The Disneyfication of Atomic Power
spark.nautil.us
spark.nautil.us
General Dymanics had a marketing campaign with very nice graphics In the 1950's, a lot of people believed that the power of splitting the atom was a way to pull mankind out of the darkness and provide plenty for all.
Is there something nefarious here that I'm not getting?
I think that nuclear power is still the very best way of serving the ever-growing energy needs of the planet. It's a shame that the technology has been sidelined by fearmongering and endless litigation.
What's that Pizza of G(reeley)(?) rubber stamp doing there?
Decades of propaganda have led to people mistakenly believing that wind, solar and batteries on a large enough scale are a substitute for steady, controllable power generation from sources such as coal, natural gas and nuclear.
The sad part is that while we wait for the grid transition to happen at an indeterminate point in the future, climate change is a problem from yesterday that has a very real effect today. The worse part is that the nuclear industry continues to atrophy talent and knowledge when we should instead be focussing on making nuclear power an everyday thing.
Instead of playing the blame game on pollution, i really wish the West would do the one thing that has the greatest potential to supply energy to and lift millions out of poverty - build nuclear reactors and transmission grids in Africa, India and China.
"As of June 2021, China has a total nuclear power generation capacity of 49.6 GW from 50 reactors, with additional 17.1 GW under construction."
That is a pitifully low number when over half their electric energy comes from coal.
The fear-mongering was absolutely not justified given that we will soon be facing climate crises that will make Chernobyl and Fukushima seem miniscule.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-...
We are in an ongoing climate crises, it's just normalized now because that's what we are used to.
I'm old enough to remember when Cat 5 hurricanes were something like once a decade. Now we see them nearly yearly, sometimes twice in a year.
Unfortunately, that's simply not going to stop in our lifetime. It's even likely to get worse over the next 50 years as we slowly get to the point of being carbon neutral.
Allegedly, it’s saved lives: https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-change-heat-cold-deaths...
So far, anyway.
But isn't "either Nuclear or climate disaster" a false dillema? I mean, Germany right now has about half it's power being generated from renewable energy sources, and wind alone provides over twice the energy that nuclear does.
Why do nuclear power proponents insist in pushing the false idea that's either Nuclear or nothing?
You have framed the problem as a binary choice which it is not.
Only around 40% of Germany electrical energy comes from renewable resources - roughly the same as coal and natural gas.
As Germany showed the world, renewables are quite capable of doing the heavy lifting regarding a nation's energy needs, particularly while phasing out nuclear.
The Fukushima disaster is still fresh in our collective memory, as is the exclusion zone around the plant that is comprised of a 20km radius around the Fukushima plant.
It's disingenuous to depict nuclear as a desirable option, of even an acceptable onr, given it's track record and very long-lasting consequences.
I've never heard that. More like everything that can help fill the gap, including nuclear.
> isn't "either Nuclear or climate disaster" a false dillema?
That's a false dilemma you've brought from somewhere else, not from this discussion, but the reason "either nuclear or climate disaster" is nonsensical is because global warming is happening already. The extent to which it happens will depend on how fast we can reduce our carbon emissions. If adding nuclear power into the mix helps us act faster and decrease the amount of warming that we ultimately experience, then we have to weigh that benefit against the risks.
There's a taboo against weighing nuclear risk against any other kind of risk, but that is a relic of a different time when nuclear accidents were the worst thing we could imagine. Nuclear isn't the scariest monster under the bed anymore. Global warming is going to result in global human suffering on a grand scale. We have to compare.
You're literally posting in a thread whose leading post is "Nuclear power is the only hope to stop climate change."
I understand that this discussion was sparked by an article on nuclear power PR efforts, but framing nuclear as the only alternative to fossil fuels and the saviour, specially as all tradeoffs are brushed under the rug, doesn't sound like a honest discussion.
I was a kid in the 1980s, so I might not be remembering with perfect accuracy, but I remember hearing about global warming as a high-profile environmental issue sometime later, maybe the late 80s. Before then the environmental concerns you read about in newspapers and popular magazines were acid rain, nuclear contamination, nuclear winter (still in the Cold War), chemical pollution, deforestation, etc. Global warming might have been on scientists' radar screens, but it didn't hit the public consciousness until after the public had made up its mind about nuclear power.
They campaigned HARD against nuclear usually under shadowy organizations and usually supporting solar (which, at the time, was completely infeasible). [1]
Now that we've got so many restrictions in place around nuclear and solar/wind are pretty feasible, the fossil fuel industry has done a 180. They now promote nuclear over solar/wind precisely because they know it will take years for nuclear to become viable again. [2]
They got all the regulations into place to stop nuclear from being deployed and now advocate it knowing it's going to be hard, politically, to rollback those restrictions.
Personally, I think the right move at this point is renewables + battery storage and working to eliminate nuclear restrictions. It's not an either or choice, let's do both.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-f...
