People will be genuinely surprised when you tell them it's usually the same old mechanism of most other power plants - heat boils water, which generates steam, which powers a turbine. They're also really surprised to find out a coal plant puts out more radioactivity.
Same phenomenon as vaccines - people know very little about the mechanism, but have very strong opinions anyways.
That said it still seems better than many alternatives
There are actual challenges with nuclear as well (waste disposal being the primary), but those are distantly trailing the radiation fear (and not obviously-to-me worse on-balance than the fossil fuel alternatives at this point).
We know what to do with it. Bury it, deep and somewhere remote. The US already has such a place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
After that, the reaction has been self-sustaining.
It's easy to campaign to tear something down. It's hard to be the one who has to rebuild the replacement. We need people who focus on the latter before the former.
- Fear of nuclear accidents, 'not in my backyard' reactions from communities - Dealing with radioactive waste safely - Cost/time overruns building nuclear plants
Although I think all of these could be resolved, and I've heard some interesting things about thorium reactors which could be even better. I do wonder whether nuclear power is a good answer to climate change in particular though (beyond keeping the current ones functioning until end of life), nuclear power station design/building often takes decades and it seems like we have a shorter amount of time than that to make a significant difference.
The truth is our systemic desire to cut costs cuts corners. Everything after each disaster will have been "obvious".
The price of the tiniest of mistakes is outweighing the advantage.
Stick a power plant in the middle of nowhere and charge batteries with it if you want to convince people.
So the US Secretary of the Navy is in a position to make an informed decision about nuclear reactors—and he's chosen to run a significant part of the US Navy on them—but the voting public is not.
Fukushima was bad, but even if you count the deaths from the poorly handled evacuation, you're at ~2200 people that died because of it.
Coal kills 13,000 people in just the US /every/ year.
We are overall woefully uninformed about these things, to the point that the majority of people in some recent opinion polls in Europe believe that nuclear power plants emit greenhouse gases.
It takes decades now, but we know hot to build them quickly and more efficiently. We’ve done it in the past.
Now, it is too late to avoid climate change anyway, and almost certainly too late to avoid crossing the +2 degrees threshold in a couple of decades. We are too late already.
But if we want to minimise the cascading issues that are heading our way, it’s not “let us do something or something else”. We need to redirect as much as we can of our industry to decarbonised energy. This means wind and solar and nuclear fission and hydrogen, and a whole bunch of R&D into the next steps for all of that (including nuclear fusion). Also, we need to consume less. Quite a lot less, in fact.
-Nuclear is indeed a low-carbon energy source.
-It's also what you would want as baseload.
-The costs of storing waste properly have been underestimated - a few years ago nuclear operators reached a deal with the German government through which they paid 23bln Euros to make the waste the government's problem. The overall sentiment is that they were let off the hook easily and the total cost will be much higher.
-Both nuclear plants and waste storage facilities are easy targets for terrorism - fortunately that didn't happen yet, but things like Stuxnet proved that it's entirely in the realm of possibility. My pet conspiracy theory is that this, not Fukushima was the reason Germany eventually accelerated its plans to phase out nuclear.
-You can reprocess spent nuclear fuel which helps both with fuel accessibility and waste management.
-It's trivially easy to use the reprocessing infrastructure to create weapons-grade plutonium.
-Nuclear is generally safe.
-That being said its mode of failure makes a large area inhospitable essentially forever. Topsoil radiation measurements usually don't give the full picture of the problem.
-Every nuclear disaster resulted in increased safety by uncovering design flaws which were a result of cutting corners, so especially in the decade after Fukushima costs went up around 24% making nuclear the single low-carbon source to become more, not less expensive.
-As it stands even China cannot deploy nuclear fast enough to compete with renewables on delivered MWh. Since 2012 wind consistently delivered more energy in China than nuclear and the gap has been widening ever since. With the cost of storage plummeting we're heading towards a future where centralised power generation may become antiquated.
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Overall nuclear has some advantages but there aren't enough of them to break the trend of using renewables + gas and storage, which on average replace coal faster and cheaper.
It's basically a textbook example of "worse is better".
Nuclear plants can be built close to where they are needed, it's an advantage over renewables.
Also, what about Not the United States ? It seems everybody is synchronizing policies, if you hear the rumblings out of the European Commission. Where are they gonna store the wast ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
The stuff stored in these facilities is not magic. It doesn't get up and run around. The sites are selected to be deep enough and to be resilient to leaks. I'm more concerned with our culpability for melting the world's glaciers and ice caps than the risk of someone digging up barrels miles deep a thousand years from now.
