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by ben_w 1061 days ago
Sadly we don't get to ignore politics inconveniently making fission more expensive. If you do ignore politics and just look at costs alone, then we can make a global HVDC power grid for less than the cost of the other local upgrades we want regardless within each national power grid.

People demand a safety standard from fission which is expensive, and keep demanding ever more safety from them, and when it can't do that will replace it with fossil fuels even despite nuclear being much much safer than fossil fuels.
1 comments
pfdietz 1061 days ago
The reason people demand higher standards is history.

An example: stacks that scrub radioisotopes out of steam from confinement during serious accidents when the steam has to be released to prevent overpressurization of the confinement system. These were added to most European reactors after Chernobyl. The US and Japanese didn't add these, saying the cost wasn't worth it.

Then Fukushima happened. Had the reactors there had these systems, the radioactive release would have been reduced by a factor of 100.

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ben_w 1061 days ago
Given how few people got cancer from Fukushima, this doesn't really help make the fears seem rational.

One death from cancer, 2313 from relocating: https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-cher...

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pfdietz 1061 days ago
One person identified as having gotten cancer from Fukushima. Most of the cancers would be in a larger population and could not be distinguished from the large background of cancers. That doesn't mean they didn't (or won't) happen, or that regulation must assume they didn't/won't happen. Regulation is not like criminal law; radiation is not presumed innocent until proven guilty.
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ben_w 1061 days ago
That's kinda my point — in the court of public opinion, nuclear is unable to win.

This does actually matter despite the deaths from coal etc. being massively higher by the same measures.

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pfdietz 1061 days ago
I agree that fossil fuel use should be aggressively reduced. In the past, that would have meant more nuclear. It does not mean more nuclear now. Reducing fossil fuel use has ceased to be an argument for nuclear construction.
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ben_w 1061 days ago
Yup, I think we're on the same page on this point.

(Almost a pity we never got to see atomic cruise liners and cargo ships, but nobody wanted them in the ports, so…)

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