Put in a date when no more fossil fuel plants are allowed to be built and let the existing ones be decommissioned once they grow too old. With that as a starting point everything else will just have to be planned according to demand.
True. From an amoral perspective it raises the question, why did the fossil industry win?
Usually, the given answer for an upstart industry failing is "they're small and idealistic, thinking that the best idea rather than the best lobbyists determine success". But that's clearly not true here.
If you add "fearmongering and endless litigation" as you call it, it means that only nation states can develop nuclear power, and only if it is seen as strategically important. By comparison, anyone can build solar panels and wind turbines, or burn coal.
Only if you go under the traditional models. Modular reactors solve most of the problems with traditional nuclear power - but good luck having a rational discussion with most people about it :p
Why are we so sure that we know how to manage the risks of nuclear power? People just assert it like fact these days if they're on the pro-nuclear side of The Discourse, but it just seems to be that long-tail risks are really really hard for society to deal with and we get them wrong all the time. Just look at covid. Or look at plane crashes - we put a lot of resources into air safety and we have gotten really good at it, but planes do still crash once in a while.
If you want to argue that the benefits of nuclear outweigh the risks, that seems a very reasonable position to take. But insisting that the risks are truly 0 and anyone who points out the risk is fearmongering just doesn't seem that productive.
In the absent of the threat of people using fossil fuel, nuclear isn't great. It is just better than cooking the planet and continuing releasing toxic emissions in the air and water.
Let's assume the newest technology. Chance of a meltdown per year per power station, multiplied by number of stations, multiplied by years of service. Then factors in the cost of the meltdown (health, unusable land, lost infrastructure) versus the benefits somehow.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
Also, the newer reactor designs are really impressive with respect to safety and economics.
The largest insurer in the world has assets of $1,190 billion [1] and the cost of Fukushima cleanup could be as high as $660 billion [2] or even $1 trillion [3] (estimates of this vary wildly).
Insuring such a large risk would be like playing russian roulette with the company.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_insurance_comp... [2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/clearing-the-radi... [3] https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-...
Efficient - maybe, but safer??
TBH, modern big nuclear power stations are already very safe.
If you want a take very different than the anti-nuclear one, I would recommend this interview of Mark Nelson: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2vlG1Ouf001owUMwOBCfVG?si=N...
To be clear, US coal and natural gas plants kill a lot of people regularly.
One key fact about nuclear is that everything that we see from here to the horizon is a layer of lies.
All nuclear plants have commercial uses, some also make bombs in the weekends and holidays that never, ever killed anybody. Very nice bombs.
But I imagine that we talk about nuclear plants for civil uses. I guess that the Radium Girls don't qualify as people in that list of "zero" people killed by radioactivity in US.
If we talk about people killed "by" the building, yes we have five workers killed, but we could forget all about those also. Last was from 2013 so is a really old history. Nothing to see here, lets move on.
In fact if we forget all about Slotin and Daghlian and about the other 56 nuclear accidents in US we could have a list of zero accidents!. A very desirable goal!. All that we need is to discard the bad parts of the history.
All depends on how you circumnavigate and define accident in a nuclear plant.
Global warming is global, non-linear and has lots of unknown effects.
The characteristic of risk is far more important than exact numbers. I’m not necessarily pro-nuclear and I wish renewables will be a sufficient solution. But due to the risk characteristics of global warming mentioned earlier, I think nuclear energy should always be an option. I am anti-anti-nuclear.
And notice that all of these same organizations promoted things like... breakthroughs in consumer electronics, worker safety, medicine, vaccines, solar power, space travel. And yet, there are no articles about the "propaganda" around things like seatbelts. To pull out nuclear is a lazy post hoc analysis hit job.
I hate this trend in modern journalism where anytime consumers show preferences for something a journalist doesn't like, they are written about like some sort of victim in an information war.
That’s “victims of misinformation”.
If you really think climate change is an impending crises the fastest way to cut carbon emissions is with nuclear power - period.
Nuclear power is the only hope to stop climate change.
People who take a lot of stock in these types of predictions generally cannot see the value of economic growth and try to save the world by enforcing their own set of puritanical environmental restrictions.
Malthus [1] was of opinion that humanity growth/wellbeing is bound to be curbed by wars/famines due to limits of resources.
He was mostly correct up until industrial revolution.
There are, though, people who still subscribe to Malthus idea of impending doom.
I just see generalized policies of degrowth and basically destruction of the middle-class (whatever that means) everywhere in the western world:
- Local lockdowns rather than closing borders in time for the virus
- Increased tolerance of petty crime to make the cities as inhabitable as possible
- Very incompetent energy policies that will make energy skyrocket in price
- Policies and incentives making it harder and harder to be able to afford a car.
- Deindustrialization (that's been going on for a while) and no effort to reverse it.
