Data from Chernobyl and Fukushima provide answers about the risks of nuclear
medium.com
medium.com
The piece is not anti-nuclear.
Also, risk is not binary. Finding out the true risk of something does not mean it's high risk and therefore negative. You can assess the risk of something and conclude that the risk is low and generally overblown, which is the point of the article.
I'm anti-Nuclear (On Earth), but would prefer most people read it before commenting on it. So, I archived it.
> If there was a meltdown tomorrow in the UK, France, US or elsewhere, it’s likely that our failure to adjust our thinking in light of the experiences at Fukushima and Chernobyl would mean we evacuate too many people for too long. People would die as a result.
Indeed, evacuate too many. The "learning about the risk of nuclear" we did "for the first time" is a study about the effects of the evacuation versus if they had stayed. In both nuclear disasters we ever had, the overreaction was apparently huge and it cost many thousands of lives in direct and indirect consequences. It might be a bit too soon to say, but in a way, the long-term repercussions of overreacting (expanding fossil fuel burning in favor of nuclear, the public reputation of nuclear) will likely be felt for generations. I'm not sure we'd ever have made 1.5°C, but now we definitely won't. (We have to still limit by how much we go over, of course, but it would have been great if we could avoid the tipping point.)
The first obvious omissions that come to mind are:
1. The evacuations took place while the meltdown was ongoing, evacuating was the sane choice given the available knowledge at the time.
2. There is no data on how not evacuating would have affected the people, since that was not done, making that comparison with such certainty seems a bit overconfident.
Nuclear in general:
How about showing me a sound final (100k yr) storage for nuclear waste, built and ready, before you operate any more nuclear reactors?
I'm not totally against the technology, but storing all the nuclear waste in metal cans on parking lots (yes, thats where a majority of nuclear waste resides) is not a valid solution.
The trend of externalizing cost to future generations is something that pisses me off to no end.
"Nuclear waste" is an artificial problem. It is possible to build reactors that use the "nuclear waste" from existing reactors as fuel, which destroys it forever. We haven't done this primarily because people keep refusing to build new reactors that do this until we figure out what to do with the nuclear waste. Which obviously doesn't make any sense.
These kinds of reactors (Travelling Wave Reactor etc.) you mention are vapourware and have been for quite some time. And I highly doubt the "which destroys it forever" part, - really, no waste at all, magic you say?
This is just more of "Future Tech will solve this" externalization of problems.
The core problem with nuclear waste is that it's energetic. There are a number of designs that burn up waste; if we were building and testing them, poor reactor types could be abandoned and better ones could be improved. We're not doing that primarily because "nuclear" is a scary word owing to activist efforts decades ago.
> This is just more of "Future Tech will solve this" externalization of problems.
That is absolutely the right plan, though. Assuming our civilization doesn't collapse or stall, future generations will be enormously wealthier than we are, and any problem we have will be proportionately smaller for them. Of course, stall or collapse isn't impossible, but I do wish people wouldn't so heavily advocate for exactly that.
Right, activists... not those pesky meltdowns spewing radioactive waste across Europe and into the pacific, it was the activists.
Complete dilution is not a given, and expecting zero consequences to marine life (and anything that then feeds on marine life) is optimistic at best.
Or a hungry fish will introduce it into the food chain before it has dissolved completely homogeneously into the wide oceans of the earth.
You know, Plutonium is a highly toxic heavy metal, and a bit radioactive, so,
Calling this the problem is just more fear mongering. The hard part about building a uranium-based bomb is getting weapons-grade uranium, because the bomb is simpler but U-235 is only 0.7% of natural uranium and is hard to separate from U-238 because they're chemically identical. The hard part about building a plutonium-based bomb is getting the implosion right. Making weapons-grade plutonium is relatively easy -- you expose U-238 to neutrons and some of the uranium turns into plutonium, then you can chemically separate the plutonium. But then you need a sophisticated bomb instead of a sophisticated centrifuge. It's not actually easier. That's why most nascent programs don't generally even try to make plutonium.
On top of that, you can design a reactor that produces enough other Plutonium isotopes that it makes the Plutonium-239 totally useless for a bomb, because they're even harder to separate from one another than U-235 is from U-238.
Also, the nuclear waste which sticks around for 24,000 years? That's the plutonium. The existing reactors already make it, because they contain U-238 and neutrons. It's the thing we already have, don't want and newer reactors can get rid of.
