I always feel like I’m taking fucking crazy pill when we talk about nuclear energy.
Are we forgetting Chernoble, 3 mile island, or even more recenlty fukishima?
Sure, nuclear energy is great, cheap and reliable… but IF something goes catastrophically wrong, like I dunno… earth quakes, hurricanes, tornados, floods, etc (IE things we can’t really plan for) you run the risk of not being able to fix it easily…
I guess I"m not a huge fan of making large swaths of the earth uninhabital if shit goes sideways.
Uninhabitable by humans. Chernobyl created a nature preserve in an instant. The coal pollution you’ve inhaled has affected you more than all 3 of these nuclear disasters.
This was true a decade ago but since then renewables have plummeted in price. Solar is 5x cheaper than it was a decade ago. Nuclear, meanwhile, has gone up in price by 50%.
Where are you going to get all the materials for global energy battery storage boss man?
We’re not talking about storing a couple Kw here and there for each household, there is also industry energy requirements.
Once we start producing batteries for the kind of storage the price of lithium will skyrocket, and you’re in the same, maybe even worse boat of nuclear.
Honestly your best bet is both, idk why you’re so scared of nuclear. If one of these battery storage centres goes up in flames, the amount of toxins released would be disastrous for anyone nearby. And lithium doesn’t really stop once the reaction starts.
There are other battery technologies in the works, which would be environmentally more sound, and be far far cheaper. But it’s not ready yet.
There aren’t “large swaths of thr earth” that aren’t inhabitable because of nuclear. Nuclear kills less people than coal mining - where hundreds of people dying during one catastrophe happens. Renewables aren’t a solution for every country either and cover large swaths of land you mentioned. Hydro also has a huge effect on the environment, despite being the “most green” solution (unless you count the concrete needed to build dams).
Nuclear should be the default. It’s not “profitable” for the people building them who think short term.
There are currently 401 operational nuclear power plants worldwide, and you’ve managed to list three (with three mile island not even breaching facilty containment) accidents in 70 years of nuclear energy exploitation. If that doesn’t vouch for safety and reliability of nuclear, I don’t know what does. Unlearn cold war hysteria.
Anti nuclear was from a time when you couldn’t learn how it works on the internet and people were scared of nuclear weapons and thought power plants were just thinly veiled bomb factories
Are we forgetting about airplane catastrophes every time we fly? Or do we live in fear of flying, despite the risk of getting injured being significantly less than when driving a car?
An airplane crash doesn’t directly impact people completely unrelated to the airplane. Nuclear radiation has no known boundary. Just look at China being pissed at Japan right now for releasing water back into the ocean.
This is like the covid argument. I don’t want to be put in danger by other’s decisions. If you want to fly/drive/go out without covid protection, whatever high-risk activity, don’t force it on me.
Ironically, burning fossil fuels is actually making large swaths of the earth uninhabitable. Even if you include nuclear disasters nuclear is outrageously safe
Chernobyl right now is an awesome nature preserve thanks to humans being gone. The entire area has been slowly moving back to its original state with even wolves moving back. That last bit is important as wolves have a huge influence on stability in natural habitats.
I know, silver linings, but still.
To the point: nuclear energy doesn’t need to be that bad. Well designed reactor are pretty much safe, and toxic end products are relatively little and manageable in comparison to gas and coal reactors. Chernobyl just was a shit reactor managed by idiots.
Ironically, because of their desig, nuclear power plants do not emit any radiation while coal and oill reactors do emit radiation coming from their fuels. That adds to all the other pollution classic power plants emit.
Then there are other fuels that could / should be used to avoid the “we don’t want people to have plutonium” issue.
Then the two big alternative energy generators wind and solar both have their own issues. No wind? No power. Night? No power. Clouds? No power. Wind farms kill birds. Solar panels require replacement every x amount of years because they degrade. The “no power” problem require huge batteries, or if you’re lucky, an entire lake to store that energy but now that late basically can’t be used for anything else and won’t be able to sustain any life.