- Basically no research or very bad research on basic health improvement treatments that don't involve medication.
And small things like that adding up one by one. Would be not so strange if different countries were failing in different ways, but seems strange to see so many countries consistently "failing" in the same way.
It's important to finance renewables research and there's a bright future for them but, right now, nuclear is the best hope for mostly clean energy with a lot less negative environment impact than Coal and Fossil Fuel.
I am pro-nuclear, but would like to actually see how an equal amount of resources would lead to what power and when to give arguments like this teeth or debunk them.
See https://youtu.be/KC7YD98HixM. It does cost more to generate nuclear power but it’s also the only viable clean and “firm” (turn on and off based on demand) type of power generation available to us.
Demand will also follow supply, setting pricing to availability will (and has) significantly alter usage patterns.
Also, having too much peak power and not enough baseline power isn't a today problem and won't be until solar/wind sources are at a much larger scale. Rolling industrial blackouts (or price spikes) in the middle of the night might become a thing, but still.. meh?
Cost isn't the only dimension, but there is the question "how do we best utilize our available resources?" and we might be able to better find the best allocation if we had a nice comparison about the cost/reward of sinking those resources into wind, solar, or nuclear. We need all of them, but there is certainly a tradeoff between how much we put towards each.
In the summer months peak usage is near peak solar generation, and usage is as much as 60% higher than minimum daily usage. With the rise of electric cars, a whole lot of usage will be able to be scheduled for times of excess.
There is a lot of current room for renewables to displace carbon. There will probably always be some fossil fuel capacity for peaking plants and battery systems are already being deployed in places.
The point at which we have too many renewables and a gap in generation is a long time off, and possibly with battery systems and demand shifting will never happen. It seems like the time to solve that problem will be measured in decades, there's no need to say renewables aren't a solution now when they can solve a huge portion of the problem starting immediately.
For the environmental groups themselves, this is a rather complex topic since they will be forced to embrace something they’ve vilified for several generations.
Anyways I hope there’s a stronger push for nuclear but I’m not counting on it. There’s no subsidies/incentives in the BBB plan, no major political player seems to be embracing nuclear etc
Not only is nuclear power clean, it's two orders of magnitude safer than fossil fuels and on-par with wind and solar (it's considerably safer than rooftop solar, in fact). And that is including Fukushima and Chernobyl.
Further, while nuclear is expensive, Small Modular Reactor designs are safer, smaller, simpler, and faster to build. We should be building them now if only to make sure we have the experience if we need to scale them up quickly.
Yes, nuclear waste has to be dealt with, but there's very little of it and we already have to deal with it.
Ignoring nuclear and praying for a breakthrough solution for the renewable base load problem is tremendously risky and there's virtually no upside.
Don't we have Geiger counter that can measure the amount of radiation emanating from nuclear power plants, including Chernobyl?
The cover-up of Chernobyl lasted barely days.
> with no good estimate of the indirect deaths and illness from exposure.
Only a multitude of studies. The current consensus in the scientific community is that somewhere around 20,000-30,000 total deaths attributable to Chernobyl have or will occur.
A little nuclear waste goes a long way. If you have any concrete, practical suggestions for ways to deal with it, the world needs you. Summarizing them here will make me an advocate.
I see your point, but it also doesn't go a long way. It's very dense and solid, and tends to stay put as far as wastes go.
> If you have any concrete, practical suggestions for ways to deal with it, the world needs you. Summarizing them here will make me an advocate.
This is wrong for a couple of reasons:
1. We already know how to deal with nuclear waste: [deep geological repository][0].
2. Moreover, we can continue to safely manage nuclear waste above ground for a very long time. Far longer than we can continue fossil fuel pollution. And this worst-case solution is still far, far, far safer than fossil fuels.
If skeptics aren't convinced, I don't think their skepticism is founded in reason.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository
In terms of the waste, right now nuclear waste can be recycled (as it is in France) 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:
"...What is more important today is why fast reactors are fuel-efficient: because fast neutrons can fission or "burn out" all the transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides) many of which last tens of thousands of years or longer and make conventional nuclear waste disposal so problematic. Most of the radioactive fission products (FPs) the reactor produces have much shorter half-lives: they are intensely radioactive in the short term but decay quickly. The IFR extracts and recycles 99.9% of the uranium and Transuranium elements on each cycle and uses them to produce power; so its waste is just the fission products; in 300 years their radioactivity will fall below that of the original uranium "
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 some people have about nuclear waste is greatly overblown to say the least. The amount of waste is very manageable (the Netherlands actually stores their waste in an art museum!) and in a relatively short amount of time we will likely be able to use most of this "waste" to generate electricity.
(To help put it in perspective, do some web searches about the problems with coal waste - it will be a much harder problem to solve than nuclear waste. The problems with coal waste aren't discussed much since people focus on the air pollution from burning coal as it directly kills so many people.)