Quite simply, humanity is too good at screwing things up to harness such a fundamentally powerful and dangerous source of power. It requires a commitment to long lasting peace and stability that we're just not capable of.
> we’re not capable of
I don’t think so, either. This sentiment tends to be met by the techno-futurists on this site with swift downvotes, though, so is not a popular one to espouse here. Nevertheless I believe it to be true based on the evidence at hand: humanity is too short-sighted to prevent its own doom.
I believe nuclear power is essential to the survival of humanity. I also think you are likely correct: humanity cannot be trusted with nuclear power. If true, this is yet another data point against our survival.
Regarding survivability of humanity I have similar fear but my current hope is that while weapons will continue to be more attainable their relevance might diminish. Why fight your neighbor if you have everything you need? But warlords create a problem of their own because they seem to exist to attain superiority for its own sake.
One word serves to explain why what you imagine won’t happen in time: profit. More specifically: oil profits.
If we can make energy storage simple and cheap enough
The materials needed to make those batteries are finite. They will become "the new oil" in N years.
Energy storage is going to be a big part of any sane energy future, but it's going to have to make heavy usage of non-battery means: giant flywheels? Pumping water? I don't know.
But energy can be stored by pumping heated water to deep wells in the bedrock for example or you can use excess power to generate hydrogen and feed it back to the grid via fuel cells when needed. All of this is doable, but also slow to build and currently expensive.
This is not an argument against recycling batteries, by the way. Chemical batteries are a big part of the future, and we should recycle them. But let's not be glib about any of these choices.
The existential problem with oil is climate change, not finite resources.
Clearly this line of logic is not working, seen in Ukraine. At some point there is a person with enough power who wants to fight just because they can. Essentially humanity is at mercy of random power-hungry sociopaths to not bomb the nuclear power plants.
It can't be a very large percentage.
I would like to be wrong.
Global warming is a threat that will have tons of negative impact. But is it really "civilization-ending"?
There are the typical threats (which assume society remains more or less stable) such as ecosystem collapse leading to food shortages etc.
Then the non-typical threats. It is hard to predict what an unstable society will do, and some of those choices could be civilization ending.
We've built an extremely fragile massively interdependent system. It is conceivable that the US power grid could go down, and due to supply chain issues could not be restored in < 5 years. Unlikely, yes, impossible, hardly.
Is that enough to end civilization? How would we distribute food, assuming we have it?
Plenty of cases of lost civilizations in America, Asia and Africa linked with desertification and climate going unstable
Global warming is not a civilization-ending threat. Even nuclear war is not a civilization-ending threat, outside a few places in the Northern hemisphere. I could be wrong about both of these claims. But you could be as well, and you're taking an extremely pessimistic view based on what you know, which is not the whole picture.
The worst case scenario of global worming would not kill everybody. People living north of 40o will survive.
Then Saddam lit thousands of oil wells on fire as a big fuck-you to the miltary coalition arrayed against him, more oil than would be set on fire by any nuclear war. The cooling effect was detectable, but hardly serious.
We also know that it causes an extinction event, since it was one of the effects of the K-t extinction event 60 million years ago. It is the one that killed the dinosaurs, and many more: A huge number of species, including almost any large land animals, dies. It is unlikely that homo sapiens would survive this time.
That gave me pause for thought that our governments and institutions just might be up to the task of running something like nuclear. If you understand the physics and engineering, then nuclear done right is a no brainer. I have less faith in us doing it right that I did in the past.
Add to that the huge capital costs, and the trendlines in renewables + storage capital costs... it's hard to be enthusiastic about anything nuclear that doesn't fundamentally change the economics. And so far every attempt at that (eg SMR) has failed rather definitively.
Progress, for the most part, can’t be given.
It is hopeful that Ukraine is having some real success fighting back and for the most part without an external force coming in and trying to do it for them.
As if it were so easy!
And why not criminals while we’re at it?
Sounds like utopia.
The desire for power might be baked into humanity at a deep level.
I think we confuse the direction of causality a bit here. People in power tends to be those that want power. To get a powerful person you only really need one person who wants power. I think it's a false conclusion to think that people in general seek power.
I don’t know how many people would be able to resist the One Ring if it was within their reach.
Currently, it is disguised as politics and capitalism.
Nothing to it - piece of cake. Forget about millennia of human history.
