Comment by cjslep | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cjslep | Hacker News Reader

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This seems like cherry picking and the innate human bias at play. Given a big enough disaster, there isn't anything anyone can do as it unfolds. And spectacular failures stick in our mind. Here's some non-nuclear disasters that happened that people could only watch:

* Taum Sauk hydro pump-storage collapse

* Duke Energy's 30k+ tons of coal Ash spill into the Dan River

* But that was tiny, try Kentucky's 306 million tons of coal Ash spill or Tennessee's 525 million. People can only stand and watch that unfold, no modern robot is going to stop that either.

* Gas pipes in San Bruno, New Jersey, and Colorado exploding, killing families instantly

* Deepwater Horizon and the Valdez. Again, not much to do but stand and watch as it unfurls.

I could keep Googling more but every source of energy has its gigantic catastrophes where no amount of human bodies or robots will save the day (well, I guess a large enough pile of bodies would plug a hole in a collapsing dam).

In all of your examples, a few hours or days later people could wander right into "ground zero" and begin cleaning/re-building or whatever.

No so with nuclear. The impact is so much more serious when radiation comes into play.

> Valdez

Actually thousands of people were mobilized to contain the spill then clean up afterwards. It would have been a much better outcome if they didn't try to hide/downplay it for the first couple of days.

Yes, and radiation can be serious. But nature knows how to deal with high levels of radiation (see Chernobyl's flourishing ecosystem) after a period of time, same with any other disaster. You as a human could go into some moderately radioactive areas since the civilian limits are set so extremely low below the non-stochastic effects, and maybe not have much more of an elevated cancer risk than if you went to the hospital and got an MRI or PET scan (which is unregulated in terms of legal dosage limits).

Just because radiation causes different constraints on cleanup than oil on a large ocean or arsenic in the water table or issues in a space rocket means it is morally worse? That's the part I fail to understand, so long as the engineering continues to behave ethically behind all the systems in their design and construction and retrofit.

Adding to this - there seems to be a lack of observable damage from nuclear accidents apart from self-imposed evacuations.

Literally no-one died at Fukushima. It is the only energy disaster I know of where no-one ended up dead.

This is strong circumstantial evidence that we are being too safe, because we implicitly accept a few deaths when things go wrong in, eg, coal (pollution & extraction deaths), solar ( mainly in installations not in operating), hydro (big-time risks).

Going from 1 death to 0 deaths on this scale is a huge marginal cost. It almost certainly outweights the benefits.

EDIT: We haven't had a solar disaster yet, but coal & hydro disasters happen and can be very bad indeed.

I agree. Anywhere there's a dam, people will drown in it. In fact, if it's close enough to a town and people like to drink then we'll see many more deaths in the winter since it looks like you an skate on it---but can't.

But those events were temporal and local. Nuclear failures are catastrophic and never ending events in many generations.

You have a strange definition of "local" for Exxon Valdez/Deepwater Horizon. As well as "temporal", too. 20 years later species haven't recovered from the Valdez spill (unless you ask Exxon). Deepwater Horizon was also a very prolonged event, it took "forever" to cap the damn thing. 1 billion+ tons of coal Ash spilled across the USA didn't just disappear over a day either from some small city corner.

The only reason why nuclear sticks so easily is because of the magic word "radiation". It's easier to be scared of it than sit down land learn that it is all a natural physical phenomenon, even if it originated from a man-made isotope. It's difficulty arises from the stochastic (quantum) nature of it's interactions.

Lastly, reactor designs have significantly improved since 50 years ago. New reactor designs I saw coming out of Westinghouse could lose all power and pumps and still use natural convection and reservoirs (elevated pools) within the containment to prevent any sort of critical event leading to meltdown. Imagine if we were stuck with the coal technology of the 70's. I would prefer modernizing the nuclear fleet if possible, which does include decommissioning old reactors, and closing the fuel cycle loop in a way that is proliferation resistant (some sort of pyroprocessing) unlike UREX.

Look, I'm pro-nuclear but 'if only everyone were as knowledgeable as me' is a losing communications strategy. seriously, why do you expect people to trust the engineering in a nuclear power plant when clever people can't even get the financing to work or the construction ot go smoothly?

My point isn't "be as smart as me" and I do apologise if my tone is coming across that way. My point is "get educated on the issue" which seems reasonable to me (the tone of which I guess can also be misconstrued as negative, but I mean it in a constructive and positive manner).

I know you mean well and I do feel your frustration. But to use a phrase from political scientist Brian Caplan, people are 'rationally irrational' about this (as in public choice theory): it's very hard to really assess the risk factors properly, and given the potential downside risk and the existence of alternatives they decide not to bother.

>closing the fuel cycle loop in a way that is proliferation resistant

Isn't simply using a non-PUREX reprocessing method sufficient? Realistically, a "nuclear club" nation like the US/France/GB only needs to ensure that the reprocessed fuel contains enough non-Pu239 isotopes that any attempt at a bomb with stolen Pu would necessarily fizzle. The fact that the nation itself could (theoretically) produce Pu239 via the process and cause "proliferation" seems far fetched in the absence of the Cold War level rivalry that was the original proliferation impetus. Warheads are expensive. Nobody who already has a bunch of them already is really interested in making more.

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