My personal opinion is that in large part, the reason people have such an aversion to nuclear power is the imagery that is associated with the word "nuclear". Bring up the word, and there is an immediate association with nuclear weapons, mushroom clouds, irradiated wastelands. Just think of how many entertainment properties use the trope of a nuclear wasteland or things glowing green, mutants and radiation beasts..etc.
We know that media significantly affects culture, so it's not that surprising to me that if how we picture nuclear anything in entertainment leaks into how people think of it in the real world.
We're also not very good about perceiving continued effects. The radiation that a coal plant spits out is in effect diffuse. Yes there's a lot, but its a lot over a time scale instead of immediately. Whereas a nuclear meltdown, well, that's quick and extremely potent. We're far more likely to react to the latter viscerally. For a parallel, consider air travel vs car travel. Air travel is far safer per miles traveled, but we still get our collective panties in a bunch over airplane accidents, despite there being far more car accidents in any given span of time.
I think nuclear power's biggest issue is image. It has far too many negative associations in most people's minds. Until that image is changed, I don't know if nuclear power is viable culturally. Maybe once we start going further out in space and nuclear becomes the only viable power source, that might change. Right now, a few RTG-powered probes aren't going to do it.
Nuclear power has a horrible image for very good reason. There are devastating consequences when something goes wrong (nobody will insure your plant), horrible economics relying on large subsidies, storage requirements that exceed the lifetimes of any previous civilisation, operators having a history of shady practices like not reporting incidents, requirement for strong centralised (large corporations) control (that's why authoritarian states like it so much).
People always point that this is all not inherent and could be fixed by enough research (and new regulations), but why would you? Renewables have none of these issues and are much cheaper. If baseload is an issue, we know how to fix this, modernize your electricity grid to be smarter (there is always wind/sun somewhere) and invest in research into storage (that would also be needed for nuclear.
I don't get the obsession with nuclear, it does not make sense on an economical, political and environmental level.
> I don't get the obsession with nuclear, it does not make sense on an economical, political and environmental level.
I have a rather simple suggestion to resolve that. Ban fossil fuels for large scale power plants and heating plants.
Under those conditions, if nuclear is more expensive, political nightmare and economical worse than the alternative then don't use nuclear. If on the other hand people just want to use renewable when its in optimal weather conditions and then use fossil fuels because a stable energy grid is more important than the ban on burning fossil fuels, then no. At that point I rather people build that expensive, political nightmare, and waste producing nuclear plant.
As the old green movement slogan went. Keep the coal in the ground. Stop the pipeline. The sun is setting on the oil industry. It time to Get out of the Combustion Engine.
The obsession with fossil fuels has run its course. Nuclear has problems but if that is the cost we have to pay in order to ban fossil fuels than I will happily pay it. I don't demand anything more than that, but I won't settle for less either. It is criminal that enlighten countries who talk large about the current climate crisis also build fresh new fossil fueled power plants as energy demands goes up. Just like nations created a treaty against blowing up nukes in the atmosphere, there need to be one against turning the planet into a desert just because its cheap and can be done with minimum political consequences.
You do have a point, but it is also what makes that particular fear not completely without merit. Over the past few decades, the number of nuclear arsenal wielding countries increased. It is genuinely hard to keep the two separated when having a nuclear power plant can easily lead to a weapon.
People don't want a potential bomb in their neighbourhood in the same way they don't want a nuclear waste dump in their neighbourhood. No sane person would blame them and that's the whole story.
Germany is sitting on decades of dirty waste and has no hole to make it disappear. It creates ridiculous costs that have been shifted to the tax payer and they will pay for it for hundreds of years. Again: no sane person wants to do that or would blame them.
Meanwhile there is renewable energy getting better and better with every year and decade.
> People don't want a potential bomb in their neighbourhood in the same way they don't want a nuclear waste dump in their neighbourhood. No sane person would blame them and that's the whole story.
The stubbornness of people like that has cost thousands if not tens of thousands of lives to air pollution, caused the destruction due to coal mining of big swathes of land and increases the risk of a resource war or other difficult geopolitical situation arising.
