But that's not what happened. The anti-nuclear team won and we collectively made the responsible decision to fill our atmosphere with CO2 instead. Yay?
Rates of builds were declining before Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and those were the events that turned the public against nuclear.
There was a great 1985 article about this in Forbes, which I highly recommend:
https://blowhardwindbag.blogspot.com/2011/04/forbes-article-...
Ideally we wouldn't have wasted those decades, but we must go forward with the greatest speed with the best tech we have now.
It also did not help that the 70s ended with the Three-Mile Island disaster and serious construction flaws being found at Trojan. Then in the 80s Chernobyl blasted nuclear fallout into the atmosphere which certainly didn't help nuclear's image.
I wouldn't say the "Anti-nuclear team" won, nuclear industry shot itself in the foot with a very cavalier and lax safety attitude, and leaving behind many scary ecological disasters in its wake.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
Coal particulates, acidic gasses, and CO2 are awful. Natural gas CO2 is awful. I hardly need to elaborate, yet this is the alternative we chose.
It's not just coal that has problems, though: hydroelectric power has an appalling history of accidents leading to enormous death and destruction, yet it maintains a sterling reputation in environmental groups, at least compared to nuclear. Why?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure (sort by fatalities, look for Banqiao Dam at 170000)
Wind and solar installations illustrate why it's important to count per unit of energy produced. They commit the "sin" of low density. With wind, you construct a gigantic edifice of concrete, steel, and fiberglass, likely in a remote location or even out at sea, and at the end of the day you can power a couple neighborhoods, some of the time. In a nuclear power plant, you construct a gigantic edifice of concrete and steel and you can power a couple of cities, all of the time. You have a handful of experts in a concrete bunker, compared to, say, residential solar with an army of contractors running around every roof in a city every few years. Slips and falls won't get a HBO miniseries, but they ruin lives just the same.
At scale, it all must be accounted for. It has been, but the results don't line up with public perception and as a consequence we collectively made a terrible mistake.
Pointing out that other stuff is "just as bad as nuclear" is not helping the argument for nuclear.
Yucca Mountain was bulldozed by the anti-nuclear faction. Hooray?
> Is Hanford a disaster or not?
Unquestionably.
> Pointing out that other stuff is "just as bad as nuclear" is not helping the argument for nuclear.
That's generally how decision-making works: you weigh the tradeoffs and make the best choice.
Well, that's how it's supposed to work, I suppose. If you refuse, well, nature just punishes you accordingly. In this case, we get an atmosphere full of CO2. Hooray?
You weigh the tradeoffs and make the least bad choice. We've decided as a society that we cannot live without electricity. No method of generating that electricity is without negative implications. (yet?)
> Unquestionably.
Hanford is a disaster... But just Hanford. Upstream and downstream are both fine. It's a few dozen square miles of contamination that affects people more than it does nature. (Look at the Chernobyl exclusion zone)
Compare to something like ocean acidification, caused by burning coal and oil, which is killing all the coral reefs, worldwide.
WIPP also had a leak issue with cost estimates of up to $1.4 billion to fix.
There are also dozens of sites orphaned and essentially the problem for the DOE to figure out. The cost of nuclear waste has been heavily socialized. The problem won't be going away anytime soon.
In addition, what is the result of 3 mile island? The word disaster comes with a lot of baggage that I would debate doesn't apply, it was an accident without any fatalities. But... it was a set of lessons and they have been applied throughout the industry. That is forgotten. It did have a huge impact to the industry and was a disaster as far as perception goes. Chernobyl was a case of lets turn this reactor to 11 and disable the safeties. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Fukushima should be remembered. It was when we knew better and ignored expert advice. This seems to be the theme of the 21st century though. But even with Fukushima, it took one of the largest earth quakes ever, causing a very very large tsunami, and then it was still working.... but because the experts where ignored and the wall was shorter than it should have been and, most importantly, the generators were not on higher ground it lost power and was able to melt down. Even with that though, only one person has died, and two had radiation burns, plus there is several km by several km of land that cannot be used right now. The sad part is that this was the focus and not the thousands displaced by the tsunami.
Solar and Window are doing great, they should be used as much as they can be. Hydro is largely tapped out and small systems are not as effective compared to their impact; even with the fact that rivers form lakes and move on their own. So that leaves sources like nuclear, tidal, and a few others related to the earths energy(whether kinetic or heat) Nuclear has the benefit of having the smallest footprint too.
Just because someone doesn't kill someone driving recklessly does not excuse their behavior, nor does it mean they won't kill someone next time.
The rest of your post seems to be hand waving away serious safety concerns. Chernobyl and Fukishima involved the people who were in charge of the plant making poor decisions. They both played stupid games, and they were not the sole recipient of the stupid prize. Neither of these events were cakewalks for the people affected by them, or the people fighting to prevent an even greater disaster. Dumping ocean water on damaged reactor cores is not standard operating procedure. Lots of uncharted territory in both. It was not sad that a major nuclear meltdown was one of the main focuses of the disaster. Your downplaying of these events is not reassuring. This is why nuclear has a bad image. Very shitty things have happened due to human negligence and they're just hand waved away, as if they won't happen again, but they do happen again, and both of these examples could have been much much worse.
>To call it waste is even debatable.
Are you volunteering your basement to store it in? Even if it can be reprocessed at some point, ya gotta store it somewhere until then, and that day may never actually come.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_phase-out#German... [3] Jarvis, Stephen; Deschenes, Olivier; Jha, Akshaya (December 2019). "The Private and External Costs of Germany's Nuclear Phase-Out" (PDF). National Bureau of Economic Research. Cambridge, MA: w26598. doi:10.3386/w26598.
