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Calm Before the Storm

typeinvestigations.org

35 pointsspenrose18 comments

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Ironic that building more nuclear plants would also stop the water from rising.

But because it's not going to happen[1] this one probably needs decommissioning.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption

Nuclear is the only technology that sufficiently solves the heat problem.

Lots of our energy is spent on heat, whether residential or industrial.

Nuclear produces heat. If only we used this for district heating, container ships, and electricity

Biofuels are a much simpler carbon-free option for ships. Cargo ships are built and scrapped, made to last only a few decades. Powering them with nuclear would be insanely cumbersome and expensive.

I'm not sure I'd trust lowest bidder flag of convenience ships operating beyond national law to operate a reactor safely without ever dumping radioactive material in the only ocean we have.

To say nothing of the 200 or so ships lost at sea every decade. Not evenly distributed across the oceans, but concentrated in sea lanes, especially near ports and land, especially choke points such as straits, capes, and canals.

The scale of operations, with ~80,000 registered commercial large ships, regulation of an international activity dominated by lowest-cost, least-regulated, flag-of-convenience registries (as you note), very often minimally-trained, and very disempowered crews (authoritarian / high-gradient socio-economic-political power discrepencies play a role in numerous accident dynamics), training, and scrapping practices all put a distinct chill in that notion.

I'm reminded of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Richard_Montgomery : 1,400 tonnes of explosives sunk in the Thames estuary. At least it's safeish as long as nobody touches it. The couple of nuclear reactors in subs that have already sunk are I believe in deep distant water, losing one inshore would be a serious problem.

Nuclear submarines tend not to congregate in and/or near shipping lanes, as a general rule.

Their role in commerce is limited.

... the point being, for nuclear-powered merchant traffic, that that does congregate near shipping lanes. Increasing consequent risk.

No wonder that support for this fearmongering hit piece for Type Investigations comes from Anti-nuclear foundations, and i mean all of them (Bottom of the page)

This is exactly why I am against nuclear power, not because it is in any way bad but because it gets treated with not much more sophistication than a chimp would given matches.

Nuclear power is of fabulous value, but the way it gets turned into a potential liability is what puts me off it. It seems to be the way the human race approaches anything; with the shortest term view.

The merit of any tool is in wielding it wisely.

Yup, the problem with nuclear is not the safety of the technology as such, the problem is the combination of two things:

* People's greed, stupidity and laziness means that in practice, there is no such thing as a safe technology.

* A nuclear reactor is pretty much the only thing where a local fuckup can have globally disastrous consequences

Or you could say nuclear power isn't for humankind, at least not in their current irresponsible state.

> * A nuclear reactor is pretty much the only thing where a local fuckup can have globally disastrous consequences

As opposed to a distributed fuckup that has >95% probability of failure.

There is 100% failure probability for everything

Yes, correct :)

I meant within next 100 years or so. On a predefined time horizon.

It's unclear what high probabliity, distributed fuckup you're talking about. Climate change? In that case I'm entirely with you but that's a result of the same short-termism I mentioned.

I am horribly certain we've painted ourselves into a corner.

Climate change, yes.

>* A nuclear reactor is pretty much the only thing where a local fuckup can have globally disastrous consequences

Hydro-electric wants you to hold its beer.

Over the timeline that civilian nuclear has existed dams going pop has killed a lot more people and caused more destruction than nuclear. The fact that the consequences are "global" is mostly a reflection of how good we are at measuring radiation. While (for example) Chernobyl going pop was detectable over much of Europe the actual amount of radiation was of basically no consequence (i.e. less than more local sources of air pollution) except in the immediate vicinity.

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