They are also causing tens of thousands of people to waste their lives working unproductively in energy-producing industries when they could have been doing something useful instead.
Sane or otherwise, they are just people who don't understand statistics or how energy works. They are symptoms of the general problem that society has with implementing evidence-based policies.
> The stubbornness of people like that has cost thousands if not tens of thousands of lives to air pollution
Considering that the research suggests 7,500 and 52,000 people in the US each year[0], I think you could safely say "hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost due to this argument" (considering that less than 30k lives have been lost to nuclear, including future deaths from disasters).
I want to make this abundantly clear. We're pro-nuclear because we want to save lives. Because we want to save the environment. And because we are listening to the scientists. No one is saying "nuclear vs renewables", but rather "keep nuclear on the table". We're on the same team as those that advocate for renewables (I myself strongly advocate for renewables!).
In many situations people prefer choices with worse expected value when they also have a lower variance. That's the whole point of insurances for example. Choosing more expected deaths from air pollution over lower expected deaths from nuclear accidents (but with a very large variance compared to pollution) can be rational. It just depends on your valuation function.
It can be rational. However, in this context, it is not. It is pretty clearly people who just don't understand what 6 orders of magnitude improvement of fuel density implies for pollution and efficiency. Or how rare a 1 in 30 disaster is on a global scale.
COVID-19 just dropped on us one day and everything shut down. That is a pretty good example of how scary the world is. The tiny odds of a nuclear disaster (that can still be walked away from!) is nothing compared to the baseline risks of being alive.
We'd be a lot better off right now if the anti-nuclear protests in the 80s had been anti-aeroplane-travel instead; because disease from having fast transport links has done a lot more damage than nuclear power could. Nuclear weapons notwithstanding.
Yeah it's funny how it goes with those "tiny odds" eh? Today nuclear technicians need to sleep and life in their plants because of one of these tiny odds actually happening. I don't see any solar panel technicians having to sleep at their solar panel fields.
And how about those odds of a salt mine that was perfectly good a few decades ago to store the tons of waste suddenly getting a nasty groundwater inflow and becoming a risk for groundwater? It's happening right now in Germany and has been for a few years now. All that money wasted for pumping out and clearing out this mine could be invested into REALLY clean energy but it's not. It's dumped into radioactive waste "management".
In reality A SINGLE overdue French reactor could wipe out a whole country (Luxembourg) leaving us with a nuclear wasteland right in the middle of Europe. A beautiful picture you can't draw with numbers. To make my point even clearer and because I have the feeling like I'm talking to Americans who have never even took a look at an European map. This is it: https://i.imgur.com/SVom3rl.jpg Yes, there are people all over the place.
This stuff is being kept alive for political reasons (hey here is your favourite reason for nuclear "mistakes": human error again) while it rots from within. So how it may be surprising that people do not trust the energy and those who are responsible for it politically and technically, is beyond me.
All that money wasted for this technology could have been invested into renewables which would have brought us much farther than we are today but it didn't happen because: hey nuclear lobby. Throwing even more money on it now is beyond stupid (https://www.reddit.com/r/de/comments/emc2ne/quelle_surprise_...) and I really hope the lobby money for this artificially kept alive propaganda train finally runs out just like the technology did.
The only INES 7 disaster in the last 30 years involved Fukushima being hit by an earthquake that was out of design spec and then a literal 14 meter high tsunami. I think it was something like a 1 in 600 year event. Even then they had to be negligent on their safety standards for it to cause a bad meltdown.
That was what it took to fail a 1970s designed (pre-Chernobyl, pre-computer-aided-design) nuclear reactor with upgrades. Standards haven't gotten lower since then. Luxembourg will be fine. Don't panic.
Unless they migrate to the coast with global warming. Which can be mitigated by more nuclear use!
> I think it was something like a 1 in 600 year event.
Nice how those numbers worked out eh? It looks so good on paper almost like "we're safe for 600 years" but we weren't. IT HAPPENED. So how about the chances for that reactor near Luxembourg and some satellite falling on it or something like that? What is the big number for that and how much will it be worth if it happens to the people there losing their country when it happens again?
