It is not the top one in the typical usage of the word “nuclear energy.” Sure, it is nuclear energy, but that normally refers to electrical infrastructure, not nuclear weapons. Nuclear electricity is pretty much always just heating water up in a safe and controlled manner, and using that to spin a turbine.
sure, like corners are cut in every industry including renewables (which have a higher accident rate even). yes a nationalized nuclear power program is less perversely incentivised. if you look at countries where nuc is accepted more you wont find insane accident rates nor are plants bombs.
I heard that Fukushima was problematic because non-engineers thought it would be easier cheaper?) to put some of the critical infrastructure near the sea rather than on the hill…
I heard that Fukushima was problematic because non-engineers thought it would be easier cheaper?)
fukushima was problematic because literally everything in the chain of safety that should’ve happened, either didn’t or was ignored, due to callous stupidity.
If literally any one thing had gone differently, there’s a good chance it wouldn’t have been that bad.
Station safety is so overboard, that we only had like three meltdowns or so, and only some hundreds of thousands of people killed by premature cancer deaths as a result of them and some million or so permanently displaced.
But surely after the next event we will have learned and then it will be totally safe. Like they said after Three Miles Island. And like they said after Chernobyl. And like they said after Fukushima.
have we built and RBMK reactors since chernobyl? Have we built and confusing and badly maintained reactors since TMI (that weren’t legally operating btw) have we built any BWR reactors in bad places, with no concern for safety since fukushima?
Did people during the concept and design phase of these anticipate them causing disasters?
Did the people who operate them adhere to best safety practices, maintenance and regulations?
Did the regulatory authorities ensure that there would be no disaster possible through enforcing said regulations, in particular regarding location specific concerns such as Tsunamis in Fukushima?
As long as you have the same human characters in the same economic structures in the same administrative structures, there is no reason to be confident, that these disasters will not happen again.
Chernobyl was a ridiculous level of negligence on the part of the technicians working at a plant with a very unsafe design.
Fukushima was a reasonably safe reactor design with terrible (and noted as such decades before the meltdown) site designs which could be described as “designed to fail”.
You could argue that lessons have been learned from both of those, and Three Mile Island, and safer designs are the result. Or you could argue that Fukushima clearly shows that people shouldn’t be involved in such high-risk projects because they will cut corners that will inevitably lead to disasters. If the second is your stance, take a look around. There are plenty of projects with similar risks in other fields all the time.
Here’s a list of industrial disasters. Take your pick of the ones that count as engineering or negligence (and Chernobyl was at least as much negligence as engineering) and tell me how many you get to.
Of course, we haven’t discussed what kind of risk we’re talking about. And is it better to have thousands of low-impact high-risk activities or one or two high-impact low-risk activities? Because, make no mistake, nuclear has cost less in human lives per unit of energy than any other power generation method we have. And hydroelectric has as profound an impact on the environment as nuclear fallout, it just tends to make some nice beaches and fishing so it isn’t negative, right?
more like a few thousand ever, if you are really really conservative tens of thousand, though the methodology to get there is unscientific. tmi killed nobody, fukushima will have killed nobody. meanwhile people falling off roofs installing solar or accidents working on wind are much more common. keep doing solar and wind, but your perception about nuclear is wholly irrational and unfounded.
Humanity, or at least written scripture, is roughly 10,000 years old. So if you take humanity = earth, then yes it’s approximately true. But also, it’s an incredibly egoistic viewpoint because earth is not just humanity.
Edit: by humanity, I mean human culture and not so much human biology.
how many cancers have they witnessed from the likes of coal power? Or things like asbestos? Shit like arsenic, or worse, lead. They probably have a significant IQ drop from leaded fuel, assuming they’re american.
Sure, nuclear energy is valid and all, but you sound like an absolute spanner…
If you want to argue that nuclear energy has its place, maybe don’t ridicule people who remember how much of an issue the last major nuclear meltdown was (and partially is).
