Partly I think nuclear triggers a cognitive bias where humans will tolerate ongoing low-level shittiness, but really struggle with large catastrophes, even if the catastrophe is far less damaging than the ongoing low-level damage.
However, I think the resistance is also because the nature of the catastrophe is different. Have coal or gas plants ever created a Chernobyl-style exclusion zone? I know that mining/drilling are incredibly damaging to the environment, but theoretically work is done to mitigate/restore the areas. Of course, they're essentially turning the entire planet (or large, currently-inhabited swaths of it anyway) into an exclusion zone, but unfortunately there is another cognitive bias humans have where we under-rate long-term risks.
I've been a nuclear skeptic, but gradually I'm coming around to it. At this point the main questions I have are whether it can be done cheap enough. It seems like price is really driving renewable adoption at this point, so maybe green policies should focus on subsidizing storage and nuclear instead?
Burning coal creates fly ash which needs to be stored somewhere, usually large ponds near the power plant. In Tennessee in 2008 a dike ruptured and released 1.1 billion gallons of coal fly ash slurry that flowed into nearby rivers that drained into the Tennessee River. No-one was injured in the initial spill, but people contracted to clean it up developed cancers from being exposed to the toxic coal ash, 300 people died within 10 years after the accident.
It is considered the largest industrial spill in US history.
As stated that not that unusual. At 45 a man has a 0.3285% chance of death per year at 55 that bumps to 0.7766%. https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html 3 deaths per year out of 900 works out to 0.3333%. So, depending on the age of workers that’s anything for fairly normal to low.
As time goes on, more workers are experiencing health effects that might be due to their years of work cleaning up the spill:
>...More than 30 cleanup workers at the December 2008 TVA Kingston Fossil Fuel Power Plant coal ash spill are dead and at least 200 are sick or dying — all with common ailments known to be caused by long-term exposure to arsenic, radium and the host of other toxins and metals found in the ash.
That is only worth noting if you bring it along with a more detailed account of accident rates by government-owned facilities as compared to privately owned facilities.
Until then it's just an anecdotal bit of snark that serves a political world view without the evidence necessary to evaluate it.
Why is that worth noting? I feel like you're being intentionally ambiguous by leaving unstated implications.
Do you believe public operation had an impact on safety? Better or worse, and based on what evidence? If neither, how is your statement relevant to the discussion?
I don't know why the parent poster brought it up, but it does seem relevant to me. The government isn't going after quick profits, so you can't blame it on that. You might be able to blame profits if it had been a private corporation though.
The public and private sectors are, in principle, equally capable of incompetence; the causes tend to be somewhat different, but the outcome can be the same.
Profits play a massive factor in why governments tend to be incompetent.
What do you think taxes are? They're a wealth transfer without option from everyone else to those in the employ of government.
A whole bunch of people are profit from government expenditure, we even have a word for a special type of fraud about government expenditure: pork barelling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_barrel
But, government run operations tend he notorious for incompetence for a few reasons, others have done a better job of detailing:
In 2013, an ammonium nitrate storage facility exploded (1). In 2014, a leaky storage container poisoned a river in West Virginia (2).
It's instructive to consider some thought experiments/scenarios:
What if...
a) Both were run by the government. In this case you'd have people of certain political parties screaming about government incompetence, and how the best solution would be to eliminate regulations and privatize, since competition somehow guarantees better results.
b) Foreigners deliberately engineered both situations, an act of terrorism. In which case as certain administrations after 9/11, the US might pick some country that didn't have anything to do with it and go to war.
c) Private companies were responsible. This is actually the case and the collective attitude was generally "eh, shit happens, private companies just trying to run a business". Just declare bankruptcy and walk. No real changes made in either case.
>Partly I think nuclear triggers a cognitive bias where humans will tolerate ongoing low-level shittiness, but really struggle with large catastrophes, even if the catastrophe is far less damaging than the ongoing low-level damage.
