Fossil fuels. No question. We know the dangers of both very well. Only a handful of people have died from nuclear. More people die each day from climate.
I accept that statement only when it's followed by ' so far as you know.'
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[https://www.nytimes.com/1994/08/25/us/us-nuclear-accident-in...]
* Yeah, the number of deaths from radiation poisoning is very low, so we can be reckless.
So, let look at nuclear risks:
* potential damage area is extremely high. If a state sponsored actor will take control over a nuclear station or nuclear waste store, he can blast it and disperse over half of a continent. Unlike nuclear weapon, it will be very dirty, so it's better not to do at same continent, but an Asian or African country can do that in the USA.
* potential loses are very high, up to billions of people, if major part of the continent will be contaminated. Nobody can provide insurance for such event.
If we increase the number of nuclear stations by 10x, risks will increase by 10x or more, because it's easier to guard a few stations than a dozen or a hundred stations.
To keep risks low, safety of stations must be improved by the same number, otherwise, by increasing the number of stations by 10x we will have a Chornobyl/Fukushima level event every 3-5 years.
Do you see a way to improve safety of nuclear stations and waste storage by 10x, while keeping construction cost and construction time in acceptable range?
Lets rephrase because the argument you're trying to make is good, just exaggerated and incomplete.
Nuclear has a small chance of something going bad but when it goes wrong it's big and localized. We'll bound the cost as a bit higher than Fukushima (which includes a tsunami) with $200bn. But if we look at the median cost of accidents is well under 10bn and covered by the insurance. You're right that there's also a chance of a state sponsored attack. Though note that reactor domes are designed to withstand airplane strikes. Most state sponsored attacks on nuclear facilities haven't led to disasters and fallout.
On the other hand, nuclear has provided us clean energy for over half a century. Still accounts for over 50% of the US's clean energy and provides and good constant base load.
Coal and gas have a moderate chance of things going wrong. Costs often being in the range of several billion dollars to several tens of billions, a handful being a few hundred. But the big cost is the slow release of carbon into the atmosphere which has led to the largest catastrophe in human history and has an estimated cost of $4 trillion per year.
The benefits are that these energy sources are cheap and can easily be throttled matching demand.
Renewables have a high chance of danger but it is very low in damage (high rate of people falling off roofs and dying). Sometimes there's a high risk but rare (see dams breaking and specifically Banqiao). The other issues are that we don't have a way to provide constant load, there's not enough batteries, low production rates, and some unsolved problems that mean they don't work everywhere and thus require gas or coal to fill in.
The upside is that they are relatively cheap and produce no emissions.
This is the calculous that the scientific community is doing. It's not simple and requires a lot of experts working in different areas working together. The scientific community is asking for nuclear + renewables (not nuclear vs renewables). Preference renewables but when you can't, nuclear is infinitely better than gas or coal. There's some that argue we don't need nuclear but their estimated costs are far higher than renewables with a sprinkling of nuclear. This is a more nuanced debate that I encourage others to read on but take your emotions out of it. The calculous extremely convoluted. Please listen to the scientist. Trust but verify does mean to first trust.
I don't need to invent or exaggerate arguments, because I can point to problems we already have:
* Chornobyl disaster tanked economy of Ukraine for decades. Ukraine still paying for it. Life-time profits from nuclear energy cannot cover loses from just one disaster. Huge thanks for international help.
* Radiation level in my hometown was higher than in many parts of Chornobyl safety zone, because few hot particles are landed near to town and caused micro red-forest (so they are easy to spot). My parents were not able to move, because the price of land and property sank to the bottom ($600 for a 4-bedroom house). I moved to clean city. As a student, I measured the radiation level and found that my lungs were the most radioactive item in the classroom. It was not funny.
* Long term effects of nuclear poisoning. I watched it effect on my younger brother. People are forgetting about the danger of radiation now, so they're stopping taking iodine pills or iodine salt, and cancer level are rising and rising. For example, a whole school was sick in Northern Ukraine about a decade ago just because the school administration replaced iodine salt with regular salt to pocket the difference.
* Long therm safety of nuclear stations, reciprocal stations, waste sites. How to make them prone to diversion from a state sponsored (RF) agent. How to protect Chornobyl zone: lots of radioactive materials are stolen already. It's not possible to maintain long term full time ground patrol in a zone with dangerous levels of radiation.
* Safety subsystem can automatically shutdown a nuclear station when base level drops below threshold.
* Nuclear stations are competing with cities for fresh water because of drough: Rivne and Khmelnytsk stations from 2015, South-Ukrainian station from 2020. How to solve the problem with water?
