there is pretty strong evidence that Nuclear energy is significantly safer than most energy production with the exception of wind & solar which are similarly as safe. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
For nuclear power the public is on the hook for cleanup fees from hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars and the large scale accidents we have seen caused hundreds of thousands to get evacuated.
It is not even comparable. If I chose to not work in the solar and wind industry my chance of harm is as near zero as it gets. Meanwhile about all consequences from nuclear power afflicts the general public. Both in terms of costs, injuries and life changing evacuations.
Fentanyl is a prime example. I believe (from memory) over 100,000 people die of it each year in the in the US. Everyone knows it's a problem. We should "do something". But, we don't. Nobody cares enough (except as a platitude come election time). However if 1000 people died in a bomb attack (or similar) it would be top news for weeks and they would be scrambling the military and make us take our wedding rings off for scanning at airports.
If 10% of people who died in auto accidents each year were to perish in one horrible spectacular event it probably would be "transformative" as far as public policy.
(Never mind that cracking down actually increases the death rate. And the fentanyl problem came about because of cracking down on heroin. Fentanyl is far cheaper to make and far easier to smuggle due to being much smaller. But it has a tendency to clump and thus when handled by street dealers they can't produce a uniform product.)
How much expense is justified for each life (or year of life) saved from radiation exposure by scraping up the soil and bagging it? Can we justify the evacuation of elderly from close to Fukushima on the grounds that in 20 years time they will have an elevated risk of cancer? How is that balanced with deaths caused by the process of relocation? What about the human cost of an energy shortage caused by shutting down the nuclear power stations in Japan?
The same goes for chemical cleanup (heavy metal poisoning, pesticides, dioxins, PFAs, fly-ash, asbestos).
To make the cleanup decisions we need some notion of tradeoff between cost and benefit. Otherwise we'll end up in a situation where an indeterminate amount of money can be spent on something with no benefit (other than achieving something a politician willed to happen).
A gun is dangerous even if it hasn't killed anyone yet. We know that if you point the gun at someone and pull the trigger they die, hence it is considered dangerous. We knew this even before the first gun killed the first human.
Similarly, we know that nuclear power plants can cause immense disasters in a worst case scenario, even though it hasn't happened yet.
It's the worst case for a runaway reactor. Did it cross the prompt critical line or not--I don't think this will ever be resolved but it doesn't matter. We saw what happens--power level through the roof, destroys the reactor, other than the radioactivity it didn't do much.
It's also the worst case for a China Syndrome. Nothing happened, as a lot of the more sane people thought would be the case. The molten reactor core burned through the reactor floor but was no longer in an ideal configuration and thus no longer critical. (And it could not be critical as the moderators were destroyed, which would inherently take it subcritical.) Note that this is inevitable--the margin between critical (below which you don't get the heat to burn into the ground) and prompt critical (where it destroys itself and thus ceases melting) is very narrow.
It's also the worst case for a radioactive spill. No containment dome, fire in the reactor contents. The supposed thousands of radiation deaths simply did not show up. We have about 90 that are clearly caused by the accident. We have a huge variation in the estimated numbers since then, the first that looks reasonable is the UN estimate of 4,000--to a large degree in the people Russia sent in to deal with the situation without proper safety equipment. For comparison the largest coal disaster was 1,500 dead--and I doubt you've ever heard of it.
>It's the worst case for a runaway reactor.
No it was not. The worst case would have been that anyone involved with Chernobyl ran for their lives and abandoned the plant leaving it to burn to the ground, no sarcophagus was built, nobody spent billions on treating farmland all over europe, nobody destroyed animals unsuitable for human consumption for decades and nobody started screening for the excess cancer cases (which occurred everywhere in europe as well as behind the iron curtain) leaving them untreated until too late.
None of that happened, luckily, but it could. Instead people gave their lives at the scene and others have worked their entire careers since to prevent Chernobyl from actually becoming a "worst case scenario".
It is also a mistake to think that Chernobyl is a disaster in the past, it is not over yet. The latest sarcophagus was built not even a decade ago at a cost of over 2 billion USD. Why do you suppose that was deemed necessary?
Also, it is currently in a warzone.
My guess is we'll need to see newer safer designs before public options shift.
Even our legal systems address singular events better than low level harms because it's harder to deflect blame because the damages are so immediately identifiable; Fukushima and Chernobyl destroyed their closest cities and areas overnight in ways that they'll likely never recover from and the effects of their poisons are rapidly identifiable.
Nuclear and renewables compete for the same slice of the grid. The cheapest most inflexible where all other power generation has to adapt to their demands. They are fundamentally incompatible.
For every passing year more existing reactors will spend more time turned off because the power they produce is too expensive.
Let alone insanely expensive new builds.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/commodities/energy-...
Batteries are here now, and delivering nuclear scale energy day in and day out in California.
No one will want anything from your desalination plant in Norway, and shipping water is not a thing because it becomes too expensive.
The next problem is energy cost vs. duty cycle. The less you run due to only utilizing cheap prices the higher the impact of fixed costs on your business.
Except for a significant portion of the GDP of Fiji
There is a very small amount of people working on low-capital industries (normally with higher operational costs), and they seem to be close to some gain here or there. But almost all of our knowledge is biased against turning things off.
that's the bit I don't quite understand - yes, in a simple economic model where you want the numbers to go brrr, it makes sense, but is there a physical limit? could a country decide to own the big facility and use the excess electricity and sell the results to commercial ventures? the government can afford to have a piece of land taken that doesn't return a profit 100% of the time?
Additionally, California is ideal for solar panels, but I assume you haven’t put even an ounce of thought into how New York or Chicago will handle it, have you?
This will reduce the effective load factor of nuclear power and therefore increase its production cost (it is only profitable with a high load factor), with a strong feedback.
It gets worse because, on the technical level and despite some progress, nuclear power cannot (due to technical limitation and for safety-related reasons) adjust its production ("load following") to always exactly match demand.
This will promote the deployment of an RE system based on a continental a mix (wind, solar, etc.), smart grid, clean backup (green hydrogen), storage, etc. which will reduce the variability of its production (intermittency effect) so nuclear power will be less and less useful and more and more expensive.
The effect on nuclear is easy to predict.
> That’s why you have a blend of renewables. Yes, we then have to build wind turbines, plenty of under-utilised transmission (because wind is in the wrong place), methane CCGT/OCGT backup (and they need to receive capacity payments to keep them in business) and perhaps eventually electrolysers to convert excess electricity to H2 (which then have to operate at low utilisation). The overall system seems quite complicated and more complex than the first step of deploying cheap solar panels so save a bit of methane.
I believe both have their uses, but I don't buy they go together well.