How come hydroelectric dams don't get treated this way? In 2019 a dam in Brazil had a catastrophic failure that cost the lives of 270 people. In 2019! In 1975 a dam failed in China and the death toll is estimated between 80,000 and 240,000.
All of this ignores the ecosystem destruction that building a dam and flooding a valley does. All of that plant life will die and the carbon goes back into the cycle.
Yet I don't see hydroelectric dams getting nearly as much push back from activists. Why?
Hydro disasters have been large, but are tangible/sensible, immediate, and resolve relatively quickly (days for rescue, months for recovery, possibly a few years for rebuilding).
Banqiao is now home to 17 million people (after 40 years, largely achieved within a decade or so). Meantime, Chernobyl still hasn't seen complete containment (after 34 years), and Fukushima hasn't begun initial cleanup (after 9 years). The two nuclear sites will be obligatory nature preserves for centuries, containing still-lethal risks.
The specific failings at Banqiao were virtually all managerial and political, not technical; poor engineering, inadequate safety provisions, underestimated environmental and operational risks, poor contingency planning, unforseen perfect storm (literally), severed communications, insufficient warnings, no community disaster preparation, inadequate rescue and recovery. None of these failures are specific to hydro, all apply to nuclear power, and as non-engineering problems there is no technical fix that makes them go away.
In Banqiao, about 25,000 people died in the immediate innundation. Another 150,000 died in the following weeks of starvation and disease. There's no great mystery as to how such deaths are avoided: floodwaters are mitigated by high ground and evacuation centres; starvation and disease by food, water, and medical stocks; and rescue & recovery by trained teams and equipment. Reestablishment of communications, transport, and utilities is critical.
China at the time was desperately poor, politically dysfunctional, and gambled hugely on risk and lost. Other major hydro disasters tend to share these traits.
As do many regions looking to nuclear power for salvation.
> How come hydroelectric dams don't get treated this way? In 2019 a dam in Brazil had a catastrophic failure that cost the lives of 270 people.
Brumadinho wasn't a hydroelectric dam; it was a dam containing leftovers from iron mining (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brumadinho_dam_disaster for details). Apparently, this kind of dam has a very different design from hydroelectric dams (according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tailings_dam, "Unlike water retention dams, a tailings dam is raised in succession throughout the life of the particular mine.").
Hydroelectric dams are huge infrastructure projects, and they're almost impossible to build these days because of political concerns with huge public pushback. France and Finland have built nuclear reactors recently. When was their last hydro dams built?
China got huge pushback from both environmental and human rights organizations with diplomatic tensions. Ethopia is on the brink of war because of their huge hydro project.
Has the Gulf of Mexico recovered from deepwater horizon? How many ecosystems were lost permanently? Animals living in the exclusion zone have a life expectancy 30% lower than those in the surrounding area (based on the last paper I read about the topic) so it's not an acceptable risk for humans but it's still peanuts compared to the damage that single spill did to the Gulf ecosystem.
It's an extension of the cognitive bias you point out. Just because we humans find the area too risky to inhabit afterwards doesn't mean that the damage made a meaningful impact on the survivability of our planet.
It definitely seems like most people are dismissive of this point because they think technology has somehow advanced to the point where we will never be able to have accidents.
They're common enough that the risks are known to coal-towns. But they're uncommon enough that most people don't seem to know about them. There are many coal-seam fires across the world, all of which take decades (or centuries) before the fires are expected to burn out.
In contrast, nuclear disasters are so rare that pretty much every nuclear disaster is known by everyone. Nuclear disasters are your "black swan" event, so to speak.
I doubt there's any conspiracy, or detractors to the coal-seam fires. Its just not a very well known fact.
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There are literally hundreds of coal seam fires around the world right now. Small enough to be obscure, large enough to not catch the attention of anybody looking for novelties.
I think you have a point that the drama of evacuating a city sears nuclear disasters into our minds as uniquely damaging.
