The only true fix would be a reactor and fuel design that can't melt down. A walk-away safe design that, even if you intentionally induced the worst disaster, still wouldn't pose a real threat to the public. Then it wouldn't matter if the operator was a cartoon villain determined to destroy the city.
This is the part that people still don't want to hear. They can't accept that their pet concern can be eliminated by approaching the problem differently and breaking their assumptions. They look for new concerns, but educating them doesn't help because when they run out of unaddressed concerns, they just circle back to old concerns that were already addressed. Their concern was never more than an excuse. They just want the answer to fit their preconceived notions.
For nuclear to be accepted, it needs better public messaging, because ultimately people are reacting emotionally rather than thinking critically.
Some of the relevant German organisations discarded dangerous waste at a construction site and then shredded the paperwork. That happened due to organisational traits, nothing to do with nuclear physics, but if my concern is that organisations with those organisational traits shouldn't be doing things with potential catastrophic effects, then you can't just answer with physics. Shredding paperwork is real, and my concern about is a concern to answer, not to ignore. If you ignore it, blame yourself for ignorance, not me for refusing to listen to "new information that addresses my concern".
This is similar to the Challenger space shuttle. NASA had organisational traits that led to powerpoint slides with seven different font sizes, and "the shuttle might burn" was in the smallest font size. The shuttle eventually did, and partly because organisation's culture was one to suppress risks using the smallest of seven font sizes. TEPCO did similar things at Fukushima — there was more emphasis on how to document that all requirements had been fulfilled than on maintenance. Sometimes that led to low costs and discrepancy between documentation and reality.
Fukushima has severity 5 risks, and some people are willing to accept them as long as they think the likelihood is 1. But not you, and that's fine. Me neither, btw.
This is the problem that new technology is trying to address. Eliminate the severity 5 risks.
But a lot of people are resistant to taking stock of what's been eliminated so far and what hasn't. That's the problem with the public discourse. That's the new information that people reject. They only think along the likelihood axis and can't recognize when the severity has been reduced.
Going back to your concern. TEPCO is an operator. They can only affect the likelihood, not the severity. That's why I don't want to debate you about them. I don't want to convince you to accept a severity 5. I want to ask you where you think we are in eliminating the severity 5s.
A great start would be not consistently lying about everything until the lies are indisputably proven and then pretending it never happened every single time about everything for over 70 years.
Demonstrate a walkaway safe pebble bed reactor or similar that doesn't break down constantly or start leaking unsustainable levels of Kr-85. Remediate the hundreds of contaminated mines, spills and processing sites that the buck is being passed on. Stop demanding unlimited indemnity from any accident exceeding a pittance. Actually tell the truth about contamination events and levels entailed in standard practise ahead of time. Allow actually independent third parties rather than industry bodies to confirm claims on site, and estimate costs that are somewhere in the ballpark of reality with no backroom 'service' contracts. Stop pretending you've 'solved' waste by gathering a quarter of the money required and saying "we'll probably bury the SNF somewhere", don't worry about all the low level and intermediate waste. Demonstrate the existence of a viable fuel source or breeding program that isn't walking a tight rope on the edge of prompt criticality. Demonstrate a reprocessing process that doesn't push an entire continent's coastlines to 5% of safe limits whilst producing barely enough fuel to run about 2GW of reactors.
Then it's worth considering as something that isn't just another scam.
Until that point the oligopily of the nuclear industry should be rightly treated as a bunch of craven ghouls who are having a tantrum because they were held to account and didn't get to hoard billions whilst killing millions of people like the coal barons did.
This is an incredibly transparent attempt to frame a conversation in such a way that the only possible avenue of discussion is how long we have to sit on our thumbs and wait for a gen IV nuclear reactor to materialise whilst ignoring the absolute failure of any previous designs to deliver on their promise of cheap, clean, abundant, or safe power.
Your gaslighting is not as subtle as you think it is. Refusing to believe nuclear advocates isn't 'panic' or irrational when the lies have been so consistent for wellover three generations that assuming the opposite of what you say is a much better strategy for coming to correct conclusions than believing you.
