Surely a nuclear accident will affect 600x more people than a plane crash…
If you calculate radioactive materials released per energy produced - nuclear is below coal, even including all the accidents.
It's irrational to avoid nuclear powerplants.
nuclear damages aren't just dead humans. they come in the forms of lost lands and untrustable food source.
You are forced to build massive battery farms. Batteries require mining chemicals. For the scale we are talking about, you would be strip-mining the earth.
You are forced to make incredibly costly upgrades to electric grids–some of which are nearly a century old. Because the current grids can't handle the unreliable, wax-and-wane nature of solar and wind power.
You are forced to build gigantic solar panel and wind farms, destroying vast swathes of natural ecology and displacing and destroying many species.
You are forced to deal with solar panels and wind turbines at the end of life problem, especially solar panels which contain toxic chemicals which are at risk of leaching into the environment (think 'water table') unless they are properly disposed of. No one has a viable plan for proper disposal of solar panels at the scale we would have to be talking about.
And finally–the elephant in the room. The giant energy corporations just won't transition to renewable energy if they don't get a high-enough return on their investments. They want something like 12% ROI. This is extremely unlikely. They've left all their commitments to go renewable conditional so they can weasel out by saying it's not cost-effective for them. Just look at what's happening in reality: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/23/siemens-energy-scraps-profit...
A quote:
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910
"On the History and Future of 100% Renewable Energy Systems Research"
"With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels."
The plan by RE people is 'Let's hope that a hundred different unlikely events all line up exactly right, and we'll be able to go fully RE'. This is not a realistic plan. If you did software engineering like this, you would be laughed out of the room (and then fired).
How big will the exclusion zones of Climate Change be if we keep burning fossil fuels?
The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant produced 4.7GWe when it was operational, and its current exclusion zone covers an area of 230 square miles - or 0.0204 GW/mi^2.
The US has (according to https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/how-much-land-power-us...) 102.9GWe of solar capacity covering an area of 965 square miles - or 0.1GW/mi^2.
Judging by that, a nuclear disaster's exclusion zone is worse than that of a "solar disaster" (so to speak).
However, the Fukushima plant itself occupies 1.34375 square miles - putting its normal-operation figure at 3.498 GW/mi^2. That's considerably better than the land area occupied by a Fukushima-equivalent solar installation. The question, therefore, is whether a better worst-case figure for land destruction justifies a substantially-worse best-case figure; I don't think it does, but I understand that not everyone would agree.
If land cost rules out solar, it also rules out agriculture. I never see the nuke bros saying we shouldn't grow things because it uses too much land, or that we need to go vegan to reduce land use.
Land cost rules out solar because there are alternatives which do not cost nearly as much in land (barring, per above, preventable and rare disasters). The same can't be said about agriculture; there ain't (to my knowledge) some agricultural equivalent of a nuclear power plant. Vertical farming might be it someday, but so far that hasn't panned out at scale.
> I never see the nuke bros saying we shouldn't grow things because it uses too much land, or that we need to go vegan to reduce land use.
We "nuke bros" ain't saying we shouldn't use PV at all, either. Solar panels:
- Are much more portable than nuclear plants
- Can be deployed in a wider range of locations than nuclear plants (Have you tried putting a molten-salt reactor on a rooftop? Solar's great for that!)
- Are great at providing energy for peak loads, energy to be stored later, and energy for things that don't typically need to be powered when there's no sunlight (e.g. air conditioning)
Solar panels have their place even in a world powered primarily by nuclear.
Likewise, livestock animals:
- Are much more portable than crop fields
- Can be raised in a wider range of locations than most crops (Have you tried growing corn on a mountain? Chickens and goats are great for that!)
- Taste good, produce byproducts that taste good (like eggs and milk), and provide nutrients that are harder to come by in vegan diets without either supplements or additional planning (e.g. multiple different crops).
Animal products have their place even in a world fed primarily by plant products.
Given this: yeah, by all means work toward reducing agriculture's land footprint - but that effort's independent from the effort to reduce the energy sector's land footprint, so it really shouldn't be surprising that people advocating for the power-per-land effort won't automatically start talking about the food-per-land effort in a conversation about power.
Given that, we can ask what's the ratio of the value of the output of a farm to the value of the displaced natural ecosystem, and do the same for PV. And if we do that, we will find the ratio is MUCH higher for PV than it is for farming.
So, if the goal is to maximize utility for a given displacement of natural ecosystems, we come out ahead (on the margin) if we use land for PV instead of farming. If we want to return land to nature at lowest cost we would do that by returning farmland to nature, not PV land.
This effects people too.
Edit: Really don't get the down vote here. It's costing the Japanese anywhere from $200-$800 billion? (Depending on how you look at it) Is this controversial or something? Is that not a lot of money and an unaccounted for cost of nuclear?