But long-lived isotopes aren't even what you would use because they're only mildly radioactive.
Depends on a country:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BREST_(reactor)
>The reactor uses nitride uranium-plutonium fuel, is a breeder reactor and can burn long-term radioactive waste.
I think existing BN reactors can also be used in the same way:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor
Yes, it's not 100% ready technology (e.g. there are problems with fuel fabrication), but I would call it last stages of development.
Those things had more downtime due to technical issues than operation time. The issues were indeed so severe, that the follow-up project (BN-1200) required a redesign and was put on hold indefinitely...
I'm usually skeptical of arguments like these especially when "X" is complex, potentially harmful, or offered as a magic bullet.
In your case in order to validate claims, I have to be a nuclear scientist to understand the potential ramifications of your argument before I can fully understand the pros/cons.
If as an engineer, I cannot afford the time to do it, how our are politicians supposed to?
When bridges fail, they don't affect potentially millions of people's health. Nor does when an ATC system fail at an airport -- traffic can just be rerouted to other airports.
That's why we're trying to make extra extra sure that it doesn't happen and hire experts, and learn from mistakes (and there were plenty, and I'm sure there will be more).
"If this fails it's just too horrible, we mustn't attempt it" doesn't sound like the most helpful attitude when dealing with large projects that have gigantic benefits but can also cause gigantic issues when they explode.
Have you read how:
TEPCO tried to hide the extent of Fukushima?
USSR tried to hide the extent of Chernobyl?
Russia tried to hide the extent of the latest nuclear sub accident recently?
If you are saying bad policy decisions are inherently less scaling than nuclear disasters, I would remind you the Great Leap Forward and the tens of millions of people dead as a result of the famine in just a few years. Sure that was an outlier event, and so was the nuclear disasters of past.
The problem is, with nuclear there seems to be an emotional shock and imagery that accompanies it which doesn’t seem to match those of, for example, dying of hunger. Just like airplanes feel less safe than cars but the latter kills much more people in practice, our emotive reasoning biases us heavily in this topic.
There are also a lot more agricultural experts in the US than nuclear experts.
1986 USSR bureaucracy didn’t fail only for a lack of expertise either.
> There are also a lot more agricultural experts in the US than nuclear experts.
It is not a numbers game of that sort. If anything, public misinformation being amplified in influence through social media affects expert based political will negatively insofar the topic is ripe for emotional biases, not lack of real experts.
I think you're talking Chernobyl here, without actually saying Chernobyl. Again they were arguably pushing ideology over science -- in many ways to save cost. Then making any criticisms about safety state secrets so no one could know about them.
It's worth noting that Gorbachev believed that Chernobyl led to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992, six years later.
> If anything, public misinformation being amplified in influence through social media affects expert based political will negatively insofar the topic is ripe for emotional biases, not lack of real experts.
True, but that cuts your argument. As it turns questions of science into ideological ones. If you're a farmer you can go to your local extension office, and ask questions about herbicide and fertilizers and planting schedules without government interference -- essentially expanding knowledge.
If Russia ran ads on FB that said the best time to plant corn was in November of the following year, there would be a lot of laughter.
There is no such thing as extension offices for nuclear science -- ergo making it even more ripe for the idea that you're talking about.
On the other hand, people trust vaccines less, and there has been a concerted effort to cause public distrust. Imagine what would happen if that happened to nuclear scientists. Worse, there would be only few people to make that argument against it. With vaccines there were lots of people that could, and still largely failed.
Yes.
> True, but that cuts your argument. As it turns questions of science into ideological ones.
That’s fair enough. If I am understanding correctly, you’re saying the institutional mistrust and failing public discourse we are experiencing today would render existing nuclear dangerous too. No matter if we have expertise or not (I believe we do) we can’t navigate our way to it in the presence of so much other BS.
This makes the entire situation worse. Who does the public trust? The press? Watchdog groups?
It's bad enough it happens at all, but could it happen in the US? I would have said no until the last few years.
I kind of think this would be a good board game, actually. Kind of like pandemic but for a nuclear accident, and trying to make decisions based upon imperfect information.
I'm not fond of this line of reasoning. Politicians are by definition not scientists and engineers. Their job is to listen to different experts, not to understand nuances of a technology.