Then finally: in comparison, nuclear energy generates enormous amounts of power where wind and solar generates very little. Humanity needs huge amounts of power to live.
Nuclear power plants take a long time to build but then give us huge amounts of power for as long as we need it to. If we really want to move away from CO2 emitting power generation, which we really really really do, I really think we can’t ignore nuclear energy
That’s fair, but you are assuming that the US, or any other nation with a nuclear plant will be run by competent people. I don’t have that faith. Perhaps because I’m pessamistic, but perhaps because I see people like Trump getting elected, or the rise of right wing, anti science, governments getting elected across the globe.
Ukraine likely wasn’t thinking they would be invaded by their neighbor and neighboring countries are now put at risk because of one rogue nation attacking their neighbor.
My problem with nuclear is that IF shit goes sideways, you can’t put that genie back in the bottle. I just watched a documentary on Fukishima, and despite the fact it was built on the ocean, it’s a nightmare of engineering to try to contain the shit show…
Look, I know I’m not going to convince this group that I’m right, but your also not going to convince me that I’m wrong… because you can’t engineer end users or nature out of the discussion. They are always wild cards.
All of these items are accounted for when feasibility studies are conducted for new plants (and even old plants up for license renewal). Chernobyl was due to the type of reactor (which doesn’t exist in the US), 3 Mile Island resulted in no adverse effects to health or environment and led to more stringent training and equipment upgrades, and Fukushima was built in a poorly selected location.
Of course there’s risk involved with nuclear, but we mitigate those risks appropriately. We don’t stop driving cars because of deadly accidents - we engineer safety systems to mitigate risk.
The safety of a region is fairly predictable even if the individual disasters aren’t as predictable. If you don’t build on fault lines, earth quakes aren’t generally going to be a risk. If you don’t build in tornado alley, or on the coast, tornadoes and hurricanes aren’t going to be a risk. If you build at higher elevations, flooding isn’t going to be a risk, etc.
And even with those nuclear disasters (that we’ve now learned from and can design reactors to prevent), nuclear has a far, far, far lower death rate per kWh of energy than all fossil fuels. The cost of continued fossil fuel use is already killing the planet, and already too high of a cost. We need to be switching away as fast as we possibly can, and nuclear is a viable alternative among many.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but coal powered plants have caused more cancer than any of those events on their own and when operated safely to modern standards they have a very low to no risk of release whereas coal plants release pollutants by design. Nuclear waste is in a solid state so it’s far easier to dispose of underground vs coal which immediately gets put into the atmosphere
It’s all pretty much been said already, but I feel like I’m taking crazy pills when I read takes like yours.
You mention the possibility of things going wrong with nuclear, but you don’t mention the things currently going wrong with fossil fuels. Coal is killing people right now, and actively “making large swaths of the earth uninhabital”.
Depending on your source, nuclear is either the safest or second safest energy production method, even when including Chernobyl and Fukushima.
Nuclear is not the end goal of power generation, but it is the best we have right now.
My goal is not really to turn this into a discussion, but I feel like your concerns might be based on common misconceptions about nuclear energy.
Chornobyl (Ukrainian spelling) was such a big disaster because it was the first major nuclear disaster. The reactor was built without hands-on experience with the consequences of a nuclear disaster driving the design of the facility itself. We have since learnt a lot about proper design of nuclear reactors and about how to respond to any incidents.
The Fukushima reactor was designed with that knowledge in mind, but the event was a perfect shitstorm consisting of both an earthquake and a tsunami hitting the facility at the same time. And even though the local population might disagree, the disaster was arguably less serious than Chornobyl was. Due in large part to a better design and proper disaster response.
We’re more capable than ever of modeling and simulating natural disasters, so I’d argue we acutally CAN plan for most of those. Any disaster we can’t plan for nowadays is likely to also fuck up an area even worse than the resulting nuclear disaster would.
