Somehow that’s an often missed aspect of this. Yeah, ditching coal has a wide array of nice side effects. It has killed many, many more than the world’s nuclear accidents.
It's worse than that, it's every 3 to 7 hours of fossil fuel pollution roughly equaling the total death toll of all nuclear power accidents in history (around 4000 indirectly, most from cancer resulting from Chernobyl - but there's only around 100 total in a direct way).
I think that depends on where you draw the line around the term "coal plant." There have been plenty of coal ash disasters that result in years of exclusion (for purposes of habitation, drinking water, fishing, etc.)[1][2][3][4]
Have you ever seen the common medical advice that pregnant women should avoid eating more than a few servings of seafood every week, and avoid certain kinds entirely, because they’re all contaminated with mercury? A huge portion of that mercury comes from burning coal. How’s that for an exclusion zone?
Nature would enjoy that. The economy not so much, depending on location. Around San Onofre (decommissioned now), a 30 mile Chernobyl-size exclusion zone would cover big chunks of Orange County and San Diego County. The US government recommended a 50 mile exclusion zone around Fukushima. 50 miles would cover southern Los Angeles and millions of people.
So The "worst case scenario" for nuclear power is creating a new wildlife park free from human interference [and emptying out half of Los Angeles]
If you look at net damage to the planet, fossil fuel burning energy sources kill literally 8 million+ people a year. Coal plants are vastly more radioactive than nuclear plants, and the effects of burning coal will have a vastly outsized share of damage to the planet in the long than nuclear. Its effects are just less concentrated to a single area.
And not all nuclear plants are the same. I don’t think it’s reasonable at all to compare Chernobyl to modern reactor designs, just because they both use the word “nuclear”.
Apso not sure if you are including coal mining, and all of the deaths and negative health outcomes as a result of the industry
Most of the exclusion zone is political nonsense. And overall coal has made much more areas much worse to live in. I rather live in the exclusion zone then next many coal plants.
Also there is a single case that happened from a non-western design. When looking at western countries like France, it shows how incredibly safe the whole industry is end to end.
Chernobyl's political nonsense was mostly down to the USSR wanting to deny that anything had, or possibly could, go wrong; if anything, the exclusion zone is the opposite of the western nonsense about nuclear power.
It's our unique freedom-themed nonsense, not the Soviet dictatorial-nonsense, which means we have radiation standards strict enough that it's not possible to convert a coal plant into a nuclear plant without first performing a nuclear decontamination process due to all the radioisotopes in the coal.
> When looking at western countries like France, it shows how incredibly safe the whole industry is end to end.
Relative to coal, absolutely. But don't assume western countries are immune to propaganda on these things, nuclear reactors are there for the spicy atoms, not the price tag or public safety.
Nuclear plans have objectively made power generation save and clean. When they were built in the 1960-1990s the were objectively the best and cleanest energy that saved a gigantic amount of lives.
The exclusion zone is nonsense because many that live in that zone has lower cancer rates then those outside. The idea is based on a invalid assumption about radiation an a linear relationship between radiation and harm. An I do think the standards we apply are to extreme in many cases mostly dating back to this misunderstanding about radiation.
As for the locality to nuclear plants and cancer, this is as far as I know been shown in many countries and as far as I know at least can mostly be explained by nuclear plants usually being built in industrial areas that often used to have coal plants and other industry going on.
> nuclear reactors are there for the spicy atoms, not the price tag or public safety.
Not sure what 'spicy' means in this context. In terms of price tag they are objectively a fantastic deal if built in larger numbers. Even in places where they were not built in the numbers they did in France, they are good life time deal, and give relativity stable long term prices.
And they don't have to be 'there' for public safety, they just need a good record on public safety and they do.
In places like Austria and Germany we have many known cases where a nuclear plant was planned and was prevented by activists, only to be replaced by coal, in both cases impacting 10000s of lives being worse financially in the long term.
Because coal desposits in the ground have bits of Uranium and Thorium which are radioactive, they get concentrated in coal fly ash, and blow out the chimney in the smoke from a coal power plant, and kill people, they leach into the soil and waterways, and kill people.
That is, nuclear power plants only kill people by radioactivity in the case of an accident. Coal power plants do it in normal operation. As well as coal dust having a PM2.5 dust problem which kills people.
Make it about nuclear vs coal because people say coal is better than nuclear because it's not scary radiation, and it actually is.
