[jwie]

Anti nuclear fearmongering is based on ignorance for the most part, and a kind of exploitative cynicism on the other.

Most people just don’t know how safe nuclear power is. I worked on a nuclear reactor personally. We used to joke that the safest thing we had in the power plant was the radiation. I received less operational exposure in 6 years than typical nuclear medicine procedures create.

The other source is entrenched players in the power industry hate nuclear power because it works, and can credibly produce post scarcity levels of power production.

It is unfortunate that the green energy movement has been lied to and co-opted against this genuinely fantastic energy source.

[makeitdouble]

> Anti nuclear fearmongering is based on ignorance for the most part, and a kind of exploitative cynicism on the other.

Is it fearmongering when incidents actually happened and right now we have a country that could potentially have a reactor get destroyed by act of war ?

You seem to focus purely on the technical part, and swiping away the margin for human error, unpredicted issues, political incompetence, and straight hostility. Those are also part of the discussion.

[jwie]

Nuclear power is not without risk. Those risks are far more attractive compared to the risks of not using it.

Nuclear power is far simpler than people would intuitively believe. The nuclear reactor boils water at scale, the steam spins an electric generator via a steam turbine. The steam plant side of things is well understood technology, almost 170 years old at this point, nuclear power itself is about 70 years old. As technologies go, it's incredibly simple, and thus far less prone to error.

It is fearmongering to suggest or imply that there's catastrophe right around the corner of every nuclear reactor. This is just not so. It's not possible to have the kinds of nuclear disasters people are afraid of. Fatalities from nuclear power measure around 100 per thousand terawatt hours, far lower than any other power production source by orders of magnitude.

There is simply no evidence that nuclear power is dangerous, and a lot of evidence to suggest it is the safest, most effective power source we have created.

[makeitdouble]

> There is simply no evidence that nuclear power is dangerous

Wait, what? You even started your own reply with “Nuclear power is not without risk.”

> a lot of evidence to suggest it is the safest, most effective power source we have created.

A lot of evidence also suggest the opposite. Again, you took the time to explain how technically nuclear was simple, without engaging with the context it is used in.

PS: Fatalities per thousand terawatt hours is an interesting metric, except it completely ignores non lethal effects (cancers can be survived, and might also not be attributed to exposure officially, same way low dose exposure don’t have obvious consequences that feed the numbers), and environmental issues that don’t lead to standard air pollution, like soil and water contamination for instance. Basically that’s looks like a feel good number to discredit coal, but isn’t that relevant in any other context.

[jwie]

Its a full footprint measurement. Coal miner deaths for instance count against it. A study attempted to aggregate fatalities from atmospheric effects from emissions.

It does make nuclear look particularly good, but this is also because it is so energy dense that effort is efficiently allocated. It makes everything except oil and coal look good on a chart.

Most of the deaths attributed to nuclear are more steam plant accidents that also happen in coal plants. Operators are far more likely to die from steam, rotating equipment, or hydraulics than radiation doses. But the energy density of nuclear more efficiently allocates fatalities.

Nuclear power is not dangerous in the same sense that parachuting or commercial flight is not dangerous. You are exposing yourself to lethal forces, but with proper procedures, engineering, and training these activities are safe, even at scale.

[makeitdouble]

> Its a full footprint measurement.

Nope, I was interested and looked at a few publications compiling it, and as its name says it only takes directly attributed deaths into account. Albeit it will count air pollution and particles from coal operation as leading to deaths. An example of that: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener...

Of course that number also relies on governments providing the stats, and no gov wants to give accurate numbers on what’s happening with nuclear waste for instance, or water pollution. Even now the JP gov. is in half denial as it would be a further economical catastrophe to fully own it.

A way better number would be the maintenance, healthcare and environmental cost per energy produced, which would put nuclear way behind anything but fossil energy.

[chelical]

Wind and solar numbers should also include amortization for deaths during power outages and deaths caused by peaker plants.

[Sporktacular]

Nuclear had decades to become affordable, safer and sustainable. Instead plants have remained hugely expensive and slow to commission, intrinsically safe reactors are still a pipe dream, the environmental impact of building plants and mining and refining uranium is still large when only 1% of it is used, thorium reactors are a rarity and there is only one dependable, permanent waste depot in operation.

Economics is nuclear's enemy, not environmentalists. Solving the energy storage issue is a hell of a lot easier than solving all the above. The greenies got it right, the future is in renewable sources.

[kleene_op]

I'm sorry but let me just drop this reality check here real quick:

Nuclear provided 50 years of low cost energy to France despite an uphill battle in the public opinion. Renewable energy is failing to save Germany this winter despite being hailed as the holy grail for the past few decades.

Everytime you listen to environmentalists talk you'd think we're already there, that countries are already covered with batteries for long term energy conservation, that a continental-wide energy grid has already been deployed (or will in the incoming week) so Finland can get electricity from solar pannels in Spain, that solar panels or wind turbines are great for our sovereignity when they're being produced in China, that they are infallible ecologically when they require rare materials and aren't systematically recycled.

No, green energy is not there yet, and it definitely won't before quite a bit of time. People failing to realize that and fighting teeth and nails against nuclear are gonna cause our demise if they keep at it.

[tstrimple]

> Nuclear provided 50 years of low cost energy to France

This is outright false. Look at any current data on the cost of running nuclear power. These plants are being shut down en-mass because they are too expensive to operate. I live in Iowa. The nuclear plant here was shut down early because buying out the rest of the contract and switching to other sources was cheaper than leaving the plant up and running. Nuclear proponents completely ignore the economic realities of these systems.

https://www.pveurope.eu/markets/energy-policy-fairy-tale-che...