The body count and environmental damage doesn’t even compare. The bad examples are just more spectacular and singularly horrifying in the moment. It’s a perception issue.
Fukushima has barely any fall out though, does it. And the nuclear energy sector is moving towards even safer methods with SMRs that are self contained and just can’t have a runaway reaction AFAIK
If you want a reaction that you can take energy away from the reaction, the reaction needs to create more energy than it needs to maintain itself. If you fail to take that energy away, the reaction will accelerate and your output will grow even further.
It is basic physics.
The only alternative would be to have an open system that runs on so little fuel that you need to feed it continuously. This has an entirely different level of problems, as now it will be impossible to contain the radiation to the reaction chamber and the containers of the spent fuel. Also with that you would need an entirely different design of how the radioactive material is held in place and how the reactions are controlled. The current way of adjusting how much you block with control rods probably won’t work.
It is just impossible to have an exponential system like the nuclear reactions used in a reactor without active control measures. And active measures can fail.
For starters we are talking about concepts, not actually built and tested Reactors. If you have any connection to scientific research, technology development or engineering, you should know that between hypothesis, laboratory testing, prototype development, technology upscaling, establishment of production lines and finally long term operation routines there is a lot that will not be like expected, has to be revised, adjusted, scrapped, redesigned…
The history of nuclear energy is riddled with cases of hubris leading to disasters. It is evident that so far humans were unable and unwilling to give safety the proper considerations.
But from a practical point of view anyone with some industry experience would find the idea insane, that Small and Modular systems, so high throughput of small batches would increase safety. It is much more complicated to provide Quality and Safety checks in such an environment. Especially as these would be done by multiple for profit companies, the necessary oversight would be more difficult to provide for the regulation authorities, so in the medium run we will get Boeing like situations. Just that cost cutting and mingling will lead to reactors contaminating large swaths of areas on top of potentially killing hundreds of people.
So now you explain, why we should totally listen to the claims made by for profit cost cutting companies, that are solely based on concepts, without any actual field testing.
Because that was exactly the Titanic situation. People believed it to be unsinkable and decided to cut on costs for emergency measures. Reality proved them wrong on the first and last voyage.
But Fukushima did render a fairly large area uninhabitable, and the ongoing cleanup is still costing billions every year.
Also, there’s still no solution to nuclear waste beyond burying it and hoping that no one digs it up.
Renewables exist, and, combined with upgrading the grid and adding sufficient storage facilities, can provide for 100% of electricity demand at all times. Without any of the risks associated with nuclear power (low as they may be, they exist), and without kicking a radioactive can down the road for hundreds of generations.
Uninhabitable? Most of the evacuations were unnecessary, and there would have been less loss-of-life if most people sheltered in-place. In the year following the event, nearby residents received less than 20% of lifetime natural background radiation, about 2 chest CT scans, or a bit more than an airline crew, and less than a heavy smoker.
As for waste, dry casks are plenty good. The material is glassified, so it can’t leach into ground water, and the concrete casing means you get less radiation by sitting next to one, as even natural background radiation is partially blocked. Casks are also dense enough for on-site storage, needing only a small lot to store the lifetime fuel use of any plant. A pro and a con of this method is that the fuel is difficult to retrieve from the glass, which is bad for fuel reprocessing, but good for preventing easy weapons manufacturing.
Meanwhile, coal pollution kills some 8 million people annually, and because the grid is already set up for it, when nuclear plants close they are replaced with coal or oil plants.
Upgrading the grid is expensive, and large-scale storage is difficult, and often untested. Pumped hydro is great for those places that can manage it, but the needed storage is far greater, and in locations without damable areas. Not only would unprecidented storage be necessary, but also a grid that’s capable of moving energy between multiple focus points, instead of simply out of a plant. These aren’t impossible challenges, but the solutions aren’t here yet, and nuclear can fill the gap between decommissioning fossil fuels and effective baseline storage.