Once the accident starts, there's maybe a handful of people that really know what's going on, if that. Worse, is if there's a "fog of war"-like scenario where they can't see inside, their sensors aren't working, and they have to send sacrificial humans in to get word back to the control.
I keep thinking about this event. Some people might speculate that the fallout level would have been low across Europe as a whole. But, who's to say really until you cross that bridge? And do you really want to cross that bridge to find out?
https://www.businessinsider.com/chernobyl-volunteers-divers-...
The coal industry's astroturfed anti-nuclear campaign in the 1960s and 1970s has warped thinking on this for generations.
The only problem is the political problem of choosing the sites.
In terms of the waste, right now nuclear waste can and should be recycled which would reduce the amount of waste: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste
Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:
"...Fast reactors can "burn" long lasting nuclear transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides), turning liabilities into assets. Another major waste component, fission products (FP), would stabilize at a lower level of radioactivity than the original natural uranium ore it was attained from in two to four centuries, rather than tens of thousands of years"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor
While there are issues with nuclear power, the worry people have about nuclear waste is greatly overblown to say the least. The amounts generated are manageable and in a relatively short amount of time we can use most of this "waste" to generate electricity.
You might change your mind on that after a bit of reflection; it doesn't make sense. We produce a bunch of things that are going to be hazardous forever - I always point to lead when nuclear comes up. The only reason anyone talks about nuclear waste is because 1 football field is small enough that we could contain it forever. Most industrial processes produce too much hazardous waste for that to be feasible.
This is actually a particularly apt comparison, because Uranium is a toxic heavy metal that affects the body much like lead. Nuclear waste is toxic forever - but it was toxic before it was used as nuclear fuel, too.
I portray it this way: buried in the ground there's toxic uranium in unknown locations. We're taking all this toxic material and putting it in a known location where we can monitor it. And in between we use it to generate carbon free energy.
There is probably other ways of doing it, but saying there is no method ready is wrong. I would prefer to burn it again in a breeder and get 500yr waste instead of 50k yr waste. But if we're going to bury it, this will keep the stuff safe for the time needed.
This isn't a complete solution, but reprocessing the nuclear fuel gives you a significantly smaller amount of waste to deal with and also removes some of the most problematic elements - meaning you don't have to worry about 100k years of protection.[0]
Go ahead and keep arguing about whether or not nuclear is a good idea. Earth doesn't care. The water will be lapping at your feet soon. How's that for externalizing a cost to future generations?
I am, and will continue to be blown away that the world found out how to make rocks so spicy they can power our civilizations for thousands of years with no carbon 50+ years ago....... and decided to keep burning dead dinosaurs. Fuck big oil, fuck greenpeace, and fuck anyone who is STILL anti-nuclear energy.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
It's solid waste (not radioactive sludge like in many movies/shows), and requires very simple storage containers, which you can just keep on site or bury, no problem.
> In fact, the U.S. has produced roughly 83,000 metrics tons of used fuel since the 1950s—and all of it could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards. [1]
[1] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...
AFAIK nuclear is older than oxidation/burning.
On a more serious note, burning has been a source of power only since about the steam engine, so about 300 years.
Yeah, too bad it doesn't work in practice.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nuclear-environment-i...
https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/articles/entry...
https://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2008-09-20-year-long...
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2004-10-30/scotland-expos...
https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/un-atomic-agency-probing-del...
https://apnews.com/ba820f02074247fc8486b63b7c87d6cb/russias-...
https://www.upi.com/Energy-News/2008/09/08/Nuclear-waste-sca...
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-april-23...
https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2020/02/oregons-response...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_waste_dumping_by_the_%27...
Agreed. The reality is there is nothing like nuclear energy. We lost (and continue losing) decades of nuclear development and deployment due to the anti-nuke movement (environmental or otherwise). This resulted in hundreds of billions of tons of CO2 emitted that otherwise wouldn't have been emitted (imagine if the developed world invested in nuclear to the same level as France in the 70s) - emissions that would have bought us more decades to tackle climate change.
But physics are physics. Nuclear will come back because you cannot beat the energy density of nuclear in a world which requires more and more power, with a growing population and living standards, and is dealing with the double environmental whammy of global warming and your generic environmental collapse. Things like wind and solar need huge surface areas to operate in, and require environmentally disastrous mining as well as huge swaths of landfill once decommissioned ... and need fossil fuel base load to be viable.
