It is almost as if the public discourse is dominated by loud simple minded people who sort themselves into tribes along arbitrary/self-serving lines and fiercely double down in the face of evidence.
I know it's frustrating, but maybe just maybe society isn't so keen on 40 year [1], $500B cleanup jobs [2] and 1000 square mile areas becoming uninhabitable [3], and instead prefers diffuse damage (climate change, air quality, oil wars, etc). I'm not arguing either way, just observing.
HN: before you downvote, please ask yourself if you're hitting the button because this comment is false, or because you don't want it to be true.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=three+mile+island+cleanup
[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=fukushima+cleanup+cost https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/chernobyl.pdf
[3] https://www.google.com/search?q=chernobyl+exclusion+zone
People also stopped developing reactors when Chernobyl happened. Of course, the Chernobyl reactor was already an outdated reactor by the time it failed, but the problem is clearly visible in reactors that have been maintained and kept for prolonged lifetimes bexause of necessity (for medical supplies, for example).
I can imagine a future where renewable energy can serve most of the world's power demand, with nuclear reactors kept as a backup in case of prolonged bad weather draining the batteries/energy stores that keep the excess solar/wind energy.
People also several understate the damage traditional coal plants cause to their direct environment, which funnily enough includes excessive radioactive materials.
Switching away from nuclear because of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima feels similar to banning planes or skyscrapers after 9/11. Disasters happen and leave incredible death tolls, but they're not common in the slightest.
I'd reckon you're far more likely to get sick because of a coal plant leaking coal ash into the air you breathe or the water supply than being nearby enough to a meltdown to be affected.
Gas and oil plants suffer far fewer downsides, but they still incur a cost on the environment that some countries have decided to ignore. They use more fuel but require less cleanup if you don't consider complete carbon capture as a necessary cleanup step.
Some areas can't get nuclear power. I'd consider the entirety of Japan to be a terrible fit for such power plants because most of the country is either in a disaster zone (tsunamis or earthquakes) or has no access to cooling water. With little access to fossil fuel sources and a highly dense population Japan hasn't exactly had many alternatives for many years, so I understand why they went nuclear anyway, but I wouldn't build a new nuclear plant there now that wind and solar are cheap enough that the supplies need to be maintained artificially in some cases.
Areas like Tornado Alley and cities built on top of super vulcanos are also an obviously terrible fit for nuclear power, as are countries plagued by terrorism and corruption, and countries bordering hostile powers with no remorse for the population like Russia and China. However, in a safe country with a decent grid, you can build more safe nuclear reactors than you'll ever need in the places that do qualify.
Nuclear can work and it can work a whole lot better than fossil fuels can, but it's not a magical solution that you can just put down anywhere for cheap power like some advocates seem to claim it does. I believe the current anti-nuclear sentiment is largely fueled by unnecessary fear and the freeze on research and construction will have a self-fulfilling prophecy effect as old reactors won't be replaced with newer, more efficient ones, larger and larger percentages of nuclear reactors will be shut down and cost more and more as nobody is willing to invest in them, and more and more unmaintaind reactors will likely suffer accidents.
AFAICT nuclear doesn't work that way, it's best for giving a constant output for years, rather than being able to be brought up and down.
That land isn't uninhabitable and the vast vast majority of that clean up isn't cost effective on a $/life basis. You could invest that money in healthcare like breast cancer screening and get a much better return once you've done some basic cleanup of the most dangerous spots. But people insist on a clean up to a level almost as good as before rather than being homo economicus...
People hear "radiation" and are afraid, even though tire particulates are much more dangerous than living next to Three Mile Island at the time. The evacuation of towns near Fukishima was a mistake, killing far more people than would have died of radiation (check radiation map of Japan, plug in standard radiation cancer models then compare with deaths caused by the evacuation).
And unlike a nuclear power station, they don't take years to build.
[1] According to Lazard, the total costs of nuclear energy - including value writedowns caused by slow building - make it six to twelve times more expensive than utility scale solar. Wind and geo are even cheaper.
https://www.lazard.com/media/450773/lazards-levelized-cost-o...
1970s reactors and regs were much less sane and didn't value a human life north of a billion dollars like modern ones do.
> You could invest that money in healthcare like breast cancer screening and get a much better return once you've done some basic cleanup of the most dangerous spots.
(Breast) cancer screening doesn't actually work all that well.
Eg the US does a lot more colon cancer screening than the UK, and thus can claim that survival rates for colon cancer are much better in the US. However, if you look at how many people per million die from colon cancer each year, the rates in UK and US are almost the same.
Ie American screening discovers a lot more cancers that never become a problem, but doesn't actually help in aggregate.
But at one point we'd need to start handling the failures and accidents with maturity and not with panicked reactions
I think you’ve counted to one strike against the ability of well-functioning societies to operate nuclear safely—-Fukushima—-because $1 billion is pretty negligible in comparison and Chernobyl was operated by a shambolic totalitarian state.
I'm eating produce from Fukushima here in Singapore.
But in general, lots of specialty produce is sold with more specific region information beyond just the country. Especially the Japanese producers are really keen on that.
(For a related, but famous example, have a look at wine, especially Champagne which has to be from the Champagne wine region of France.)
Yes, the diffuse damage is much higher.
Btw, there's another problem with nuclear: because of politicking and public opinion, it's very expensive and almost impossible to build new nuclear power plants.
Budget and schedule overruns are to be expected.
So capital costs are very high.
It's recycling of plastic where it gets complicated. Some plastic recycling does work, but much does not. That's where the public has generally been mislead the most. The other place is that mant businesses that do home "recycling" service send what is picked up to a landfill or incinerator. This is straight up fraud and should be prosecuted.
But please let's not over simplify a complicatwd issue to the point of lying. Recycling does work and is essential in many cases.
Otherwise, landfills filling up is a non-problem. Earth has enough space.
I personally don't think there are too many issues with clean and reuse and indeed a lot of the shapes are standard and if we forced more standards we could probably reuse plastic 10+ times and vastly decrease our need for new plastic. That would require companies to make a cycle for their packaging however and they are really don't want to and so far no government has thought it might be a good idea to force them to.
Metal recycling really is a bright spot!
This is a nice way of looking at it. Another is those "simple minded voices" are likely being paid by the oil companies to spread the pro recycling and anti nuclear positions.
And like any sort of large-scale consensus, it's dumb ("simple" if you like). Why? Because any sufficiently large group must accommodate below-average humans, and, well, those are below average. So such any large scale consensus cannot be very complicated, and cannot advocate for complex solutions.
For example, I prefer using something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_chaos to use very minimal resources to take control of weather, and the climate, and letting go of emission limits (at least for CO2). It doesn't require everyone to cooperate and will be a heck of a lot cheaper. This in turn protects a lot of mostly poorer people who don't really have that much to do with the problem, while remaining a realistic option. (or more bluntly: it's a realistic option that doesn't ask the poor to live in the cold)
It is exactly this
> If one harbours anywhere in one’s mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts, although in a sense known to be true, are inadmissible.
Recycling of aluminum works really well. Recycling of paper works ok. Recycling of glass is pretty pointless (it doesn't really safe energy compared to make new glass, however re-using bottles via a deposit system works ok).
And yes, a lot of household plastic still isn't recyclable because there are just so many types of plastic, with so many different additives used. But it is also a case of "build it, and they will come"; new industrial uses for recycled plastics do pop up once the infrastructure for delivering high-enough-quality streams of raw materials is in place.
Writing this after simplified ideas in first paragraph sound strange.