I don't understand how people who keep bringing up that conventional power generation kills more people than nuclear ever has (yet!) get around having their nose rubbed in the fact that we haven't experienced a worst case nuclear incident yet and that we keep getting lucky and scraping past worst cases -- at least according to what I read about all those old fuel rods stored at Fukushima. People keep ignoring safety precautions and we keep getting lucky, but luck and hope is not an acceptable strategy when you can irradiate large chunks of countries as a worst case scenario.
@SuperChihuahua: I can't find the articles now, but just one failure case is there were pools with spent nuclear rods in them that required active cooling. Failure to do so produces a plume of radiation straight into the air. Of course you're never supposed to store that many fuel rods, yet somehow safety wasn't important and there we where with tons of fuel rods in pools that required active cooling and no real plan for what to do if, say, we couldn't actively cool them.
> It's baffling to me that so many people seem unwilling to accept the idea that maybe, perhaps, we've learned a few lessons about building safe nuclear reactors over the last 50 years.
I would suggest that the real problem with nuclear energy is that we don't know how dangerous it is. And we have no means of estimating the danger that isn't obviously inadequate. You see, nuclear disasters don't happen because engineers are incapable of designing failsafes and containment buildings. Nuclear disasters happen because it's impossible for engineers to envision all the possible failure modes. The confluence of events that causes a meltdown is inevitably something the engineers didn't design for.
In an enlightening article [0] written after the Fukushima disaster, a physicist and expert on nuclear safety argues that
- severe accidents at nuclear reactors have occurred much more frequently than what risk-assessment models predicted;
- the probabilistic risk assessment method does a poor job of anticipating accidents in which a single event, such as a tsunami, causes failures in multiple safety systems; and
- catastrophic nuclear accidents are inevitable, because designers and risk modelers cannot envision all possible ways in which complex systems can fail.
In other words, everything we "know" about nuclear safety is wrong.
Humans are terrible at evaluating rare but expensive failure modes. Nuclear power is far safer than just coal mining operations, even taking into account accidents.
What other metric would you use though? It seems to me the top-level comment is arguing "I think nuclear is scary so therefore statistical risk analysis is invalid"
And I don't understand people that don't make this very valid point rather than making fools of themselves by denying the dangers of nuclear power and refuting arguments no one ever used.
And this is precisely why we can never consider nuclear power to be “safe”.
It’s just not worth the risk exposure. The worst case failure modes must be expected to occur, and they must be economically and ecologically acceptable when they do.
The idea that “this can theoretically happen but we promise it won’t” is simply not acceptable. Versus, “this is extremely unlikely to occur because of these numerous counter-measures, but when it does here’s what we do and what it will cost us.”
If you can do the later analysis on a nuclear plant and come away satisfied, then build baby build.
The worst nuclear accidents that could possibly happen have already happened. We couldn't have a worse nuclear power disaster than Lake Karachay even if we tried on purpose. And yet the sum damage they caused is a negligible blip compared to how many people die due to the use of fossil fuels on any given month of any given year.
The environmental impact of nuclear power vs. fossil fuels or even renewables is just a negligible number no matter how you spin it.
I too am confused like the GP poster as to how otherwise intelligent people just break down into baseless fearmongering about imaginary disaster scenarios while ignoring that today's conventional energy industry is literally thousands of times worse.
If every single operational nuclear power plant had a meltdown incident after operating for 20 years, they'd still be orders of magnitude less damaging than what we're doing today. The environmental impact and safety numbers are just that far apart.
It sounds laughably absurd when he makes it, too. Do you understand anything about risk management?
edit: I've stated elsewhere in this thread that the absurdist language used by nuclear power proponents greatly undermines their credibility. This is a perfect example.
The probability of a catastrophic event in a modern nuclear plant is vanishingly low. Even the overworked ancient plants from the 60's and 70's we are currently running are exceedingly safe.
People will rather take constant death from coal power than risk a low-probability event.
This is a great article, which restates the obvious, the people are lousy at understanding 'risk'.
Time, after time, after time. Every single study on every single metric shows that energy from Nuclear power is the safest and cleanest source of energy we currently know about, and yet the 'risk' boogie man is always at the forefront.
And in a weird way, by stopping implementation of power plants, we have sort of 'frozen' the perception of the risk based on experiences from the 70's. Have you ever compared the safety of a car you drove in the 70's with a car you drive today? Any different?
How do we 'grow up' past our 20th century fears and step up to save people, the planet, and our sanity by taking a more 'grown up' view of the risk / benefit analysis of nuclear power?
I really give Bill Gates credit for putting significant funds into the travelling wave reactor concept. He's looking at being able to take advantage of a safe way to generate power and consume left over waste products. How cool is that. But we have to get past a collective fear that the idea has the words 'nuclear' and 'reactor' in the title.
I don't see any evidence humans are smart enough to operate nuclear power safely. There are too many examples of humans not fully understanding nuclear, or just being stupid with nuclear. For example, building a nuclear power plant near an earthquake fault line in CA, or where tsunamis occur in Japan. We can't get the basics of safety right here.
That really casts doubt on your assertions. Nuclear carries significantly fewer risks than coal (which operates in the nuclear failure state all the time).
There will always be unknown unknowns.
One such happened in Fukushima - an earthquake and tsunami exceeding design specifications; the earthquake logarithmically so.
This resulted in near total defeat of the safety protocols.
Layers of containment designed never to be breached, were breached.
Rods in the nearby cooling pools even got hot.
Fundamentally, the plant operators lost control of the situation.
Yes, its probable the final number of lives lost will be low. But, almost all the safety mechanisms were breached.
With slightly more misfortune (perhaps another hydrogen explosion), much radiation could have been released, and many could have died.
Anyone (like Monbiot, the author) who argues that this incident increases faith in the safety of the nuclear power plant needs to read Feynman's minority report on the shuttle disaster.
When the safety systems, designed never to be breached at all, are 50% breached, you do not have a 50% margin of error.
You have an extremely serious problem.
Is nuclear fisson probably going to be our medium term energy source? Yes; there are few better alternatives.
But we are going to have to be very careful about how we build them.
Finally, while I am not attacking nuclear power here, it is erroneous to reason about the relative safeties of technologies based purely on the historical track record.
What we should be thinking about is what the risk is in future; not what it has been in the past. If I told you I had an energy source that had a known 0.01% of ending the world, each year, but a clean 50 year track record, would you allow me to continue with it?
Of course not!
We must not make inferences about possible risks based purely on the track record, with no regard for improbable, but perhaps catastrophic, scenarios.
Thankfully, nuclear power is not the doomsday energy source some people make out; and I'm not arguing against it - just against the specious reasoning.
You're still lying about the alternatives to nuclear power. You are still underestimating the impact of a nuclear disaster. You are still underestimating the risk of a nuclear disaster. These things have always occurred more frequently than expected, and we haven't seen anyone intentionally blow up a nuclear facility yet. The possibility for someone to actually make that happen intentionally (as supposed to the also criminal but less intentional neglect in the case of Fukushima) makes the risk calculations around nuclear impossible.
We should definitely be afraid of misinformed nuclear apologists using an example of a major nuclear meltdown event as a testament to nuclear's safety. Comments like these are why nuclear is not trusted. These kinds of disasters demand respect and sobering retrospectives, not flippant dismissal.
I think your perception of the risk from terrorist attack on a Nuclear power plant and the actual risk involved are out of whack. Especially given that human error is a much more likely source a radioactive leak.
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