Comment by MostlyStable
6 days ago
While I think you are accurately describing how people do/would react, the "big deal" you describe killed, injured, or caused adverse health effects for exactly zero people. It is possible that these are inevitable outcomes of human psychology, but a more rational world would have gone full steam ahead on nuclear power, even after all of the events you describe. A Chernobyl level accident every single year would have killed fewer people (by a few OOM) than particulate emissions from coal, and that's completely ignoring any climate effects.
Our societies risk tolerance with nuclear is literally orders of magnitude disconnected from how we treat risk from any other source, and as a result we are all poorer, less healthy, and have injured the environment to a dramatically greater degree relative to a pro-nuclear alternative timeline.
>a more rational world would have gone full steam ahead on nuclear power
Nuclear is not perfect, it has some drawbacks that totally justify not going "full steam ahead". Even if it is the cleanest energy possible and 100% safe guaranteed, it is also very concentrated (at least for now) that makes a plant shutting down for repairment/manteinance a problem, it is expensive to build, it takes forever to increase capacity, it creates dangerous residues, it is not very modulable.
> and have injured the environment to a dramatically greater degree relative to a pro-nuclear alternative timeline.
France is having a problem to install green energy, because their nuclear capacity is so big. The alternative pro-nuclear timeline might be using fossils as the modulable part forever by blocking solar and wind installations.
>and as a result we are all poorer
How? Nuclear is safe, but it is expensive. And it almost naturally lead to monopolies and oligopolies due to their size and complexity, allowing owners to have pricing power. In fact, the economics of building a nuclear plant don't work unless a state subsidizes (i.e. extra costs you won't find in the utility bill, but hidding in your taxes, ask the french) its build and insurance costs.
> Nuclear is not perfect, it has some drawbacks that totally justify not going "full steam ahead". Even if it is the cleanest energy possible and 100% safe guaranteed, it is also very concentrated (at least for now) that makes a plant shutting down for repairment/manteinance a problem, it is expensive to build, it takes forever to increase capacity, it creates dangerous residues, it is not very modulable.
I'd imagine a lot of that would be solved if we just kept building them.
Also, solar have zero ability to modulate upwards and need massive energy banks to cover weather/non solar peak.
Nuclear plants are what about 5% per minute ? So you only need 30 minutes worth of capacity vs hours and hours for anything green
> Also, solar have zero ability to modulate upwards
The solution is to overprovision and either disconnect or cover the surplus panels.
> and need massive energy banks to cover weather/non solar peak.
Power banks are useful in themselves (smoothing over demand peaks that would be hard to follow with any technology), and you can fill in with wind as well, as having multiple sources make times of reduced capacity less likely.
> it is expensive to build,
Is that because the building materials, engineering, and labor are super expensive or because of environmentalists throwing up legal and monetary roadblocks for decades? ("OK, if you can do a decade-long study on the impact of this plant AND make sure no Native American tribes declare a 100-mile area around your proposed site sacred AND you can design it in such a way that it emits less background radiation than a vacuum cleaner, maybe we can advance your proposal to the review stage, which will last a couple years. Too expensive, huh? Shame!")
> it creates dangerous residues
We have a perfectly good storage site (Yucca Mountain), but of course political and environmental opposition is what keeps it closed.
> France is having a problem to install green energy, because their nuclear capacity is so big. The alternative pro-nuclear timeline might be using fossils as the modulable part forever by blocking solar and wind installations.
I don't see how it reasonably follows that leaning heavily on nuclear power would cause France to decide that fossil fuels are somehow a better choice than renewables for that purpose. Pure speculation based on the common anti-nuclear belief that using nuclear power will retard the usage of renewables for some reason.
You're kind of highlighting what's stalled nuclear energy for decades: demanding absolute, total perfection in the face of reality, which is that nuclear is and has been the _best_ overall option for baseload power generation.
It stands to reason, that climate change costs should be burdened as taxes on technologies that where suggested as full nuclear replacement.