At the same time, single mining disasters have caused hundreds of deaths many times over the last century. Also, black lung killed 25,000 people in 2013 alone. The death toll from the coal industry, even in very immediate, direct terms, is still higher than nuclear.
Existing already-operating nuclear plants can barely compete with cheap fracked gas in the United States. Capital investment in new nuclear is never going to pencil for a private operator without carbon taxes or enormous price drops.
The existing regulatory structure for nuclear power was designed for the previous generation of reactors. I don’t have deep knowledge in this area, but it’s clear to me that more modern designs have very different risk profiles, and the regulatory structure should change to reflect that. This should reduce the compliance cost, which is a very large portion of the initial and operational costs of nuclear power.
In short - nukes are expensive now because they’re an extremely regulated industry. New designs are much safer and new regulation for them should therefore have much lower compliance costs.
It's not just that "The existing regulatory structure for nuclear power was designed for the previous generation of reactors."
It was designed specifically to bankrupt them. It was designed to make them unprofitable.
Just changing an ordinary light bulb in a nuclear power plant is all sorts of certification and paperwork.
There was a ratchet effect on regulations. You could always add more, but nobody would take responsibility for removing regulations. The existence of regulations makes the reactors seem even more terrifying (because why else need the regulations) and then the resulting terror was used to justify more regulations.
That's not quite why rigorous regulations were put in place.
There have been thousands of tanker oil spills, 3,000,000 gallons of oil spilled from US pipelines each year, hundreds of coal-ash spills...
In that context, Nuclear wasn't over-regulated, other power sources are severely, dangerously under-regulated. The excellent safety record of Nuclear points towards the regulations being rather effective.
I will grant that those regulations are out-dated. Reactors designs are different now, and probably need to be streamlined. But rigorous regulations regarding multiple redundancies, safety checks, emergency drills, meticulous documentation of all practices & procedures performed... these things shouldn't go away.
>That's not quite why rigorous regulations were put in place.
Yes it is. Greenpeace and the like paraded Chernobyl and three mile island around and because it was the 70s and 80s and pollution was a big problem politicians tripped over each other to be seen Doing Something (TM) and that's more or less how we got the current regulatory environment. Of course their intentions were good but it's perfectly possible to both have good intentions and be wrong.
No, really, it isn't. Part of the picture? Sure. But here is literally the history of nuclear regulation [0]
You'll find a tremendous amount of regulation occured long before that time. And yes, in the wake of Chernobyl and our near miss at 3 Mile Island, things were tightened up more, but the lack of new plants was as much about negative public perception than anything else, including very strong coal and gas lobbies that had a vested interest in keeping nuclear energy's market share as low as possible. In the face of multi billion dollar entrenched interests, you over estimate the impact of small non profits. If you really think the industry is over regulated, blame those entrenched interests, not some vocal minority and NIMBY folks.
You also failed to address the point about the excellent safety record of a well-regulated nuclear industry compared to the awful record of significantly less regulated power sources.
Even if you are right about the high cost of regulations, what has that achieved? It has achieved a product that actually prices in the true cost, unlike all of these slipshod practices with oil or coal, where the cost of their incredibly awful safety records is passed indirectly on to everyone. So even if you're right, you've simply described the correct way things should work: potentially unsafe products should have a lot of upfront costs to ensure safety. If we all had to pay for the full environmental impacts of such choices up front, we'd be hammering down the doors of nuclear power to get plants built because, done right, it is safer and cheaper than pricing those same consequences into coal and oil.
The existing regulatory structure was designed specifically to stop nuclear power plants from doing things like running all the sets of redundant control and monitoring wiring through a single narrow space, filling that wiring space with flammable foam, and then testing the foam for air leaks with a candle when the plant was in operation. (This is not a hypothetical example - it actually happened in the US during the golden era of nuclear power, indeed I think it may have even been standard practice across multiple plants, and it very nearly caused a serious accident when the inevitable happened.)
