FIFTY MILLION people would have been contaminated.
When it comes to the miners, they actually weren't necessary, the corium lava didn't breach the lower levels of concrete, it solidified before that, so all those miners were exposed to all that radiation and risk of cancer needlessly, of course at the time it wasn't known that would be the situation so they made the right call anyways
The people that were very unfortunately necessary that deserve to be remembered are the 3828 "liquidators" that cleaned up the radioactive graphite (mixed with bits of reactor fuel/waste) that covered the roof above the reactor. In their own words[1]:
> [the remote control bulldozer] has overridden a graphite block with it's right caterpillar track, and now was sitting on 12,000 Roentgen fragment. [...] Starodumov was already thinking about something else... what all of us have already known: robots failed, and the extra radioactive zones will have to be cleaned by men.
> The shift lasted only two minutes. [...] Here, the unthinkable background radiation of nearly 8000 Roentgens. 20 meters away from us is the naked muzzle of the destroyed reactor. [...] With each succeeding group, with each fragment removed, the background radiation will reduce. This means the risk for the next group will already be lower.
Even that is misleading though. The consequence of that isn't that fifty million people have to drink contaminated groundwater forever, it's that you have to build a fancy water filtration plant not unlike the ones in Silicon Valley where the water supply was polluted by 20th century semiconductor manufacturing.
Talking about risk mitigation in hindsight as unnecessary is a very bad view of risk management, especially for someone who is supposedly an expert at it.
You don't do risk mitigation because things will go badly, you do it because it could go badly.
Or alternately, you could use "password" for all your passwords, after all, if no one ever breaks into your accounts, there's no reason to have bothered with difficult passwords.
No one will be able to live in Chernobyl for another 20 thousand years... the author persecutes the director of the show for up playing the severity of the disaster while simultaneous down playing it, fact. The author makes it seem like the disaster at Chernobyl was nothing more than a slight hic-up or a little boo-boo... let me reiterate, no one can live in Chernobyl for another 20 THOUSAND years. There are a LOT of reasons for why (current) nuclear energy productions methods are dangerous, fallout from a total meltdown is 1% of them. It certainly isn't the primary concern. The primary concern is what we do with the by product of a nuclear power plant, the spent fuel. What do we do with it? Shove it into some hole in the ground and write a note to the next 200 generations: "Oh, hey, sorry about poisoning your drinking water with our radioactive waste. We figured you could fix our problems for us if you dont mind!" There is nothing clean about nuclear power plants. Just because we aren't pumping CO2 into the air doesn't make it clean.
...except people live in Chernobyl all the time. It wasn't evacuated. The plant itself kept working with the remaining reactors until like 2000. You might have meant Pripyat but nobody has seriously tried to decontaminate it. It was a city built specifically for nuclear plant, with no history to speak of, so there was no sense to restore it.
It was evacuated immediately (some 100k people), no one is allowed to live in the exclusion zone (19 square miles) and yes the final reactor wasn't closed down until 2000 but the other two were closed down before then, unit 1 in 1996 and unit 2 in 1991. The only reason and despite world outcry that those reactors stayed in operation was because they had no choice. So either your ignorant of the facts or your trying to put a positive spin on a terrible and tragic event... which makes you a huge pos.
Most of these 100k people lived in Pripyat. Chernobyl is to the south of the nuclear plant and wasn't as affected. According to [1] 12500 people lived there before the accident, currently about 600 people live there.
Like... about half of the Gomel region of Belarus has almost no young people anymore. When the incompetence is sufficiently extreme, the outcomes are dire and felt by many.
I want nuclear to become the energy of choice for the west, primarily because the alternatives would practically bankrupt even the richest regions of the U.S. (if you look at the relation between increased reliance on batteries, and the subsequent increased demand for higher daily/monthly/bimonthly minimum supply) if taken too seriously.
However, downplaying Chernobyl in particular (considering how similar many plants either are, or seem to the public; and considering how near-soviet levels of incompetence can be seen regionally in the west today) is a bad play.
The single incident is extremely dramatic, ruined many people's lives, and still costs a fortune to keep in check. While some of the response is exaggerated or driven by unfounded fears; the fact remains that people from widely varying cultures tend not to find the places that faced the aftermath of Chernobyl desirable or healthy places to live.