I watched a YouTube video recently that compared nuclear-powered and diesel-powered aircraft carriers [1]. The diesel-powered carrier needs to refuel every few weeks, while nuclear-powered carrier needs to refuel every 20 years. That is just insanity. Living in the modern world, we have an intuitive understanding how often things need to recharged and/or refueled, and nuclear just breaks your mind.
True, but while refuelling only takes hours, ROH operations on a naval reactor are usually scheduled to last 46 months [edit] and cost several billion dollars [/edit].
That's just insanity :D
90% of what we are burying could be re-burned in different technology reactors. Note I didn’t say new, because the tech isn’t new. It just wasn’t prioritized because the current reactors byproducts could be used for weapons too.
And the stuff that is left over from these other reactors isn’t nearly as nasty or as long lived either, so no need for ridiculously over-engineered holes in the desert either.
The anti-nuke hysteria of the last 40 years has prevented having even remotely rational discussions about the true clean energy source out there.
Europe doesn't have that many vast uninhabited landscapes for example. That Canada can just dump it beyond the polar circle is another thing.
Uranium isn't endless. With the current rate of consumption, it would last ~80 years. Sure, there are ideas to extract it and we certainly could find more, but it should certainly be a factor to be reminded of. There are also quite rare materials needed for containment, which have similar restrictions. Some say we could extract Uranium from seawater, but that is pretty much bullshit, not only economically.
I am not for shutting down nuclear plants, but I doubt it can compete or is the future of our energy production. Maybe other reactor types may help, but I don't judge people for being anti nuclear.
We will not see nuclear plants in the future as long as fossil fuels are burning to power up the energy grid and warm up homes. Maybe when the coral reefs are all gone in 20-30 years, water levels has increased a bit to be inconvenient enough, and enough people are displaces because of drought and other humanitarian disaster, then maybe the cost of burning fossil fuels will finally be applied to the operators of such power plants and alternative sources become more competitive when the sun is down and the wind is not blowing.
I do judge people for burning fossil fuels. That my country has a set date when nuclear should be all gone but no date when fossil fuels can be banned is a pretty good sign how bad the priorities are.
It's solid waste (not radioactive sludge like in many movies/shows), and requires very simple storage containers, which you can just keep on site or bury, no problem.
> In fact, the U.S. has produced roughly 83,000 metrics tons of used fuel since the 1950s—and all of it could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards. [1]
[1] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...
It is also worth mentioning that almost 20% of France's energy is produced from recycled nuclear (not 20% of nuclear energy, 20% of total).
Making orders of magnitude less waste that stays in one place seems obviously better... it’s in parking lots because there isn’t much of it
Trees have been extensively proven and are reliable. Human body stores also a lot of carbon.
Basically for ever bit of fuel burned we expand a ever expanding area of nature reserves which carbon is forbidden to be touched until it return itself as fossil fuels. It would gloriously make fossil fuels prohibitively expensive to the point where any other energy should would be more commercial viable.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
Bury it in bedrock with no aquifer. The only scenarios where this results in waste being exposed are borderline hyperbolic: somehow society collapses, all knowledge of radiation is lost, and some future civilization decides to dig up a waste disposal site. The US already built one of these, but then the government killed the project for political reasons [1]. Europe is building a facility in Finland [2].
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
You don't need one. You reprocess the waste; then you only need about 100 years storage, not 100,000, for what's left over, and we already have plenty of storage methods that will meet that need. Every nuclear-using country other than the US already does this. The only reason the US doesn't is stupid politics.
So you'd rather breathe the waste NOW from your power source instead of storing it where something maybe, possibly might go wrong?
Waste is not a good talking point if you want to be anti-nuclear given what we know about just exactly how bad air pollution is--and the medical science around air pollution just keeps bringing more and more bad news.
You could have a Fukushima every year and it wouldn't match the harmful effects of fossil fuel air pollution.
There's however not just health risk but also economic risk. There's different estimations of how much the entire Fukushima catastrophy cost but estimates range from dozens of billions of dollars to hundreds of billions[1]. And even if relocation hadn't been mandatory I'm not so sure regions that get the stigma of being radiated would survive anyhow and I can imagine a lot of voluntary exodus and as a result further economic and property damage.
Regardless of what particular number one picks, it was economically absolutely devastating.
[1]hhttps://www.scientificamerican.com/article/clearing-the-radi...
