[karaterobot]

> And its not a problem with the technology, its a problem with human beings. We're forgetful, lazy, and make mistakes.

That is true. Another weakness humans have is our inability to intuit large numbers and probabilities.

For example, it's hard for people to really grok that, even if you added up all the people who have died from nuclear and radiation accidents in all of history[1], including not just the sources you mentioned, but disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima, it would be far less than the number of people who die from pollution caused by fossil fuels every month[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_...

[2] https://news.mit.edu/2013/study-air-pollution-causes-200000-...

[caddywompus]

Definitely, but those figures can't be compared directly, since deaths by air pollution are caused by industry scale deployment of both small and large power plants/generators/engines. I fail to see how [2] is related in any way to the conversation. As I said, I do believe that nuclear energy has a place in current and future energy production.

The other things we humans are bad at, is implementing solutions that last decades. It is inevitable, that over a period of 30 or 50 years, there will be multiple lost small reactor installations. My case in point, is meant to be the aforementioned videos, where an extremely expensive radiotherapy machine can be neglected to the point of abandonment.

What I want to highlight, is the insidious nature of a potential loss of a radioactive source. A small amount of material can contaminate a very large area relative to it's size, and its not something that can be seen or detected without equipment.

And the type of damage isn't as immediate or jarring as say a runaway reaction/meltdown, it would be limited to people who unintentionally handle, or ingest particulate.

For example, if you don't realize that you've been exposed to a material like this, you can carry it around on your clothes, or in to your home, and that's the real issue. You're body would be exposed to radiation over a long period of time, eventually resulting in a higher than safe dose. Any cancers/diseases as a result of this may not even be attributed to exposure, since a person may not have even realized they came into contact with it.

> That is true. Another weakness humans have is our inability to intuit large numbers and probabilities.

I'm not sure if this is meant to be a jab at my comment, it's not my intent to be a scare monger, but I would like to point out these past incidents to highlight the unique nature of the danger inherent to these materials.

[Johnny555]

For example, it's hard for people to really grok that, even if you added up all the people who have died from nuclear and radiation accidents in all of history[1], including not just the sources you mentioned, but disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima, it would be far less than the number of people who die from pollution caused by fossil fuels every month

That's kind of a false equivalency since fossil fuel plants are much more common than nuclear plants (nuclear generates ~10% of the world's electrical power), and they tend to be highly regulated and maintained, and run by first world nations. But if nuclear was as ubiquitous as fossil fuel plants, it would also be run by poorer nations with less ability to maintain them.

So you can't really compare nuclear plants that exist today with what we'd see if nuclear were as common as fossil fuel plants.

[foxyv]

Nuclear power currently makes up 20% of US electrical power. Fossil fuels are 60% of grid electricity. Multiply by 3 and you are there in the US. France is at 70% so they are already there. I don't see any significant deaths from nuclear power there.

I agree that nuclear isn't currently a great solution for stuff like trucks and planes. However for baseline power generation it is one of the best low carbon energy solutions when taking into account storage costs to provide constant power from intermittent sources like wind and solar.

[lamontcg]

The biggest problem with nuclear is that its too expensive. And that's before factoring in the $187B cost of cleaning up Fukushima.

The "but nobody died" argument doesn't matter. You're still arguing with Jane Fonda in 1979. You need be arguing with economists in 2021.

[mdorazio]

1) Please stop using fatality comparisons when talking about radiation incidents - it's disingenuous. You need to look at total impact, including negative outcomes like cancers and reduced life expectancies rather than outright deaths.

2) If your argument is "it's better than the worst alternative" then your argument is not very good. You should be comparing to power sources that are not fossil fuel-based, which is the real alternative we want to move toward

[woodruffw]

> 1) Please stop using fatality comparisons when talking about radiation incidents - it's disingenuous. You need to look at total impact, including negative outcomes like cancers and reduced life expectancies rather than outright deaths.