I know the Trump administration has tinkered with adding more flexibility to the regulations covering fire protection and safety in nuclear plants in order to try and encourage more economical new nuclear power plants with modernized designs, but it hasn't really helped because the tradeoff for being able to deviate from the rigid rules is that the companies building them have to do a bunch of work to show that their new designs achieve the same safety goals.
> I don’t have deep knowledge in this area, but it’s clear to me that more modern designs have very different risk profiles
There are lots of claims of that, but many of those claims sound exactly the same as the ones made about he "safe Japanese nuclear industry" prior to Fukushima.
Here's a take by someone who actually has very deep knowledge on the subject:
>I oversaw the U.S. nuclear power industry. Now I think it should be banned. The danger from climate change no longer outweighs the risks of nuclear accident
That sounds like an indictment of the commercial industry and deep corruption of US regulatory bodies. Its not an indictment of nuclear itself. The new designs are fundamentally safer, but i can see the value in the aegument that its not worth trying in as risky and corrupted a regulatory environment as the United States without significant political change first.
It's the exact opposite of your claim. In it he points out how the regulator actively worked to enable the nuclear industry in the US.
It's also worth nothing that this didn't appear to be corruption by any conventional definition. It seems more like the regulators believed that nuclear power was beneficial and acted based on that belief rather than a particular commercial motive.
Instead of a carbon tax, the government should simply treat gas similar to what many governments did before to nuclear. Forbid the construction of new ones, and let the planned life expectancy of existing plants be final.
When they did that to nuclear it worked wonders in getting people to invest. After all, people then knew that there would be vacant spots in the energy market at very predictable dates. Telling a market that in X year there will be Y amount of demand not being fulfilled, and a main competitor gone, and someone will want to fill it. The price will be based on how cheap the non-fossil fueled alternatives can be made when competing against each other.
Another part is that people are distrustful, especially when previous promises were broken, and as far as I know, before each major accident (Chernobyl, Fukushima) happened, it was said that such an accident can never happen.
That brings into doubt any promise of future safety.
No one except the Soviet Union said the Chernobyl style plants were reasonable designs. That kind of design would have been illegal to build anywhere else in the world.
No one ever promised that there would never be a nuclear accident - that would be unrealistic for any power source. But historically nuclear power has been safer than all the alternatives that were available. (For example, nuclear power has saved hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives that would have been lost if coal plants had been built instead.)
>Have coal or gas plants ever created a Chernobyl-style exclusion zone?
Coal extraction has created far more land where you can't drink the well water and probably would be unwise to eat any plants or animals raised on the land.
Ongoing shittiness is predictable and easy to understand. We've survived so far, surely we can survive if it gets just a little worse. Big disasters are unpredictable and hard to understand. One of those could end the world at any time. AFAICT that's the whole reason people are more afraid of them.
> Big disasters are unpredictable and hard to understand. One of those could end the world at any time.
In the context of nuclear reactors, Fukushima and Chernobyl are pretty much the worst case scenario. A large nuclear disaster is very disruptive to the immediate area but it would not "end the world" in any sense.
I'm pessimistic but the only way that can end the world is if we really want to. It would be very similar to a nuclear war. At some point you have caused so much damage there is no point in further fighting. The only reason why the world would end at that point is that the remaining people want it to end at all costs.
Well said. I had a small version of this debate with someone I know who posts political stuff on FB, who pointed out in absolutist fashion that the poor failure modes of nuclear and the regular emissions from dirtier sources are both bad, and we need something without either downside.
Literally true but has a bit of "perfect as the enemy of the good" to it. I know absolutely nothing about the challenges involved in updating existing infrastructure to a different source but it seems like an immense challenge, and not at all black and white.
>> it seems like price is really driving renewable adoption at this point.
Another article fresh from Wired about the aging solar panel mess and the toxic waste they're leaving behind:
Solar panels are an increasingly important source of renewable power that will play an essential role in fighting climate change. They are also complex pieces of technology that become big, bulky sheets of electronic waste at the end of their lives—and right now, most of the world doesn’t have a plan for dealing with that.