1) That isn't an astronomical number. It is $2,000-$8,000 per Japanese person. For a freak accident. Put that in $/kWh terms and you might find that nuclear was reasonably cost effective even in one of the worst nuclear disasters in history, let alone under normal conditions.
2) I don't know if it is controversial; although if the people demanding the cleanup are the same lunatics who regulate the industry in the west I want to see what the justification is for spending $100s of billions of dollars.
3) The cleanup cost should be considered. When we multiply probability by cost it will be a short consideration. There is no way it is as bad as what everyone is currently already doing with coal. It is likely that it will also be better than renewables once waste is factored in, just because the volumes of material involved.
Entire nations are disappearing under the rising seas [0]. So far they are relatively poor and lack political influence. Bangladesh is soon for the chopping block. Louisiana and Florida are not far behind. Folks really don't get how close to sea level massive portions of these very large areas are. Far larger than the Fukushima exclusion zone, that's for sure.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/cop/tuvalu-turns-metaverse-...
And that's just around sea level rise. The Central Valley's water issues are another probable symptom of global climate change, and just because the Valley lucked out with a wet winter this year doesn't mean that luck will persist. If push comes to shove, I'm sure California's agricultural sector would much rather invest the billions necessary for desalination and upgraded levees to address those symptoms than abandon California entirely - but those are still costs being thrust upon California due to a continued reliance on fossil fuels.
As long as coal, oil, and natural gas are burned and released into the atmosphere, the economic "competition" going forward is illusory. We're just buying the mitigation and cleanup efforts on credit.
$60B in refugee compensation.
And $200B because they stopped using nuclear for a while as an overreaction.
Oh, and the tsunami+earthquake cost over $250B independent of the nuclear accident.
Your number is FUD.
I’m just stating that the cleanups are expensive, stupidly expensive and the more nuclear we have the more chance of this happening again, or worse, there will be.
Look at coal seam gas jn the US, sole plants are leaking untold levels of methane. The US can’t regulate anything properly when it comes to energy.
People don’t realise that Fukushima wasn’t caused by a tsunami, it was caused by negligence.
That we haven't seen anything like a worst case scenario for a unclear accident does not mean those are impossible.
Another exciting option: unnoticed containment failure of waste storage, which contaminates huge amounts of groundwater over weeks and months before the contaminated water starts reaching a densely populated area.
And don't tell me these things can't happen outside the Soviet Union. Greed and complacenty can always find a way.
Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant doesn't really factor in to that picture.
Three Mile Island was close to worst possible in a Western design, and those aspects that led to that accident were fixed 45 years ago.
Worst case isn't a nuclear accident at this point; it's continued reliance on fossil fuels and the accelerating effects from warming the planet. Huge swaths of land near the equator that will be rendered uninhabitable for large scale human habitation due to extreme heat events.
We have already seen 129 degrees in those areas with a real heat index (due to humidity) of 142. These areas are already at their absolute limit. That's your continent-wide Red Forest.
You cannot plan an electrical future on the hope that the weather is always pleasant and consistent. This is one of the reasons why fossil fuel dominance continues in those regions. Go ahead and draw a map of those places where hurricanes and tornados are most prevalent and their large scale adoption of solar and wind. They're not stupid. They're not just political. There are real concerns you are handwaving away because you (likely) like in a region that does not have these same concerns.
What works for California will not work for Georgia, Florida, or Nebraska as-is. Baseball-size hail destroys huge solar arrays let alone softball-size [0]. Nuclear plants laugh at hail and would handle and have(!) weathered tornados and hurricanes just fine.
Check the numbers. Even accounting for nuclear disasters outside the US like Chernobyl and Fukushima, the number of deaths attributed to nuclear power per unit of electricity is lower than any fossil fuel, lower than wind, and about equal to solar. Just imagine if we put the same R&D force behind nuclear that we've done for solar. You think solar's cheap? It wasn't ten years ago. It was intense investment that made it so. We have the same potential for nuclear.
At the very least, we should be aggressively working toward fast neutron reactors so that we don't have spent fuel that will remain dangerously radioactive for 100,000+ years. We can "burn" that "waste" and supply the entire current need for US electrical production for the next 150 years without mining a single new kilogram of uranium [1].
[0] https://cowboystatedaily.com/2023/06/27/baseball-sized-hail-...
So, you propose to increase number of regulations and total cost of the nuclear energy, right?
Covering too much land in solar panels could have dire long-term effects that we don't even know. Sucking too much energy out of the air with windmills could too. All energy sources have risks.
But we know exactly how badly nuclear reactors can fail, we know exactly how widely nuclear contamination can spread, and we know exactly what it can do to people. The results if those things happened on a large scale in a densely populated area are not speculative at all.