It's my understanding that nuclear power performs very favorably in these metrics as well. Living near a coal-fired plant isn't very healthy, and probably exposes you to more radiation anyways[1].

I don't really follow the alternative power source news, but I don't think anybody's argument actually stops at "it's better than the worst." Most people seem to think that nuclear power makes a good choice because it's a consistent source of power and has a proven track record (see: France).

[1]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

[jfengel]

Comparing it to coal is precisely "better than the worst". Coal is the worst option, and even the US is phasing it out rapidly.

(Developing countries are still using it, and China is still acting as if it were a developing country. But coal simply isn't the alternative to nuclear any more in any developed country. Even natural gas is better for the environment than coal.)

[woodruffw]

> Comparing it to coal is precisely "better than the worst". Coal is the worst option, and even the US is phasing it out rapidly.

I don't think anybody disagrees with that. The claim is only that there are lots of sufficient reasons for nuclear power that don't stop at "it's not the worst."

[Manuel_D]

> 1) Please stop using fatality comparisons when talking about radiation incidents - it's disingenuous. You need to look at total impact, including negative outcomes like cancers and reduced life expectancies rather than outright deaths.

Granted, you would also need to do the same for whatever you're comparing it against. Fossil fuels have profound negative impact beyond fatalities, like pollution, supporting cruel regimes, environmental spills, and more. And also climate change.

Dams exacerbate water evaporation and disrupt ecosystems. Solar panels require vast amounts of land to generate significant power.

> 2) If your argument is "it's better than the worst alternative" then your argument is not very good. You should be comparing to power sources that are not fossil fuel-based, which is the real alternative we want to move toward

And what are those alternatives? Renewables need to be backed by a dispatchable source to deal with intermittency. If your country already gets 30-50% of its power from hydroelectricity that's great. But for most places, this means fossil fuels. The reality is that the alternatives like wind and solar are really wind and solar plus fossil fuels.

[ncmncm]

"Plus fossil fuels" is, again, a markedly temporary situation. Numerous storage methods are still vying for which will end up cheapest. Batteries look like they will end up the most expensive, but easiest to field. Underground and underwater compressed air are being proved out. A GW-scale liquified-air system is coming online in UK. We will need efficient electrolytic H2 and NH3 processes anyway, and both are good for both storage and fuel.

So, burning LNG continues for a while because the equipment is already in place, and nobody wants to invest immediately in what might not end up the cheapest storage, or anyway is not yet nearly so cheap as it will shortly be when volume balloons.

Underground compressed air is compatible with existing LNG turbines. Liquified-air storage has useful side products. Fuel you will make anyway is a good storage medium too.

[Manuel_D]

Global battery production remains in the low hundreds of gigawatt hours annually. And only a small fraction of that is going to grid storage, in the single-digit gigawatt hours. Global electricity consumption is 60 TWh per day and continuing to rise. Alternatives like compressed air, hydrogen, thermal batteries, etc. still remain in the prototyping phase. Whether or not they prove to be viable is totally unknown.

We are going to be in this markedly temporary situation until we experience a miraculous breakthrough in energy storage that yields several orders-of-magnitude improvement. Breakthrough technology that's 10-20 years away often stays 10-20 years away for a lot longer than that.

[ncmncm]

Since we will not need to rely on batteries for utility energy storage, battery production capacity is no impediment to renewable grid storage buildout.

There are plenty of known viable storage methods, which you oddly omit all of except compressed air. There are no impediments to their implementation beyond simply scaling up; no new materials science, no new physics or chemistry, or industrial process barriers need to be solved. It is just not clear which will end up cheapest in each use environment.

Other, less mature technologies, e.g. electrically synthesizing ammonia and hydrogen efficiently, need to be developed anyway, and once developed, will also be incidentally useful for storage. Their independent industrial demand will drive fast improvement, so they may come to displace the others.