It's very laborious explaining that to vehemently anti-nuclear people. Please read my other comment in this thread, because I'm not going to repeat myself.
And you're positioning dealing with this as necessary due to an imagined need that can't be better solved with alternatives.
And instead of acknowledging the industry's unbroken history of gaslighting and lies you are positioning anything other than credulous paying of the scammers to continue doing nothing other than grift as an unfounded panic.
Without specifying which non-existent design you are vaguely gesturing at, the objection cannot be made more concrete. One concern will be 'addressed' with a half lie about one technology, which then isn't allowed to come up when talking about a completely different technology where the half lie doesn't apply.
Gen III+ reactors have many many failure modes that 'can't happen' but require assumptiona and defense in depth princies that are regularly violated. MOX is a complete lie, especially with regard to Pu240 and Pu241 or meaningfully solving fuel shortages. There is nowhere near enough fuel for large scale expansion of them.
Molten salt reactors skate on the edge of prompt criticality and there's no process for cleaning the salt. They also leak constantly.
Sodium cooled Uranium breeders operate on the certainty of emitting more fission products into the ocean (or the Techa river) than fukushima did during reprocessing. Primary coolant leaks are also on fire in addition to being radioactive. They also catch fire constantly and skate on the edge of prompt criticality if used in breeding mode.
Neither has a strategy for dealing with the primary coolant after a plant is done or shuts early other than making the public pay to look after it for 50 years then putting it in a hole. Neither actually helps reduce Pu240 or Pu241 meaningfully. Neither can breed enough fuel to maintin a significant fleet of burner reactors.
HTGRs have yet to manifest and either no-one outside of the boys club will be allowed to make fuel for them or they will produce an order of magnitude more waste. The claims about having '3x' the fuel efficiency are based on 6x as much U235, so they actually run out of fuel twice as fast.
The lies about the rest of the fuel cycle are too numerous to summarize.
Look at this comment thread. You're the only one who's raised points against yourself. You surmised what you thought I would say, and then got mad at me for it. I keep telling you I wouldn't say those things, but you just don't want to hear it. You're arguing with yourself.
Firstly that Fukushima was a severity 5 event rather than a severity 2 event. Even chernobyl and mayak had most of the consequences narrowly avoided by acts of heroism and dumb luck.
Secondly that Gen III+ reactors already eliminate severity 5 events or whatever Gen IV reactor you're imagining will do so once it meets reality in spite of that being the exact same story we were given about Gen II and Gen III.
This can only happen if the physical assumptions about the reactor's normal operational state hold, which can only happen if defense in depth is followed and there is no complacency or corruption and there are no black swan events. This assumption is incompatible with a world in which there isn't constant and strenuous objection and externally imposed accountability to the nuclear industry and sufficient attention to cover all malfeasance in depth. It is only barely compatible with the world we have now.
Thirdly that the severity 2 events with likelyhood of 100% are non-existent, when they have been constant, and the ones that happened 70 years ago are only just having their financial and health consequences felt now.
Then on top of that you're bundling in a bunch of assumptions about upsides that don't exist, and framing any objection based on those as the same allegedly unfounded fear of the same type of failure.
You are the one who is claiming any objection is irrational fear and refusal to accept new information. Refusing to accept any objection that is different is entirely circular.
> Firstly that Fukushima was a severity 5 event rather than a severity 2 event.
What are you angry about this time?
A 5 is any risk we don't want to accept in the future. Unless you're ok with Fukushima and Chernobyl happening again, they're all a 5.
I'm trying to give vocabulary for establishing risk requirements. If you don't want the bad thing to happen, it's a 5. Doesn't matter if it should be a 10. 5 is the threshold of being unacceptable. If it's 5+, then it's just 5.
If the new proposal only changes the likelihood but doesn't reduce the severity, then it doesn't meet the requirement. That's it. It's just a framework to dispassionately discuss risk.
Gen IV technology? Has severity 5 risks. Doesn't meet the requirements. We agree.