It is, but the reckoning for me is how a single dictator among billions could make so much harm. So it is not enough that humanity is 99.9999% fine. We need fail-safes for things going terribly wrong, and in this particular scenario, having an autonomous colony outside of Earth or underground on Earth could be one such.
Is that all? We can get that done with a new app I think.
Additionally there is the whole thing about the dangers of an accident and the cost for insurance against it. The cost of building and maintaining a somewhat secure reactor and the later cost of dismantling it and storing the additional waste.
Nearly all these costs for externalities were not factored into the price of energy. Calculating in all these costs mskes renewable energy look more than interesting. And also makes the question of storing excessive energy an interesting case. But governments/lobbies argue for cheap (read subsidized) nuclear, while not factoring the same subsidiaries into energy storage for renewables.
Investing into the future with a broad renewable energy and storage infrastructure program could ensure not only less dependency on Russia (for oil or gas) but also have a positive impact on the topic of climate change.
On the other hand. The German/European dependency on Russian gas and Russias dependency on the money from the sale of said gas was done to reduce the risk of war. The idea being that both sides could loose too much in the case of war and that would act as a deterrent. Even during the height of the Cold War Russian gas flowed towards the western world (aka Europe/Germany).
Additionally there is the whole thing about the
dangers of an accident
- As a species, we've been running hundreds of nuclear reactors (440 currently) for a while now.
- Their cumulative track record is (very roughly) "one Chernobyl every 25 years."
- The cost of a Chernobyl-scale incident is that it renders a region uninhabitable and kills several hundred people.
- With plants getting safer and safer, we might reasonably expect the risk to be more like "one Chernobyl every 50 or 100 years" for modern plants.
- Waste storage is obviously a challenge. The US has apparently produced enough nuclear waste "to cover a football field about seven yards deep." (64,000 metric tons)
That is steep but manageable.
Relative to fossil fuels, this is less-bad by orders of magnitude. It is regrettable (to put it laughably mildly) that the Fukushima and Chernobyl regions are no longer inhabitable, but fossil fuels have pushed us to the point where everything near the equator is going to be uninhabitable soon.
As for the waste issue, again, compare it to the alternatives. 64,000 cumulative tons of nuclear waste in America's history versus 6,500,000,000 tons of CO2 emissions last year. Obviously a ton of nuclear waste is not directly comparable to a ton of CO2 emission, but at least nuclear waste can be collected and sequestered. It is a local problem, not one that irrevocably poisons the entire planet.
Yeah, green energy sources are better than nuclear, for sure, and maybe fusion will save our butts eventually. But we need energy in the meantime. We should use the least-bad thing until we get something great, and nuclear is the least-bad option by such a ridiculous margin that it's not even funny.
> The cost of a Chernobyl-scale incident is that it renders a region uninhabitable and kills several hundred people.
There are quite a few interesting numbers regarding Chernobyl:
31 deaths, for example, is an official figure. But the credits for the TV series also state that estimates of deaths would vary between 4,000 and 93,000 victims.
A bit more about the numbers and some additional estimations:
The environmental organization Greenpeace estimates the total number of dead as a result of the Chernobyl accident at 93,000.
Kate Brown, a professor at MIT, considers up to 150,000 deaths realistic for Ukraine alone.
The International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) says Chernobyl caused 50,000 to 100,000 deaths and up to 900,000 disabled.
34,499 rescue workers died, according to the Ukrainian Commission for Radiation Protection. However this figure is considered to be wrong because there is usually no such precise information on this scale. So the number just seems to be doctored to look more precise than is possible at estimations like these.
So now we can pick and choose to support our ideology. I don't pick and chose, but state that there are quite a few nuclear reactors that sit in areas way more densely populated with massively more inhabitants in the zone of imminent danger.
So any extrapolation from Chernobyl numbers (whichever one selects) would need to factor this into their argument imho.
Edit: One question ==>
> Waste storage is obviously a challenge. The US has apparently produced enough nuclear waste "to cover a football field about seven yards deep." (64,000 metric tons)
Does this number include the parts of the reactor buildings being contaminated?
>
For a 1.3MW reactor block the amount of highly contaminated material will probably be in the range of 3000 to 5000 metric tons.
For the US with around 96 active reactors (2020) this would imply something (back of a napkin calculation) 280,000 to 470,000 metric tons of additional waste on top of burned nuclear fuel. Depending on the peculiarities of the reactors and so on. I know there are error margins.