I live in an area with multiple nuclear plants. We've never had an issue with them, although there was one false alarm. Even then, nobody seems to feel very unsafe about it around here. Property values are just as high as they always were.
We did have a natural gas plant blow up. So I'm not very convinced of the nuclear dangers by comparison. Especially since nuclear technology keeps getting better, safer, and more efficient. That can't be said for much of the fossil fuel industry.
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
The reason why nuclear is safe and a great option is energy density. You cannot really beat that with fossil fuels or renewables. We have to make nuclear safe in the sense that not even an earthquake can trigger an accident like Fukushima but we already made nuclear the safest source of energy based on the number of deaths per twh produced.
Any reports I've seen seem to be quite localized and minor.
Most of all, he quantifies stress and exhaustion as a primary cause of death for those evacuated. How did he figure that out?
The author provides links to the study. You can also just google NREFS.
I moved from St. Louis (Tornado Alley) to Seattle. There are really no earthquakes or volcanos in St. Louis (except from newmadrid which is a dooozy, but rare). I had trouble understanding earthquakes and they scare me a lot. But I was having a conversation with the Northwesties about Tornados. When I explained just how bad they could be, it terrified the Northwesties. There are no bad storms up here; lightning makes the news. To add to that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Joplin_tornado happened the next day. This terrified all of the northwesties. To me tornados are a part of life, and I'm more ok with them than earthquakes as you "get a warning", and you have a chance to move away from them (it's only a chance).
At the end of the day we all, except maybe Ray Kurzweil, have to deal with the ultimate risk of death. Many of us just ignore it for our whole lives as a way of coping. Others stare it in the face and logic it away, which is essentially the same thing. Why are we all not constantly panicked with the existence of death?
> Sadly, of the 160,000 people evacuated due to radiation fears, there were 1,121 deaths in the first 3 years from physical and mental exhaustion.
When the public’s perception of risk is misaligned with official messaging, this logically will increase anxiety levels. Well informed high-trust societies should do best with a transparent and well communicated J-Value based policy. Measuring trust and refining communication practices seem like important aspects of the public response.
Which is of course completely flawed. Firstly it is in monetary terms, when there is a dynamic amount of money. Pulling the furlough pay rabbit out of the hat put the myth of a fixed amount of money to bed forever. Money is an endogenous concept designed to allow all the resources of a currency area to be engaged usefully.
Secondly even if you reassess it in the correct real resource terms, it assumes that there are no unemployed resources and that all current uses of resources are the most socially advantageous uses.
The one thing we have learned from the Covid crisis is exactly how few people we need working to maintain the population, and how much of what we call work is an activity that is somewhat less important than your average football match.
There is. But there isn't an infinite amount of stuff. And since to spend you have to have something to buy the spending stops when the real resource runs out. That's the actual limit - until you use some sort of power dynamics to start moving physical resources from their current uses.
Hence the shortage of PPE at the start of the Covid crisis. All the money in the world; not enough masks to go around. There was "demand", but no "effective demand".
Money is essentially inductively connected to the real economy, not directly connected. As an analogy in electrical terms money is apparent power, and the stuff it buys is real power.
And sure enough, Phillip Thomas, the lead researcher for this study, comes from a 20+ year career with the chemical and nuclear industries. I would take everything in this article with a grain of salt.
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/engineering/people/philip-j-thomas/...
More info here: https://whataboutthewaste.com
I think nuclear needs a significant, stable and non-politicized source of funding with a good balance of support and regulation.
If we ahd modern, sustainable "nuclear battery" type nuclear reactors I think we would be better off.
Maybe we could play factorio with the reactors so that power output only went towards battery and solar cell production.
RCOH procedures alone would make civil use prohibitively expensive.
Refuelling and maintenance of civil reactors takes place more often (usually every 18 to 24 months) and is much quicker - about 45 days, not months). Gen IV reactors even allow for on-line refuelling so the reactor can continue to operate with no down-time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Abqaiq%E2%80%93Khurais_at...
Even wind-turbines cause more damage by killing many, many birds. They aren't as reliable and they certainly cause a lot of noise pollution. And they aren't all that pretty, either.
The risk of nuclear is low to none, barring any unforeseen freak accidents.
Yes, if a tsunami hits the nuclear plant, it might break down. If a meteor hits it, it might break down.
