Financial liability on nuclear plants for nuclear disasters is capped at ~0.5% of the cost of a cleanup like Fukushima/Chernobyl because sophisticated private insurers fully understand the risks and categorically refuse to shoulder them.
Thats why the taxpayer is forced into providing free insurance for every nuclear power plant. The private sector would only ever build solar and wind and storage if externalities like this or CO2/coal pollution were fully priced in. Since the government has a vested (military) reason for wanting a thriving civilian nuclear industrial ecosystem, however, they provide lavish subsidies - some budgeted, while others (like this one) are not.
There is a lot of PR sourced from profit driven pro nuclear lobbies telling us that "contrary to popular opinion" it's totally 110% safe now though - none of which acknowledge the private sector's categorical refusal to assume the financial risks, obviously.
Presumably Greenpeace, who are apparently motivated purely by a desire to protect the environment and fully funded by donations from the environmentally conscious must be the ones who are misleading us. After all, "young climate activists" say it is being "old fashioned": https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/dear-greenpeace-nuclear...
And three mile island and Fukushima. Nuclear has some serious concerns that are clearly not addressed enough.
Usually this is when the low death toll is brought up but it's not just about deaths. It's about environmental destruction. And the potential to do so in the far future through its waste.
I don't think we should move away from nuclear altogether but use it as a buffer only for the times when the real green sources are low (eg solar and wind). And we should find a permanent waste solution.
Oh yeah totally, they had a meltdown too. Though it was an idiotic operation at that time, with such a cavalier attitude to safety that I should hope will not be repeated in this day and age. They even opposed the air filters that were introduced anyway and reduced a lot of the contamination during the meltdown.
I didn't remember to mention it because it was not an energy generation installation that melted down but a military one for nuclear weapon manufacturing.
About those filters, a quote from wikipedia:
> They became known as "Cockcroft's Folly" as many regarded the delay they caused and their great expense to be a needless waste. During the fire the filters trapped about 95% of the radioactive dust and arguably saved much of northern England from becoming a nuclear wasteland. Terence Price said "the word folly did not seem appropriate after the accident"
And that's the one that is public, there is at least one more that is still under wraps and possibly more than that. Nuclear is only as safe as the people running it and that is a major issue even before you bring in economics. You can't treat safety as a cost in installations like these and inevitably that's what happens. What I also find disingenuous is that in calculating the cost of electricity production from nuclear power capex required for the eventual dismantling isn't taken into account at all, and those costs are inevitably massive.
Wow I had no idea of that one. I actually lived pretty close to there.
Seems like the incidents happened in part because the operators couldn't see in the dark after a power outage, and the emergency torch had been taken by someone to fix their car... :X You can't make this stuff up.
Yes, that's how it happened (I heard it from a person that was closer to the source). And because you can't make this stuff up I don't think it is possible to responsibly operate a nuclear reactor because the normalization of deviation is impossible to guard against over the career span of a typical human. Everywhere people work they make mistakes and do stupid stuff and over time this accumulates to the point where the 'experts' are themselves the danger but because they've done it for so long nobody can do a better job than they can in the short term. And then there is aging gear, embrittlement and a thousand other things that can (and do) go wrong.
You can't fix human nature and that's the root cause of many of these problems. And because of that I'm very much against nuclear power, no matter what the short term advantages may seem to be. Sooner or later every plant needs to be de-commissioned, will have an incident or will end up as a target or a casualty of something or other. Multiply that by the number of power plants that you'd need to make the world reliant on nuclear power and the number of accidents would quickly rise above what is acceptable (if we're not already there).
Nuclear proponents are quick to argue that this was all with old technology and newer designs are safer but people are still the same and even new technology resulting in working installations will eventually see those same installations age.
Thats why the taxpayer is forced into providing free insurance for every nuclear power plant. The private sector would only ever build solar and wind and storage if externalities like this or CO2/coal pollution were fully priced in. Since the government has a vested (military) reason for wanting a thriving civilian nuclear industrial ecosystem, however, they provide lavish subsidies - some budgeted, while others (like this one) are not.
There is a lot of PR sourced from profit driven pro nuclear lobbies telling us that "contrary to popular opinion" it's totally 110% safe now though - none of which acknowledge the private sector's categorical refusal to assume the financial risks, obviously.
Presumably Greenpeace, who are apparently motivated purely by a desire to protect the environment and fully funded by donations from the environmentally conscious must be the ones who are misleading us. After all, "young climate activists" say it is being "old fashioned": https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/dear-greenpeace-nuclear...