Highly contaminated material that needs to be secured for thousands of years.
This is a multi generational cost factor for our generations convenience. For the ability to burn electricity like there is no tomorrow.
Today the lower half (poorer half) of US population is living a live that would enable the US to reach Paris Climate goals. The same applies roughly to most western/northern countries.
People like me in the upper income half are the culprits so to speak (statistically speaking).
I am curious, though, to how many people die due to the normal, continued operation of coal plants (both from mining and from the plant's actual operation). Is that something we can quantify with a reasonable degree of accuracy (like to a rough order of magnitude)?
Because even if we have a Chernobyl every 25 years that kills 150k people and gives another million some sort of disability, we have to acknowledge that operating coal plants -- as a "normal" part of their operation -- kills people too. I don't know if they are better or worse than the "amortized" 6k/year killed by nuclear in our estimate here. But it's certainly not zero.
And beyond that, burning fossil fuels destroys ecosystems, causes extinction of various animal species, and, if we do not arrest the affects of climate change, will kill millions of people due to its various effects. (Arguably, this has already killed lots of people during extreme weather events linked to climate change.) Maybe 150k people dead every 25 years in a nuclear disaster is, unfortunately, a "bargain" in comparison.
If we could scale up renewables at the same rate we could scale up nuclear, then it'd be a no-brainer: choose the former. But it's not clear that we can meet our energy needs with renewables today, even if there was a giant, global push to go fully renewable on a short time scale. Maybe it's better to risk nuclear power incidents in the medium term than continue to vomit fossil fuel byproducts into the atmosphere. But of course the general public will never make this kind of decision rationally; ultimately most of these are political decisions.
It would be catastrophic but much more localized. Fallout from Chernobyl went around the world several times, poisoning most of the humans alive or being made at the time (not to mention the rest of the biomass)
The dam breaks killed and hurt magnitudes more people.
> Not at a dangerous level, say more than eating a banana.
Born 1986 in Germany and I got a rare metabolism illness that only ~2000 more people have, all born around June/July/August in 1986 in Western and Middle Europe with some exceptions distributed around as late as born in September and October. But the Spring of 1986 was probably just a famous year for pregnant women eating exceptionally many bananas I guess?
At least I agree that dams killed more people than that specific event. But wait till you see the numbers for fossil fuels ...
Fossil fuels, and especially coal, have worse impact in total but they are typically more diffuse. So I left them out of the discussion.
Are people able to move back into the Chernobyl fallout zone in the next few thousand years? No.
[1] See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di....
[2] The model assumes that any amount of radiation is harmful and estimates the harm of low doses as a corresponding fraction of the harm of large doses. Empirical evidence is unclear, at best, but it functions as worst-case estimate.
> In 2009, the New York Academy of Sciences published a book Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment. A team of European scientists led by Dr. Alexey Yablokov, former environmental advisor to Russian Presidents Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev, assembled over 5,000 research studies, most written in Russian and not previously published.
> The results were staggering. Yablokov’s team estimated that just in the first 20 years after the Chernobyl meltdown, some 986,000 deaths attributable to it occurred, many in parts of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. The percent of children living in these areas considered in good health plunged from 80% to 20%. Rates of certain cancers soared, including childhood thyroid cancer in Ukraine (20 times higher) and Belarus (200 times higher). Rates of disease in covering many organs in the body all increased in areas closest to Chernobyl.
> Yablokov’s team indicated that the number of casualties would continue to grow, well after publication of the book.
However, its methodology and rigour have been criticised [3]. As I am not an expert in this area I cannot evaluate the source directly, but several general heuristics apply. The source is a single book. (I am aware that the book claims to rely on numerous non-english sources, but I do not believe that they make the same claims.) The book relies on observational epidemiological data, which is generally hard to get right, and dose-response curves seem to be not analysed (seeing a relationship between doses and effect sizes is a good way to exclude spurious correlations). Finally, since the article mentions Yablokov's prior occupation I will also note that he founded and lead the Soviet chapter of Greenpeace, an organisation with a strong anti-nuclear position.
So I do not think that this is strong evidence. (But as I said earlier, I do currently consider it weak evidence.) In any case, the book claims one million deaths, not multiple millions, and only a fraction of those is attributed to thyroid cancer.
[1] https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/03/02/russian-takeover-of-...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20110419144513/http://www.strahl...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...