[Sporktacular]

"Nuclear provided 50 years of low cost energy to France despite an uphill battle in the public opinion. Renewable energy is failing to save Germany this winter despite being hailed as the holy grail for the past few decades."

Its ability to supply France in the past is irrelevant to its ability to power global demand in future. The fuel is too limited and the technology too immature to turn this around. Nuclear is uneconomical as it is, fancy future designs even more so, if they ever arrive on scale. Nuclear has a limited future.

The Germany talking point is deliberately misleading. It was in transition and couldn't reasonably have been expected to predict gas would be switched off overnight. But it could reasonably be expected to predict the serious consequences of runaway global warming. The risk of the former was lower than the risk of the latter and while it was unlucky, it was a reasonable bet as a good global citizen that's done more than almost any country in trying to address a problem that affects literally everyone. So you don't get to knock it for doing what most countries weren't brave enough to even try.

No one credible called renewables the holy grail. No serious environmentalist said green energy is already there. They have been arguing for decades for more R&D, expansion of sustainable power infrastructure, local jobs for installers etc. We should have listened. And you might have heard them if lazy, right wing, straw man talking points weren't drowning them out.

I'm sorry but that's just a quick reality check for you.

[kleene_op]

> Nuclear has a limited future.

Nuclear power is such a dead end China plans to build a hundred of them https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli.... Russia, over 20 https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil.... Japan, probably concerned about what's brewing over the Japanese sea, is going back at it as well https://www.ft.com/content/b380cb74-7b2e-493f-be99-281bd0dd4..., despite Fukushima's disaster.

> It was in transition and couldn't reasonably have been expected to predict gas would be switched off overnight

Except maybe for the war in Dombas plaging us since 2014?

> No one credible called renewables the holy grail.

You are correct.

[Sporktacular]

They're building new coal plants as well, does that mean coal is also the way of the future, or maybe just a stopgap?

Germany has been working on the demand side so that growth is decoupled from carbon. This is the hard problem and will take decades to achieve. So even if it didn't predict a Russian invasion, the international response and Russia's counter, it made a reasonable bet and deserves credit, even if the dice came up short.

It will be an uncomfortable winter, and tragically some old people might even die. But not more than coal power kills with respiratory problems in the short term. And heatwaves, floods, hurricanes and resource wars kill in the long term.

No one credible called renewables the holy grail, not in their current form. But they're on the right path.

[arez]

tell that to france and their inability to generate power with many reactors because either the rivers are dry or too hot. How is that a sustainable solution

[rglover]

Depends on perspective. I hadn't heard about this but looking it up quick and the reason it's considered too hot [1] is:

> After the 2003 heatwave, France’s nuclear safety authority (ASN) set temperature and river flow limits beyond which power stations must reduce their production, to ensure the water used to cool the plants will not harm wildlife when it is released back into the rivers.

And also...

> Since 2000, production losses due to high river temperatures and low river flows have represented an average of 0.3% of annual production. However, half of EDF’s 56 nuclear reactors are offline due to planned maintenance and work to repair corrosion which was delayed by the pandemic, just as Europe faces an energy crunch following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

So, in essence the inability to use the water appears to be a regulatory/timing issue, not a technical one, as far as I can gather.

While I wouldn't advocate for harming wildlife, I'd say the answer to your question is "locate nuclear plant developments in areas that will have the least impact on wildlife (or, where wildlife can easily be relocated and protected from potential harm)."

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/03/edf-to-redu...

[nullc]

... as if the alternative energy solutions don't harm wildlife (including solar and wind). Is this again an example of expecting nuclear to mitigate its externalities while ignoring them for everything else?

[jwie]

This is a very important point. The externalities of nuclear are actually containable because they are so small. Hundreds of kilos of waste product compared to billions in spent fuel products.

The heavy industry footprints of logistics to create the plant and equipment also are more efficient.

How many solar panels or wind turbines would you need to produce to generate a nuclear reactor’s worth of power? How expensive would that process be comparatively? These factors weigh heavily in nuclear power’s favor because it is so energy dense.

[tstrimple]

> How many solar panels or wind turbines would you need to produce to generate a nuclear reactor’s worth of power? How expensive would that process be comparatively? These factors weigh heavily in nuclear power’s favor because it is so energy dense.

And yet literally every single for-profit energy production company in the world is heavily investing in renewables and avoiding nuclear despite government incentives and subsidies for nuclear. Surely if the cost of nuclear was worth while, the folks looking to maximize profits would be investing more in these technologies. Economic reality doesn't support nuclear power. It's unfortunate that the people pushing for nuclear power are also the people who generally push for private ownership of everything, because public ownership and investment is the only time we see anything close to successful nuclear programs.

[nullc]

Nuclear is forced to eat phenomenally more of its externalities than alternatives, this changes the economics entirely.

Responding to people highlighting this by pointing out that nuclear is uneconomic under the current policies is either making their point for them or saying nothing at all. :)

[desindol]

Ah yes, the strawman argument... possibility to kill the entire planet vs killing some birds.

[delroth]

In this specific case (regulations on the cooling water temperature) it's killing some fishes vs killing some birds. That seems very comparable to me.

Why wouldn't we require wind turbines to stop when birds are migrating to reduce their environmental externalities?

[nullc]

kill the entire planet? From exceeding a delta-t of 2 degree C in their discharge water?

[rglover]

Desert tortoise has entered the chat