But probably the most important thing to mention is that nuclear power is a lot more diverse in the modern world. Gone are the days that uranium fission reactors are the norm. They were only popular because they serve a secondary purpose of creating resources for nuclear weapons, in addition to their power generation. With molten salt reactors, thorium-based reactors and SMR (small modular reactors) there’s really not a good reason to build any more “classic” nuclear reactors other than continuing the production of nuclear weapons, which I hope we can just stop doing.
The best way to prevent large scale incidents is to prevent large scale reactors, which is why there’s so much interest in SMR lately.
All in all, we likely can’t fully transition to renewables fast enough without the use of nuclear power as an intermediary. But the actual dangers with modern designs are far fewer than they used to be and we should take care not to give in to irrational fears too much.
To put things into perspective: We currently have no way of stopping a major solar storm that would thouroughly disrupt all modern life, nor can we stop large asteroids heading our way. Both are potentially planet-ending disasters, but the possibility that they might occur doesn’t stop us from trying to build a better earth for the future, right?
There are talks about civil war in the US and fears of a further escalation of the war in Ukraine, while Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is in the war zone right now.
Nuclear power isn’t even cheap anymore. Solar power is 5x cheaper per megawatt than it was 10 years ago. Wind power is half the price. Both are cheaper than nuclear, which has gone up in price despite a decade of research to make it cheaper.
There’s a lot of money in the nuclear industry and they spend a lot of money to shape public opinion about it. No doubt they use troll farms to manufacture consent too. For me, the biggest and most glaring problem with nuclear power is the human element that can’t be trusted long term. Governments and industry will go to any length to cut costs, to line their own pockets, to lie, and put their personal ambitions above anything else. That’s how you get Chernobyls and 3 mile islands and fukushimas. It’s also not financially viable without massive government subsidies and government insurance. It’s highly centralized, and easily controlled and monetized by capitalists. It requires a readily available and reliable source of water which is something that climate change will cause problems for. Plus they take forever to build and cost billions. The answer nuclear bros have to that is to cut red tape, but then you have the problem of Chernobyls and Fukushimas. The fact is, nuclear is not a solution. Capitalism and the idiotic need for endless growth and exploitation is the problem. We need de-growth and switch to a combination of wind, solar and other real clean energy.
This comment has gained me the most attention on the fediverse so I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of these comments are from or directly related to those type of content farms
3 Mile Island had completely minimal impact. And Fukishima, despite being a cataclysmic combination of unfortunate events and poor planning on that possibly happening, the impact there was also extremely minimal, with the only negative effects more on the evacuation reaction being way wider than necessary.
And, of course, all of that is with decades old facilities that lack many of the mechanisms of modern technology that even further protect and minimize any possible negative impacts.
Heck, a thorium nuclear plant physically can’t melt down.
I always feel like I’m taking fucking crazy pill when we talk about nuclear energy.
Are we forgetting Chernoble, 3 mile island, or even more recenlty fukishima?
Sure, nuclear energy is great, cheap and reliable… but IF something goes catastrophically wrong, like I dunno… earth quakes, hurricanes, tornados, floods, etc (IE things we can’t really plan for) you run the risk of not being able to fix it easily…
I guess I"m not a huge fan of making large swaths of the earth uninhabital if shit goes sideways.
Uninhabitable by humans. Chernobyl created a nature preserve in an instant. The coal pollution you’ve inhaled has affected you more than all 3 of these nuclear disasters.
Coal emits more radioactive particles into the air than nuclear power plants
Right, but arguably more when they have catastrophic failures
Chernobyl is an acceptable outcome for you? Scary af
Chernobyl was a worst case scenario. It has affected millions of people and will have an unknown death toll due to the inability to measure it.
It’s still less harmful than any non renewal able energy source.
Nuclear is a safe, intermediate bandaid while we find a long term solution.