But we’ll need to develop one soon, because the solar e-waste glut is coming. By 2050, the International Renewable Energy Agency projects that up to 78 million metric tons of solar panels will have reached the end of their life, and that the world will be generating about 6 million metric tons of new solar e-waste annually. While the latter number is a small fraction of the total e-waste humanity produces each year, standard electronics recycling methods don’t cut it for solar panels. Recovering the most valuable materials from one, including silver and silicon, requires bespoke recycling solutions. And if we fail to develop those solutions along with policies that support their widespread adoption, we already know what will happen.
People seem to think solar and wind and electric power don't come with equally damaging aspects to the environment.
Remember in the 1970's and 80's when people thought plastic was the greatest thing on earth? We can save the trees now!! People started using plastic for everything. People stopped using paper bags at grocery stores. People opted for Tupperware instead of glass bowls and containers and on and on. We all thought we were saving the world by using plastic for everything.
Apparently we were dead wrong about plastic and not look at what we've sown? Huge plastic floating islands in the oceans. Plastic debris washing ashore on distant islands, killing the entire ecosystems.
Price is all good and fine, but the long term ramifications of renewable energy we still don't know about.
Gas no, but coal and other burning based fuels create similar hazards, in addition to nasty waste products and mining related pollution.
Coal spreads radioactive ash and various noxious chemicals. In my area of the country, many lakes were “killed” by coal related pollution from the Midwest in the 70s and 80s, for example.
Nuclear waste disposal is a real issue that needs to be deal with, but overall the technology has potential to be much better than it is today.
You hit on a really important point here, the notion of "dread risk"[1]. The public tends to poorly characterize and amortize the different degrees of risk associated with different activities, due to biases in how we perceive the risk of extreme or rare events. Simply running the numbers, it's far more likely for the average American to die in a car accident (or even, probably a plane accident, even given how rare they are!) than for the same person to ever be impacted by a nuclear meltdown, or a terrorist attack, etc. And yet, NIMBY-ism runs rampant while there are quite active political voices which argue against mandating seatbelts (I guess less so in the year 2020), helmets for motorcyclists, etc.
Sure. Centralia PA is now uninhabitable because of coal mining and on a smaller scale you’ve got things like the TVA fly ash spill that caused widespread environmental damage.
People tie nuclear power to nuclear bombs. They think, consciously or subconsciously, that they're some kind of slowed down nuclear explosions, and one day there will be a mushroom cloud turning the area into glass.
Yeah, the experts say it can't happen, but how do we know they're not arrogant Jurassic Park style fools?
> However, I think the resistance is also because the nature of the catastrophe is different. Have coal or gas plants ever created a Chernobyl-style exclusion zone?
Indirectly, yes. I think that rising sea levels due to climate change effectively does the same thing by making once-habitable coastal areas effectively uninhabitable.
> Partly I think nuclear triggers a cognitive bias where humans will tolerate ongoing low-level shittiness, but really struggle with large catastrophes, even if the catastrophe is far less damaging than the ongoing low-level damage.
Much like how low level corruption can be absolutely devastating to a democracy over time versus a high profile scandal or two which can be dealt with with urgency and clearer solutions.
However, I think the resistance is also because the nature of the catastrophe is different. Have coal or gas plants ever created a Chernobyl-style exclusion zone? I know that mining/drilling are incredibly damaging to the environment, but theoretically work is done to mitigate/restore the areas. Of course, they're essentially turning the entire planet (or large, currently-inhabited swaths of it anyway) into an exclusion zone, but unfortunately there is another cognitive bias humans have where we under-rate long-term risks.
I've been a nuclear skeptic, but gradually I'm coming around to it. At this point the main questions I have are whether it can be done cheap enough. It seems like price is really driving renewable adoption at this point, so maybe green policies should focus on subsidizing storage and nuclear instead?