Solar and Wind don’t have the best disposal record either, with more efficient PV cells needing more exotic resources, and the simple bulk of wind turbines making them difficult to dispose of. And batteries are famously toxic and/or explosive. Once again, these challenges have solutions, but they aren’t mature and countries will stick with proven methods untill they are. That means more fossil fuels killing more people unnecessary. Nuclear can save those people today, and then allow renewable grids to be built when they are ready.
Nuclear plant accidents have happened tho. Remember Fukushima? It was 13 years ago, not that long. It didn’t strait up explode like a nuclear bomb, and neither did Chernobyl, but still; contamination is a pretty big deal. You can argue that the risk isn’t that bad or that fossil energy plants also have risks; but you can’t just dismiss it as a superstition.
Fukushima? It was 13 years ago, not that long. It didn’t strait up explode like a nuclear bomb, and neither did Chernobyl, but still;
fukushima was a BWR design, put on the coast of a place known for having tsunamis, and wasn’t properly equipped with emergency generators (they flooded, oopsies) which they couldn’t get to, in order to service the reactor, due to the roads being fucking yeeted.
Literally any other plant on earth is going to have a better outcome.
You get much more radiation and excess deaths from Coal and Natural gas plants than Fukushima and Chernobyl, it’s just that it’s not as obvious as it happens slowly over time.
In fact there are more deaths caused by wind energy sources than nuclear energy sources.
There was still 164,000 people who needed to evacuate 230 square miles. The land is contaminated and cleanup is proving difficult. Japan will be dealing with the environmental impact for a century I’d wager.
Look up fly ash storage ponds. That’s just normal coal usage. Then look up fly ash spills. Then look up how much radioactive material is released into the atmosphere each year from burning coal. Compare that to the estimated amounts of radioactive material released into the environment from all the nuclear plant accidents, and tell me we still wouldn’t be better off switching all coal off and using nuclear.
Now, we don’t really have to do that, because we have other options now. But we definitely should have used more nuclear 50 years ago, just for the reduced cost of human lives.
The Katsurao village official said about 337 square kilometers of land in seven Fukushima municipalities are deemed “difficult-to-return” zones. Of those, just 27 square kilometers in six of the same municipalities are specified reconstruction zones.
27 km² are the worst areas. The other 310km² are still “difficult-to-return”.
They need cooling water, so “on the coast” is a reasonable location. Or do you mean “not in Japan”? A country without many great options for clean energy generation. Frankly Japan is one of the places nuclear makes sense to me. There’s not many options.
It doesn’t make sense to me in the US where there’s a sunshine belt across the country 5 timezones long, large windswept plains and shallow coastlines. The US is rich in options and nuclear falls down the list.
The idea of an explosion is. That’s what this thread is about. It’s not just about meltdowns, which, like you said, is very low risk, and lower than ever from what we’ve learned in the past.
to be fair ; its both.
It is not the top one in the typical usage of the word “nuclear energy.” Sure, it is nuclear energy, but that normally refers to electrical infrastructure, not nuclear weapons. Nuclear electricity is pretty much always just heating water up in a safe and controlled manner, and using that to spin a turbine.
Until something goes wrong and it is not safe and controlled anymore. You know, because of the whole exponential chain reaction thing.
meltdowns do not resemble bombs at all. nor are they really possible either.
That must be why it’s still advised to not collect and eat wild mushrooms in parts of southern Germany.
Also I didn’t say they resembled bombs.
did i claim chornobyl didnt have any effects or are you just searching for stuff to argue about?
On a world where everybody is effraid of nuclear power, station safety is really overboard, and nuclear is super safe.
If everyone accepted nuclear power the same way we accept cars, then you can be sure capitalism would cut corners on nuclear safety…
(Source: many of my clients are nuclear power plants people)
and yet, cars keep getting safer, and safer every year, they also keep getting larger, and more expensive and harder to repair, but they do get safer.
