And as a side note: we have to somehow learn to deal with "inevitable human error and conflict of interest" in events where failure near population centers might be catastrophic. We either have to, or give up on a lot of progress. Quite a lot of interesting technologies and research areas involve managing higher and higher energies.
Nuclear has the potential to create a whole no-go area around it. And I have very little faith in us humans as a wider group to learn to deal with conflict of interest. I believe mitigation is better. Widespread solar and other distributed tech like that might not hold the raw promise of nuclear but I hope it will give us a more robust energy system in the world, harder to disrupt either by malice, conflict of interest or by accident.
Personally I am in love with things like nuclear fission powered rockets (nuclear engines could be started from bases in high orbit to avoid spewing dirty stuff into the atmosphere), submarine derived nuclear mini electric generator stations towed to coastal cities, fusion research and all that. I hope humanity in the long run will make use of such things...
Worth noting that 17 Chernobyl-style RBMK reactors were built and have largely operated without incident. Lithuania was entirely powered by two such reactors until they were shut down in the 2000s, to be replaced by fossil fuels, on the grounds that they lack containment buildings. The EU ponied up nearly a billion Euros for the decommissioning, which I can't help but notice is almost as much as the new Chernobyl sarcophagus. Might it have been cheaper and better to just... build a containment building? Perhaps. But there would never have been the political will for that.
The fear of nuclear is doing more damage than nuclear ever did.
It's less than 2/3rds (<1bn vs. 1.56bn) and the new sarcophagus is the (hopefully) last of a series of developments for confinement for a century (ie. there were costs before) while the decommissioning reduces these two reactors to mostly nothing, where the remaining troublesome radioactive material can be long-term stored together with any spent fuel (once there's a proper solution for that which we need, decommissioning or not).
I say, play to our strengths. Massive roll out of solar now - keep nuclear on the table (it's good tech), but don't rely on it to solve a substantial part of short to medium term future energy need. I also think we should plan for the event of "Global Thermonuclear War". Solar deployments and other renewables will fare much better. You can count on any centralized structures being targeted. That means (large) nuclear power plants and large hydro installations.
You’re accepting a real threat (global warming) to sustain an imaginary one (nuclear meltdowns of modern plants).
This deserves a lot of upvotes
Wind/Solar don’t fit the demand curve, but they crush Nuclear from a cost perspective. This is making Nuclear non viable as the gap ends up looking more random which is the worst place for Nuclear power.
Basicly, if wind/Solar is 50% cheaper than Nuclear having a 30% over supply of wind/Solar still costs less. Resulting in the need for zero power most of the time. In large power grids Hydro power can then fill most to all of these gaps. Nuclear is then competing with storage but it’s costs per kWh go up when it’s spending most of it’s time off.
Nuclear is somewhat special because radiation feels like magic (invisible killer), but I'd like to point out that we already deal with lots of comparably dangerous large-scale endeavours like this. Consider hydroelectric plants and large chemical plants. Both create as much danger of a "no-go area" as nuclear plants. Few times, accidents did happen, and people died (in case of hydro, a lot of people), ground became uninhabitable. But mostly, we manage all of them well worldwide.
I don't see how nuclear power plants could create extra in-group conflict of interests beyond what we already know to handle both in nuclear, and other industrial processes. Humans suck, but not that hard.
> Widespread solar and other distributed tech like that might not hold the raw promise of nuclear but I hope it will give us a more robust energy system in the world, harder to disrupt either by malice, conflict of interest or by accident.
That's a good point and I'm sympathetic to it, but my worry now is twofold: long-term, I'm not convinced solar/wind will give us enough energy (note how progress of mankind is mostly tied to commanding more and more energy). I'd love to see fusion working in particular. Short-term, due to unsuitability of solar/wind for base load and current lack of battery technology that would compensate, I'm not convinced solar/wind will be enough.
(Also, I don't understand why it's always nuclear vs. solar/wind, instead of nuclear+solar/wind vs. coal&gas. Ecological activism has weird priorities.)
source: from 2011 phys.org - Why nuclear power will never supply the world's energy needs
The amount of available Uranium is disputed of course, but I could not find sources about significant new finds. Canada is still the largest provider.
So "long-term" isn't something nuclear power excels at. Yes, yes, Uranium is found in traces everywhere. But economically extracting it for energy production is a different matter. Demand is higher than production even today.
What really would help us would be a good energy sink to store power produced by water/wind/sun.
The article from phys.org you quote doesn't show its math much; I'll try to track down the proceedings it references, as I'm genuinely surprised by the difference with what's in "Without Hot Air".
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Why is it that everyone says the area will be unusable for such a long time when the Nagasaki and Hiroshima areas are usable.
Is there a different half life for those nukes than the ones we have today ?
Air burst bombs don't produce as much dangerous fallout as ground bursting ones. Ground bombs causes debris on the ground to be ground up to dust and mutated into radioactive isotopes. Nuclear power plants acquire over time nasty radioactive products in the spent fuel.
What I was alluding to above though, was that in the event of total war, what the enemy (regardless of sides) will target, is large centralized infrastructure. Such as power plants, including nuclear. So if we have to rebuild in the aftermath, the harder it gets, the more we relied beforehand on centralized power plants, like nuclear plants. Since these will have been bombed to craters.
In this scenario, I'm not even considering fallout - just how easily we could get any infrastructure up and running again.
If you want to be really nasty you can use something like cobalt to blanket your secondary - cobalt having isotopes that are fairly long half lives but still rather potent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_bomb
Fortunately, nobody has built weapons like this.
The cynic in me says yet.
As a species some of us are really fucked up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersonic_Low_Altitude_Missil...
From what I was taught anyway.
There is also a false dichotomy presented here, because the alternative to nuclear is not limited to just fossil fuel. There are numerous forms of clean energy that doesn't have the failure possibility of nuclear.
On the other hand, if you look at actual fatality statistics, you can make a fairly strong case for wind and solar being far deadlier than nuclear (hydro is pretty close though). Just because solar and wind often involve installing things high up and people fall.
That's a somewhat different scenario (scientists saying "yes, but" and administrators saying "hell, yes!"), but it's still pretty interesting to see what the push for nuclear power (eg. France's strategic reliance on it, UK's new reactor that is dead on arrival economically, or Iran's interest in obtaining the means) is really about.
On the other hand, China and India apparently were looking into building systems that are safer with no weapon grade by-products.
The "administrative" picture is not so rosy! Of course, the history of atomic energy in the US is replete with examples of lies told to the public to obtain "consent" - exhibit A, the Nevada Test Site and the "downwinders" [0]. These lies were told to citizens by the AEC, the predecessor agency of the NRC, which now regulates nuclear power in the US.
A review of a recent book [1] by a former member of the NRC indicates that, in the view of some, administrators rolling over for commercial operators of atomic plants remains standard operating procedure. This sounds very similar to the problem with the Challenger shuttle:
"The political infighting was particularly intense after the 2011 Fukushima disaster. Jaczko visited Japan and grew impatient with the “litany of guarantees” from industry about American nuclear facilities. He tried to insist on new requirements to mitigate accidents triggered by natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes, and tsunamis. One internal NRC report drafted after Fukushima criticized the practice of relying on voluntary industry initiative to address safety concerns. Jaczko's descriptions of other commissioners' attempts to quash or edit the report provide a disturbing glimpse of the dynamic of trust and betrayal within the agency."