This was true a decade ago but since then renewables have plummeted in price. Solar is 5x cheaper than it was a decade ago. Nuclear, meanwhile, has gone up in price by 50%.
A baseline power source is required, until battery tech catches up, or we build a fuckload of dams, something needs to fill the gap.
Right, and battery tech is going down in price and nuclear is going up. Which is the better investment?
Where are you going to get all the materials for global energy battery storage boss man?
We’re not talking about storing a couple Kw here and there for each household, there is also industry energy requirements.
Once we start producing batteries for the kind of storage the price of lithium will skyrocket, and you’re in the same, maybe even worse boat of nuclear.
Honestly your best bet is both, idk why you’re so scared of nuclear. If one of these battery storage centres goes up in flames, the amount of toxins released would be disastrous for anyone nearby. And lithium doesn’t really stop once the reaction starts.
There are other battery technologies in the works, which would be environmentally more sound, and be far far cheaper. But it’s not ready yet.
3800 people a year die from coal plant pollution in the US alone; there are, in fact, much worse things than Chernobyl
Great reasons to not use coal either.
So then anything not as bad is A-OK?
More nuclear = less coal, that’s the thrust of like half of the comments here dude
I mean, we are using less coal in the US than we were… and that’s without more nuclear.
There aren’t “large swaths of thr earth” that aren’t inhabitable because of nuclear. Nuclear kills less people than coal mining - where hundreds of people dying during one catastrophe happens. Renewables aren’t a solution for every country either and cover large swaths of land you mentioned. Hydro also has a huge effect on the environment, despite being the “most green” solution (unless you count the concrete needed to build dams).
Nuclear should be the default. It’s not “profitable” for the people building them who think short term.
There are currently 401 operational nuclear power plants worldwide, and you’ve managed to list three (with three mile island not even breaching facilty containment) accidents in 70 years of nuclear energy exploitation. If that doesn’t vouch for safety and reliability of nuclear, I don’t know what does. Unlearn cold war hysteria.
Anti nuclear was from a time when you couldn’t learn how it works on the internet and people were scared of nuclear weapons and thought power plants were just thinly veiled bomb factories
Are we forgetting about airplane catastrophes every time we fly? Or do we live in fear of flying, despite the risk of getting injured being significantly less than when driving a car?
An airplane crash doesn’t directly impact people completely unrelated to the airplane. Nuclear radiation has no known boundary. Just look at China being pissed at Japan right now for releasing water back into the ocean.
China can be pissed all they like, the water Japan is releasing is heavily diluted, and effectively no more radioactive than normal sea water.
Depends who it crashes into
China’s not actually pissed about that, they just love coming up with excuses to get their population riled up against Japan.
I mean it’s possible to be both, right?
I live on a great lake, and if Canada started dumping their treated toxic waste into the water, I’d be pretty upset.
The city of Toronto already does that into Lake Ontario, and probably the same for other cities there.
This is like the covid argument. I don’t want to be put in danger by other’s decisions. If you want to fly/drive/go out without covid protection, whatever high-risk activity, don’t force it on me.
Ironically, burning fossil fuels is actually making large swaths of the earth uninhabitable. Even if you include nuclear disasters nuclear is outrageously safe
https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/
And when operating properly coal plants irradiate their surroundings significantly more than nuclear plants
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/
And we actually can plan for natural disasters. Fukushima was avoidable https://carnegieendowment.org/2012/03/06/why-fukushima-was-preventable-pub-47361
Also it’s worth noting that most of the world has the luxury of not building nuclear plants on seismically active, volcanic islands.
Well…
Chernobyl right now is an awesome nature preserve thanks to humans being gone. The entire area has been slowly moving back to its original state with even wolves moving back. That last bit is important as wolves have a huge influence on stability in natural habitats.
I know, silver linings, but still.