>So where is the real disaster?
It was Fukushima, which resulted in more loss of trust for nuclear energy. It seems you're more angry at the media for covering a nuclear meltdown, than you are at the operators rolling the dice and making huge errors in their management of the plant. The lame stream media didn't cause the plant to meltdown, that was TEPCOs own hubris and blind ignorance.
It was a chain of failures that started years ago and we ignored the people telling us otherwise. But even then, it took a lot to put it in a situation like this.
As for my basement, no thanks. That's just stupid. People are so scared about things that cannot hurt them that they just say no instead of saying do it correctly without cutting corners. Verify it is done correctly. Nuclear waste storage isn't a bunch of green barrels hastily piled up with green ooze making Ninja Turtles. It's engineered concrete vessels that can survive without leaking during transport accidents. And then the tolerances have been increased. Then they are put deep down into the earth below the water table, several km below the surface, in geologically stable areas. Even then, they plan for failures and how to mitigate them. Layers of protection. These are the consultations going on in Canada right now, and people freaking over it. In the mean time it has been above group in vessels for decades next to the great lakes.
Meltdowns don't have the potential to kill? How did you know Fukushima was "no big deal" while it was happening? You didn't. No one knew. It also displaced 154,000 people. I guess that's not newsworthy though.
There was actually plenty of coverage of the earthquake and tsunami, which were immediate uncontrollable natural disasters. No one is lobbying for more earthquakes and tsunamis. Fukushima took months to get under control, and was a preventable man-made disaster.
>But even then, it took a lot to put it in a situation like this.
No it didn't. It took a predicted major earthquake to occur. The earthquake could likely have been weaker and still resulted in a similar outcome.
>things that cannot hurt them that they just say no instead of saying do it correctly without cutting corners
Why does something that "cannot hurt them" need so much engineering to prevent it from hurting them? This looks like doublespeak.
Nuclear power and storage could be done correctly, but it just hasn't been done correctly often enough, making people skeptical of it. It is also extremely costly to engineer these solutions.
That is complicated to assess, how do you account for the indirect and long-term fatalities or illnesses? E.g. here in Germany's south east (bavaria), every hunted boar is still tested whether it contains safe levels of radioactivity. Chernobyl was 34 years ago, but it still is a problem for food safety several thousands of kilometers away from the place of the accident.
In the Harrisburg accident, the core had a melt-down, and molten uranium was forming layers at the bottom of the vessel. Water had been being cracked into oxygen and hydrogen by the intense heat. This process was stopped little time before the vessel would have blown up from overpressure. It would also have been possible that the layering of Uranium in the vessel would have become super-critical with the result of the reactor literally exploding. And this would definitively have had consequences comparable to Chernobyl.
This is stuff which isn't well-known outside of expert circles. During my studies, I read about it in an article in a journal of the nuclear power industry... this must have been between 1991 and 1995, I think.
Another huge problem which Fukoshima exposed is that not only the active reactor core must be subject to cooling at all times, in order to be safe, but also cooling basins for spent fuel with remaining radioactivity. And they should also be inside safe containments (that is, protected from airplane crashes, and so on). I think that no reactor built in the West before 2009 has adequate protections against that type of problem.
And to add, in France there is at least one reactor which is built directly at the shore of the Atlantic. It is probably not safe against major Tsunamis.
The general problem is that nuclear is a very high risk, low probability technology. Protecting against that risk costs lots of money, which makes it uncompetitive. The financial pressures in corporations lead again and again to the result that safety measures are skipped. And in addition, it is inhumanely hard to predict and plan to cope with all possible risks.
Does it matter if the one french reactor at the shore of the Atlantic wasn't safe against tsunamis?
You can try to argue that the US would have less carbon emissions than today - something I'm inclined to believe given how much fossil fuels are used today - but in no way would it be zero.
I think your point is valid, but lacks generality. Almost nothing we do is carbon neutral. Our energy production certainly isn't. Playing devil's advocate, PV and wind turbines also need to be built, transported, installed, disassembled, and disposed of, all of which emits greenhouse gases.
Instead, now we’re trying to shame people into flying less, which amounts to 2.5% of emissions a year..
All the data is there, the IPCC even took the time to vulgarize this part because people don't seems to understand, took the highest evaluation wiht post-70s tech (12gCO2/MWh) and there is STILL people that talk about climate and don't even READ the IPCC document. I don't understand why you would talk about something this important and dont read the BASICS.
Like those climate denialist who "prove" that low atmosphere CO2 will make everything greener. WE KNOW! At least climate denialist have the excuse that this information is not easily accessible [0][1]. Everything else is written in the vulgarized papers, it a two hour-long read top, just take some time to inform yourself!
This is why nothing will never be done and we are hoping for a technological silver bullet, because people rather act like they care about climate than care about climate.
I'm angry.
[0] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/TAR-03.pdf [1] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/03/TAR-04.pdf
[edit] spacing, swear words.
Tech gCO2/kWh
Coal 920
Gas 490
Solar-Util 48
Solar-Roof 41
Solar-Conc 27
Geothermal 38
Hydro 24
Wind-Offshore 12
Nuclear 12 <---
Wind-Onshore 11
But you are right, I shouldn't have made it sound as if no one produced such numbers.
The valid criticism from many including the green party in Germany is, the shutdown of coal plant could go faster. But it already started.
[1]: https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/germany-co2-emis... [2]: https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/japan-co2-emissi... [3]: https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/us-co2-emissions... [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_phase-out#/media...
At any rate - it's a truly miniscule amount of carbon anyway, when amortized over the plant's lifespan. If all of our power came from nuclear, we would not be worrying about greenhouse emissions from the concrete in their construction.