Interesting.
sure, like corners are cut in every industry including renewables (which have a higher accident rate even). yes a nationalized nuclear power program is less perversely incentivised. if you look at countries where nuc is accepted more you wont find insane accident rates nor are plants bombs.
I heard that Fukushima was problematic because non-engineers thought it would be easier cheaper?) to put some of the critical infrastructure near the sea rather than on the hill…
fukushima was problematic because literally everything in the chain of safety that should’ve happened, either didn’t or was ignored, due to callous stupidity.
If literally any one thing had gone differently, there’s a good chance it wouldn’t have been that bad.
that is believable, no structures should have been where fukushima was nor with the lacking tsunami protections it had.
To be complete, you can’t ignore the dangers of nuclear power plants in a war setting. It sucks but it is what it is.
To be honest, every large power generation systems is critical is a war setting… Don’t tell them about hydro dams!
Station safety is so overboard, that we only had like three meltdowns or so, and only some hundreds of thousands of people killed by premature cancer deaths as a result of them and some million or so permanently displaced.
But surely after the next event we will have learned and then it will be totally safe. Like they said after Three Miles Island. And like they said after Chernobyl. And like they said after Fukushima.
have we built and RBMK reactors since chernobyl? Have we built and confusing and badly maintained reactors since TMI (that weren’t legally operating btw) have we built any BWR reactors in bad places, with no concern for safety since fukushima?
Did people during the concept and design phase of these anticipate them causing disasters?
Did the people who operate them adhere to best safety practices, maintenance and regulations?
Did the regulatory authorities ensure that there would be no disaster possible through enforcing said regulations, in particular regarding location specific concerns such as Tsunamis in Fukushima?
As long as you have the same human characters in the same economic structures in the same administrative structures, there is no reason to be confident, that these disasters will not happen again.
Chernobyl was a ridiculous level of negligence on the part of the technicians working at a plant with a very unsafe design.
Fukushima was a reasonably safe reactor design with terrible (and noted as such decades before the meltdown) site designs which could be described as “designed to fail”.
You could argue that lessons have been learned from both of those, and Three Mile Island, and safer designs are the result. Or you could argue that Fukushima clearly shows that people shouldn’t be involved in such high-risk projects because they will cut corners that will inevitably lead to disasters. If the second is your stance, take a look around. There are plenty of projects with similar risks in other fields all the time.
Then name three examples please, that have a Chernobyl level of risk.
Here’s a list of industrial disasters. Take your pick of the ones that count as engineering or negligence (and Chernobyl was at least as much negligence as engineering) and tell me how many you get to.
Of course, we haven’t discussed what kind of risk we’re talking about. And is it better to have thousands of low-impact high-risk activities or one or two high-impact low-risk activities? Because, make no mistake, nuclear has cost less in human lives per unit of energy than any other power generation method we have. And hydroelectric has as profound an impact on the environment as nuclear fallout, it just tends to make some nice beaches and fishing so it isn’t negative, right?
Coal power plants release more radioactive waste in the environment than nuclear stations.
I’m not sure if this statistics includes meltdowns, but considering their rarity, it may still be true.
Which is why both technologies need to be abolished asap and replaced with cheaper and sustainable renewable energies.
more like a few thousand ever, if you are really really conservative tens of thousand, though the methodology to get there is unscientific. tmi killed nobody, fukushima will have killed nobody. meanwhile people falling off roofs installing solar or accidents working on wind are much more common. keep doing solar and wind, but your perception about nuclear is wholly irrational and unfounded.
So do you still believe in bloodletting to cure colds or the earth being 10,000 years old?
Humanity, or at least written scripture, is roughly 10,000 years old. So if you take humanity = earth, then yes it’s approximately true. But also, it’s an incredibly egoistic viewpoint because earth is not just humanity.
Edit: by humanity, I mean human culture and not so much human biology.
so basically, if you define a leaf as a caterpillar, it’s basically the same thing, got it.
yeah, you got it!
