[ethbr0]

Highly publicized 80s accidents (Three Mile Island in 79, Chernobyl in 86) coupled with late-Cold War anti-nuclear weapons proliferation protesting resulted in environmentalists lumping everything nuclear together until it reached "No" criticality.

After that, the reaction has been self-sustaining.

It's easy to campaign to tear something down. It's hard to be the one who has to rebuild the replacement. We need people who focus on the latter before the former.

[throwawayboise]

"Believe the science" seems to be the rationale for many other things we are told to do, so why not this?

[kragen]

Well, in part due to the nuclear weapons programs, the US and Soviet governments told a lot of lies about nuclear energy in the 01940s, 01950s, 01960s, and 01970s. A lot of the science on things like nuclear fuel enrichment isn't actually available publicly, even today, only to people whose families have been interviewed to make sure they will lie if the government orders to.

So the US Secretary of the Navy is in a position to make an informed decision about nuclear reactors—and he's chosen to run a significant part of the US Navy on them—but the voting public is not.

[effie]

I'll bite, what's up with those zero prefixes?

[cpeterso]

Preparation for the Y10K problem. Five-digit years is something the Long Now Foundation started using to encourage people to think longer term:

https://longnow.org/about/

[thelean12]

Holy hell, talk about premature. That's 100 lifetimes away.

Is it still April 1st?

[kragen]

> That's 100 lifetimes away.

Such a pessimist!

[stjohnswarts]

lol that's ridiculous. We'll either have wiped ourselves out by then or be so far beyond problems like Y2K that it's a ridiculous thing to worry about

[kragen]

More fun than worrying about global pandemics or nuclear meltdowns!

[krrrh]

It’s promoted by the Long Now Foundation, as a way of encouraging thinking on 10,000 year time scales.

https://longnow.org/

[why_Mr_Anderson]

That's so -idiotic- short term thinking. 10k years is nothing in the timescale of the universe.

[radicalcentrist]

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

[kergonath]

You’re missing the last bit, though. It’s “believe the science, when the science agrees with my ideas”. The truth is, a lot of those people claiming IPCC should be listened to conveniently ignore the bits in the IPCC reports that don’t align with their opinions. Also, nobody has time to read the reports and spend years training to actually understanding them.

We are overall woefully uninformed about these things, to the point that the majority of people in some recent opinion polls in Europe believe that nuclear power plants emit greenhouse gases.

[moolcool]

Because NIMBYs

[tstrimple]

This argument is facile. We have a for profit energy sector that doesn't want to invest billions of dollars to see returns in over a decade when they can build wind turbines next month and start making money immediately. If you want nuclear power it needs to be a national investment (see France). No amount of NIMBY can stop coal plants. It seems silly to think that's the thing holding back nuclear adoption.

[moolcool]

The "BY" in "NIMBY" gets larger with nuclear imo. Nobody cares if a coal plant is built miles out of town, but sentiment is big that nobody wants a nuclear plant in their state

[noja]

Don't spread FUD. Fukushima was ten years ago.

The truth is our systemic desire to cut costs cuts corners. Everything after each disaster will have been "obvious".

The price of the tiniest of mistakes is outweighing the advantage.

Stick a power plant in the middle of nowhere and charge batteries with it if you want to convince people.

[cthalupa]

... Did you just accuse someone of spreading FUD when they're specifically arguing for people to be less afraid?

Fukushima was bad, but even if you count the deaths from the poorly handled evacuation, you're at ~2200 people that died because of it.

Coal kills 13,000 people in just the US /every/ year.

[pc86]

Fukushima was also caused by an earthquake and tsunami - not exactly a scathing indictment of nuclear power itself.

[Ma8ee]

Eh? Earthquakes and Tsunamis happen, so it’s a bit weird to remove them from the equation.

[kelnos]

Sure, but if you're going to build a nuclear power plant on an island that's prone to be hit by earthquakes and tsunamis, it probably makes sense to harden it against really bad cases of both of those things.

[effie]

Yes, but is that an argument against nuclear energy in general or argument against building a nuclear plant in tsunami-endangered area?

[deckard1]

I'm pretty sure people understood earthquakes and tsunamis from the 1960s to 2011.

> not exactly a scathing indictment of nuclear power itself.

No, but it's certainly a statement about our ability to operate nuclear power. You really can't separate the two.

Fukushima may have been spared the worst, but the amount of deaths is only part of the story. Pripyat is still a ghost town. That's nearly 50,000 people that were permanently displaced from their homes. I imagine quite a few people are not returning to the Fukushima area as well.

[effie]

> No, but it's certainly a statement about our ability to operate nuclear power. You really can't separate the two.

... in tsunami endangered areas. Yes, Japanese made a bad mistake to let Americans build such a badly designed nuclear plant in that region and this was known before the disaster. They did not care - the price was good and the risk was acceptable to the people in charge.

Most of nuclear plants in the world are not in tsunami endangered areas though and are operated safely.

[deckard1]

> Most of nuclear plants in the world are not in tsunami endangered areas though and are operated safely.

How can one begin to even make this claim knowing: a) Chernobyl, b) Three Mile Island, and c) Fukushima? They clearly aren't operated safely. Just to be clear, I'm not anti-nuclear and I'm not making a case against nuclear power. I'm making a simple observation that really shouldn't be a debate. Three entirely different areas with three entirely different political/power/environmental structures in place.

What about regime collapse? We've been worried about nuclear weapons and the political situation in Pakistan. But a similar threat lurks behind nuclear power. What if the government of the future cannot properly maintain their nuclear plants? Based on the past 100 years of history I do not believe this is merely a hypothetical concern.

There will be disasters in the future. You understand this concept, right? Things that we know today which we will later claim could only be known in retrospect, like a tsunami hitting a nuclear power plant in Japan. I'm rolling my eyes right fucking now.

[effie]

Notice "most" and "not in tsunami endangered areas". By safely I meant following standard practices, not in areas in risk of being crashed by tsunamis. I did not mean no disaster can happen. Nobody can guarantee that for any industrial operation.

Yes sometimes people or nature do bad things that result in disasters. Disasters will happen with or without nuclear reactors.

I'm saying the serious disasters involving nuclear reactors are rare. Serious disasters because of nuclear reactors are rarer. Chernobyl was incompetence of personnel due to dysfunctional society + cheapest design without containment. It is not indictment of nuclear energy, but indictment of the soviet system. Fukushima wasn't as bad as Chernobyl, but it too shows problems with how government approached nuclear risk. I do not condone building plants like they did in Chernobyl and Fukushima.

> What if the government of the future cannot properly maintain their nuclear plants? Based on the past 100 years of history I do not believe this is merely a hypothetical concern.

We help them. West did help Russia with decommissioning of old nuclear equipment. I think that is a good strategy.

> There will be disasters in the future. You understand this concept, right?

Indeed I do. But it would be very stupid of us to stop advancing nuclear energy because we made mistakes in the past. We learn from mistakes and double down. I believe we can do it and we should do it.

[Ma8ee]

The problem with nuclear isn’t that it in theory can’t be made safe. The problem is that is is run by humans, in combination with the failure modes being so sudden and large scale.