And considering the usual ways giant industries choose to "reduce costs", it's a bit unnerving for the rest of us.
Blaming the costs on regulatory compliance bureaucracy is one of those things that pro-nuclear people really need to stop saying, even to the extent that it's true (which is less than they think). Distrust of big corporations is as high as distrust of government, and for good reason. No one wants to live downwind from a nuclear plant constructed by the lowest bidder. Blaming the cost and construction issues on those stupid anti-science treehuggers and their liberal regulations is just alienating the very people you need to win over.
That said, nuclear will never, ever be able to achieve either the real or the apparent risk levels of a wind farm or a bunch of rooftop solar panels. And there's probably not a less attractive look for nuclear enthusiasts than some dude mansplaining about how solar is more dangerous than nuclear based on the number of people who smash their thumbs with a hammer while installing panels.
> That said, nuclear will never, ever be able to achieve either the real or the apparent risk levels of a wind farm or a bunch of rooftop solar panels.
I'm going to go ahead and point out that more people die falling off their roofs installing solar per kWh than have died per kWh from decades of nuclear operation [1]. Denigrating that data as mansplaining seems pretty anti-scientific. Both death/kWh rates are nearly zero compared to fossil fuels.
Apparent risks, now that's a real problem. Can be solved with PR and education.
Check my link in the previous post. You'll see that the industry is writing down in good detail exactly how it plans to reduce costs by increasing procedural efficiency without reducing safety.
To just say that appropriate safety has to be expensive, and any attempt to fix it is unsafe, is pretty bold, especially in the face of what the climate scientists are predicting with continued carbon emissions.
The "falling off the roofs" argument is bogus in at least two ways.
First, most PV installs in the US are now large scale, where the PV modules are installed on the ground, not on roofs.
Second, deaths of workers in an industry are different than deaths of the general public. Workers made a choice to work on roofs; the public has no choice if a reactor near them has a problem.
So if a technology kills workers but not the public, that's ok, because the workers made that choice? I don't think that stands to much scrutiny. Most workers choose careers of opportunity.
Besides, the direct short-term deaths from commercial nuclear nearly all came from Chernobyl first responders, where staff and firefighters were the ones who got ARS (they chose hazardous careers too).
For the "up to 4000" latent deaths from Chernobyl, I think you have a good point. 1960s nuclear is worse than wind and solar in latent deaths. I'm hoping advanced nuclear with passive decay heat removal and low pressure coolants will even that out.
I also didn't mention the reasons behind deaths from wind, which include hazardous maintenance and ice throw. Deaths from these things are exceedingly low per kWh, just like they are for nuclear. That's the point I'm trying to convey: nuclear is roughly on par with wind/solar in terms of deaths/kWh.
Anyway, where is the best data on what kind of solar is currently being built?
I'm not saying it's ok, I'm saying its different. And it IS clearly different, in regulation. Risks to the uninvolved public are subject to stricter control than to workers, in the energy industry and elsewhere.
One could make the case that the public is also subject to risk from solar, for example from traffic accidents transporting the materials to and from large scale installation sites. But the "falls from roof tops" argument isn't doing that.
It's definitely different. I agree. I should adjust the falls from rooftops talk. I don't want to malign the variable renewables. I need to figure out how to explain to people that nuclear deaths/kWh are extremely low compared to our current mix, and yes they're even roughly as low or lower than the excellent characteristics of the wind/solar lifecycle.
People often meet this idea wish shock: "But how can wind or solar hurt anyone? There are no Captain Planet episodes about that." So I have to explain some mechanisms of why huge distributed energy harvesting can harm people. If you have other suggestions on how to communicate this effectively I'd love the help.
OK well I can agree with that! I have never converted an antinuke with that fact. I have converted dozens (at least from absolute rejection to cautious optimism) with 10-15 minute in-person discussions. I have not found out how to scale that.
The pro-nuclear advocates are usually their own worst enemies. That smug dudebro points-scoring is a huge problem. Then again, I think most people would be a lot more effective at life if they'd sit down and read How to Win Friends and Influence People and other basic sales texts.
I'm generally anti-nuclear, but not for safety reasons. I'm sure we can build safe plants. Rather, I distrust institutions, whether governments or giant corporations. I'm also concerned about the impact of nuclear power on inequality, as it's simply not available to the poorer nations, for reasons both good (proliferation, terrorism) and bad (lack of infrastructure).
Renewable power is so good in terms of fundamentals, particularly accessibility to poor nations and difficulty in using it for state-level violence, that I no longer see good reason to even attempt scaling up nuclear power. A meaningful scaling would take decades of effort and trillions of dollars worldwide. In that time, we'll grow a renewable infrastructure of the same scale profitably and organically.
This is a very good point. The shape of society will mirror the shape of its vital infrastructure. Energy is the fungible commodity - you can make virtually anything else with it. Centralize the [electrical] power, and the [political] power will centralize also.
I'm generally pro-nuclear - I think it's astonishing and tragic that we discovered an infinite source of clean energy, and doomed the Earth by failing to switch to it immediately - but the self-organization of the internet holds valuable lessons on the importance of distributed, fault-tolerant structures.
Especially as we enter a time already made uncertain by climate change, perhaps now is not the time to aggressively centralize. Windmills and Tesla walls look distinctly more "apocalypse-proof" than nuclear power stations.
Eh, nuclear isn't that great. It's taken decades to start even getting close to truly safe, low-waste reactors, and that only due to the considerable public pressure involved after various high-profile accidents. It's pretty cheap in the long run, but the initial costs are extremely high. We can't trust every nation to stick to high standards in terms of safety, so we're running globally at the safety level of the least competent crew of the worst reactor.
At this point, we're rapidly approaching (or already past) the point where renewables are cheaper per kwh in the long term than nuclear, and much cheaper in the short term - without the dependence on the neoliberal hegemony of giant governments and giant corporations and giant finance.
At this point, I'm not too concerned about climate change, largely because there's not much we can do about it. Environmentalism and liberalism are unfortunately full of a bunch of hairshirted Puritan shaming over anyone doing anything that feels happy or successful - denial is a moral good, and allowing ourselves the benefits of abundant energy is a sin. I feel that's driving concerns about global warming more than the actual environmental damage - they finally have an excuse to deny people a good time.
More importantly, denialism won't work. If we cut our consumption by 50% right now (fat chance), it'd just take us 100 years rather than 50 to burn through the same amount of dinosaur. Same long-term damage. The only thing that will work is creating an energy framework (both production and consumption) that doesn't use fossil fuels, but has roughly the same cost (or less) and the same output.
Renewables are on their way to giving us more energy than dinosaurs ever did, at lower cost, without complex technical dependencies, high up-front costs, etc. It's the greatest weapon against the Corporate State since the internet. Why anyone would want nuclear and its dependency on the neoliberal hegemony (especially if they fear concentrated power at all) is beyond me.
Blaming the costs on regulatory compliance bureaucracy is one of those things that pro-nuclear people really need to stop saying, even to the extent that it's true (which is less than they think). Distrust of big corporations is as high as distrust of government, and for good reason. No one wants to live downwind from a nuclear plant constructed by the lowest bidder. Blaming the cost and construction issues on those stupid anti-science treehuggers and their liberal regulations is just alienating the very people you need to win over.
That said, nuclear will never, ever be able to achieve either the real or the apparent risk levels of a wind farm or a bunch of rooftop solar panels. And there's probably not a less attractive look for nuclear enthusiasts than some dude mansplaining about how solar is more dangerous than nuclear based on the number of people who smash their thumbs with a hammer while installing panels.