> Every nuclear disaster so far has exposed incompetence, negligence, corruption, or unsafe practices at some level, and has usually been accompanied by delays, denials, and attempts to bury the evidence.
Humans are lazy and greedy and stupid. But that applies to everything, and nuclear is responsible for fewer deaths per TWh of power generated than anything you're proposing as a "dirty" alternative.
> When dealing with potentially "forever" contaminants, this is simply unacceptable.
This is factually not what we are dealing with. The radioactivity of a substance is inversely proportional to its half life. In other words, the more radioactive something is, the faster it disappears.
The most problematic nuclear contaminants are therefore the ones with medium half lives (i.e. decades), because they're radioactive enough to be harmful but long-lived enough to still be there a week later.
This is nasty stuff, but not in any way "forever" and not particularly any nastier than a lot of the chemical substances industries deal with on a large scale all over the place, which are chemically rather than radiologically hazardous and therefore don't even have a half life, i.e. they really are there forever. How is a nuclear reactor worse than a chemical plant?
> Ans since human nature and psychology is not going to magically evolve over the next couple of centuries, and since there's no such thing as a foolproof design, reducing nuclear power is a pragmatic approach, even if it causes a temporary increase in dirtier energy production (up to a point, of course).
Considering that coal is responsible for more radioactive emissions than nuclear per TWh produced including Chernobyl and Fukushima, that is a totally irresponsible and dangerous course of action.
> nuclear is responsible for fewer deaths per TWh of power generated than anything you're proposing as a "dirty" alternative.
Irrelevant. The issue here isn't the expected value but the magnitude of the failure modes.
Hundreds of thousands of people die every year in or because of automobiles, way more than in commercial airplanes, By any measure you can planes are safer. Yet, you will find more prevalence of the fear of flying than driving. Why? Because incidents are catastrophic often killing hundreds of people at once. There's only so much damage a single car can do even though cars collectively do way more damage than planes.
Caol has obvious issues but the failure modes aren't catastrophic. Nuclear failure modes are. Nuclear has the power to make thousands of square miles uninhabitable for centuries (the last time I mentioned this I was accused at exaggerating so I'll preempt that by pointing out the absolute Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is, currently, 1000 square miles).
> The most problematic nuclear contaminants are therefore the ones with medium half lives
Yeah, no sale. There are two factors you're ignoring here:
1. Not just the strength but the type of radioactive decay. For example, a piece of paper will stop alpha emissions but alpha emissions are highly energetic and this is what makes Polonium-210 (as an extreme example) so deadly;
2. The chemical toxicity of the byproducts. Even U-238 (with a 4.5B year half life) is quite toxic; and
3. What an element decays into and the properties it (and all subsequent elements) has.
> How is a nuclear reactor worse than a chemical plant?
And what "chemical substances" are you referring to in particular here?
I'll reverse your own argument here and say that any process is capable of producing toxic byproducts, nuclear waste has the additional property of being radioactive too. How is that better?
> Why? Because incidents are catastrophic often killing hundreds of people at once.
You're rationalising something that isn't a rational or reasonable response. Exactly the same argument could be applied to trains; but I havn't met anyone who is scared of traveling by train.
People are scared of heights and having no plausible escape routes if something goes wrong is also pretty scary. The statistics are overwhelming that this instinctive response is wrong.
You have to take education into account. Nuclear isn't the kind of thing many people easily understand. They know "nuclear" makes for those amazingly destructive bombs, they know Chernobyl, and Fukushima. They know those results and explaining "but a new reactor would make that impossible" doesn't make a difference because they can't understand why, so it sounds like empty promises.
Also I remember reading a survey (can't find it now) where smokers were put in a hypothetical situation: they live in a parallel universe where smoking is completely harmless except 1 in 18.000.000 cigarettes would be laced with explosives and kill the smoker the moment they light it up. Every person asked said they would find that risk unacceptable. Needless to say it was exactly the same as smoking in our reality. The perception of risk is different in the 2 cases. It doesn't matter that a new nuclear reactor design would make this kind of catastrophe impossible, it's not how people perceive the risk. They still see bombs and Chernobyl. "Better safe than sorry".
Having no plausible escape (or counter measures) is also a big factor for nuclear scare. If there's a fire or flood, a few weeks/months later everything will be back to normal. If radiation leaks contamination remains for generations (even if it's not that bad as news make it sound) and that freaks out people. That and the general fear of unknown and invisible (just look at the 5G panic for that)
I don't think this is a "fear" or a "feeling" thing. Accidents do have a non-negligible probability. Then it can kill people, can make land completely unhabitable. I don't have an _unsubstantiated_ "bad feeling", "fear" or "panic" about it, because accidents pose a real, even proven problem.
