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A passively safe reactor was demonstrated 36 years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Breeder_Reactor_I...

Most reactors today are older or based on older designs, but this is largely for regulatory reasons, not because we don’t have the technology.

(And even these older reactors are among our safest energy sources: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy)

Maybe if they’ve been maturing that experimental design for 36 years then you’d have a point, but they haven’t so you don’t.

And I'd blame anti-nuclear folks for keeping nuclear less safe than it could be, even though it's already one of the least dangerous energy sources in existence

It’s the government not putting money into R&D across the board.

Oh and it’s ridiculously dangerous to the point everything around it must be super protected and over engineered.

Coal power kills a million people every year. Go check how many die from nuclear then x15 that as a thought experiment and then tell me which technology is dangerous and half baked

Are you comparing deaths so far or total lifetime mortality of the effluent from both processes?

I guess people don’t like abandoning entire cities for decades when an accident happens.

Poisoning the entire planets food chain with mercury on the other hand…

Better to evacuate a city than kill a city--and that's what coal does. It's just the deaths are spread out and not attributed to coal.

Besides, Fukushima shouldn't have been evacuated.

> hasn’t had any real advancement since the Cold War ended.

That's just plain ignorance.

> Case in point most reactors today are not failsafe

Most reactors in use today sure, but we've already established that we haven't been building new reactors for a while now. Any new reactor built today would be failsafe.

The ‘new’ reactors are barely more advanced than the old ones and even more complicated.

Nuclear is pretty high end technology, it needs real investment to move forward. The government has shown little interest. Few reactors are built, what we have is aging, the number of people doing R&D is next to nothing.

I disagree, there seems to be a fair amount of R&D happening around small modular reactors, this is likely the future of Nuclear.

Small, self contained, fail safe, sealed reactors that can be build centrally on an assembly line and shipped to destination.

I've seen several different announcements over the last few years of different SMR type reactors.

They have been talking about that for 30 years. It could be done in a very short period of time if real R&D was put into it. Look at submarine nuclear reactors for example.

They have them, they exist but the regulatory frameworks to build and deploy any nuclear technology is horrendously slow.

But they are being built.

https://www.power-technology.com/features/where-will-the-fir...

Look at this project in Canada

https://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/reactors/research-reactors/o...

The application was submitted almost 3 years ago and we're barely halfway through the approval process.

So sure rollout has been mega slow but that doesn't mean the technology has not advanced it 30 years. Only that our deployment of it has been slow.

> technology is still extremely complicated and dangerous

That's a common fallacy.

If you look at mortality rate by terawatt-hour for each energy source, nuclear is going to be orders of magnitude below coal/gas/oil.

Same thing with planes: people are afraid to fly them, but driving the same distance by car is way more dangerous.

Precautionary Principle doesn't work that way. Also you're assigning a terawatt value for a human life. We do that anyway often enough, but when you do it consciously it's ghoulish.

If you're willing to look at it from a different lens, I'm actually increasing value of a human life that has already been assigned naturally.

Ignoring the tradeoff doesn't make it go away, and if you don't consciously put a value on a human life, you'll probably wind up far from the Pareto frontier. In this case, for instance, thinking in terms of deaths-per-TWh is exactly what you want in order to fulfill our energy needs with as few people dying as possible. If a little "ghoulishness" saves lives, then I'll happily be a ghoul.

Like, how else should we talk about the topic in any other objective way? Sure, the death of any person is said and tragic. But true zero and true one probability simply doesn’t exist in reality. And we require energy, otherwise hospitals could not operate killing much much more people. So simply by that logic, one can minimize the amount of human suffering by nuclear.

And it is a fact, that non-nuclear, non-renewable energy sources kill a shitton of more people per unit energy, release orders of magnitude more radiation, let alone other carcinogenic gases.

Humanity isn't a process of talking about things in an objective way. You're talking about people as if they are numbers.

> And it is a fact, that non-nuclear, non-renewable energy sources kill a shitton of more people per unit energy

I once heard the circus of Congressional, reactionary policies described as thus:

"Something has to be done. This is something, so we will do it."

Yes, that's all perfectly true, and something absolutely has to be done. Many things actually. We're making good progress on a number of them. And turning off coal fired plants at a steady clip. It matters what you replace it with.

One of the things missing here is that when humans are involved, choices and the illusion of choice apply a multiplier on the risks. People volunteer for risks all the time, and they are happy to do so. Which is effectively what this is saying:

> Same thing with planes: people are afraid to fly them, but driving the same distance by car is way more dangerous.

