[andbberger]

the danger of radiation has been greatly exaggerated and pales in comparison the existential risk of climate change. even accounting for black swan events like getting hit by an airliner, coal plants emit drastically more radiation than nuclear.

it's not a rational risk assessment.

making nuclear energy economically unfeasible by mandating that things be drastically overbuilt has doomed us all to climate catastrophe

[caslon]

I don't disagree that nuclear energy is good; I'm pointing out that you're strawmanning. A solar farm doesn't have to be protected from missiles, because if it gets hit with missiles, only it is destroyed. It harms nothing around it, if it gets destroyed or fails in some fashion.

If you want to represent nuclear, do it honestly; there are a million reasons why it's a good thing, a weak strawman doesn't help your case.

[andbberger]

it's not a strawman. designing to requirements driven by fear and not rational risk assessment can make feasible technology infeasible.

if we designed airliners with a safety factor in line with people's fear of flying and not the actual risk of failure, they would never be able to get off the ground.

yet we require that nuclear power plants tolerate any conceivable failure mode, no matter how unlikely, or dangerous.

that's not rational.

[TheOtherHobbes]

It's far less rational to keep building expensive and unsafe generation when cheaper and safer generation is already available - and can be built more quickly.

And that's before equivalent spending on research, plus tax breaks and subsidies.

[hinkley]

That may be true for the number of actual plants we have, but public sentiment against nuclear is why we don't have 10, even 100 times as many plants as we do now. If you start shifting decimal points two positions to the right, and diminishing the distance between plants, between plants and critical habitat, by an order of magnitude (separation is square root of density per area), those numbers aren't quite as rosy.

100 might sound like hyperbole, but if, somehow, nuclear was guilt-free power, we'd be using at least twice as much power as we currently do. Eventually that much waste heat becomes its own problem (requiring more cooling to 'deal with')

[andbberger]

Earth is _very_ big, safety numbers are given per kWh, waste heat is insignificant compared to total insolation and all other generation methods generate the same amount of waste heat (that’s the law). Solar wind and hydro kind of cheat with the accounting though.

[hinkley]

These are the same sort of average calculations that are the reason the general public don't understand why 1.5ºC is going to be a shitshow. Peaks and troughs and local maxima are what humans will notice, and the averages lie a great deal.

I was more talking about the distance between plants as a function of the odds of encountering the Precautionary Principle with regards to radiation events, but heat pollution is something that I've already seen happen in a town near where I grew up, where an artificial lake intended as a cooling pond ended up being unfit for recreation due to encephalitis-inducing microbes that enjoyed the heat of the cooling system.

Heat pollution at the plant can be problematic depending on where the plant is and what cooling system you use. On the consumption end it exponentially contributes to the heat island effect. Not a huge exponent, but an exponent nonetheless. Doubling power consumption more than doubles heat pump power budgets, and pushes nearby systems that previously relied on passive cooling into requiring active cooling, which pushes more systems into active cooling, on and on.

I think the only time I ever really disagreed with George Carlin was his bit about how arrogant humans are to think that we can possibly ever do enough to alter the climate. Turns out we can. There are just so many of us doing our own little game of externalities. I wonder if he were alive today what he'd have to say about it.