Yeah global warming can be mitigated by technologies which have astronomically higher numbers you can wave around because nobody gives a damn if a satellite falls on a field of solar collectors. No technician has to sleep in a wind turbine because of some pandemic virus.
Face it: nuclear is dead. It's a energy source from the last century.
It was hit by tsunami because it was built in a tsunami-prone, seismically vulnerable area. A "1 in 1000 year" tsunami hitting it in first 40 years of operation sounds like a planning and engineering failure, and is why people tend to be super sceptical about safe nuclear.
How many nuclear plants are there in the world? About 500 [0]. Years between Chernobyl and Fukushima? ~30.
I expect a 1 in 1500 year event to have happened to a nuclear reactor somewhere in the world in that time.
People are skeptical because they don't have a very good grasp of statistics. I may have mentioned something about that a few posts up. Somewhere in the world something is going horribly wrong. The world is a big place.
That being said; I think there were design decisions made around Fukushima. The engineers in the 70s didn't have the capabilities we enjoy now.
Nuclear power today is about 10% of overall power generation. Were it 100%, INES 7 catastrophes would be happening every 3 years. That's before you account for wars and low safety culture plaguing significant part of the world which does not operate nuclear currently.
Engineering in 1970s was overall solid and not that much behind on material science and control systems theory than today: they could get people to the Moon and back after all. Dismissing the catastrophes to that is a dangerous hubris.
> Nuclear power today is about 10% of overall power generation. Were it 100%, INES 7 catastrophes would be happening every 3 years.
Well, no. It would probably be 0 INES 7 catastrophes because none of the new reactors would be built using pre-1980s designs.
> Engineering in 1970s was overall solid...
There is no comparison between modern engineering and 1970s engineering. Was 1970s engineering good? Yes. That is your clue at how jaw-dropping modern engineering is in terms of capabilities.
There would be fewer old failure modes in new reactor designs. There would be other failure modes (some unknown at design stage) in the new designs. Concentrated energy gradient in nuclear power generation suggests any claim of inherent safety is wishful thinking.
> There is no comparison between modern engineering and 1970s engineering.
There absolutely is, and tech people simply don't appreciate how slow the pace of progress was outside semiconductors. Outside the CAD based process flow the differences in mechanical and civil engineering to what they were are minimal. There are hardly any materials (outside of some niche exotics like PEEK) used today that were unknown in 1970s.
I'm a mining engineer. I assure you that there is no comparison between modern and 1970s capabilities. The discipline lives right next to civil engineering. Nothing to do with semiconductors.
I like how you wrote "solves that" when the product is not there, never was and probably never will be. Your article was from 2011 and the company which should have made this thing real now invests in:
Ocean thermal energy conversion and Floating wind turbines
It's where the subsidies are, flexblue took a hit from Fukushima as did other efforst but the concept does resolve the issue of availability of land and addresses a lot of cost issues via serial factory production.
Rn the most promising efforts to watch concept wise IMO are nuscale and russia/china's floating concepts.
1) There's no equivalence between a bomb and nuclear waste.
2) The waste is actually REALLY REALLY small. We're talking about a coke can per person per year. That's total waste, which only 3% of that is high level waste and needs to be buried. There's a deep misconception about the amount of waste we're talking about here. And this is before we talk about recycling, like France does (see above comment), or using waste in medicine.
3) The cost for nuclear is more similar to why the postal service costs so much/isn't profitable. This cost is manufactured.
4) No pro nuclear person is saying "nuclear vs renewables". They may say "nuclear vs fossil fuels" or "let's not remove it from the options because there's places where nuclear is a better alternative". (e.g. renewables work great in southern california and the southwest. Not always in areas where it is cloudy like the northern coasts). All pro nuclear people want is nuclear to not be removed from the portfolio of technologies.