> "Both are bad"
Nuclear generates more power from a Kg of fuel, with less CO2 pollution and fewer deaths. It's not bad, but even if it was bad it's not "both sides", it's much less bad.
Nuclear energy can be used to generate 24x7 energy as the grid-power to supply energy to a country whereas Solar and Wind require batteries.
I think that the last time I checked, when you take into factor the CO2 emissions and everything, Nuclear is the best source of Energy.
> I don’t think nuclear is the answer to things
I think that I am interested in seeing thorium based reactors or development with that too. That being said, Nuclear feels like the answer to me.
Feel free to correct me if you think I am wrong but I don't think that there is any better form of energy source than nuclear when you factor in everything.
Daytime doesn't mean the sun is out; the UK has heavy cloud cover and sunset near 4pm in mid-winter. https://grid.iamkate.com/ shows the UK is currently getting 10% of grid power from Solar at 3:30pm in March.
> Batteries are cheaper and faster to make in large quantities.
Yes I agree but their extraction at scale is still very C02 Expensive.
> No economy on the planet needs 24/7 peak power production. The times humans work correspond nicely with the times the sun is out.
With Nuclear energy, let's face it. If you have a nuclear plant running, the input is just some uranium which we have plenty of. Thereotically we have no problem with running at peak power production.
You are also forgetting that Sun can be blocked during times of rains and Wind is unpredictable as well.
If you can work with solar panels only that's really really great. Unfortunately that's not how the world works or how I see it function :(
You are forgetting that markets operate after work and the late night culture and so many other things. You need lights at energy and quite a decent bit. You are also forgetting that if we ever get Electric vehicles then we would need energy during late night as well.
A lot of energy in general is still needed during nights and would we be still burning coal for that?
With all of this, I am not sure why you'd not like Nuclear?
Respectfully, Can you tell me more about it because I genuinely don't know how you think Nuclear energy is bad. It's one of the cleanest forms of energy.
Is there any particular reason why you think Nuclear is bad in all honesty as its worth having a discussion here? Why do you feel Nuclear Energy is a hazard?
I understand if you feel Chernobyl or any event makes it sound dangerous but rather, Please take a look at this data on the number of death rates per unit of electricity production[0]
Oil is roughly 615x more deadly than nuclear. Nuclear, Solar and Wind (the renewables) are all less deadly and are 0.03,0.02 and 0.04 respectively and nuclear is a reliable source of energy source which can be used in actual generation.
Nuclear is very much a green energy. I'd like to hear your opinion about it.
Nuclear plants are great if they actually happen to get built and every person designing and operating them and storing the waste never makes a single mistake
> every person designing and operating them and storing the waste never makes a single mistake
Even within Chernobyl Disaster, it was a series of mistakes which led to the full scale disaster IIRC so it isn't as if a single mistake
Also Thorium based Nuclear Reactors wouldn't have this issue from what I understand as in the idea of explosions or anything,
> Nuclear plants are great if they actually happen to get built
I get this part but shouldn't this mean that people should be more vocal about support for Nuclear. We are vocal about support for Solar, might as well be vocal about support for Nuclear and Solar both too?
Not cost competitive with solar+batteries in many locales (less so the closer to the poles), and no learning curve, if anything a negative learning curve, nuclear never was more expensive than new nuclear.
And off course societal (and geopolitical) acceptance issues.
>And off course societal (and geopolitical) acceptance issues.
Right. One thing I've rarely heard emphasized is that, while nuclear power is not at all the same as nuclear weapons, it's still infrastructure that can be repurposed from one to the other. A world where nuclear is the predominant base load power source is a world where nuclear weapons are more accessible due to the proliferation of sibling technologies.
The cost competitiveness and societal issues make sense (though I suspect some of the cost is being externalized in terms of materials extraction and manufacturing).
I don’t understand what you mean by “no learning curve”. Do you mean that the learning curve is particularly steep for plant operators?
We make too few nuclear power plants for them to have a noticeable learning curve, and recently each subsequent one ends up more expensive than the latest, notably because of safety regulation. Korea and I think China had the best success in that regard (and France in the 80s) by being able to make real series, but you don't really see those now except maybe China.
It’s super expensive and it takes forever to build—so much so that fossil fuel companies fund “libertarian” voices to use it as an attack on environmentalists because nuclear means decades of unabated fossil fuel sales. If you commit to solar or wind, you start cutting into their business within as little as months.