[fshafique]

"Lie" is such a click-baity triggering word to use here. Sounds more like they overstated the harm of cumulative small doses of radiation.

But, I mostly just skimmed through the beginning of the article, so maybe it gets better, like maybe the author reveals an international cabal of influential anti-nuclear activists who are holding human progress back.

[antonvs]

> Sounds more like they overstated the harm of cumulative small doses of radiation.

Not even that, they simply didn’t know because they couldn’t measure, so they took a conservative approach.

Btw you can count me in to the cabal of anti-nuclear activists. Humans simply are too greedy and incompetent to manage the technology responsibly over the long term. We’ve already irreversibly altered the biosphere with the nuclear activity we’ve engaged in so far. Time for it to stop.

[amarant]

Your not wrong, but you seem to be missing one significant detail: we have altered the biosphere even more by not engaging in nuclear activity, instead opting for less-scary-but-worse alternatives like coal, oil and gas.

[microgpt]

This could be a convincing argument 70 years ago but we have other options now - mostly batteries and renewables.

"But what about the cobalt mines?" - that damage is limited in both space and time

[antonvs]

Historically, yes. We have good alternatives now, though. What’s stopping us moving off carbon fuel is not the viability of alternatives.

[loeg]

Unless by "viability" you're completely ignoring price, I disagree (I would argue that excessively expensive solutions aren't viable). We don't have good alternatives to gas (carbon fuel) peakers yet. Nor is winter generation a solved problem. Non-nuclear carbon-free generation needs a tremendous amount of battery storage to get to 0% carbon-emitting.

[Schiendelman]

That is much, much cheaper than nuclear at today's prices.

[LorenPechtel]

Nuclear is expensive because nuclear is defined as expensive.

The problem lies with the standard of As Low As Reasonably Achievable. If you had reasonably priced nuclear power you could add more safety. Thus you have to add more safety. Thus you no longer have reasonably priced nuclear power.

And, when it comes to power it's a totally wrong standard. You should not be looking to minimize individual technology risk, you should be looking to minimize total risk of competing technologies. Making your nuclear plant safer instead drives generation to natural gas (~10x as dangerous as nuclear, plus climate effects) and oil (~10x as dangerous as natural gas, even more climate effects.) Or even coal (~10x as dangerous as oil, even more climate effects plus nasty stuff going up the stack--including emitting more radiation than would be tolerated for a nuclear plant.)

[loeg]

Up to how many hours of battery capacity?

[UltraSane]

a 100% wind solar storage grid really isn't viable.

[NetMageSCW]

Depends on transport.

[kmoser]

You're not wrong, but you seem to be missing one significant detail: if we had invested in renewable energy resources like solar and wind to begin with, we wouldn't have needed (as much) assistance from nuclear, coal, oil, and gas.

[amarant]

I didn't miss that at all! I think we should definitely build more solar and wind.

I also think we should build more nuclear. I've seen estimations saying we could supply the current grid demands with renewables in about 10 years time if we start building now. Thing is, in ten years, power demand will have doubled. So we should build renewables and nuclear. Any other plan will end up using coal oil and gas.

[kmoser]

I think you missed my point, which is that if we had invested early on (think 1970s) in wind and solar, by today they would be at a capacity such that we would need far less nuclear, coal, oil, and gas than we do currently.

[Kon5ole]

>we have altered the biosphere even more by not engaging in nuclear activity

You imply that we could have made enough nuclear plants to replace coal, oil and gas and that would have prevented the effects of fossil fuel consumption.

That's not the case. It would have been entirely impossible to make enough plants to even replace coal and oil fast enough, and even if we did, electricity is only 25% of emissions.

[Kon5ole]

Perhaps I didn't make my point clearly enough?

The claim that lack of nuclear power is to blame for global warming doesn't hold up because even in a best case scenario, nuclear power can only replace a small part of the activities that cause global warming, and it takes way too long to even replace that.

The argument that we have a choice between nuclear power or global warming is therefore either misinformed or dishonest.

We're already dealing with global warming, and as of 2026 the fastest, cheapest and most effective way to replace fossil fuel is solar power and batteries, not nuclear power.

Batteries are so far mainly deployed in cars, where they replace millions of gallons of fossil fuels from being consumed every day, but they can also effectively be deployed in homes, communities and cities. It takes days to deploy, can be mass produced and distributed to any country in the world with no issue (even North Korea and Iran) and immediately reduces fossil consumption.

Newly deployed solar panels are adding several nuclear power plants worth of new power to the world every year, and they too start working the same day and can be deployed by almost anyone, everywhere.

If we want to stop altering the biosphere by burning fossil fuels, clearly we should hurry up with batteries and solar and not spend billions and decades on nuclear.

[lisper]

The problem is that stopping nuclear activity has ancillary effects -- like increased carbon emissions -- that are potentially much more harmful than the radiation. The results of technological decisions are never independent of one another.

[PaulHoule]

Don't forget

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturally_occurring_radioactiv...

considerable amounts of low-level radiation is emitted by fossil fuel production and use as well as and construction materials.

[Zigurd]

In theory. But in fact, attempting to build nuclear power plants results in big increases in electric rates, and the supposed benefits of nuclear power end up being delayed by many years and in many cases decades.

The effect of trying and failing to build nuclear power plants on time and on budget uses up many billions in capital that could've been applied to reliable delivery of renewables.

Even the supposedly efficient French nuclear power program vastly underestimated decommissioning costs.

In other words project risk for nuclear is hideously expensive, even when you think you've dodged project risk problems, there's another whole very expensive project in decommissioning that has its own set of project risks.

[lisper]

> attempting to build nuclear power plants results in big increases in electric rates

Largely due to the costs of complying with draconian regulatory regimes.

[Zigurd]

I know a thing or two about project management and I can tell you that the modularity of modern reactor design failed to deliver on de-risking nuclear reactor construction projects. Building modules offsite seems like a good idea on the surface but the problem is that if they're delivered out of order or if they need rework you've made the on-site construction problem 3X harder and more expensive.

You might be thinking "But China!" China also over developed a number of ghost cities full of empty apartment towers so take their claims of an efficient nuclear power construction project with a grain of salt. Even in China, solar and wind projects come online faster, at a lower cost per kilowatt hour, and the projects are completed on time.

[lisper]

> the modularity of modern reactor design failed to deliver

So? Just because one particular approach failed doesn't mean it's impossible.

My father was a nuclear engineer so this is something I happen to know something about. I can tell you from speaking to my father back when he was working (from the 1970s to the 1990s), the nuclear industry was lousy with politics, and there were many, many innovative ideas (his own included) that never saw the light of day because the political pressure against doing anything new with nuclear power was insurmountable.

The anti-nuclear lobby in the U.S. successfully killed nuclear power by 1) stopping all research and development and then 2) saying, "See? We told you it couldn't be done." Well, yeah, but the reason it couldn't be done was you, you idiots. And now we have climate change to deal with as a result, so thanks for that.

[antonvs]

Why do those regimes exist, do you think?

[shakow]

Because for some reason, our societies decided that cancer caused by radiation = bad, cancer caused by air pollution = OK.

[Paradigm2020]

Because rich people would be impacted by nuclear fallout in an unlikely event but are not impacted by fallout of daily coal/gas etc burning...

Also can read up on the bootleggers and baptist scenario that happened between the oil industry and greenpeace...

[UltraSane]

Global CO2 emissions would be drastically lower if people hadn't opposed nuclear energy so irrationally. No other technology can produce 1.2GW of zero CO2 electricity anywhere you want.