A coal plant puts more radioactive isotopes into the air then any nuclear plant.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
dont let the facts get in the way..
The video says the replacements were sometimes things like wind turbines. These tend to kill birds.
These RTGs seem quite impressive actually. Simple and easy to construct, if you have a nuclear industry. They survived for decades of being completely abandoned in a society falling apart. The biggest risk was only to people who literally broke in and stole them. There were no construction accidents creating and maintaining endless thousands of kilometers of transmission cables, no dead birds or dead maintenance engineers trying to repair a huge non-solid-state device in the middle of a Russian storm, the lighthouses presumably saved many lives and were cheap enough to build that the embattled USSR could afford to do so.
I wouldn't be surprised if a full lifecycle cost/benefit analysis that took into account the alternatives ended up being strongly positive in favour of this technology.
I don't accept this characterisation. I see Fukushima as an example of being curiously diligent in one area, and negligent in another, perhaps because rather than have a "culture" of safety it was simply legislation driven, such that standards dropped as soon as there was a gap/oversight in the legislation. To clarify - as safe as the plant was, it was not in a safe chosen location. Concerns were raised, and ignored. legislation covered the building and operation of the plant, not diligence in planning its location.
security is somewhat weakest-link - it doesn't matter if your doors are metal with strong locks if there are large windows without bars. Fukushima was always unsafe, just conditional on a relatively rare event - by the same measure the unstable warehouse cargo that exploded in Beirut was always unsafe, even if it existed for nearly 7 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Relative_is...
«According to estimates by the US Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the world’s coal-fired power stations currently generate waste containing around 5,000 tonnes of uranium and 15,000 tonnes of thorium. Collectively, that’s over 100 times more radiation dumped into the environment than that released by nuclear power stations.»
About 1% of it is leaked into air, so about 500 tonnes of uranium and 1500 tonnes of thorium are leaked into air every year.
However, uranium and thorium are much less dangerous than radioactive iodine, strontium, and cesium.
Nuclear proliferation is a worldwide concern, but a new power plant in your backyard is as safe as relative to the national record.
Until the nuclear plant suffers a catastrophic accident...
I do not agree with this overall. It holds true only for some timescales and for some assumptions of risk factors.
Not specifically about waste, but still relevant. Fukushima and other plants in Japan were designed to withstand a 100 year tsunami. Bad luck that 3/11/11 was greater than that.
But Chernobyl and Fukushima (and others, let's not kid ourselves) are disasters with minuscule cost in lives and environment harm. Every year 60 million people die and out of that 12 million die due to unhealthy environment. Risks of (non-weapon) nuclear energy to life, while they exist, are a complete non-issue. Apart from political changes, we need cheap reliable energy to fix the atmosphere and to fix that unhealthy environment.
On the other hand, particulate matter emitted by oil and coal plants causes millions of deaths per year, right now. And CO2 emissions from oil, gas and natural gas are bringing us to the brink of an environmental catastrophe.
Its not nuclear vs oil and gas. Renewables are an alternative with lower cost and lower waste.
A good safety history is a measure of what happened, not what could happen.
I specifically called out SYSTEMIC risk.
What's the systemic risk of solar panels and wind power, for example? A terrorist attack destroying 100 millions solar panels?
> On the other hand
The usual false dichotomy between nuclear and oil/coal/gas.
> And CO2 emissions from oil, gas and natural gas are bringing us to the brink of an environmental catastrophe.
...not to mention the direct release of heat into the atmosphere due to poorly isolated house heating, industrial production and electric generation plants themselves. None of which is mitigated by nuclear. Rather, it's made even worse by any source of cheap electricity.
Release of heat due to chemical and nuclear sources does heat the planet, but the contribution to heating compared to effect of increasing CO2 concentration is negligible in the range of 1%, this is well known.
Thanks but I don't need a strawman.
When you add some batteries you will be fine with no pollution. And no waste your childerns childern (and beyond) have to take care of.
Rare earth metals have to be mined in remote portions of China in dystopian hellscapes. Lithium and other minerals also have to be mined, and leave toxic tailing ponds. Solar panels frequently have cadmium and tellurium, which are also hazardous, and need to be managed. Plastics and composites in wind turbines also cannot be recycled.
There are no perfect solutions, and the future will almost certainly require a mixture of kinds of energy.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
Concorde was the safest form of commercial air-travel, until one day in Paris it wasn't.
Nuclear currently has around 3% share of power generation globally. More share than Concorde had, certainly. But not enough to say definitively that nuclear's comparative safety is not just because of its comparative scarcity. It's been a low-hanging fruit.
Scale up to 30% share and be necessarily exposed to new risks which were not exposed at current levels of deployment.
Many of these additional risks would be from economic factors: we'd probably never achieve 30% share without a less rigorous and much less costly safety regime.
I am not going to be able to give statistics, but to me it's obvious. After all these decades, what's been holding nuclear down to its present market share is its economics of safety. Cost overruns all but bankrupted Toshiba, just to give one recent example.
If you want an order of magnitude more installations, you will have to relax those constraints.
So we cannot use today's safety record as proof of tomorrow's safety if we also expect massive increase in deployment.
Last time i studied this topic one of the main drawback of nuclear energy was precisely that it required accurate forecasts of future demand, so not suitable for "on demand" production, because of how long it takes to cool down. Had anything improved in this area?
Therefore you need to run your plant at about full power all day to have a chance to recoup the investment. With renewable, although intermittent, sources vastly undercutting nuclear on price many hours of the day this becomes an even harder calculation.
Based on this nuclear is an uniquely bad pairing together with renewables, and it will only get worse. Say you can make massive profits on average one hour per day, but that means all other methods of energy generation of storage can make the same, and still undercut you.
This isn't even factoring in that it is impossible to get insurance for a nuclear power plant.
Thanks for the information.
No it's not - to compensate for times when there is not enough energy from renewable sources, you need power plants that can be shut down and brought back online quickly, and nuclear plants are certainly not that.
If Germany, NL, Denmark, Spain, UK et al. had 80% nuclear France's nuclear power would become uneconomic.
It's the grid and unique political considerations, not those plants' responsiveness that makes it work for France.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_following_power_plant [2] https://www.oecd-nea.org/nea-news/2011/29-2/aen-infos-suivi-...
An RTG is just a hot piece of radioactive material surrounded by thermocouples that directly convert the heat into electricity.