[roenxi]

> There's nothing special or magic about nuclear.

Apart from the technology, safety profile and generally being the cleanest source of energy ever discovered. And being able to stockpile enormous amounts of energy in a small heap if necessary ^^.

And if we could just convince people to accept it only causing say, half as much damage as coal it would be ridiculously cheap too. These appallingly high safety standards are expensive.

^^ EDIT Which would really help if there was some sort of large, unexpected event which disrupted the world's logistic chains for a few years. Unlike natural gas. Longer term supply rather than short term spot markets, lots of room to recover from surprises.

[aljg]

Half as much damage as coal is a pretty low bar! Natural gas also meets it, for example.

Your broader point is strong though, and there's no reason 4th-gen nuclear power plants being designed now couldn't deliver a quarter (or less) the damage of coal while still being economical.

[aeternum]

Could they really be economical though? There is potential for harm (including terrorism) that must be insured against, you also need to pay a premium for the land compared to solar/wind since few want to live nearby. The construction timelines are huge compared to solar/wind and you don't have the economies of scale that drive prices down.

Nuclear easily beats coal if we include the environmental costs but it's also up against solar, wind, geothermal, and tidal options which have seen huge efficiency gains in the last decade.

[opo]

>Half as much damage as coal is a pretty low bar! Natural gas also meets it, for example.

Natural gas has advantages over coal, but if we are talking about effects on climate change, natural gas is unfortunately comparable to using coal. The CO2 emissions from a natural gas plant are much lower than a coal plant, but it isn't clear that if you account for methane releases during production/transporting/storage that it is better for climate change than coal.

>...Back in August, a NOAA-led study measured a stunning 6% to 12% methane leakage over one of the country’s largest gas fields — which would gut the climate benefits of switching from coal to gas. We’ve known for a long time that methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (CO2), which is released when any hydrocarbon, like natural gas, is burned. But the IPCC’s latest report, released Monday (big PDF here), reports that methane is 34 times stronger a heat-trapping gas than CO2 over a 100-year time scale, so its global-warming potential (GWP) is 34. That is a nearly 40% increase from the IPCC’s previous estimate of 25. ...The IPCC reports that, over a 20-year time frame, methane has a global warming potential of 86 compared to CO2, up from its previous estimate of 72. Given that we are approaching real, irreversible tipping points in the climate system, climate studies should, at the very least, include analyses that use this 20-year time horizon. Finally, it bears repeating that natural gas from even the best fracked wells is still a climate-destroying fossil fuel. If we are to avoid catastrophic warming, our natural gas consumption has to peak sometime in the next 10 to 15 years, according to studies by both the Center for American Progress and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

https://thinkprogress.org/more-bad-news-for-fracking-ipcc-wa...

As we use more and more natural gas, we can expect more and more methane disasters like the leak from Aliso Canyon in CA which was the largest methane leak in US history. This released over 100,000 tons of methane into the atmosphere and required 11,000 residents to be evacuated.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35659947

[ephbit]

> ... appallingly high safety standards are expensive.

Not an expert on probability/statistics ... but wouldn't lower safety standards have meant, not 1 Tschernobyl and 1 Fukushima but most probably like say 10 such events in the last 30 years?

Yeah no, something tells me that having lower than "appallingly high safety standards" isn't a deal I'd want. Not at all.

[Arnt]

Yes or no.

Arguably the accident wasn't due to lax rules, but rather to lack of observance. The rules weren't followed. If that argument is correct, then the key isn't to make the rules stricter or looser, but rather to change the rules and/or environment to eliminate violations. Thus, IMO it's not a statistics problem, but rather a matter of how to design rules and the organisations to which the rules apply.

Germany, too, failed at designing rules for nuclear power: All of the nuclear operators disposed of contaminated waste without permission and without keeping records. How much? Probably not very much (or else it wouldn't have gone on for as long as it did), but there are no records.

Germany and Japan are good at rules. If those two failed, this task can't be a simple one.

[4ggr0]

The issue for me is the trash, or rather, how we are supposed to handle the trash these plants produce.

If you really think just burrying that stuff in a mountain is good enough, then I can't really agree.

[jonnycomputer]

The safety profile of nuclear is difficult to assess in face of changing climate patterns. In general long-tail events are hard to evaluate. Think Fukushima.