By that logic we shouldn't build cities. After all, if a tsunami hits a city many people will die.
I wish politics around the world would just leave the decision-making up to smart people instead of vote-gatherers.
The radiation difference isn't small if you include accidents. (Are we somehow supposed to pretend they never happened, and no nuclear accident - even if it's "just" a fuel spill, or a small fire - will ever happen again?)
Also one has to consider how much energy needs to be spent to get certain amount of energy generated, so called EROI. Nuclear is orders of magnitude better than other low-co2 options. For example for solar it is about 6, versus 75 for nuclear. [1]
Given the investment energy is mostly in shape of fossil fuels, one, for example, cannot fuel carbon capture with anything other than nuclear, as in balance it will not reduce co2.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2015/02/11/eroi-a-to...
It’s easier to rewrite some words on paper than do actual planning, and implementation of upgrade work.
A rich nation seeks financial efficiency, circling around tried and true solutions, whittling them down to pointless husks. Costing it self reliability and resiliency.
With big projects like nuclear plants and nation states, only so much whittling of resiliency can happen before ... poor. The structural support fails and the systems is no more.
https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-scienc...
It's not actually known definitively how many people Fukushima killed, but it is known definitively that the final economic costs wildly outweighed the "cheap" energy it produced.
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/8/12/1301/pdf
Nuclear is not clean. There is still no solution to nuclear waste, which makes it impossible to cost the TOC of nuclear.
And considering the number of accidents to date - and their economic cost - nuclear certainly isn't safe either. Is it really a good idea to create pools of extremely toxic heavy metal waste which is also radioactive?
It also isn't cheap. Renewables have been consistently undercut the cost of nuclear electricity, and that's without any significant push towards an improved smart grid, a combination of centralised and local distribution, and clean pumped storage facilities that would be possible with a Green New Deal.
As you say - these decisions should be left to smart people, and not to an industry which has consistently overpromised and underdelivered.
[1] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2018.08.006
"No solution to the waste" is a myth [2]. The waste is stored in dry casks which have never injured a soul. Meanwhile combustion waste from fossil and renewable biofuel kills 8 million/yr [3].
[2] https://whataboutthewaste.com
[3] https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution
Yes, by those numbers, fossil and biofuel kill the same number of people every single week than have ever been attributed to nuclear accidents in the history of the industry.
Plus nuclear solves climate change. If fossil and renewable biofuel had to pay insurance for climate change, we'd be building nuclear like crazy.
Also, wind turbines kill large raptors and migratory bats, not songbirds.
The source you list gives an estimate for bird deaths that is an order of magnitude less than the Audubon society or the US Fish and Wildlife service. But the issue isn't so much the number of birds, but the type:
>...Although fatality rates for raptors may be lower compared to passerines, raptors are especially vulnerable to collisions due to their flight behaviors. Given the life history traits of raptors (i.e., long-lived and low reproductive rates) their populations are more at risk of decline from the number of different sources of impacts that affect these species on a daily basis.
https://www.fws.gov/birds/bird-enthusiasts/threats-to-birds/...
This isn't to say that means we should drop wind, but we shouldn't hand wave away the issue.
>...It's not actually known definitively how many people Fukushima killed, but it is known definitively that the final economic costs wildly outweighed the "cheap" energy it produced.
The death rate from Fukishima is far less than the death rate from any properly working fossil fuels source (or wind or rooftop solar for that matter)
>...but it is known definitively that the final economic costs wildly outweighed the "cheap" energy it produced.
This is an argument to move away from 50 year old plant designs into something more modern and even safer.
>...And considering the number of accidents to date - and their economic cost - nuclear certainly isn't safe either. Is it really a good idea to create pools of extremely toxic heavy metal waste which is also radioactive?
In terms of safety, no major power source has as good of a safety record as nuclear. In terms of nuclear waste, as many people have already said in this discussion, it is very low volume, could be recycled right now and eventually most of it can be used as fuel on 4th gen reactors.
>...It also isn't cheap. Renewables have been consistently undercut the cost of nuclear electricity, and that's without any significant push towards an improved smart grid, a combination of centralised and local distribution, and clean pumped storage facilities that would be possible with a Green New Deal.
It is possible there will be some major advances in grid storage that will allow us to stop using natural gas to cover for the intermittent nature of wind and solar. But what if that doesn't pan out? The dangers we are facing in the coming decades are immense. Is your fear of nuclear power so great that if you had to choose, you would prefer the world to suffer through catastrophic climate change rather than use nuclear power?