Furthermore, there might come a time when the knowledge about radioactivity is diminished so far that people call it a "believe" thing. And then it will cause even further problems.
Irrational part of this fear is ignoring the very low probability of it ever happening. People have this strong, but from mathematical perspective irrational preference for 100% safety, compared to say 99.99999% safety, even when the 2nd offers many benefits.
I think it is rather irresponsible to make up such a number.
With Chernobyl 1986 and Fukushima 2011, two ultimate MCA's happened in my past lifetime. Does your number include them? And, even if it is a small percentage: if it does happen, the costs involved are so much more than one would be ready to set aside (e.g., if you just measure the monetary effect, Fukushima costs $750 billion, and the US insurances would max. payout $13 billion)
I would be very happy if the world does experience the next 50 years without no more of these events. But I honestly consider that as quite unlikely. Especially from a mathematical perspective.
The number was just to illustrate the point (but I'm pretty sure the actual probability, if modern technology taken into the account, is lower than that). Also take into the account that neither of those events, no matter how much media coverage they've got, in the end didn't affect that many people outside those locations. Chernobyl did scare us in Eastern Europe, but those effects would be way smaller if it wasn't for the dysfunctional Soviet political system that first tried to hide it, so it was a very unique event unlikely to happen ever again. US had the 3 miles island accident, which was a huge thing when I was a kid, and now it's almost forgotten.
Before accounting for 40 years of technology improvements in reactor design (the 40 years with the most stunning safety improvement in humanities' history) that suggests a probability of ~0.004%.
40 years of tech improvements could feasibly have reduced the risk by 2 orders of magnitude. ivanhoe's made up number is in fact defensible. It has big error bars on it but it is not unreasonable.
> Caol has obvious issues but the failure modes aren't catastrophic.
If we don't recognize global warming as a catastrophic failure mode then people are going to disagree on a fundamental level with no space for agreement or understanding of the other persons view.
Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is pretty large. Add a few order of magnitude and you get the desert that global warming is causing to grow. It would take quite a few nuclear accident to cause global starvation, but with global warming we are on track for just that future.
> Humans are lazy and greedy and stupid. But that applies to everything, and nuclear is responsible for fewer deaths per TWh of power generated than anything you're proposing as a "dirty" alternative.
There may be fewer deaths, but it's the only energy source to create effectively permanent no-go zones.
In areas with heavy coal mining activity the water and the soil is poisoned from erosion and runoff and people that live in these places come in enough contact with the toxins (mostly heavy metals) that they develop medical problems later in life. In practice the effect is about the same that you'd get if you lived in a radioactive area.
This is a non argument. Nobody is seriously proposing coal as an alternative to nuclear. Sure in some countries (e.g. Germany) they phased out nuclear before coal, but there are very different reasons for this, for example they are favoring brown over black coal. That is for different reasons though, largely the political lobby and associated jobs in economically weak regions (note I'm not saying this is right).
However, nobody is proposing coal as a long term solution. Yes one might make the argument that nuclear is safer than coal (however that argument is by no means as clear cut as you make it out too be), but the competition are renewables and neither nuclear or coal come close.
Not the parent, but if you look at what's currently replacing nuclear power world-wide it seems to be gas. Gas extraction is also not very environmentally friendly and releases a lot of nasty toxins into the air and surrounding areas, just not as much as coal mining does. I think the point still stands.
> Considering that coal is responsible for more radioactive emissions than nuclear per TWh produced including Chernobyl and Fukushima, that is a totally irresponsible and dangerous course of action.
Don't concentration and distribution matter? I mean in Serhii Plokhii's book on Chernobyl he several times repeats the claim that a significant leak into the river/sea would have rendered large parts of Europe uninhabitable. Now either that's a gross lie or your point is ignoring a hugely significant difference between coal production and nuclear. Which is it?
Concentration absolutely matters, and based on the figures I've seen coal fly ash - which is what the claims about radiation released from coal power plants are based on - is about as radioactive, kg for kg, as granite is. Which isn't nothing, but it's also not exactly nuclear waste. (Speaking of nuclear waste, the comparisons with coal often also get their numbers by ignoring it and only counting radiation intentionally released to the environment from a properly-working plant. Which is basically just a way of saying that if we could solve the nuclear waste disposal problem and the humans are too incompetent to build and run nuclear power plants problem it'd be a really clean form of power. That's probsbly true, but not realistic. Also, the comparison is generally based on really old and polluting coal power plants that mostly don't exist anymore.)