No one is denying renewables are the way to go. The argument is "are renewables enough to kill coal and gas?" There's significant evidence to suggest no. Even if you don't believe that, that's not a good reason to remove nuclear from the table (mind you, just being on the table doesn't mean you have to use it). I'll even note that a significant number of climate researchers advocate for expansion of nuclear, including the IPCC.
4) No anti-nuclear person is saying "nuclear vs. coal" it's still such a prominent argument. Weird eh? And it's not even real. It's a huge straw man set up by the lobbyists of a dead technology picked up by some misguided fans. Here is a read up for the baseload theory that comes up at this moment in a discussion so you can save yourself a few useless lines: https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=374
> 1) Yeah, the bomb is the reactor. Waste is waste.
Citation needed. Reactors don't explode. Chernobyl is an exception to the rule. The USSR is the only country to build positive void reactors.
> 2) Posts in German
Unfortunately I don't read German. But I'll mention that again, high level waste and low level waste is treated differently.
> 3) Another post in German
Again, I don't read German. I'll just link you to this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22852228 and encourage you to read more of AcidBurn's posts, as he is a reactor scientist.
> 4) No anti-nuclear person is saying "nuclear vs. coal" it's still such a prominent argument.
I'm claiming anti-nuclear people are saying "nuclear vs renewables" In fact, it is the first sentence of this item.
But who wants to listen to scientists anyways... Not when we have our feelgood politics on our side! https://i.imgflip.com/1pk2po.jpg
1) Yeah they do not "explode" which doesn't make any difference at all for the disaster and playing the word game won't change a single thing about the problem itself.
2/3) I changed the link to english but besides that: you are here on a board for technically capable people and you can't paste that into google translate? You got the picture at least?
4) No you didn't say that, but you implied it. Just like OP and oh look it's a funny picture from The Simpsons. Guess you reached the end of your arguments. Good bye.
Chernobyl is probably the most damaging thing to come out of the Soviet Union long-term. The design of Chernobyl was crazy. I dug fairly deep into the many, many issues the reactor had when that HBO mini series aired, if anything it only made me massively more confident in our modern designs.
Chernobyl's design was deeply flawed and they knew it yet did nothing, not even tell the people operating the reactor. Then it took these operators doing everything wrong, including consciously putting the reactor in an unstable state (removing nearly all control rods way beyond regulation) and keep pushing the reactor for absolutely no rational reason to create the explosion.
And even then, had the reactor had a proper concrete enclosure like western reactors do, the fallout of the explosion would probably have been severely dimnished and mostly contained on-premise. It still would've been the worst catastrophe in the history of nuclear power generation but only a fraction of what we've had to deal with. It would've been Fukushima-like, probably (i.e. pretty damn bad, but not apocalyptic).
There is always something and that time, it was in some remote area in the Ukraine. Now imagine that something happening in one of those overdue rotting reactors in Frace. Right in the middle of Europe. What sane person would want that to happen?
And you just don't know what might happen. A few months ago you wouldn't dream of coming up with the idea that nuclear technicians need to life there now because of some pandemic. Some Chinese satellite may fall down on one of those things tomorrow.
Why bother with the risk when the alternatives are there, get better, are cheaper and won't leave you with their waste to pay for for the next hundreds and hundreds of years?
We know that media significantly affects culture, so it's not that surprising to me that if how we picture nuclear anything in entertainment leaks into how people think of it in the real world.
We're also not very good about perceiving continued effects. The radiation that a coal plant spits out is in effect diffuse. Yes there's a lot, but its a lot over a time scale instead of immediately. Whereas a nuclear meltdown, well, that's quick and extremely potent. We're far more likely to react to the latter viscerally. For a parallel, consider air travel vs car travel. Air travel is far safer per miles traveled, but we still get our collective panties in a bunch over airplane accidents, despite there being far more car accidents in any given span of time.
I think nuclear power's biggest issue is image. It has far too many negative associations in most people's minds. Until that image is changed, I don't know if nuclear power is viable culturally. Maybe once we start going further out in space and nuclear becomes the only viable power source, that might change. Right now, a few RTG-powered probes aren't going to do it.