To the point: nuclear energy doesn’t need to be that bad. Well designed reactor are pretty much safe, and toxic end products are relatively little and manageable in comparison to gas and coal reactors. Chernobyl just was a shit reactor managed by idiots.
Ironically, because of their desig, nuclear power plants do not emit any radiation while coal and oill reactors do emit radiation coming from their fuels. That adds to all the other pollution classic power plants emit.
Then there are other fuels that could / should be used to avoid the “we don’t want people to have plutonium” issue.
Then the two big alternative energy generators wind and solar both have their own issues. No wind? No power. Night? No power. Clouds? No power. Wind farms kill birds. Solar panels require replacement every x amount of years because they degrade. The “no power” problem require huge batteries, or if you’re lucky, an entire lake to store that energy but now that late basically can’t be used for anything else and won’t be able to sustain any life.
Then finally: in comparison, nuclear energy generates enormous amounts of power where wind and solar generates very little. Humanity needs huge amounts of power to live.
Nuclear power plants take a long time to build but then give us huge amounts of power for as long as we need it to. If we really want to move away from CO2 emitting power generation, which we really really really do, I really think we can’t ignore nuclear energy
That’s fair, but you are assuming that the US, or any other nation with a nuclear plant will be run by competent people. I don’t have that faith. Perhaps because I’m pessamistic, but perhaps because I see people like Trump getting elected, or the rise of right wing, anti science, governments getting elected across the globe.
Ukraine likely wasn’t thinking they would be invaded by their neighbor and neighboring countries are now put at risk because of one rogue nation attacking their neighbor.
My problem with nuclear is that IF shit goes sideways, you can’t put that genie back in the bottle. I just watched a documentary on Fukishima, and despite the fact it was built on the ocean, it’s a nightmare of engineering to try to contain the shit show…
Look, I know I’m not going to convince this group that I’m right, but your also not going to convince me that I’m wrong… because you can’t engineer end users or nature out of the discussion. They are always wild cards.
There is 54 nuclear powerplant in US my dude, how many of it exploded catastrophically?
I mean, time is on my side with this argument, no?
Time isn’t when you’re inhaling smog.
All of these items are accounted for when feasibility studies are conducted for new plants (and even old plants up for license renewal). Chernobyl was due to the type of reactor (which doesn’t exist in the US), 3 Mile Island resulted in no adverse effects to health or environment and led to more stringent training and equipment upgrades, and Fukushima was built in a poorly selected location.
Of course there’s risk involved with nuclear, but we mitigate those risks appropriately. We don’t stop driving cars because of deadly accidents - we engineer safety systems to mitigate risk.
A car accident doesn’t have ripple effects for those no where near the car accident.
I just think it’s absolutely nuts that, given the volatility of the earth, that we would even risk it.
The safety of a region is fairly predictable even if the individual disasters aren’t as predictable. If you don’t build on fault lines, earth quakes aren’t generally going to be a risk. If you don’t build in tornado alley, or on the coast, tornadoes and hurricanes aren’t going to be a risk. If you build at higher elevations, flooding isn’t going to be a risk, etc.
And even with those nuclear disasters (that we’ve now learned from and can design reactors to prevent), nuclear has a far, far, far lower death rate per kWh of energy than all fossil fuels. The cost of continued fossil fuel use is already killing the planet, and already too high of a cost. We need to be switching away as fast as we possibly can, and nuclear is a viable alternative among many.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but coal powered plants have caused more cancer than any of those events on their own and when operated safely to modern standards they have a very low to no risk of release whereas coal plants release pollutants by design. Nuclear waste is in a solid state so it’s far easier to dispose of underground vs coal which immediately gets put into the atmosphere
It’s all pretty much been said already, but I feel like I’m taking crazy pills when I read takes like yours.
You mention the possibility of things going wrong with nuclear, but you don’t mention the things currently going wrong with fossil fuels. Coal is killing people right now, and actively “making large swaths of the earth uninhabital”.
