[philipwhiuk]

I don't really think he understands why the safety paradigm is the way it is.

The problem is fear. Fear generated by individual incidents that have terrible local harmful effects. And the (perhaps inaccurate) perception that plants may still have issues. Plus the fairly unsolved waste storage problem.

Fukushima, 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl were existential for the nuclear industry. Like it or lump it, they made nuclear feel less safe.

When will we know that the new nuclear power plants are safe enough? Not for a decade or more.

Pretending that the industry isn't taking a rationale line based on the same tired stats about radiation is pointless. Humans are bad at judging risk, but your job as a power plant operator is to deal with the risk people perceive as well as the risk that actually exists.

(And the fact he links to LessWrong which is a site that overemphasises rational thinking to the extent it ignores the human condition says a lot to me).

[jeltz]

What terrible local harmful effects? Only Chernobyl had any and they were very modest. Compare that to the hydroelectric plants. There we can talk real incidents with harmful local effects. If people actually feared incidents they would campaign against hydroelectric power. And the last such incident was last year in Ukraine. Also just building a hydro plant can ruin the local ecosystem even if there is no incident.

Fro the record I am pro-hydroelectric, pro-nuclear and pro-wind (I am a bit more skeptical towards solar but that is probably just me being from Sweden where solar isn't really an option). None of these are perfect but nuclear is by far the safest. The issues with nuclear do not relate to safety.

[kalaksi]

Are you saying Fukushima had none or less than modest harmful effects? I don't know what the parent meant, but the whole Fukushima disaster management and clean up will take decades and people had to leave their homes.

To add, I agree about your point about hydro in general. It's a complicated comparison, though.

[ZeroGravitas]

Nuclear, per TwH, is basically tied with solar and wind if you use decade old data.

Why do you think it's "by far the safest"?

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

[robertlagrant]

> Plus the fairly unsolved waste storage problem.

I don't think it is unsolved, is it?

> Fukushima, 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl were existential for the nuclear industry. Like it or lump it, they made nuclear feel less safe.

I don't think Fukushima made nuclear feel less safe. The terrible reporting and existing mindsets might have, but how could a single death when a tsunami hits a reactor make people feel unsafe in and of itself?

[ZeroGravitas]

Someone in Germany pointed out that on their TV coverage of Fukushima they had German Nuclear Scientists who were correctly describing based on 3rd party observations what was happening while official spokespeople were claiming there was no issue and downplaying risks. That's a killer blow to credibility, doubly so if you have a high respect for Japanese industry.

If they're lying/mistaken about stuff obvious to scientists half a globe away then who can you trust with nuclear?

edit to add some sources to back up this third hand anecdote:

https://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/communicating-science/

> The government was telling us nothing. TEPCO [Tokyo Electric Power Co., operator of the plant] was telling us nothing. We had very little input from the scientific community in Japan. Here we are trying to figure this out, and we had first one, then two, then three explosions.”

Fackler had to talk with scientists overseas to learn that what he had witnessed were likely hydrogen explosions, which probably meant partial meltdowns of the affected reactors. “But when we reported this, we had so much criticism from the Japanese side for using the word ‘meltdown,’ ” he said.

[robertlagrant]

Sure, but this is you finding very specific stuff. Most of the world wasn't watching German TV and seeing that difference.

[ZeroGravitas]

There's only so many countries with nuclear and that the two most technically respected countries in the world both shut their entire fleets down as a result of Fukishima is a fairly strong signal even for those not paying attention.

[medstrom]

LessWrong emphasises taking human factors into account all the time. Maybe you're thinking of RationalWiki or some such site?

[krisoft]

> Plus the fairly unsolved waste storage problem.

Is it more or less solved than the waste storage problem of fossil fuel generation?

[cameronh90]

I'm a huge fan of nuclear power at a technological level, but we have to acknowledge that fundamentally the safety of nuclear power depends on trust. If a NPP is designed, built, and operated correctly, it's perfectly safe to have one next door. I would personally be entirely happy to live next to one in my country (the UK).

There's not much that an individual can do to verify the safety of any given nuclear installation, however, and, bluntly, the global track record isn't great. Even countries with regulatory environments that we'd expect to be very effective have had INES 4+ incidents, and some of those could have been far worse were it not for pure luck. You could rightfully counter that any large civil engineering project relies on trust in a similar way, but a bridge collapse or even dam collapse, while horrifying, cannot conceivably render a large area uninhabitable for hundreds of years.

I think the reason that regulations in nuclear power have become overly burdensome is ultimately an attempt to try to build trust and demonstrate to the public that the risks are being taken as seriously as possible, in an attempt to prove that a worst-case nuclear disaster will never happen. You could think of it as safety theatre or something, but were it not for these regulations, in a democratic country, the public would simply not allow NPPs to be built, and therefore complying with these regulations is just an inescapable cost of that form of power generation. Arguably we even give NPPs a pretty significant subsidy by limiting their total public liability.