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[dragdeler]

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[Il Palazzo]

These are not factors that are being ignored. They are being weighted against the benefits, and are found to be manageable. What you're doing, is assigning infinite weight to those factors, so that no benefits can ever outweigh them.

[Madman198237]

I'm no scientiest but if a meteor can't vaporise a rod, please tell me why it couldn't... Because I am under the impression that even at chernobyl they mostly managed to keep shit submerged which is a HUGE risk mitigation boon (at the cost of human sacrifices, let us not forget). Or let me say it this way: the core being exposed was a matter of days/weeks. After the fires, the premisses were phyisically accessible right? What if they are not after the catastrophic failure.

What the hell are you smoking?

If a METEOR wipes your power plant off the face of the earth, well, we can stop right there because the odds of a meteor directly striking a nuclear facility are literally astronomical, so tiny you might as well forget about it. But maybe we won't stop there, instead let's consider what actually HAPPENS when something large enough to matter hits the surface. The answer is "a huge explosion". On impact, the impactor basically explodes. If this hit a nuclear power plant, it'd spray the material inside over such a wide radius that it would not meaningfully increase radiation. And if it did, who cares? Everyone close enough to get enough radiation to notice so much as an increased risk of cancer has died in a hail of molten rock.

At Chernobyl nothing stayed "submerged". It went full meltdown. The core is in fact not in the reactor vessel right now, it's a still-somewhat-molten mass of "corium" that melted straight out of the bottom of the entire facility. The main reactor vessel completely failed in multiple directions, nothing was contained. The 2000-ton steel lid of the reactor was turned into a missile.

They didn't manage to keep a darn thing "contained" at Chernobyl, and you cannot do worse than "multiple steam explosions that scatter the contents of the reactor around the area".

[dragdeler]

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[Madman198237]

The Chernobyl plant had THREE other reactors operating at the time of the accident, and none of them were compromised and they kept operating after the accident, until the 90s.

Curse the Russians for Chernobyl, because it gave so many people such a great point of discussion for "NUCLEAR BAD!" despite it not being representative of potential failures at all.


By that definition, NO present power sources are "green", as none of them take carbon from the air to provide power. None. And none ever will, because removing CO2 from the atmosphere and turning it into any other chemical is an energy-USING process, not an energy-producing one.

Nuclear power does not turn air into anything deadly, and doesn't really do that to water either unless you're actively trying to create isotopes, and even then as I recall most isotopes you can convert hydrogen and oxygen to don't pose a serious radiation threat unless you suffer extremely long-term exposure, which would again require actual INTENT to cause.

Please stop conflating "radiation" with "acute radiation poisoning". You can receive a small dose of radiation and by completely fine, you can receive a moderate dose and suffer only an elevated risk of cancer. Only if you are, say, directly exposed to the actual molten core of a failed reactor would you suffer serious and immediate effects. If you cover a huge geographical area, you can only ever get SMALL doses in any portion of that area, because there is simply never that much radioactive material involved.

We're not talking about widespread death with nuclear accidents, we're talking about widespread elevations in cancer risk and the damage incurred to the actual reactor plant and the people who are there when it happens.

[dragdeler]

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[Madman198237]

No, the maintenance and operating costs DO NOT outweigh the profits, but it's much faster to start making money if you build, say, a natural gas plant, than if you build a nuclear plant.

It's unlikely that we WILL see another Chernobyl, because everybody knows how it happens and desperately wants to avoid it. Chernobyl wasn't a "once in a lifetime" disaster, it was a "once, period" disaster. Also ahahahaha "nuclear proliferation" I wish. No really, I wish, nuclear power is slowly being cut out of the market, leaving us ever more dependent on fossil fuels that kill more people with their emissions than nuclear does even if you include the accidents. Oh well.

I replied to the rest of the edit in an edit to my post right after I made it.

[dragdeler]

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[Madman198237]

So, what, a supervolcano is too unrealistic but A FLIPPING ASTEROID STRIKE isn't? That is absurd.


I'm not sure why you paired those two quotes since they are literally talking about two separate things.

[dragdeler]

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[Madman198237]

The Chelyabinsk asteroid didn't even touch the ground, it detonated in air. Therefore it wouldn't have compromised a nuclear plant and it wouldn't have led to any fallout. Not sure why you've latched onto the supervolcano point as something meaningful, honestly. It was only meant to demonstrate the absurdity of suggesting that any given power source should be proof against a literal apocalypse. You would never worry about making solar power volcano-proof or making a nuclear reactor asteroid-proof, any more than we worry about protecting chess games against cruise missiles or antitank munitions.


No but the fact that it isn't dealt with properly DOES NOT MEAN that the cost of doing so must be so high as to make nuclear unreasonable. Hence why I didn't make that assumption despite suspecting that that might be the point.

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[martinuzz]

Molten salt reactors will be able to burn almost all of the extremely long term radioactive waste, like plutonium and americium.
China's building the first reactors already.

Once the world adopts these new reactors, the (old) nuclear waste problem will be solved (and when the old reactors are phased out, no new waste of the 100000s of years type will be created). There will still be some radioactive waste that will stay dangerously radioactive for longer than any civilization ever existed, but it will only be a tiny fraction of what is produced now. And that indeed is already very little if we're speaking volume. The vast majority of the waste will only remain radioactive for a few decades to a few centuries.

The chance of terrorists blowing up a reactor or making a dirty bomb with stolen waste is present but very small. I think much smaller than terrorists buying a nuke or chemical weapon from a failed state or corrupt regime. Terrorism is a threat anyhow. More civilian nuclear power is not going to increase that threat.

[feelotraveller]

Nuclear power is decidedly NOT cheap.  Comparing it to renewables (in us$/megawatt-hours), levelised costs of electricity:

Nuclear 131-204
Wind - onshore 26-50
Solar PV - rooftop residential 147-221
Solar PV - rooftop commercial and industrial 67-180
Solar PV - community 59-91
Solar PV - crystalline utility scale 30-41
Solar PV - thin film utility scale 28-37
Solar thermal tower with storage 126-156
Geothermal 56-93

It gets far worse when capital costs are considered (us$/kilowatt-hour):

Nuclear 7800-12800
Wind - onshore 1025-1350
Solar PV - rooftop residential 2475-2850
Solar PV - rooftop commercial and industrial 1400-2850
Solar PV - community 1200-1450
Solar PV - crystalline utility scale 800-950
Solar PV - thin film utility scale 800-950
Solar thermal tower with storage 6000-9090
Geothermal 4325-5575

(source for figues Lazard (2021): https://www.lazard.com/media/451881/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-150-vf.pdf - pdf download link)

There is an issue with base-load/storage capacity with regard to renewables which delphonso rightly mentions.  However the lower production costs leave lots of overhead for storage inefficiencies, something like say green hydrogen.  Investment dollars would be better directed into the battery issue rather than into the continually failed and failing nuclear cycle.

[martinuzz]

Despite our government re-opening the schools a few weeks ago, a lot of children are still not getting education.
Too many teachers are in mandatory quarantaine because they, or someone they were in contact with for more than 15 minutes tested positive.
There's not enough spare teachers to fill the gap, so entire schools are sent home.