If we only cared about traffic numbers we'd ban automobiles and force everyone to take public transit and airplanes to go anywhere. We'd save more people than we would by replacing coal with nuclear, and banning the cars would also reduce death by pollution by something like 10%.

Do you count deaths caused by mining rare minerals which is needed for the production of renewables?

Re your car example: And that’s why everything should be talked about in context. Cars are essential for our modern lives and it would be close to impossible the negative impact of its disappearance. And the relevant such context for energetics is the deaths per unit energy.

The point of the "Nuclear waste" is that it is perceived as dangerous. If someone gives a numerical argument to rebate a perception and your comeback is that "using numbers like that is ghoulish", then I know who is winning the argument.

We know who’s already won that argument, yes, but we also spend a lot of time here talking about the dystopian mess created by reducing everything to a number. This is the same exact situation.

I didn’t make an accusation to win the argument. I made the accusation to make the accusation.

Some risk and complexity is just intrinsic. Flying is risky because of hitting the ground. Nuclear power is risky because of the nature of radioactive material. Mitigating those risks add complexity and cost.

You need more redundancy, higher quality materials, better QA, more pro-active maintenance, more security, etc. And many of your staff will need to be very highly trained and expensive. This all adds up in terms of expense and timescales. Flying may be cheaper but we all still drive!

We still tolerate much less flying risk than driving risk -- driving makes much more deaths than flying, and coal makes for worse health than nuclear, but we hold flying and nuclear to higher standards than driving and coal

> We still tolerate much less flying risk than driving risk -- driving makes much more deaths than flying, and coal makes for worse health than nuclear, but we hold flying and nuclear to higher standards than driving and coal

Driving has more deaths than flying because we hold flying to higher standards than driving. If both were held to the same standard, there would be more deaths flying. That's because flying is inherently less forgiving: the energy involved is higher (both kinetic and potential energy), and you cannot "just stop" like a land vehicle can.

The same applies to nuclear: if we built nuclear power plants the same way we build coal power plants, the health consequences would be worse than coal.

But we should be holding driving and coal to a higher standard. And many people are trying to do exactly that.

I think an interesting part of this question is consent. People have a reasonable understanding of the road and are implicitly consenting to that risk. And as a society we make a conscious choice to balance safety and convenience. But that is just not true with flying, nuclear or even coal power. People don't understand and they absolutely don't consent to the risk. As professionals and scientists that does change things. As a hypothetical example imagine a lab testing the cold virus. It needs expensive safety equipment and an ethics review board. A scientist who just has a cold just needs a box of tissues. It is ethically different.

I think a problem we have is that some historical things have managed to escape the ethics review board because people are used to them. Cars cause cancer and yet people are presumed to consent to that. A solar farm with no real impact has to spend years getting consent. It is unbalanced.

Maybe the biggets problem with nuclear is that it is mostly driven by careful responsible professional people. In renewables society can cut corners (relative to nuclear) and get away with it because risk is just so much lower.

Nuclear power is not half-baked, it's corrupted. The powers that be co-opted it for nuclear weapons programs. We chose to invest exclusively in war-time applications while pretending to seek peacetime uses.

Only now are we going back and looking at solutions that don't create ingredients for fission and fission-fusion warheads, and the lack of progress there means that countries who we don't want to join the nuclear arm's race are in a prickly position because the nuclear plants they can build leave them with ingredients the UN doesn't really want to proliferate.

You could argue if it weren’t war we wouldn’t have nuclear power or have landed in the moon, and many other things. There are many technologies out there completely obtainable, but without the investment of billions it won’t happen.

Commercialization is the commoditization of an established technology. Many technological leaps are far beyond what any company is capable due to the amount of investment and risk required.

Biotech for example is so far behind compared to our advancements in computers.

Plenty of countries without nuclear weapons have extensive nuclear power industries: Belgium, Slovakia, Sweden, Korea.

Sweden had a nuclear weapons program, it was moth balled in the seventies but only tore it down just now.

Co-opted?

This is a weird history of nuclear fission.

The Manhattan project developed nuclear fission to make bombs

The weapons programs were extended to generate power

I didn't understand how true this was until someone in the pebble reactor camp pointed out that these ideas were already known before the Manhattan project, and that there was a moment where the direction of investment was still up in the air and the war hawks won. I figured that was something someone discovered in the 80's and took a while to popularize. Nope.