My parents have witnessed not one but two nuclear catastrophes in their lifetime. Wtf are you talking about?
how many cancers have they witnessed from the likes of coal power? Or things like asbestos? Shit like arsenic, or worse, lead. They probably have a significant IQ drop from leaded fuel, assuming they’re american.
Sure, nuclear energy is valid and all, but you sound like an absolute spanner…
If you want to argue that nuclear energy has its place, maybe don’t ridicule people who remember how much of an issue the last major nuclear meltdown was (and partially is).
Let’s compare it to oil, gas, coal…
The body count and environmental damage doesn’t even compare. The bad examples are just more spectacular and singularly horrifying in the moment. It’s a perception issue.
Fukushima has barely any fall out though, does it. And the nuclear energy sector is moving towards even safer methods with SMRs that are self contained and just can’t have a runaway reaction AFAIK
Can’t have a runaways reaction like the Titanic was unsinkable.
Well there is a difference between marketing and physics
If you want a reaction that you can take energy away from the reaction, the reaction needs to create more energy than it needs to maintain itself. If you fail to take that energy away, the reaction will accelerate and your output will grow even further.
It is basic physics.
The only alternative would be to have an open system that runs on so little fuel that you need to feed it continuously. This has an entirely different level of problems, as now it will be impossible to contain the radiation to the reaction chamber and the containers of the spent fuel. Also with that you would need an entirely different design of how the radioactive material is held in place and how the reactions are controlled. The current way of adjusting how much you block with control rods probably won’t work.
It is just impossible to have an exponential system like the nuclear reactions used in a reactor without active control measures. And active measures can fail.
Flippant “it sounds true-isms” are not useful for discussion and can even spread misinformation.
So please: explain your comment or stop repeating it
For starters we are talking about concepts, not actually built and tested Reactors. If you have any connection to scientific research, technology development or engineering, you should know that between hypothesis, laboratory testing, prototype development, technology upscaling, establishment of production lines and finally long term operation routines there is a lot that will not be like expected, has to be revised, adjusted, scrapped, redesigned…
The history of nuclear energy is riddled with cases of hubris leading to disasters. It is evident that so far humans were unable and unwilling to give safety the proper considerations.
But from a practical point of view anyone with some industry experience would find the idea insane, that Small and Modular systems, so high throughput of small batches would increase safety. It is much more complicated to provide Quality and Safety checks in such an environment. Especially as these would be done by multiple for profit companies, the necessary oversight would be more difficult to provide for the regulation authorities, so in the medium run we will get Boeing like situations. Just that cost cutting and mingling will lead to reactors contaminating large swaths of areas on top of potentially killing hundreds of people.
So now you explain, why we should totally listen to the claims made by for profit cost cutting companies, that are solely based on concepts, without any actual field testing.
Because that was exactly the Titanic situation. People believed it to be unsinkable and decided to cut on costs for emergency measures. Reality proved them wrong on the first and last voyage.
But Fukushima did render a fairly large area uninhabitable, and the ongoing cleanup is still costing billions every year.
Also, there’s still no solution to nuclear waste beyond burying it and hoping that no one digs it up.
Renewables exist, and, combined with upgrading the grid and adding sufficient storage facilities, can provide for 100% of electricity demand at all times. Without any of the risks associated with nuclear power (low as they may be, they exist), and without kicking a radioactive can down the road for hundreds of generations.
Uninhabitable? Most of the evacuations were unnecessary, and there would have been less loss-of-life if most people sheltered in-place. In the year following the event, nearby residents received less than 20% of lifetime natural background radiation, about 2 chest CT scans, or a bit more than an airline crew, and less than a heavy smoker.