Nuclear waste can basically be safely solved by dumping sealed containers into the sea. We're talking about extremely small amounts of waste. A swimming pool can contain a year's supply of waste, and 20 ft of water is extremely effective radiation shielding. The ocean is so large that this would be totally negligible even if the worst happened.
It wouldn't be negligible. Dumping all our HWL waste (250,000 tons) would increase background radiation of the oceans by 10% if completely mixed, but of course oceans are not. We would simply end up with highly radioactive areas of ocean if and when the containment failed.
Just a throwaway idea, but instead of radiating the whole ocean evenly, why not dump it in the already highly radiated nuclear weapon test zone? The US blow around 100 nukes and I wonder if a few thousands of tons would actually do much worse compared to what already down there.
> I mean in Serhii Plokhii's book on Chernobyl he several times repeats the claim that a significant leak into the river/sea would have rendered large parts of Europe uninhabitable.
The grandparent's claim is about what did happen, not what might have happened in some hypothetical, but the claim you're quoting sounds utterly implausible to me; there simply isn't enough nuclear material anywhere to render a significant area uninhabitable for any significant length of time.
A lie or just wrong? I haven't read the book (but probably will now I've been reminded) but Plokhii is a historian not a scientist, right? Is this a peer reviewed projection or hypothetical scenario a la nuclear bombs igniting the atmosphere?
Fair comment, but these claims form a very major portion of his argument on the ramifications of an accident like Chernobyl and therefore what it really means. So I think if these claims are lacking in substance then he would be guilty of a significant misrepresentation.
>Humans are lazy and greedy and stupid. But that applies to everything, and nuclear is responsible for fewer deaths per TWh of power generated than anything you're proposing as a "dirty" alternative.
Such an argument still undermines the pain and suffering such an accident can create, especially because nuclear can create suffering that doesn't necessarily end in a death caused by it.
>This is factually not what we are dealing with. The radioactivity of a substance is inversely proportional to its half life. In other words, the more radioactive something is, the faster it disappears.
Long-lived Radioactive materials have other problems if they are farther up in the atomic charts. Uranium and Plutonium are simply toxic to life (with few exceptions), other materials produced in a nuclear reactor behave similarly.
Large amounts of uranium can still produce lethal amounts of radiation if they're on a long halflife. If it leaks into the ground water, you have much bigger problems because radioactivity from inside the body is even more troublesome.
And it doesn't detract from the fact that the short and medium lived isotopes still need to be isolated for quite some time.
It's estimated that the zone around the Chernobyl nuclear plant will be uninhabitable for 20,000 years.
The Fukushima area (especially the sea surrounding it) suffers a similar fate.
Once the Bikini Atoll containment fails within the next decade or so due to neglect, it will be uninhabitable for thousands of years as well.
The world is awash in secret-but-not-really nuclear dumps with failing containment systems built too close to groundwater sources, which cannot be fixed due to the radiation hazard from the failed (due to neglect, improper design, and seismic activity) containment.
Humans are lazy and greedy and stupid. But that applies to everything, and nuclear is responsible for fewer deaths per TWh of power generated than anything you're proposing as a "dirty" alternative.
> When dealing with potentially "forever" contaminants, this is simply unacceptable.
This is factually not what we are dealing with. The radioactivity of a substance is inversely proportional to its half life. In other words, the more radioactive something is, the faster it disappears.
The most problematic nuclear contaminants are therefore the ones with medium half lives (i.e. decades), because they're radioactive enough to be harmful but long-lived enough to still be there a week later.
This is nasty stuff, but not in any way "forever" and not particularly any nastier than a lot of the chemical substances industries deal with on a large scale all over the place, which are chemically rather than radiologically hazardous and therefore don't even have a half life, i.e. they really are there forever. How is a nuclear reactor worse than a chemical plant?
> Ans since human nature and psychology is not going to magically evolve over the next couple of centuries, and since there's no such thing as a foolproof design, reducing nuclear power is a pragmatic approach, even if it causes a temporary increase in dirtier energy production (up to a point, of course).
Considering that coal is responsible for more radioactive emissions than nuclear per TWh produced including Chernobyl and Fukushima, that is a totally irresponsible and dangerous course of action.