Depending on your source, nuclear is either the safest or second safest energy production method, even when including Chernobyl and Fukushima.
Nuclear is not the end goal of power generation, but it is the best we have right now.
My goal is not really to turn this into a discussion, but I feel like your concerns might be based on common misconceptions about nuclear energy.
Chornobyl (Ukrainian spelling) was such a big disaster because it was the first major nuclear disaster. The reactor was built without hands-on experience with the consequences of a nuclear disaster driving the design of the facility itself. We have since learnt a lot about proper design of nuclear reactors and about how to respond to any incidents.
The Fukushima reactor was designed with that knowledge in mind, but the event was a perfect shitstorm consisting of both an earthquake and a tsunami hitting the facility at the same time. And even though the local population might disagree, the disaster was arguably less serious than Chornobyl was. Due in large part to a better design and proper disaster response.
We’re more capable than ever of modeling and simulating natural disasters, so I’d argue we acutally CAN plan for most of those. Any disaster we can’t plan for nowadays is likely to also fuck up an area even worse than the resulting nuclear disaster would.
But probably the most important thing to mention is that nuclear power is a lot more diverse in the modern world. Gone are the days that uranium fission reactors are the norm. They were only popular because they serve a secondary purpose of creating resources for nuclear weapons, in addition to their power generation. With molten salt reactors, thorium-based reactors and SMR (small modular reactors) there’s really not a good reason to build any more “classic” nuclear reactors other than continuing the production of nuclear weapons, which I hope we can just stop doing.
The best way to prevent large scale incidents is to prevent large scale reactors, which is why there’s so much interest in SMR lately.
All in all, we likely can’t fully transition to renewables fast enough without the use of nuclear power as an intermediary. But the actual dangers with modern designs are far fewer than they used to be and we should take care not to give in to irrational fears too much.
To put things into perspective: We currently have no way of stopping a major solar storm that would thouroughly disrupt all modern life, nor can we stop large asteroids heading our way. Both are potentially planet-ending disasters, but the possibility that they might occur doesn’t stop us from trying to build a better earth for the future, right?
Id say the immediate risks of climate change are worst.
There are talks about civil war in the US and fears of a further escalation of the war in Ukraine, while Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is in the war zone right now.
Nuclear power isn’t even cheap anymore. Solar power is 5x cheaper per megawatt than it was 10 years ago. Wind power is half the price. Both are cheaper than nuclear, which has gone up in price despite a decade of research to make it cheaper.
There’s a lot of money in the nuclear industry and they spend a lot of money to shape public opinion about it. No doubt they use troll farms to manufacture consent too. For me, the biggest and most glaring problem with nuclear power is the human element that can’t be trusted long term. Governments and industry will go to any length to cut costs, to line their own pockets, to lie, and put their personal ambitions above anything else. That’s how you get Chernobyls and 3 mile islands and fukushimas. It’s also not financially viable without massive government subsidies and government insurance. It’s highly centralized, and easily controlled and monetized by capitalists. It requires a readily available and reliable source of water which is something that climate change will cause problems for. Plus they take forever to build and cost billions. The answer nuclear bros have to that is to cut red tape, but then you have the problem of Chernobyls and Fukushimas. The fact is, nuclear is not a solution. Capitalism and the idiotic need for endless growth and exploitation is the problem. We need de-growth and switch to a combination of wind, solar and other real clean energy.
This comment has gained me the most attention on the fediverse so I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of these comments are from or directly related to those type of content farms
3 Mile Island had completely minimal impact. And Fukishima, despite being a cataclysmic combination of unfortunate events and poor planning on that possibly happening, the impact there was also extremely minimal, with the only negative effects more on the evacuation reaction being way wider than necessary.
And, of course, all of that is with decades old facilities that lack many of the mechanisms of modern technology that even further protect and minimize any possible negative impacts.
Heck, a thorium nuclear plant physically can’t melt down.