[fireant]

> Believing we're in a climate crisis and also being anti-nuclear are mutually exclusive positions

I also used to believe that but now I'm not so sure. Nuclear carries massive and unpredictable risks on failure. We can fairly well predict what will happen on catastrophic wind turbine failure, but with nuclear it is much more difficult. And what is arguably worse is that nuclear catastrophic failures are very infrequent and so we have very hard time estimating and thinking about probabilities of them happening.

Personally I think that keeping existing reactors running is better than the alternatives, but I'm not so sure about building up new reactors compared to building more predictable green energy sources.

[leonidasrup]

Burning coal in coal power plants causes more deaths each year in Europe than the total deaths caused by Chernobyl accident (4000-8000).

"The health burden of European CPP emission-induced PM2.5, estimated with the Global Exposure Mortality Model, amounts to at least 16 800 (CI95 14 800–18 700) excess deaths per year over the European domain"

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349938542_Disease_b...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016726812...

But only nuclear accidents get the media attention, because they are big and infreqeunt. Similar to deaths caused by aircraft crashes vs deaths caused by car crashes.

[tcfhgj]

I live in Germany and dead wild animals are still burned instead of eaten because of radioactive contamination

[Dunedan]

While your statement is true, it leaves out relevant details:

There is a certain threshold for radiation exposure where if exceeded the animal isn't deemed safe for consumption anymore. The vast majority of these cases are from boars in certain areas of Germany nowadays and affect less than 1% of all killed boars [1] [2].

[1]: https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/fast-3000-verstrahlte-wildsch...

[2]: https://www.wildtierschutz-deutschland.de/_files/ugd/173a38_...

[Moldoteck]

ironically if you talk about boars, it's not because of chernobyl but nuclear weapons tests https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66665646

[Moldoteck]

it's not about belief https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

https://ourworldindata.org/low-carbon-technologies-need-far-...

docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/80580.pdf

https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2022-04/LCA_3_FINAL%20...

The question is simple, if you are afraid of nuclear, are you willing to erase any more dangerous tech? I'm not even mentioning cars which cause each 2y same nr of fatalities in Germany as Chernobyl is expected during whole lifetime per UN (or even worse if we look at updated uncsear reports)

[Cwizard]

Serious question, when has there been a serious nuclear accident? Fukushima was caused by a natural disaster that killed far more people than the nuclear failure did. Chernobyl was pure communist stupidity. This level of incompetence would never happen in a well functioning country. So that leaves Three Mile island?

Meanwhile coal kills millions each year (mostly the old and children).

And what are these predictable green alternatives? Only hydro is reliable and is heavily restricted by geo. We’d need massive breakthroughs in battery technology to make solar and wind reliable in most of the world (by population).

Look up historical weather patterns days with no sun and no wind, you need massive, massive amounts of energy storage.

[watwut]

The category of "well functioning country" is unstable. It takes two elections to make it dysfunctional.

A country can go from well functioning to disasterous shit show in 8 years.

[fireant]

My point is that since we have had so few nuclear incidents, but they have done massive damage, it is very possible that we don't actually know much worse it could get. We have only seen a few points from a distribution that could be much wider than we think. Compared to renewable failures for which we have a pretty good idea.

[Moldoteck]

oh we know. Chernobyl is pretty much the worst case scenario. It's impossible to replicate it in newer plants (fukushima being proof)

[idiotsecant]

Renewable generation is not the hard part. Renewable transmission and storage is the hard part. Its so hard, in fact, that building very expensive nuke is still much cheaper and more attainable.

[adrithmetiqa]

That’s not true. The true capture price of nuclear is much higher https://green-giraffe.com/publication/blog-post/what-capture...

[AnthonyMouse]

That link is pretty silly:

> So nuclear plants, by and large, get the market price whenever they produce (which is most of the time) and this does not equal the average price as they will be producing a higher share of total production at times of low demand (and low prices), and a smaller share of total production at times of high demand (and high prices).

The assumption here is that the price is set by only demand rather than the combination of supply and demand. Under that false assumption, generating power when demand is lower (i.e. at night) is bad. But how much solar generation is there at night, and what does that change in supply do to prices if you make solar a higher percentage of the grid?

It does the oppose of this:

> whilst the capture price for solar is often higher than the average price (thanks to power demand generally being higher during the day)

Because solar generates only during the day, in order to supply power with solar at night, you would need it to oversupply power during the day and then pay extra for storage to resolve the undersupply it leaves at night. So once you have a certain amount of solar, you end up with lower prices during the day, when solar is generating a higher proportion of the power, and higher prices after sunset.

And solar is double screwed by this. Not only does it get the soon-to-be-lower daytime prices for all of its output rather than half, its output is further regionally correlated, so that on sunny days when its output is highest, even the daytime price is lower than it is on cloudy days, because higher or lower solar output is a cause of lower or higher prices, i.e. the daytime price anti-correlates with its output.

[idiotsecant]

Your post is completely orthogonal to the point I made and also fails to account for the fact that distributed renewables have enormous capex cost in the form of transmission and storage that we just disregard. Building a nuke plant on a major transmission route doesn't require any of that.

You're arguing against a point nobody made

[Moldoteck]

"The average capacity factor for the French nuclear fleet has been, due to the optimised management of production," - lol, lmao even. Optimized management in france? Check out how much their refuel outages take vs in US and say that again