Every time someone comments in favor of the safety of nuclear energy, I point to incidents like this. Totally manageable. Totally mis-managed -- or, unmanaged.
Sure, maybe technically we know what to do. (Although I find this debatable on the timescales involved.)
But the human factor -- especially at any significant timescale (even just a few decades, or even years, or even in current time and practice). Zero reliability.
Humans have not demonstrated any capacity to properly and reliably manage technology requiring such levels of commitment and diligence.
P.S. This is one reason that corporations should pay significant taxes. Because they should directly bear a significant portion of the costs of such fuck ups, and the preventive mitigation of them (e.g. effective regulation). In order for this to happen, they need to be contributing while they are extant and are making money from the endeavors. If we don't do this, society ends up chasing a non-corporeal ghost after the fact, or even when corporeal, one that no longer has any financial motive to pay. Eventually, the cost ends up being dumped indirectly and indiscriminately upon the general public. And often, the worst of the costs (e.g. health issues) end up being dumped upon those least advantaged and most defenseless.
To me this article feels so wrong. I couldn't care less if nuclear power is a bit more expensive than its alternatives if it offered advantages over them. But there is a single point that makes nuclear power so unattractive - if something goes seriously wrong, you are really screwed.
Nuclear power is expensive in no small part because of the safeguards needed to try to avert catastrophic accidents. Humans are fallible, and our best intentions can be subverted by inadequate training; fatigue; inattention; laziness; or what we used to call "a loss-of-brain accident." As a result, we can f[oul] up at any stage of design, construction, operation, or maintenance of a nuclear reactor.
(Neither Three Mile Island [0] nor Chernobyl [1] would have been so disastrous had it not been for cascading sequences of human error.)
Expecting nominal performance by people or machinery is ... unwise; as Admiral Rickover famously said, "you get what you INspect, not what you EXpect."
All that adds to costs.
Source: Former Navy nuclear engineering officer, qualified as [chief] engineer aboard the eight-reactor aircraft carrier USS Enterprise.
You can see their point though right? We can use Nuclear power but have to except every 30 years or so an accident will happen causing a massive exclusion zone and clean up op.
Doesn't sound like a fair price to pay to me (and a lot of others).
I worked in commercial nuclear power for a while, including a stint at three mile island. The regulatory compliance burden alone, from the NRC and DOE, is crippling financially.
The problem with nuclear is that people are afraid of it. If we had spent the last 40 years trying to make it cheaper instead of trying to prevent accidents, it wouldn't be so expensive.
Killing people is hardly the only issue. Rendering large tracts of land uninhabitable is extremely expensive. All told 4 nuclear reactors have had major issues, 2 subs and 1 power plant run by the USSR, and then another one very recently by Japan. Plus several near misses.
That’s a significant percentage of total reactors ever built including what was considered a safe design. We could go 1000 years without another incident, but from an insurance standpoint what would you charge a new power plant next to NYC? That means you need them in an a less expensive area, but everyone feels their area is valuable. That causes vast NIMBY issues and heavy regulation.
In theory modern Nuclear should cost less and be both clean and safe, but people gonna people both inside and outside the industry.
the price of protecting many small nuclear reactors against say aeroplanes will rise per watt.
I certainly agree with death per TWh calculations being naive, but for a different reason: ethics trumps metrics.
If I agree to climb a roof and maintain some solar panels in exchange for money, I am risking my own life and limb. A child 100 years from now will not fall off in my place.
If you agree to work in a nuclear reactor today, in theory a child in the future could get cancer from a mishap today.
Put differently: even if eating 20 grams of human babies cured AIDS, and hence many lives could be saved in exchange for one, does not justify the trade. We expect informed consent of all parties involved.
Since they seem to be happy to put a price on months of human lives that are not their own, how about instead they just factor the expected costs of accidents and relocations into the cost of nuclear power and tax the utility accordingly. Why is it always the little guy who has to get fucked when shit goes wrong?
The fact people in government and private industry knew the risk 18 years without addressing it it probably the most damming thing about nuclear power. The public simply can’t trust the industry or regulatory bodies. Which means they must assume avoidable disasters are going to be a regular thing.
I don’t have an issue with nuclear power but IMO the industry should be forced to pay for a ~1T insurance policy to avoid bad incentives rather than the government simply taking on the associated risks.
If just the nuclear power plant companies had to fully handle their waste products from the get go, there wouldnt be the delusion today that nuclear energy is free or cheap.
The core of the problem is, as almost always, incentives. The agencies set up to write the rulebook and supervise and the people in them gain nothing by having nuclear plants built. Their mandate is to prevent accidents - and you can't have accidents if you don't have power plants.
even then it's still a shit show because someone has to play for cleanup and storage and the nuclear company usually goes conveniently bankrupt soon after they stop producing energy.
The problem is that the operating costs are very high for nuclear (insurance alone is huge). Financially you're better off shutting down nuclear and putting the money into renewables.
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