As for waste, dry casks are plenty good. The material is glassified, so it can’t leach into ground water, and the concrete casing means you get less radiation by sitting next to one, as even natural background radiation is partially blocked. Casks are also dense enough for on-site storage, needing only a small lot to store the lifetime fuel use of any plant. A pro and a con of this method is that the fuel is difficult to retrieve from the glass, which is bad for fuel reprocessing, but good for preventing easy weapons manufacturing.
Meanwhile, coal pollution kills some 8 million people annually, and because the grid is already set up for it, when nuclear plants close they are replaced with coal or oil plants.
Upgrading the grid is expensive, and large-scale storage is difficult, and often untested. Pumped hydro is great for those places that can manage it, but the needed storage is far greater, and in locations without damable areas. Not only would unprecidented storage be necessary, but also a grid that’s capable of moving energy between multiple focus points, instead of simply out of a plant. These aren’t impossible challenges, but the solutions aren’t here yet, and nuclear can fill the gap between decommissioning fossil fuels and effective baseline storage.
Solar and Wind don’t have the best disposal record either, with more efficient PV cells needing more exotic resources, and the simple bulk of wind turbines making them difficult to dispose of. And batteries are famously toxic and/or explosive. Once again, these challenges have solutions, but they aren’t mature and countries will stick with proven methods untill they are. That means more fossil fuels killing more people unnecessary. Nuclear can save those people today, and then allow renewable grids to be built when they are ready.
100% minus the energy requirements of AI 🫠
Nuclear plant accidents have happened tho. Remember Fukushima? It was 13 years ago, not that long. It didn’t strait up explode like a nuclear bomb, and neither did Chernobyl, but still; contamination is a pretty big deal. You can argue that the risk isn’t that bad or that fossil energy plants also have risks; but you can’t just dismiss it as a superstition.
fukushima was a BWR design, put on the coast of a place known for having tsunamis, and wasn’t properly equipped with emergency generators (they flooded, oopsies) which they couldn’t get to, in order to service the reactor, due to the roads being fucking yeeted.
Literally any other plant on earth is going to have a better outcome.
Modern reactor designs have no such problem, hence the reference to ancient science.
You get much more radiation and excess deaths from Coal and Natural gas plants than Fukushima and Chernobyl, it’s just that it’s not as obvious as it happens slowly over time.
In fact there are more deaths caused by wind energy sources than nuclear energy sources.
There was still 164,000 people who needed to evacuate 230 square miles. The land is contaminated and cleanup is proving difficult. Japan will be dealing with the environmental impact for a century I’d wager.
Look up fly ash storage ponds. That’s just normal coal usage. Then look up fly ash spills. Then look up how much radioactive material is released into the atmosphere each year from burning coal. Compare that to the estimated amounts of radioactive material released into the environment from all the nuclear plant accidents, and tell me we still wouldn’t be better off switching all coal off and using nuclear.
Now, we don’t really have to do that, because we have other options now. But we definitely should have used more nuclear 50 years ago, just for the reduced cost of human lives.
This one says, now it’s only 27 square kilometers ( fuck your stupid ass miles) https://edition.cnn.com/2022/06/14/asia/japan-fukushima-katsurao-village-return-intl-hnk/index.html
And this is from 2022
I think you misunderstood what was written:
27 km² are the worst areas. The other 310km² are still “difficult-to-return”.
Put them in more appropriate places (not like everything has to be nuclear) and don’t act like the USSR.
Nuclear is a very valuable component of a mixed energy structure. There are absolutely use cases for it and we should not avoid it.
They need cooling water, so “on the coast” is a reasonable location. Or do you mean “not in Japan”? A country without many great options for clean energy generation. Frankly Japan is one of the places nuclear makes sense to me. There’s not many options.
It doesn’t make sense to me in the US where there’s a sunshine belt across the country 5 timezones long, large windswept plains and shallow coastlines. The US is rich in options and nuclear falls down the list.
The idea of an explosion is. That’s what this thread is about. It’s not just about meltdowns, which, like you said, is very low risk, and lower than ever from what we’ve learned in the past.