Relying on operational controls? Can never be 100% foolproof. Only changes the likelihood anyway. Severity is still a 5. Doesn't meet the requirements. We agree.
We agree, but you're still arguing with me. Why?
If I take this definition of a 5, then reactor design (in the context of current fission concepts) is barely relevant, because the 5s start at the mine site (or in the case of breeders, in the reprocessing facility). Examples are Sellafield, La Hague, Kadapa, Serpent River, Rossing, Kakadu, Mayak and many others. One Fukushima is better than one La Hague. One chernobyl is preferable to a terawatt worth of La Hagues, Kadapas, and Sellafields.
At the other end there are unsustainable Kr-85 and other gaseous emissions during fuel handling for which there is no attempt at containment, fission product laden reprocessing effluent that is barely below safe thresholds for an entire continent's coast whilst only generating a few GW worth of fuel, long lived twice-cycled Pu240 and Pu241 for which there is no attempt at a clean reprocessing process, lost weapons grade plutonium, and (in the context of wantonly using as much energy as we please) waste heat cooking the planet directly.
Other 5s include at one end all small countries being locked into a small handful of fuel suppliers because plutonium separation and enrichment facilities are gatekept, or at the other end unlimited weapons proliferation.
Worth noting is in this context the current renewable industry has plenty of 5s but there are easier to see pathways to eliminating them (and many of them are eliminating themselves simply because highly polluting mines and slaves have a minimum cost marginally higher than abundant materials and full automation).
Some variation on a TRISO-style pellet based pebble bed reactor that somehow used natural uranium at high enough burnup that mining could be kept under control would be the vague shape of addressing as many of the 5s as possible. In this context there is still a near certainty of someone doing a Chevron and quietly dumping a few hundred tonnes of spent fuel somewhere it would begin leaking and be impossible to clean up in a few decades, as well as cumulative low level medium lived radioactive emissions with a similar risk profile (although different mechanisms and harms) to CO2 or methane emissions (ie. Harmless at low levels but terrible in aggregate).
It's difficult to imagine a scenario where the number of 5s in a fission reactor is preferable to the alternatives. You'd need a breeder that could take U238/Th232 and breed/burn all of the Am,Cm,Np,Pu until only fission products were left as well as some way of vitrifying all of the fission products including tritium and noble gases on site with no effluent whilst never having a weapons grade fissile/fertile ratio in any of the weaponisable elements. Even then there would probably be one or two quite nasty long alpha decay chains with at least one medium lived step due to the number of opportunities for transmutation.
Even if that last were solved, it's still inferior to solar for building a civilisation on due to waste heat.
Such a device is also far more scifi than an anuetronic direct conversion He3 fusion reactor which also solves that last to about the same extent solar can (but has a more difficult pathway to being built from abundant materials).
You thought you heard something you didn't like, you panicked really hard, and you refused to receive any new information I tried to give you.
There was no meltdown. I was outlining the history of why your cry bullying wasn't the enlightened rationality you were pretending it was. And why people correctly refuse to trust it for sound meta-reasoning even if they don't understand the technical details.
You've not even attempted to dispense any new information other than asserting anyone who disagrees with you for any reason is doing it for irrational reasons and all of the deal breakers are actually fine if they'd just see what the new tech is (but you also carefully didn't define it so it can't be rebutted other than loosely implying passive meltdown safety sufficed to answer every objection which you've now walked back without acknowledging).
At least the usual reactionaries have the decency required to posit a semi-coherent position.
You accused me of it twice without evidence.
First time, you thought I wanted you to believe people, and that since you didn't, you were panicked. I never said that. You did. The comment I linked explained to another commenter why I don't want them to trust anyone. I replied to you that I don't want you to accept anything that's unacceptable to you. And the panic refers to inability to engage in the conversation.
Second time, you accused me of not acknowledging past lies. But I had already said that the nuclear industry would have to address past bad behavior. And like I said, you shouldn't be trusting people anyway.
You argued with yourself. You gaslit yourself. You cry-bullied yourself. You had a melt down. I told you I wasn't saying those things. You said I was. Repeatedly. That's on you.
