If nuclear power was equated to cars then arguing about nuclear safety using our current examples of failure would be like arguing about automobile safety risks using a Model A.
I'm just scared of the big reactors. Nothing on this Earth is going to passively remove 1.5 GW of heat coming from something the volume of a hot water heater.
We also need to be recycling our waste like the other nations which use nuclear power, not just chuck what's still 90% useful material in a holding tank for eternity.
Nature is killing more people every year than have been killed by nuclear in all its time. The sun is killing more people than dies of nuclear (Melanomas and skin cancer) I could go on.
Nuclear isn't as dangerous as it's been claimed and with never reactors the actual security procedure is physical. On top of that investments into thorium and fusion could have gotten us much further.
It's not that bigger is better it's that bigger is safer from a number of perspectives.
Nuclear is by far the safest, greenest, most scalable, reliable energy source we know how to use and it's many times safer than the very mother nature everyone seems to want to save.
Nature doesn't give us a safe, friendly environment we then make unsafe it gives us a hostile and dangerous environment which we then make safe.
Funny how disagreement in this always gets met with downvotes rather than at least argument or reasoned disagreement.
Why is it so hard for people to disagree about this without it turning into a downvote competition?
https://www.guernicamag.com/the-fallout/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior
The problem with nuclear has always been trust, and repeated breaches of trust - often in regards to weapons proliferation, from which fission can never really be separated. See the ongoing efforts to prevent Iran's nuclear programme, for example.
It also has a nasty habit of cost overruns, because projects don't scale down. How overrun is Hinckley Point C now again?
Whereas solar cells scale down to the level of a few square milimeters on a watch or calculator. The great lesson of silicon valley - AWS and everything else - is that "big bang" projects always get beaten by things that can start tiny and scale incrementally.
We need to deploy solar and wind now. Maybe in the 25 year lifetime of a solar panel we can get a nuclear plant finished. Maybe fusion will work. Maybe someone will find a way to stop Thorium reactors dissolving their own plumbing.
Cost overruns come from extreme security legislation and the fact that we haven't built enough so those are simply not proper arguments.
Add on top of that that solar will never, as in never ever be able to deliver cheap (at scale), clean, plentiful and consistent energy which is the minimum requirement for any type of energy any sane person would support.
Promoting something that is currently not providing more than 1% of the worlds energy being heavily favored politically and with plenty of subsidies and which will never support maybe more than 10% of the worlds energy needs which is being very generous sounds like something the world will look back at in a hundred years and think "What the hell were they thinking".
This is very much the "true communism has never been tried" argument, isn't it? Unless you know a way of building it without people?
Showing your hand there.
Having no problem with misrepresenting what other say.
I was replying to this:
"This is very much the "true communism has never been tried" argument, isn't it? "
Which you very well know. So yeah thanks for showing your hand.
It’d be wonderful if it’s true but you didn’t exactly cite sources or otherwise explain how a claim which has been not true to a degree which has factored into national politics is no longer true.
There are lots of countries with civilian nuclear power, but no weapons. And also, there are nuclear weapon states with no civilian nuclear power program in sight (e.g. North Korea). And AFAIK, no nuclear weapon state have done it by reprocessing civilian spent nuclear fuel. There are much easier and cheaper ways of doing it.
Now, it's theoretically possible to build a weapon from reactor grade Pu (i.e. by reprocessing spent civilian nuclear waste). And that's why we have international safeguards to prevent nuclear waste falling into the wrong hands. Nothing is foolproof of course, but it's a tradeoff. IMHO it's less bad than continuing to use fossil fuels.
In the end, acquiring nuclear weapons capability is a political decision. An existing civilian nuclear power capability doesn't make it noticeably easier. Heck, even a backwards isolated 3rd world country like NK is able to acquire weapons, suggesting that pretty much any state which really wants one can get it, if they want it bad enough that they are prepared to endure economic sanctions and becoming an international pariah state by doing it.
Historically, bigger reactors (and bigger turbines etc.) have been one of the few things that have reduced the $/kWh.
Now, if you have followed developments in the nuclear sector, you are surely aware that SMR's (small modular reactor) are all the rage these days. There are certainly good engineering reasons behind them as well; more series production in factories with less built on-site, easier to provide passive safety due to smaller size, etc., but so far they have not been deployed in reality, so it remains to be seen whether they will be able to provide a lower $/kWh in reality. But certainly they are an interesting development, we'll see if they become a commercial success as well.
As for recycling, with current uranium prices being so low it doesn't make economic sense. But I can certainly see the appeal (breeder reactors are catnip for physicists).
besides the waste is not recycable
Anyone who is against nuclear simply hasn't looked at the facts. If you did and still came out against nuclear I would be pretty surprised and love to hear your arguments.
Reprocessing doesn't reduce the cost of nuclear power, it increases it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bento_Rodrigues_dam_disaster [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ok_Tedi_environmental_disaster [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Polley_mine_disaster
Nuclear has in all it's time killed less than coal does in a year, cars do in a year, nature does in a year. More people die from setting up solar or wind, the amount of animals that get killed by wind is in the millions I could go on.
The new nuclear power plants uses physics so there will be no meldown. Furhtermore more investing in Thorium and Fusion would be much much more beneficial and clean.
Alternative energies are linear solutions to exponential problems.
And if we ever deploy breeder reactors and reprocessing at scale, we can further extract about two orders of magnitude more energy per kg of uranium ore. Heck, with the amount of depleted uranium lying around as tailings, spent reactor fuel, surplus military nuclear fuel, with breeders and reprocessing we could power the planet for a couple of centuries before needing to start digging up more.
We haven't deployed breeders and reprocessing because uranium is so cheap it doesn't make economic sense.
Oh it uses physics? Not code and algorithms? (For those out of the loop, it refers to this meme: https://old.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/5ylndv/so_... )
Sorry to nitpick, I totally agree with what you're saying. But I am curious what this "physics" thing is that would magically prevent meltdowns.
Could it have been worded better? Sure.
E.g. the Fukushima reactors melted down because the tsunami destroyed the emergency generators (as well as blocking the roads so they couldn't get new generators on site in time). A newer design using, say, convection to get rid of the decay heat wouldn't have this problem.
The amount of nuclear waste that actually exist is microscopic and I think you would be surprised when you actually see how little exist compared to the claims about it.
According to that page, it is 4x higher than nuclear. But it is also 10x less than natural gas, 100x less than oil, and 200x less than coal.