Not every allegation that appears in print is true. One should be very skeptical about these kinds of allegations, especially when there are deep-pocketed corporations involved who can be sued or pressured to settle in the face of sufficiently "plausible and persistent" (to borrow Hazlitt's term) claims of harm done by their operations.
The impression I've gotten is that almost all of the massive bills associated with nuclear power are because of an irrational fear of the radiation. Factoring in all the nuclear disasters and the radiations released from them, nuclear causes something on the order of 10,000 times fewer deaths than coal per megawatt generated.
No? It's like saying that its safe to have more zoos with tigers because tigers pretty much never get out of their cages and get a to kill people unless there is some massive fuckup (i.e. you let soviet engineers supervise your tiger)
>No? It's like saying that its safe to have more zoos with tigers
No, then the original statement would have to have been "we should keep paying big bills so we can have safe nuclear", but it wasn't.
To be more direct, using statistics about incidents to claim something is safe a fallacy. Something extremely dangerous that is kept safe through effort and expense won't appear in the stats until you remove the effort and expense.
Not quite, because there have been disasters and radiation leaks. And if the number of deaths per megawatt produced is 10,000 times less than coal, despite those radiation leaks, radiation leaks cannot be anywhere as dangerous as commonly perceived.
> nuclear causes something on the order of 10,000 times fewer deaths than coal per megawatt generated.
If we demonstrate scientific honesty and begin to apply the same level of techniques that are used to obtain the result of "10,000 times fewer deaths than coal per megawatt", we can come to the conclusion that even a small accident at a small nuclear power plant can destroy life on planet Earth as a phenomenon.
“Better than coal” is a weak argument. Coal hasn’t been in the “game” for decades. The problem for nuclear isn’t anything irrational - it’s economics and operational and deployment flexibility - newer tech like solar PV, gas turbines, batteries and wind have created a new Pareto frontier for electricity generation and nuclear just isn’t anywhere near this frontier for any objective.
India is the fifth-largest geological coal reserves globally and as the second-largest consumer, coal continues to be an indispensable energy source, contributing to 55% of the national energy mix. Over the past decade, thermal power, predominantly fueled by coal, has consistently accounted for more than 74% of our total
power generation.
The last new coal power plant to come on-line in the US was in 2013 at Sandy Creek - 13 years ago. The last new coal power station built in Australia - Bluewaters Power station was built in 2009 - 17 years ago. In Europe coal's share has dropped from over 40% of generation at its peak in 2007 - about 20 years ago - and has declined to about 9%. Coal's days are over - natural gas is cheaper and more flexible, while solar PV and wind are cheaper.
There is of course a large installed base - a coal plant will last 50 years. The fact that developing countries have large installed coal capacity is neither here nor there.
>The story goes that Milton Friedman was once taken to see a massive government project somewhere in Asia. Thousands of workers using shovels were building a canal. Friedman was puzzled. Why weren't there any excavators or any mechanized earth-moving equipment? A government official explained that using shovels created more jobs. Friedman's response: "Then why not use spoons instead of shovels?"
Taking fewer visible risks can increase your total risk. We are already under constant threat from deterioration: aging, depreciation and decay. Entropy is the default. Action is what pushes back against it.
You do not fight entropy, only move it around, and in so doing, increase it somewhere. It is still worth it to take action. We may find an action to actually reduce entropy eventually, that does not exist yet.
Sometimes I wonder if this is somehow both an answer to the fermi paradox and the increasing expansion rate of the universe. Every alien civ doing exactly this somehow.
I remember a lot of the same sentiment about Tesla a few years ago, when there were massive short positions against it. Today, it sells more electric vehicles than all other US automakers combined.
The irony is that a key plank of the SDNY's allegations against Roman Storm for his development of Tornado Cash is that he provided a UI (since the backend smart contract is already established as a matter of law to be immutable and outside of Roman Storm's control), and the UI that Roman Storm provided was an (open source) static HTML file that users ran entirely client-side in their own browser.
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