What are the safest sources of energy?
ourworldindata.org
ourworldindata.org
Existing power plants that use fossil fuels should be phased out and new ones should not be legal to build. Pipelines for gas should not be built. If you don't want nuclear, build the battery and the renewable to fill it. If you don't want to build the battery, build nuclear. If you don't want the risk of nuclear disasters, accept the variability of renewable. Don't want to accept the variability of renewable, build nuclear.
The contention between renewable and nuclear can be good, but only in finding which one is safest and cheapest in a post fossil fuel energy grid. As long fossil fuels continue to be allowed the contention mostly serve to split the movement and pit the nuclear and renewable people against each other rather than against our main problem of greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution.
Don't forget nuke hot waste, left as a gift for future generations. Officially 'managed', yet there is no exploited repository.
Add combustible dependency (not so much known uranium reserves, no mastered way to obtain it w/o mining, in a not-so-distant future some may have to wage war in order to obtain some...), and nuclear proliferation.
The UN's reports on the effects of radiation (UNSCEAR) estimated 4000 future solid cancers (not deaths) and later dropped that estimate when the data didn't pan out.
Civil used nuclear fuel has never leaked and is not so dangerous after a few hundred years. Don't try to confuse us with the issue of weapons as those are separate programs which predated all municipal atomic power production.
Nope. You may think to the TORCH report. This report is another one. Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...
Some think that the UN is always right and without any bias. I don't. That's exactly my point here: there is no consensual way to assess nuke effective victims.
Don't try to confuse us by pretending that a nuke civilian program doesn't help nations trying to build a nuclear weapon. That's the root of Iran's current pertinent project, and "Many UN and US agencies warn that building more nuclear reactors unavoidably increases nuclear proliferation risks" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-use_technology#Nuclear )
Don't try to confuse use with "not so dangerous after a few hundred years" while all pertinent experts and legislation, for example in France and the US, require that a waste repository must hold it safely for 1 million years, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
Civilian nuclear energy rarely results in a nuclear weapons program. Today IAEA monitoring is effective in preventing diversionary pathways and enforcing international nonproliferation obligations (even where the US is obligated to not use internationally sourced uranium to produce weapons tritium).
A legislature requiring a million year containment is far from an evaluation of the waste's toxicity. Otherwise you would be forced to talk about specific isotopes.
Please reread my posts here, beginning with the very first. I was writing about another report, titled "Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment", by Yablokov & Nesterenko. It was not authored by Fairlie. If you clicked once to the Wikipedia references I provided since my first post you could see that. Here it is, once again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...
You may think that European Greens reports aren't credible, however this is IMHO a very weak counter-argument, simply the classical ad hominem fallacy at work.
My argument here is that this "What are the safest sources of energy?" article contents is highly debatable because it builds upon debatable theories. If the Chernobyl disaster really caused abut 1 million deaths, as stated by pertinent scientists in the aforementioned report, then the article's conclusions should be very different.
> Civilian nuclear energy rarely results in a nuclear weapons program
Iranian and North-Korean nuke weapons programs benefited massively from their civilian reactors, and this is widely documented ( see for example https://isis-online.org/publications/dprk/dprkplutonium.pdf )
Stating that the IAEA, which is an UN agency, has the power to prevent anything is just an opinion. Nearly all nations, small or huge, routinely neglect UN injonctions without any consequence.
> A legislature requiring a million year containment is far from an evaluation of the waste's toxicity.
This is an opinion. I, for one, cannot see any other reason for those legal dispositions. Actions aiming at keeping a repository sealed for 1 million years cost more than those necessary to keep it for "a few" centuries, this was a deliberate decision.
The Japanese don't seem so happy with dispersed fuel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup
Furthermore, your scenarios for nuclear waste leaking, while not impossible, are absurdly implausible if even a modicum of responsible engineering is applied to containing waste byproducts of nuclear fission. For one thing, this is definitely possible; the world is full of highly vital but very dangerous materials that are stored quite adequately, and it's also full of critical infrastructure whose structural integrity can't be absolutely 100% guaranteed either but which is often used for decades to improve human society in some way with few to no problems. Likewise for nuclear fission. The precautionary principle you take to extremes is absurd. Proper storage can be done and even improved enormously.
Secondly, the combined storage needs of all nuclear waste from every plant operating everywhere in the world for decades to come are minuscule compared to the availability of good, firmly sealable sites for doing this and compared to the sheer amount of waste tonnage created by fossil fuels and even by the repeat manufacture of long lasting batteries for certain renewable energy sources, if we want to get nitpicky. You're talking about one very small real estate/ecological footprint relative to energy output created with nuclear fission.
Thirdly, all of the above can be improved even further with moderate advances in how nuclear fission is produced. Even with today's more modern reactors, over 96% of already-used fissile material is recycled back into uranium-based and MOX fuel. One other immediate possibility is breeder reactors, which can in fact use waste from older fission reactors to create more energy. They can run on U-238 and transuranic elements, which create the absolute majority of waste byproduct in most current reactors. That's one exceptionally plausible solution to a part of the waste storage problem. Other even better solutions are also possible within reasonable development time frames.
In essence, your argument is somewhat similar to saying that nobody should ever use a microwave oven even while starving because there's always the very unlikely but not entirely impossible chance that it might give them a brain tumor, somehow, and let's furthermore ignore all advances in microwave oven technology to make this even less likely than it barely was earlier..
Those interested in what is already there at Yucca Mountain should go to Google Earth. Search for "Sedan Crater." Scan south.
Guess what those 1000-ish craters are.
The death potentiality of a Chernobyl/ Fukishima etc could reach the hundreds of thousands or more. The likelihood of this is probably very low, but non-zero. The likelihood of solar or wind having a catastrophic fatality event (that affected uninvolved civilians) is zero.
Given this, if all other things are equal, renewables are the favourable choice.
Then the entire world put their nuclear energy under the microscope. South Korea discovered a parts testing scam. The US demanded more tests for the AP1000 design and eventually bankrupted Toshiba (thanks Jaczko). The US industry also designed a process for responding to beyond design basis accidents: FLEX response.
With renewables all things are not equal because the materials cost is dozens of times that of nuclear (IEA, Material Efficiency in Clean Energy Transitions) and the true cost to decarbonize is many times the naive capacity of wind and solar alone (Caldiera 2018, Geophysical constraints on the reliability of solar and wind power in the United States).
The one thing that will change the death rate is if the capacity reaches the point where peak production exceeds demand. (Remember, we have no practical means of storing large amounts of electricity, the closest we have wastes at least 1/3 of it.) The thing is the deaths are from construction and maintenance, not operation, and thus go with nameplate capacity, not power generated.