> As the certainty of climate change grew clearer, nuclear power presented a dilemma for environmentalists: Was the risk of accidents or further spread of nuclear weapons greater than the hazard of climate change?
That nuclear weapons are spread by nuclear power is false. The type of nuclear plant that is optimized for producing power does not produce the right kind of products for nuclear weapons. These are produced in reactors more optimized for that task. Second, there are 31 countries operating nuclear power plants, but only 9 countries that have decided to develop nuclear weapons.
> In 2016, observing these trends, I launched a company devoted to building offshore wind turbines.
There were a lot of assertions in this article, but very little meat to back them up. I'd have liked much more detail on how he thinks alternative energy sources will economically meet all electricity needs globally, and more safely over the full life cycle.
The weapons thread is bogus anyway. Elon could have a impactor in every spaceship he launches- and level the city, holding the world ransom. With exponential tech every alien noose hair trimmer allows every individual to departicipate a city. This is uncomfortable territory for the high and mighty. Cause if everyone is el presidente with a football- nobody is special.
Either we all live in peace, or nobody does in pieces.
Is tech still exponential?
Moores law is dead, and we should be glad of it. Change at a scale we can adapt with is good. We’ll be adapting to the havok created by exponential tech for a while to come, but some might say it’s finally slowed down.
Regardless, nuclear energy absolutely presents a dilemma for me. I love the dream of what nuclear energy could become. But the reality of the industry at present does not live up to that. That doesn't make it a practical option for investment and that is always a problem. It is right to try and fix that, but in the meantime renewables just make sense as a good option. If the industry can get its act together then nuclear plants will be built. Arguing about how nuclear is better on paper does not help that one bit. It needs to be better in the messy real world.
Nuclear power is by far the cleanest and safest, including wind power.
>In England, there were 163 wind turbine accidents that killed 14 people in 2011. Wind produced about 15 billion kWhrs that year, so using a capacity factor of 25%, that translates to about 1,000 deaths per trillion kWhrs produced (the world produces 15 trillion kWhrs per year from all sources). -- https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2013/09/29/forget-ea...
1 TWh = 1 billion kWh, so multiply by 1,000 to get trillion kWh and you have ~70 deaths for nuclear, compared to 1,000 for wind per trillion kWh.
Fairly small sample size for wind power deaths vs nuclear (someone let me know if you find a better source), but I'd be very surprised if it didn't hold up with a more complete set of data. There have only been a trivial amount of nuclear power related deaths throughout history, with less than 10 deaths in the last 33 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident...
These are cooked numbers. How many died constructing nuke plants? How many mining, refining, processing, transporting fuel and fuel handling equipment? How many died of radioactive krypton gas poisoning after 3MI? (No, not zero.) Zirconium refining, alone, accounts for plenty of deaths.
The author clearly has access to far better information than defenders posting here.
Just the fact that all nuke plants in operation were designed to withstand much less severe weather and flooding events than are now expected, with no requirements or plans for improvement, justify shutdown.
Then you have to play fair. How many died constructing wind turbines? How many mining, refining, processing, transporting the construction materials and equipment? How many died of pollution generated in the manufacturing process. Etc...
Admittedly, I don't know the actual data, but as far as I understand, people have made attempts to factor in these kinds of side costs, like estimating deaths caused by Chernobyl, and even with those factors, nuclear still comes out looking a lot safer.
>How many died of radioactive krypton gas poisoning after 3MI? (No, not zero.)
Can you actually prove anyone died as a result? The American Nuclear Society concluded:
>"The average radiation dose to people living within 10 miles of the plant was eight millirem, and no more than 100 millirem to any single individual. Eight millirem is about equal to a chest X-ray, and 100 millirem is about a third of the average background level of radiation received by U.S. residents in a year."
>"Several health studies found there were no long-term adverse effects on the health of the population living around TMI."
>The author clearly has access to far better information than defenders posting here.