[Manuel_D]

There absolutely are impediments to implementation. Producing hydrogen efficiently through electrolysis demands very effective electrodes which we are still trying to develop, for example. We only know that these solutions ar hypothetically possible, not that they are viable. Let alone viable at scale. Let alone cheaper than existing options.

Until one of those storage methods actually becomes viable at scale, rather than in laboratories, we'll be burning fossil fuels.

[stickfigure]

1) Fatality statistics are the best measurement we have. Sure, there's a long tail of lesser impacts for nuclear power; there's also a long tail of disabilities and reduced life expectancies for pollution too.

2) How about "it's better than other power sources that can consistently service base load"?

[caddywompus]

When it comes to base load, nuclear is pretty interesting. I remember reading that some plants sell electricity at below cost during low periods (nighttime in some locations), since they can't ramp the reactor up or down quickly.

It's a situation where both intermittent renewable sources and nuclear plants would benefit from a way to store excess produced energy

[onethought]

Love the base load argument… if only there was a way to store electricity, we’d stop hearing these ridiculous “base load” arguments

[hetman]

You mean, if only there was an economically viable way to store electricity. Still waiting on that one.

[onethought]

Batteries. Economic viability is the next argument when you externalise the true cost (carbon).

[hetman]

Carbon is not the only possible cost to the environment. Building batteries is not exactly easy on the planet either.

[Retric]

Deaths from such accidents alone is a poor metric of comparison. Marie Curie for example isn’t on that list.

[Tuna-Fish]

Doesn't change the end result. Hell, you can add every person who died in the atomic bombings to the nuclear tally (even though that makes no sense at all), and it still won't change the result.

[Retric]

No, you don’t get 2.5 million deaths per year from fossil fuel usage. Though a few seriously flawed studies have gotten some very extreme numbers.

For example respiratory diseases represent ~5% of all Chinese deaths or about 500,000 in 2020. Which is a horrific sign of air pollution except China also has 350 million smokers. Looking at the non smoker population you see air pollution as a major factor, but again not all air pollution is from fossil fuels.

Air pollution is also associated to strokes and heart attacks, but again other factors are involved.

[karaterobot]

True, it is likely much higher[1], but the 2.4 million I cited comes from an older estimate that used different data.

[1] https://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2021/02/deaths-fossil-fuel...

[Retric]

Yet here’s one saying 1.05 million. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-23853-y

It’s easy to find flawed studies with silly results, the underlying reality is rarely so extreme.

[karaterobot]

Apart from war, what are some other sources of deaths by this type of radiation?

[Retric]

If you mean radiation then it gets complicated, people for example, used to use X-Rays for shoe fittings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe-fitting_fluoroscope

I have yet to see an estimate for related deaths from such ignorance.

[philwelch]

We've already mitigated that problem by not doing that anymore.

[Retric]

Sure, but if you’re planning a new thing saying we stopped doing dumb stuff in the last isn’t a great justification.

The general public became scared of radiation in part because of the rapid flip flop from this stuff is safe and useful to holy shit no don’t do any of that.

[philwelch]

> Sure, but if you’re planning a new thing saying we stopped doing dumb stuff in the last isn’t a great justification.

I'm not sure that argument really works though.

When it comes to radiation, we understand the dangers of radiation a lot more now than Marie Curie did, and we can argue the merits of SMR's based on the knowledge that we've gained.

Furthermore, the argument is very overly general. Sure, it's true that people made a lot of mistakes because we didn't fully understand the dangers of radiation at first. But we're talking about SMR's to generate electricity here, and people didn't even fully understand the dangers of electricity at first, either. The same could be said about fossil fuels.

That leads us to a much different conclusion--don't invent fundamentally new things. Radiation and fission aren't fundamentally new. They're understood, and the risks are understood.

[forgotmypw17]

>even if you added up all the people who have died from nuclear and radiation accidents in all of history

The whole area for hundreds of kilometers around Chernobyl is now polluted, for decades and centuries to come.

This affects everyone in that area, don't let statistics fool you. EVERYONE.