I'm tired with nonsense about telegraph failure at Banqiao dam, or mixing of flood protection with hydro power generation, or house maintenance with solar power generation, to make nuclear power look safer in comparison.
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There's nothing to debate here except what we fear more. But our lack of fear over climate change is how we got here. Because the killer is slow moving and (mostly) invisible.
That's a bold assertion. Would you care to back it up?
Nuclear does not produce carbon. It's one of the safest forms of energy we have. There's a reason France has one of the lowest emission rates in the world. Killing nuclear in the 80's and 90's is clearly one of the worst mistakes we've ever made. The mistake we're making now is pitting nuclear against renewables. There's a large scientific consensus that we should _complement_ renewables with nuclear. Use renewables where we can but it is a far better option than gas. That's the choice we are currently making.
Let's not make the same mistake twice, there's a lot more on the line this time.
At least if one ignores the hundreds of thousands of people who were directly killed by nuclear weapons.
While the sun and hurricanes are natural phenomena that we don't really have much influence over nor were they designed for the specific purpose of giving skin cancer or killing people.
And from solar panels! There are a dozen deaths a year, worldwide, from installing them on roofs, which mean solar is more deadly than nuclear ;)
When we phase out coal, say in 20 years, the next acceptable number will be much lower. We need about 20 years to build nuclear stations, so we should orient at this new number, isn't?
When a next nuclear disaster happen, public will reverse it opinion again, so nuclear projects will be frozen and nuclear stations will be decommissioned, like it happened before. Do you have a Plan B for this case?
If a next nuclear disaster will cover a much larger area (due to evil intent), say half of a continent, how much cancer percentage will rise when people will not be able to escape to clean land, clean food, clean water?
Yes, I was being facetious, obviously 1 million / year is not a good goal. But considering that the total amount of radiation related deaths has not even reached 1 million total since the first bomb in 1945, it is unlikely any such number will be approached soon.
> When a next nuclear disaster happen, public will reverse it opinion again, so nuclear projects will be frozen and nuclear stations will be decommissioned
This has never happened for oil rig disasters that have released millions of gallons of toxic crude oil into the ocean causing untold damage to the global ecosystem. If we go all in on nuclear we're not turning around.
> Do you have a Plan B for this case?
Mars? The Plan B is just to not use as much electricity or convert a sizable portion of land to solar and wind farms. The public will not tolerate either option.
See my other comment comparing the size of nuclear plants to solar farms: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29765656
TL;DR the world's largest solar park can hold 459 Fukushima plants, which would generate over 13.5% of the world's energy supply as opposed to the 2.7GW the solar panels are currently generating which is 0.016% of the world's energy supply.
> If a next nuclear disaster will cover a much larger area (due to evil intent), say half of a continent
A terrorist attack on a nuclear power plant could not cause an explosion like Chernobyl because the emergency shutdown procedure would safely end the fission reaction as opposed to Chernobyl's mechanism which accidentally accelerated it. The worst that could happen is something like Fukushima where the core melts down due to a LOCA (loss of coolant accident). Three cores melted down that day and 12 years later there has only been a single recorded radiation death.
> how much cancer percentage will rise
20 years from now we will also have more advanced and successful methods of treating cancer - keep in mind that modern chemo vs. 1980's chemo is worlds apart and certainly contributed to the public fear as cancer was still mostly a death sentence. Now many types of cancer have been cured and the likelihood of survival has risen across the board. This is not an excuse to say that cancer is acceptable, just that it won't be a death sentence for the majority of people even if a nuclear accident did somehow cover an entire continent.
Also, Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant was kept active until 2000! Operators were bused in every day following the accident. You can even go on tours in the city of Pripyat now and the resulting dose is just slightly higher than background radiation. In other words, the situation was resolved within a few years, and that was using 1980's technology. Today with technology such as robots, quadcopter drones, and advanced construction techniques (ie. the New Safe Confinement) it is unlikely that another Chernobyl would last even a few weeks before the core was covered up. It doesn't matter where it happens either; the UN and the developed world would not let an accident like that go unnoticed and unsolved in our connected society.
Well mostly why Chernobyl is different is because their reactor was pressurized, and thus had the ability to explode (and spread core nuclear material over a large area). The only other event that has caused something similar without a pressurized reactor is one of the largest tsunami ever recorded.
But a terrorist attack on a power plant would need to come from the inside of the plant and to cause a disaster similar to either Fukushima or Chernobyl would require a significantly large weapon and fairly close to the reactor or where they store high energy materials (which is still inside the a pool of water).
How much can we «safely» kill by {solar panel roof installations, wind turbines, driving, drinking water, eating, taking showers, insert literally any }. You're creating an unreasonable position that I need to defend and you are not acting in good faith.