If that's the case, why doesn't he share them? Just sounds like an appeal to authority. Regardless nuclear is safer by a massive margin, and again I'd be very surprised if that still wasn't the case even factoring all of that in. Even if you did have evidence of thousands of people dying, it'd still be safer than all other forms of generating power, not to mention much cleaner.
>with no requirements or plans for improvement,
The only reasons we're not improving plants and building new ones is government regulations preventing it.
Imagine if nuclear energy did kill the same number of people as wind energy does. Would that change your opinion? Of course not, and nor should it. Because both sources of energy are ridiculously safe compared to coal. Wind is safe enough.
But there is still a difference between wind and nuclear. In terms of public safety wind energy is far easier to model and design safely. Just make sure that the wind turbine is placed far enough away from roads and buildings. So that if it falls over (massively unlikely) it will not hurt anyone. A wind farm can be designed safe by a cad technician with 15 mins of training. A nuclear reactor requires an entire industry of scientists and engineers triple checking each others work. You can check the safety of a wind farm with a ruler. Obviously offshore wind is more complicated, but you get my point. Nuclear energy is hard.
For the record, I do think we should invest in nuclear energy. But these kind of arguments seem a little intellectually dishonest. Renewables are good enough on many of the metrics in which nuclear excels.
Perspective - Perspective Discussion of news topics with a point of view, including narratives by individuals regarding their own experiences
Honestly, I think news sites should make clear when an article is opinion piece, and therefore should be read critically. That's regardless of what you think of media bias.
The whole thing is written from a first-person perspective. It’s titled “... now I think”. It’s so exceedingly obvious that it is an opinion piece, even having the “perspective” line in the header seems like overkill to me....
Maybe because the guy's also a former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission?
The article was hardly a wind energy puff piece (no pun intended).
At no point was there ever a rational expectation of cost-effective nuke power generation, despite all the transparent "too cheap to meter" lies spread at the beginning. The original and remaining purpose was to provide an industrial base for weapons production processes.
Money for tokamak fusion research has a similar purpose: a jobs program for high-neutron-flux physicists, to maintain a pool available for weapons work. There is no plausible expectation of ever getting practical power generation from tokamaks.
this opinion piece is such garbage, typical washington post biassed journalism. not only that it's poorly written. for gods sakes this asshole doesnt even mention yukka mountain or nuclear waste in general! all he does is discuss catastrophe and catastrophic thinking and basically apologizes for the guaranteed disaster of airpollution and smog caused by 'dirty power factories'. Also solar is incredibly dirty right now to produce. wind ALSO has production tradeoffs.
finally , new tech to sluice uranium out of seawater (it is 15 parts per billion naturally! ) may make it incredibly environmentally friendly
the guy simply isn't able to put his finger on the real button of corruption in government and industry as the reason why we cannot have nice things. and the answer is innovation and technology, smaller and better nuclear reactor designs and better nuclear chemistry to isolate dangerous elements and bombard them with neutrons to speed up their wasting process. (let's not even go to the thorium and 'recycling' cycles which still have not yet been proven to be commecial viable)
nuclear was the future , and it still is. just wait until the rest of the world catches up , india and china are coming with giant power grids, and the west is going to waste away with power shortages and artificially high power prices for many decades to come ......
19 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 55.0 ms ] threadThat nuclear weapons are spread by nuclear power is false. The type of nuclear plant that is optimized for producing power does not produce the right kind of products for nuclear weapons. These are produced in reactors more optimized for that task. Second, there are 31 countries operating nuclear power plants, but only 9 countries that have decided to develop nuclear weapons.
> In 2016, observing these trends, I launched a company devoted to building offshore wind turbines.
There were a lot of assertions in this article, but very little meat to back them up. I'd have liked much more detail on how he thinks alternative energy sources will economically meet all electricity needs globally, and more safely over the full life cycle.
>In England, there were 163 wind turbine accidents that killed 14 people in 2011. Wind produced about 15 billion kWhrs that year, so using a capacity factor of 25%, that translates to about 1,000 deaths per trillion kWhrs produced (the world produces 15 trillion kWhrs per year from all sources). -- https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2013/09/29/forget-ea...
