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Fission was killed by Fukushima. While in theory we can build safe reactors, practice shows otherwise.

It's important to keep in mind the reactors at Fukushima were designed in the 1960s -- literally fifty years ago. During that same time period, we were doing things like designing machines for efficiently burning down the rainforest so we could open up land for farming, and pouring miscellaneous mixed nuclear waste into underground vats for future generations to figure out.

It might be debatable whether humanity is sufficiently responsible to maintain any dangerous machinery requiring generation-level planning, but it is important to keep in mind how far removed we are from the era in which every nuclear reactor ever having experienced a major nuclear incident was designed.

Give it a second look. Practice shows that nuclear reactors are actually extraordinarily safe compared to most other options. In fact, by 2013 they saved 1.8 million lives simply by displacing air pollution deaths, and prevented 65 billion tonnes CO2-eq. [1]

[1] http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es3051197?source=cen

Construction on the 4 new US AP1000s that bankrupted Westinghouse went ahead after Fukushima. There were regions of the US perfectly willing to take new reactors even after Fukushima, and power companies willing to buy the power from those new reactors. But construction is years behind planned schedules and billions over planned budgets. "Overruns" more than "Fukushima" seems like the greatest barrier to future US orders for more AP1000s.

We've certainly shown that reactors designed in the 60s and built in the 70s are problematic in very rare cases.

So you're saying that the nuclear industry was saying before that "yes, we fully agree that we could have a full blown meltdown at one of the older reactors in very rare cases".

BTW, how it's a tsunami a very rare case on a decades long horizon? There were warnings about the possibility of a big tsunami. It wasn't a black swan, it was a white one.

> A spokesman from the Tokyo Electric Power Corporation [TEPCO] told FRONTLINE that the company was aware of Minoura’s work and was in the process of considering plant modifications in case of a massive tsunami.

Fission fails deadly, and humans are really bad at managing these kinds of things (ie: I don't want to pay 200 mil to build a better tsunami barrier for a 1 in a million chance...)

Like the sibling commenter, I can't parse your sentence and intention except as "we've certainly shown they're not commonly problematic" which is quite a weak statement.

Is your sentence a positive sentence (do you mean we've certainly shown they're problematic essentially never) or is your sentence negative (we've certainly shown they're problematic definitely sometimes - which is unacceptable)?

I tried to read your attitude but failed.

I was mostly rebuffing the structure of the argument "While in theory we can build safe reactors, practice shows otherwise" which has two different reference classes for reactors (modern safer ones, and less safe fukushima ones).

Oh, okay! It was confusing because it sounds like "they're rarely problematic" which is not your meaning. Thanks for the clarification!

I don't think so. Fission is being killed by its lack of competitiveness and how long reactors take to build in a world where renewables are getting better so quickly people think twice about locking themselves up in a multi billion nuclear power plant project that takes 10 years to build.

Fission was killed by cheap oil and fracking revolution. Thankfully, these things don't last forever.

Very cheap oil is very recent and it's an artificial situation created by pumping by OPEC countries. Fracking was only worth it because of how expensive oil was before, now it's not worth it anymore while oil stays this cheap. I think current fission nuclear tech is competitive with fossil fuels in the "fracking era". It's not competitive with current oil but that wouldn't kill it, just at most put it on hold until inevitably oil goes up again. Not to mention environmental issues, which massively favor nuclear over fossil fuels.

IMHO it is competitive renewables that is a death sentence for current reactor tech. Nuclear needs to go back to the drawing board and come up with more efficient and realistic designs.

There are no competitive renewables. Photovoltaics can't survive at scale without massive government subsidies or screwing the environment like in China (choose one), wind power doesn't scale, and don't even get me started about biodiesel.

PV are pretty much competitive now without subsidies in current studies and getting better all the time. The "renewables are not competitive" is a thing of the past.

Like I said -- only if you disregard the environmental impact and account for reusing the scraps from microelectronics industry (which is a good thing, sure -- but can't be expanded much). Crystalline silicon production is messy.

Environmental impact of PV is negligible compared with the alternatives, especially fossil fuels.

Well, fossil fuels are not an option anyway, but going full nuclear with closed cycle is much cheaper and environmentally safe. The only problem are proliferation concerns...

I disagree. I don't even think nuclear waste is that big of a problem. I think at this point is a efficiency and engineering issue. From 2010 to 2017 the $/Mhw projections in Solar have gone down by 81% while in Nuclear it was only 19%. Wind 63%. PV is lower than nuclear now. Estimates for 2022 are even more difference. Nuclear is just not worth it at this point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source

Isn't PV a primary market for silicon? Sure looks like it:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Polysilicon_prices_h...

(the price drop is mostly a result of pretty big increases in production)

PV and wind power cannot provide base load power.

Some studies beg to differ. Also improvements in batteries will make this problem much less important. And even then, they don't have to cover 100% of the energy generation, if they cover a significant % with the rest provided by more traditional sources, it might be enough.

http://redgreenandblue.org/2017/07/18/myth-baseload-power-no...

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2010/12/02/3081889.ht...

Good luck with storing GWh of electricity in batteries for more than 15 minutes. They have terrible energy density even before mentioning costs. In fact they're not even cost efficient for home scale battery backed solar/wind projects. You need to replace the batteries every 8 years. How do I know that? We've been installing PV for 10 years. The only uses for battery backed PV/wind were remote areas with no grid access.

The only commercially viable electricity storage available today is pumped hydro. Flywheels and molten salts are also working technical solutions and could be used for wind and solar thermal.

The articles mention many options and reasons why the base load problem is vastly overblown. Batteries will probably help in households. The combination of all these methods is what you have to look at. And these technologies are still rapidly improving, they should start being a significant % of energy generation and start taking on the base load issue slowly of course.

Did China stop building after Fukushima? As I recall, they had by far the longest list of planned new reactors.

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