Imagine if the United States had gotten 80% of its electricity from nuclear over the past 4 decades.
China might have adopted it instead of coal.
We’d been talking about the danger of climate change in 2150.
China might have adopted it instead of coal.
We’d been talking about the danger of climate change in 2150.
> We’d been talking about the danger of climate change in 2150.
To think that people are afraid of nuclear energy is just crazy, I cannot comprehend how nuclear is perceived dangerous yet fossil fuels are somehow not.
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This is likely built into us through evolution. Natural selection has rewarded quick choices over analyzing and thinking probabilities.
A nuclear plant failure, I'm faced with something I can do nothing about. Coal .. well unless our case of whole-plane-pollution .. you can mitigate.
Same for cars vs planes. In a plane, I delegate my life to stats. Anything happens, I can do nothing about. My car.. I can always use slower, lighter roads, keep larger safety distance. Even if the odds of car crash are higher. (also if I were to drive alone in the midwest, my crash stats would probably be as high as planes.. density is a factor it seems)
When you're in the plane you have zero options. You don't even have a parachute. I just don't get it :)
Do you know what the most fatal portion of the sport of skydiving is? Statistically, the most deaths occur during the drive to or from the airport. Now just think of how safe _commercial_ air travel is.
> A nuclear plant failure, I'm faced with something I can do nothing about.
> Coal .. well unless our case of whole-plane-pollution .. you can mitigate.
And it looks like the US has about 50 nuclear plants, with only 2 more under construction [3], so they're doing better than us, but that's a low bar.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/859266/number-of-coal-po... [2] https://www.canadianenergycentre.ca/commentary-china-is-buil... [3] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=207&t=3
So I think that somewhat excuses their lack of scale for now as they probably want to get operating experience with these technologies before scaling much harder than that.
I can’t get behind this agenda. It’s infuriating to see the west considering itself done. It’s in the name “Developed”, past tense. No need to develop anymore. We’ve thrown in the towel, large swaths of people are against population growth and against progress.
Population growth is largely irrelevant unless you're really facing an extinction path (which we're very far from). The standard of living that can be delivered for people is what matters.
Modestly fewer people with increased standards of living is a very nice outcome for most nations. Some nations are drastically overpopulated in terms of density for their available space and resources (eg India, China). If you're in a more affluent context, having four or more children is not a blessing for most people. Raising two children well is a quite difficult and life-consuming task, even if one parent stays home full-time. It makes perfect sense that affluent populations would choose to reproduce at a lower rate. It's rational.
That said it's certainly disheartening to see the lack of spirit of seeking progress that used to widely exist in the West. It's still there, faintly, diminished.
I suggest further reading: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2021/03/27/t...
That said, overpopulation is also a problem. In a resource rich nation, it is never a problem.
To be fair, what “mosts economists think” tends to have fairly weak empirical support on purely matters that are purely internal to the narrow sense of the economy, and it only gets worse on economic connections to broader social phenomena. (And that's not even counting overtly ideological schools of economics like Austrian economics, where beliefs aren't even in principal empirically grounded.)
OTOH, there's a reasonably strong case to be made that reduced incentive for population growth is an effect of strong social saftey nets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_effects_of_shipp...
You're probably thinking of other emissions. They burn heavy fuel oil, so they emit a lot of sulfur.
The biggest reason nuclear powered shipping isn’t mainstream is because many countries have local policies to prohibit nuclear vessels from docking.
If the major powers coordinated they could force the minor powers into cooperation. If a country like New Zealand refuses to let nuclear ships dock at their local ports, then simply throw them out of the WTO. They’d have no other option but to change their irrational anti-nuclear policies.
About 1/3 of that is dedicated to the movement of hydrocarbons themselves (mostly bulk crude oil, but also natural gas, coal, and refined products).
The total military nuclear fleet is on the order of 500 vessels, and actually accounts for the overwhelming majority of nuclear reactors in operation.
Sea lanes are not distributed evenly over the oceans, but are concentrated along a limited number of high-traffic routes, notably between China, the Straits of Malaca, Gulf of Aden, Suez, and Mediterranian, between western Europe and the Americas, and from the west coast of the US to Japan and China, by way of the Aleutian Islands (great circle route).
Odds of hull losses in coastal waters near fishing grounds and shore habitation are high. Piracy and other activities are another risk.
I'm wondering how the headlines following a decrepit nuclear-powered bulk carrier discovered to be carrying a cargo of poorly-loaded ammonium nitrate, blowing up somewhere in the Medierannian, South China Sea, or Singapore, and dirty-bombing the hell out of a few thousand square kilometres will read.
Until then I'd not want to kill the idea without giving it a chance.
That's the problem with an economy in which there is a circular flow of commodities.
Container shipping is pretty efficient. I found this quote:
> A big ship will emit about 0.4 ounces of carbon dioxide to transport 2 tons of cargo 1 mile. That’s roughly half as much as a train, one-fifth as much as a truck and nearly a fiftieth of what an airplane would emit to accomplish the same task.
For CO2 emissions, container shipping from Shenzhen to Long Beach by ship is about the same as Bloomington, IL to Long Beach by truck.
Chernobyl, the worst recorded nuclear disaster, was directly responsible for 33 deaths and estimates on total attributable deaths due to health complications from radiation range from 4,000 to 60,000 [2].
In 2018, it is estimated that fossil fuel air pollution was responsible for over 8m deaths worldwide. [3]
Mortality rate by tWH isn't even close [4]. Fossil fuels are significantly more damaging both in terms of loss-of-life and habitability on this planet.
1 -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor_accidents_in_t... 2 - https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-cher... 3 - https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/c-change/news/fossil-fuel-air-p... 4 - https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
Around the former site extending 50 km (30 mi) (a bureaucratic rather than scientific determination) is an exclusion zone which must be maintained for 300+ years.
Duration for which the former core and reactor itself will remain lethally radioactive extends to tens of thousands of years.
Both intervals greatly exceed the span of virtually all human institutions, as well as modern languages, writing systems, let alone civilisation itself.
Our measures and senses of risk are very poorly suited to such timeframes. (A problem also in addressing fossil fuel hazards.)
https://www.newsweek.com/chernobyl-safe-now-when-will-141448...
That said, these aren't an issue with renewables.
If you live in Ghana, your perspective might be significantly different. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-29/the-rich-...
We don't have a plan for handling this solar waste in 25 years, which is estimated to be 78M metric tons in 2050. [1]
This doesn't need to be an either-or scenario, but we can't ignore the waste and environmental cost of solar in these discussions.
1 -https://www.wired.com/story/solar-panels-are-starting-to-die...
(All of which gets kinda exposed when there's opposition also to fusion, so many nay sayers, and it won't work this, and it takes 40 years that... also, I swear, if I'm going to see one more "fusion reactor in the sky" tweet from Elon, my head's gonna explode. Dirtbag manipulator.)
Quantities of radiation released by coal plants under normal operations are not a health concern. Coal has plenty of other health, and environmental, concerns.
Quanities of radiation released by a coal plant are unlikely to vary much at all, no matter how critically mismanaged the plant might be.
Quantities of radiation emitted by a badly-mismanaged, sabotaged, or attacked nuclear power plant, on the other hand, become a health concern for people across continents and beyond, as with Chernobyl and Fukushima.
(Note that "concern" need not mean "realised risk", but given that one of the characteristics of nuclear incidents to date has been inaccurate or misleading information on precisely the levels of risk presented, prudence and caution strongly recommends presuming a worst case until otherwise conclusively demonstrated.)