Nuclear power has 0.07 deaths per TWh. (https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy)
1 TWh = 1 billion kWh, so multiply by 1,000 to get trillion kWh and you have ~70 deaths for nuclear, compared to 1,000 for wind per trillion kWh.
Fairly small sample size for wind power deaths vs nuclear (someone let me know if you find a better source), but I'd be very surprised if it didn't hold up with a more complete set of data. There have only been a trivial amount of nuclear power related deaths throughout history, with less than 10 deaths in the last 33 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident...
The author clearly has access to far better information than defenders posting here.
Just the fact that all nuke plants in operation were designed to withstand much less severe weather and flooding events than are now expected, with no requirements or plans for improvement, justify shutdown.
Admittedly, I don't know the actual data, but as far as I understand, people have made attempts to factor in these kinds of side costs, like estimating deaths caused by Chernobyl, and even with those factors, nuclear still comes out looking a lot safer.
https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy
Can you actually prove anyone died as a result? The American Nuclear Society concluded:
>"The average radiation dose to people living within 10 miles of the plant was eight millirem, and no more than 100 millirem to any single individual. Eight millirem is about equal to a chest X-ray, and 100 millirem is about a third of the average background level of radiation received by U.S. residents in a year."
>"Several health studies found there were no long-term adverse effects on the health of the population living around TMI."
http://www.ans.org/pi/resources/sptopics/tmi/whathappened.ph...
More studies:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2389745
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1405170/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2029040
I welcome any evidence to the contrary.
>The author clearly has access to far better information than defenders posting here.
If that's the case, why doesn't he share them? Just sounds like an appeal to authority. Regardless nuclear is safer by a massive margin, and again I'd be very surprised if that still wasn't the case even factoring all of that in. Even if you did have evidence of thousands of people dying, it'd still be safer than all other forms of generating power, not to mention much cleaner.
>with no requirements or plans for improvement,
The only reasons we're not improving plants and building new ones is government regulations preventing it.
But there is still a difference between wind and nuclear. In terms of public safety wind energy is far easier to model and design safely. Just make sure that the wind turbine is placed far enough away from roads and buildings. So that if it falls over (massively unlikely) it will not hurt anyone. A wind farm can be designed safe by a cad technician with 15 mins of training. A nuclear reactor requires an entire industry of scientists and engineers triple checking each others work. You can check the safety of a wind farm with a ruler. Obviously offshore wind is more complicated, but you get my point. Nuclear energy is hard.
For the record, I do think we should invest in nuclear energy. But these kind of arguments seem a little intellectually dishonest. Renewables are good enough on many of the metrics in which nuclear excels.
Perspective - Perspective Discussion of news topics with a point of view, including narratives by individuals regarding their own experiences
Honestly, I think news sites should make clear when an article is opinion piece, and therefore should be read critically. That's regardless of what you think of media bias.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Jaczko
At no point was there ever a rational expectation of cost-effective nuke power generation, despite all the transparent "too cheap to meter" lies spread at the beginning. The original and remaining purpose was to provide an industrial base for weapons production processes.
Money for tokamak fusion research has a similar purpose: a jobs program for high-neutron-flux physicists, to maintain a pool available for weapons work. There is no plausible expectation of ever getting practical power generation from tokamaks.
finally , new tech to sluice uranium out of seawater (it is 15 parts per billion naturally! ) may make it incredibly environmentally friendly
the guy simply isn't able to put his finger on the real button of corruption in government and industry as the reason why we cannot have nice things. and the answer is innovation and technology, smaller and better nuclear reactor designs and better nuclear chemistry to isolate dangerous elements and bombard them with neutrons to speed up their wasting process. (let's not even go to the thorium and 'recycling' cycles which still have not yet been proven to be commecial viable)
nuclear was the future , and it still is. just wait until the rest of the world catches up , india and china are coming with giant power grids, and the west is going to waste away with power shortages and artificially high power prices for many decades to come ......