I think they've done their insurance calculations wrong; it seems they've divided (cost of Fukushima cleanup) by (energy produced by Fukushima) and concluded that the insurance cost is ~$3/kWh. That seems to be accidentality assuming both that Fukushima was 100% of the Japanese power industry and also that it is certain all nuclear plants end with a meltdown. Neither of those is true - insurance works by probabilities and spreading the risk.
Fukushima specifically was likely a net economic loss; when amortised over the entire Japanese nuclear industry their "insurance" estimates are far too high and nuclear power was probably a net win. Also their cost estimates are from English-language newspapers articles which is reasonable but doesn't scream careful research.
They reference an IEEE report (on pg 7) of $0.06/kWh - that is a much more trustworthy figure and roughly in line with Japan's $0.01/kWh actual insurance. Which is pretty reasonable given that probabilistically there wasn't going to be a bad plant meltdown. If Japan had been charging 0.06c/kWh they'd have been being far too conservative from an actuarial standpoint.
Totally.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
"According to U.S. NCRP reports, population exposure from 1000-MWe power plants amounts to 490 person-rem/year for coal power plants, 100 times as great as nuclear power plants (4.8 person-rem/year). The exposure from the complete nuclear fuel cycle from mining to waste disposal is 136 person-rem/year; the corresponding value for coal use from mining to waste disposal is "probably unknown".[24]"
Did you even read the article? Or at least the summary? It's a pro nuclear piece.
The researchers are trying to use a system level risk returns balance and using very high level average metrics like risk of reduction in lifespan. How about the distribution around the mean and how about the suffering of people who undergo cancer treatments and survive? Having seen a close relative battle cancer and the family suffering, i wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy and their families.
The other piece these macro economic approaches miss is that while a system level cost isn't much, for most people their property, their job and their neighbourhood social networks ARE the major assets they have in life and in the case of nuclear accidents, they lose everything. This fundamentally Behavioral Economics view of consequences is what drives the recent popular opposition to nuclear power and unless nuclear proponents start analyzing nuclear power through a Behavioral Economics lens, they're likely going to be ignored by the population. Comparing risk of death against statistical correlations with air pollution isn't going to cut it.
On nuclear, we're barking up the wrong tree by pushing for economic analysis of old style nuclear. We need to develop and qualify designs that are passively safe with no risk of driving people away from their property and society before the industry will be taken seriously, otherwise the only interest will be in weapons research.
Evidence is they figured that out in the 1980s. We haven't seen a bad meltdown from any plant built in the last 40 years.
By using Life Quality Index, which includes Health-Adjusted Life Expectancy, the research takes into account well-being and health impacts other than death; making expected-value decisions on such a metric is a standard way to encode a nonlinear objective function without needing to use higher central moments elsewhere in the decision.
Furthermore, the analysis does look at the economic impacts of relocating people from their homes and does not simply compare the statistics against air pollution.
Finally, economic analysis of old-style nuclear remains incredibly relevant, given that existing "legacy" nuclear power-generating stations represent a significant fraction of total stationary power-generating capacity, and that we have witnessed political movements to replace these facilities with fossil-fuel burning plants due to fear of nuclear accident.
I for one, would love to see some analysis of the value of lockdowns across society, i particular the prioritization of the older and more susceptible healthwise, vs the young and economically vulnerable.
And, like Fukushima, the impact of the reaction was much more severe than the impact of the radiation.
[I looked at The WHO reports that were published every decade. Each one downgraded the estimated impact from radiation dramatically, whereas the health impact of the evacuation became more and more apparent].
b: (negative) aggregate health effects of radiation
The lockdowns for Coronavirus is another. I don't know which way it actual falls (lockdowns still extended life expectancy or the reduced life expectancy) but I will be curious in a couple of years what the data will show us.
Some people are absolutely certain X will be the best way and either don't take into account the downsides or hand-wave away the concerns. I wish we could have actual debates to come to a solution instead of making it person or political ("YOU WANT TO KILL PEOPLE" vs "YOU DON'T CARE ABOUT PEOPLE"). But tis life I s'pose.
I've always said there are tradeoffs to every solution. And we may not have all the information to even know how bad or good a tradeoff is.
No solution is perfect.