> The IAEA/WHO have often sought to justify their dismissal of eastern European epidemiological studies by citing questionable scientific practices: but epidemiology is not an exact science, and the same shortcomings exist in western studies uncriticised by the IAEA. The IAEA also point to shortcomings with pre-Chernobyl Soviet cancer registries, but cancer registries in western countries had similar issues at that time.
Indeed, where is the criticism for the IEAE and WHO applying a very selective "conservativism" about epidemiological research, much like big tobacco and DuPont? They're the reason nuke fanboys make risible claims like "< 100 people died because of Chernobyl" and don't get laughed out of the room.
Pointing out that the author was affiliated with Greenpeace without noting the systemic bias of nuclear organizations against epidimiological data is questionable.
If the same thing happens to a nuclear power plant the area can't be lived in for millions of years.
Some people have been squatting in the Chernobyl exclusion zone for decades now, and are still alive. See eg https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/04/17/chernob...
I wouldn't want to live there myself, and cancer levels might be slightly higher than normal.
I'm not sure if there is a higher level of cancer. But I grant you that we can assume that.
It's not pretty, but it's also not something that prevents people from living. Remember when everyone used to voluntarily increase their risk of lung cancer by crazy amounts? Back when everyone smoked? Civilization still persisted.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Exclusion_z...
The risk of nuclear fallout is still relatively "localised", however that risk is dwarfed by the cost of disrupting centralised power production. A few nuclear plants are easy targets in the event of a war.
Distributed solar and concentrated solar w/molten salt seem like good options.
However, abandoned oil refineries and other chemical plants are also toxic nasty messes for potentially hundreds of years, too.
A few peoples actually go to the borders or the stations to help the refugees arriving. Do that. At least you leave an impact.
We'd actually have some accidents sometimes. Either we'll get good at handling it, or we will give up on nuclear. Better than pooling all the risk, lowering the probability, but keeping the same expected destruction. With the centralized approach it's too easy to act like there's zero risk.
If Putin wants radiation everywhere, he has thousands of nuclear warheads which can do that.
The day people start bombing nuclear power plants we'll be deep in ww3 already and we'd be fuck regardless
Even if the worst happen at that nuclear power plant, it will still be a small disaster compared to all the causalities that already have happened in Ukraine the last few weeks (you know: the war)
Maybe I'm missing something regarding this specific reactor but how is a war that will eventually (hopefully) be over worse than a nuclear fallout that would make large areas unlivable for thousands of years and affect multiple countries and also killing a lot of people.
I think you are over-estimating the cost of this. I contest the use of 'large'. The 30km radius exclusion zone is nothing compared to the surface occupied by deserts, ice floe, or whatever of the many others existing unhinabitable places.
> and affect multiple countries and also killing a lot of people.
Because the war has been doing that already, at a even larger scale: thousands of civilians killed, many wounded, millions displaced. That's already worse than the consequences of a nuclear meltdown.
Usually nuclear power plants are located close to cities and populated areas and not in the middle of the desert or uninhabited ice fields.
> That's already worse than the consequences of a nuclear meltdown.
In the short term yes, but on a time scale that's longer than a few years I think you'll quickly realize that a meltdown is worse. Will the same war go on in 50 years? Probably not, but the radiation will be...for thousands of years.
Russian invasion blocked wheat traffic from Ukraine, so it caused spike in prices for wheat. Just imagine prices for food when Ukraine will be poisoned permanently or occupied by RF, which may perform genocide of Ukrainians second time in less than 100 years. Wastelands are good for wildlife only, because humans are major danger to them.
Land location isn't fungible, though. That 30km radius exclusion zone is (was?) much more valuable land than some random patch of desert or ice. Being near other settled land, and having access to infrastructure, food, etc. is important. Taking valuable land like that and making it uninhabitable is much worse than it just being a random patch of sand in the middle of some desert somewhere, or a big piece of ice floating in an arctic region.
But most of the harm at Chernobyl was from the explosion. There is nothing in a molten salt reactor that makes them any safer than Chernobyl if the reactor containment is breached.
Massive amounts of highly radioactive particles will be ejected into the atmosphere in exactly the same way as happened at Chernobyl.
Molten salt advocates will say "yes, but what could possibly breach the reactor if there is no meltdown". Well we almost saw the answer to that today.
Do they somehow stop the risk of artillery? Because to be absolutely clear: that's what the risk here was.
https://theconversation.com/nuclear-power-why-molten-salt-re...