> not exactly a scathing indictment of nuclear power itself.
No, but it's certainly a statement about our ability to operate nuclear power. You really can't separate the two.
Fukushima may have been spared the worst, but the amount of deaths is only part of the story. Pripyat is still a ghost town. That's nearly 50,000 people that were permanently displaced from their homes. I imagine quite a few people are not returning to the Fukushima area as well.
I have no problems with nuclear personally, I think we should keep safe reactors running as long as our replacements would be LNG. I do think new-build nuclear would largely be deployed too slowly to help with climate change in the short run, but long-run I think it'll be an amazing source of huge amounts of power. Maybe we can have specialized reactors on-site which deal with the waste from our older reactors or from new reactors...not to mention new designs that are passively safe.
Nuclear is vastly better for the environment than fossil fuels are, however, it is still bad for the environment. This is why various groups have protested it in the past. Given both viewpoints, my stance is that we should have a real plan to phase out nuclear eventually.
Nuclear is significantly cleaner than fossil fuels. In addition, nuclear could potentially produce a huge amount of energy per "time spent deploying" (especially once there is expertise building nuclear reactors). Finally, nuclear waste can be physically handled and even further processed (in thorium reactors), which is in stark contrast to CO2 which dissipates into the atmosphere and is extremely difficult to sequester.
The problem is that nuclear isn't a perfect option, and people seem to focus on the few caveats over the numerous benefits. If there was a commitment to eventually (on the order of decades) phase it out, I'm sure many of the green energy purists would come to the nuclear party.
This 'nuclear is costly' argument would be relevant if there was a cheaper-than-nuclear replacement for coal energy with similar consistent availability and safety record. There isn't one.
> nuclear plants and waste storage facilities are easy targets for terrorism - fortunately that didn't happen yet, but things like Stuxnet proved that it's entirely in the realm of possibility.
As far as we know from public resources, Stuxnet wasn't a terrorist operation, but a state-controlled operation. And it wasn't a nuclear disaster - it was destruction of expensive equipment due to poor operational security (virus on USB drives hacked the network and destroyed the equipment).
Nuclear plants are NOT an easy target for terrorism, and they are NOT the preferred target for terrorists. When we read about some real terrorist attacks, it's clear they go for large death numbers and best visibility. The newer plants with domes are built to withstand a plane crash, a terrorist would have to be brainwashed by anti-terrorist agency to crash the plane into a nuclear plant instead of big city.
Lots of things are in the realm of possibility, but let's get real. Crazies attacking a nuclear power plant is a pretty small manageable threat, both in terms of probability of successful execution and in terms of potential resulting damage. Yes some people and equipment will have to be maintained to guard the plants, but it's not a big deal.
> -It's trivially easy to use the reprocessing infrastructure to create weapons-grade plutonium.
Yes, but again that is not a very relevant problem because in most countries where nuclear energy would be most benefitial in decreasing CO2 production already have plutonium sitting ready in nuclear weapons and can make more - US, China, India, US, Europe.
> nuclear has some advantages but there aren't enough of them to break the trend of using renewables + gas and storage
Gas power is not something we should prop up at all when we have the option to build more nuclear power plants. Gas burning produces CO2, nuclear operation does not.
"In the meantime, most nuclear power plants in the United States have resorted to the indefinite on-site dry cask storage of waste in steel and concrete casks.[14]"
Our local region just fought to shut down a plant, and now the fight continues on where to ship (or not) the waste. In the meantime of course, they're fighting over these short term store options which have guarantees of only 25 years.
Solar and wind are much cheaper, but cannot be scaled in proportion to demand. Given sufficient advances in storage and transmission they may be able to eventually, but maybe not.
Building nuclear that we may not end up needing if the required advances happen means that our worst case is a vastly cleaner energy system, a much better worse case than a continuing dependence on coal and gas.
... in tsunami endangered areas. Yes, Japanese made a bad mistake to let Americans build such a badly designed nuclear plant in that region and this was known before the disaster. They did not care - the price was good and the risk was acceptable to the people in charge.
Most of nuclear plants in the world are not in tsunami endangered areas though and are operated safely.
Vaccine is and should be a matter of personal/parent choice, because getting the vaccine is a per-person action and its benefits and risks concern only their health, not health of other people. The benefit/cost analysis is very different for different people, for some it is in favour of getting the vaccine, for some it is against. Vaccination program can and should respect individual peoples' wishes.
While building more nuclear energy is a strategic country-scale decision that cannot respect all people wishes, only the majority's.