And why would you think that I have some super secret new information specifically for you? I don't know you. I don't know what you know or don't know. It was a general comment about how some people would rather throw a tantrum instead of talking like a normal person.
> The only true fix would be a reactor and fuel design that can't melt down. A walk-away safe design that, even if you intentionally induced the worst disaster, still wouldn't pose a real threat to the public. Then it wouldn't matter if the operator was a cartoon villain determined to destroy the city.
> This is the part that people still don't want to hear. They can't accept that their pet concern can be eliminated by approaching the problem differently and breaking their assumptions. They look for new concerns, but educating them doesn't help because when they run out of unaddressed concerns, they just circle back to old concerns that were already addressed. Their concern was never more than an excuse. They just want the answer to fit their preconceived notions.
You've claimed 1) that the only possible objection is risk of plant meltdown 2) that there are credibly deployable technologies where this is categorically impossible and not just an extension of defense in depth 3) that the claimed existence of 2 satisfies any objections to existing reactors and not just potential future ones and 4) that any objection that doesn't fit this framework is the fault of the objector's reasoning faculties.
1 2 and 3 are untrue, and 4 places the blame for reality not agreeing with this on anyone objecting and silences any further discussion. This is textbook gaslighting. You also left just enough ambiguity that you can have a little cry if someone calls you out on it and call them emotional for reading what you meant rather than what you might possibly have meant if we really stretch the principleof charity to breaking point.
> I literally told you that you were wilfully misunderstanding me. You disagreed. That's on you. You gaslit yourself.
I briefly entertained the notion that you had made a good faith misunderstanding and were just an incredibly poor communicator and attempted to engage, but you disproved that resoundingly by refusing to engage in good faith. Now you are attempting yet again to claim any disagreement is a purely irrational response. This is a second attempt.
You've also abandoned the clearly stated claim that walk away safety satisfies all objections and claimed that you agreed all along Gen 4 reactors and their fuel cycles posed unnaceptable risks.
This is a third attempt at gaslighting.
You also keep talking about how you address concerns and educate people, but you've done nothing but insult.
> The gaslighting was referring to the industry's messaging as a whole and you knew this
I guess "your" means "the industry"? I'll go add that to the dictionary right away.
"My" 4 claims are your 4 claims.
For 1, context was Fukushima, which was a partial meltdown. So I gave a matching example about a concern about a meltdown. You extrapolated that yourself to mean that the only risk that exists is meltdown. I don't think that. Should have been easy to clear up early on.
For 2, I guess we should just trust you that there will never be a solution and never talk about it again? Ironic, coming from you. But also, I want to point out how I agree with you here. Most proposals are just defense in depth. People talk in circles when they can't categorize a proposal as defense in depth vs elimination by design.
For 3, I can't see anything I wrote to suggest this. It looks to me like the only evidence you had that I might think that was your misunderstanding of 1 and 2. Either way, I don't think that.
For 4, I don't even know how you got there. But again, I don't think that.
You're still adamantly telling me what I'm thinking. I'm still telling you that I don't think those things. How can I be a poor communicator if you're the one who's deciding what I'm saying?
Look at this from my perspective. You tell me what I said, and then rant about it and accuse me of being a bad person. Every time I try to tell you what I actually think, you say "no, this is what you think, and now I'm going to rant some more and tell you how you're even worse now". The only person who has the power to stop this cycle is you. You have to stop fabricating what I'm thinking.
Again, you're missing the subtle bit in addition to having nothing other than insults to offer.
You understood what I said in a very different way than I meant it. I recognized that early on and told you so repeatedly. You willfully ignored me, and apparently continue to do so.
What can I do to clarify myself? You haven't asked me for clarification. You misconstrue everything I offer up because you view it through the lense of the initial misunderstanding. You ignore me when I explicitly tell you we need clarification. I'm out of ideas. What am I supposed to do?
I already explained I never said that, much less repeated it.
Clearly I'm not really a participant in this conversation. If you want to continue this conversation with yourself, go ask ChatGPT to debate you or something.