Nuclear is the lowest footprint, biggest-bang-for-the-buck technology.
Vaccine helps the immune system to fight the infection, but does not stop the body from getting infected and we do not know how efficient it is in preventing spreading the infection.
> Results showed that following the second dose of vaccine (the recommended number of doses), risk of infection was reduced by 90 percent two or more weeks after vaccination. Following a single dose of either vaccine, the participants’ risk of infection with SARS-CoV-2 was reduced by 80 percent two or more weeks after vaccination.
Immunocompromised people, folks who have allergies to the vaccines, etc. rely on others getting vaccinated to be protected via herd immunity.
How can one begin to even make this claim knowing: a) Chernobyl, b) Three Mile Island, and c) Fukushima? They clearly aren't operated safely. Just to be clear, I'm not anti-nuclear and I'm not making a case against nuclear power. I'm making a simple observation that really shouldn't be a debate. Three entirely different areas with three entirely different political/power/environmental structures in place.
What about regime collapse? We've been worried about nuclear weapons and the political situation in Pakistan. But a similar threat lurks behind nuclear power. What if the government of the future cannot properly maintain their nuclear plants? Based on the past 100 years of history I do not believe this is merely a hypothetical concern.
There will be disasters in the future. You understand this concept, right? Things that we know today which we will later claim could only be known in retrospect, like a tsunami hitting a nuclear power plant in Japan. I'm rolling my eyes right fucking now.
https://www.mining-technology.com/features/top-ten-biggest-l...
Lithium mining has serious environmental impact:
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lithium-batteries-environmen...
Yes sometimes people or nature do bad things that result in disasters. Disasters will happen with or without nuclear reactors.
I'm saying the serious disasters involving nuclear reactors are rare. Serious disasters because of nuclear reactors are rarer. Chernobyl was incompetence of personnel due to dysfunctional society + cheapest design without containment. It is not indictment of nuclear energy, but indictment of the soviet system. Fukushima wasn't as bad as Chernobyl, but it too shows problems with how government approached nuclear risk. I do not condone building plants like they did in Chernobyl and Fukushima.
> What if the government of the future cannot properly maintain their nuclear plants? Based on the past 100 years of history I do not believe this is merely a hypothetical concern.
We help them. West did help Russia with decommissioning of old nuclear equipment. I think that is a good strategy.
> There will be disasters in the future. You understand this concept, right?
Indeed I do. But it would be very stupid of us to stop advancing nuclear energy because we made mistakes in the past. We learn from mistakes and double down. I believe we can do it and we should do it.
"Concerned citizens" who demand endless studies about things we already have a good understanding of.
People who ignore the 10,000 deaths per week worldwide because of coal power but focus on the ~2 deaths from Fukushima.
Right, smear. Sabotaging the process.
And a straw man ? Really ? I'd argue that the real hazard here is precisely such an off-hand moral position as you seem to have. Either that, or you think current civilization will stay as is, only progress.
IIRC, the Yuka mountain folks did indeed take such questions into account when designing the facility, as they though not doing so would be irresponsible. Moreover, barring climate change, we're statistically due for the start of an ice age sometime this century or the next. That would most certainly cover northern Europe.
So it's not a question of IQ, but of the stability of the civilization occupying a territory in the very long term. That could have major repercussions on any maintenance organization.
My questions would be, why even design such deep structures if it's now to take into account generations in the far future ? Solutions could be much simpler for nuclear fuel disposal.
On your other info : I don't know about culpability. I'm passing the 40 year old mark, and I don't remember my generation, or the generations right before mine having enough influence on such matters until very recently.
These choices were made much earlier, by within your framing I'd say more culpable age brackets, and which are slowly let's say "disappearing".
What remains, in my opinion, for people currently in charge of affairs, and in the future, is a matter of responsibility to all future generations. We most certainly know what's what now, and the ethical and moral calculus is publicly in evidence, as a consequence of, amongst other such operations, the Greta Thundberg UN tour.
Again, not arguing against nuclear. If we do it, I'd say let's not create new problems out because we're too sure of our probability projections... As pointed elsewhere, we were due for an Ice Age. That might still happen down the line, whatever happens to surface human politics. Let's make sure somebody's there to check for such leaks down the line, and that it's easy to access.
Once we decide we won't make matters worse now, why stop at that ? Let's make sure we don't make them worse down the line out of some new error.
Regarding doing it better, that is commendable but some waste will always be generated, we can't just burn the fuel down into non-radioactive state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Karachay
https://www.vice.com/en/article/vbn9e9/the-soviet-union-dump...