Yes, I know: Chernobyl. That's a cop out. Germany need not be governed by hysteria. The difference between Russian/Soviet incompetence and the results we see from France, Ontario and other well governed and highly successful nuclear systems is vast and decisive and could have provided Germany's 'leaders' with the ammo they needed to do something other than indulge anti-nook hysteria.
But that's not what happened... so burn coal instead.
I do understand that less nuclear means more coal and that this is a difficult decision.
But nuclear fans claiming that the problem with nuclear reactors is just "stupid Russians" disqualify themselves immediately.
Have we? The problems aren't just in Russia, but they're drastically less bad than Chernobyl.
Three Mile Island was essentially a worst case for internal meltdowns, and didn't involve any actual radiation release. Fukushima was vastly worse, but the problems revealed were remedied at similarly-designed reactors worldwide. (And most of those weren't nearly so exposed to severe storms.)
I'm honestly not sure what you're referring to with French and Dutch reactors, I'll have to look into that.
But overall, most of the things profiled as "severe problems and gross negligence" appear to have caused zero fatalities and zero radiation release. I know organizations like Rolling Stone have been running accounts of how the NRC is terrible and American nuclear plants are in crisis, but the problems raised don't actually amount to radiation risks.
I've never seen a convincing claim that the examples of actual release or meltdown risk, as opposed to mere sloppy management, are 'legion'.
> more coal and that this is a difficult decision
10,000 fatalities from coal per year in the USA alone. I agree that there's a tradeoff here, but I honestly have no idea why it's 'difficult'. Even the Chernobyl disaster is going to kill fewer people than coal kills when everything goes according to plan.
I'm not sure this is enough. "We almost head a nuclear meltdown in a densely populated area but zero fatalities so far!" is not inspiring confidence that there will be no fatalities in the future.
> 10,000 fatalities from coal per year in the USA alone.
Where did you get that number?
Three Mile Island isn't evidence of safety just because no one died, what matters to me is that there was no realistic route beyond "shielded meltdown". A lot of the fears raised by opponents of nuclear appear to be outright impossible. (Sadly realistic fears, mostly around hot waste disposal, don't seem to get as much coverage.)
The coal number is deaths from health effects of coal burning. Estimates vary widely, but 7,500 is a minimum and 10k is conservative. It's worse per capita and per watt in other countries, too - US plants are cleanish and US coal is low-particulate. Moving China onto nuclear power would be a vastly bigger gain (even per watt) than the US.
Accidental deaths are nontrivial for power sources, but don't dominate pollution effects. Coal is mostly pollution-derived because it's so dirty, oil is a mix because rigs are dangerous, wing & solar are wholly accident-based simply because there's no lethal pollution there. Nuclear causes approximately zero deaths of any kind, but again, tail risk.
US source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-other-reason-...
Global deaths/TwH source: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener...
In addition to the yet unsolved waste disposal problem you mentioned, there is the problem of mining the nuclear fuel. This can be quite dangerous to the miners, especially in countries with lax security standards. I would expect the most deaths due to nuclear power happen there.
The category of reactor that Chernobyl belonged to is grossly outclassed in terms of safety and 'meltdown' by multiple "modern" designs (produced primarily in the 50s through 70s). Even some operational since the 70s.
Chernobyl, that accident, is much more a story of piss poor crisis management set to the backdrop of poor government systems and the weaknesses of authoritarian regimes than a nuclear scare story. If citizens think their government might murder them they are less likely to take spontaneously delivered iodine pills, for example.
Chernobyl the humanitarian disaster... kinda wasn't. Most of the cancers were a highly treatable kind and didn't show up in anywhere near the predicted scale (says the WHO). Our nuclear models are _very_ conservative. The actual problems faced by them now? A poor healthcare system and high rates of substance abuse.
And for the mathematically inclined: combining Chernobyl, Fukishima, 3 Mile Island, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, and imagining that disaster every year, we still hit death rates that compare favorably with the respiratory illness and cancer deaths caused by coal.
If only nuclear power were scale-able and low-carbon, we might have something worth investing in...
Germany has vast financial resources at its disposal. They could go on a natural gas plant building binge and link deals to the US on imports for long durations that the US would be thrilled to do. That would help narrow the trade deficit Germany has with the US ($65 billion annually; natural gas trade could solidly knock out half of that), so killing two birds with one stone. With help from the US abundance of natural gas supply, Germany could replace half its coal power in the next ~15 years using natural gas and significantly reduce its CO2 output just from that (and a big chunk of the other half could probably be knocked out by gradual renewable growth from where they're already at).
When talking about gas we're always looking at Russia, and the current geopolitical situation makes this very unattractive.
Can those amounts of gas realistically be shipped to Europe?
The US is about to become the world's energy kingpin, surpassing Saudi Arabia and Russia in both oil and gas; that vast supply will be pushed outward:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-14/iea-sees-...
The average price of natural gas in Europe tends to be around $6, typically twice that of the US market. Once you add in the total cost of LNG (processing, transport, etc.), you get to a cost closer to $7.x to $8.x right now (that will come down with volume in the next few years, as the US is building several big new LNG terminals on the Atlantic and the Marcellus shale gas supply in the mid Atlantic is growing rapidly).
That's also before we get to technological innovation, which the US energy industry has always been renowned for, and has done wonders for the US shale industry the last decade (dramatically lowering costs, enabling the industry to survive the oil plunge and rapidly rebound, etc., entirely thwarting OPEC expectations of crushing the industry).
Wait, isn't that why we're funding Al-Nusra and all manners of terrorists in Syria and overthrowing the Ukrainian government? To stop it from happening.
1. Beating of the students on 30th of November. Before that the protests were small and getting smaller.
2. Use of lethal force against protesters which lead to a lot of supporters abandoning Yanukovych making it possible to vote against him in parliament with 328/450 votes.
If both of those are acts of "overthrowing government" then US could control it on such a level, that overthrowing is just plain unnecessary.
We can say that the Shah delivering a royal decree to dismiss Mossadegh makes the Iranian coup logically inevitable rather than looking at the CIA astroturfing for BP hegemony.
We can say that Torrijos's death is logical because he stepped in a plane at the wrong time rather than looking at the US reverting Jimmy Carter's deal to restore the Panama Canal control back to Panama
To ship gas to Europe, the US will need to spend about 50B-100B+ (minimum) building LNG facilities on both port sides, and then build something like 10,000 LNG Carriers (oceanic ships) to meet demand. Which would cost another 100B+ (maybe even 1T).
After all the infrastructure is set up, the prices will be at least 2-3 what they pay now (as they have to do things to and with the LNG that Russia does not in the process of delivery).
Its not feasible, unless you want the US taxpayers to pick up the bill and then subsidize it.
These were back of the envelope calculations. It could be a factor of 10 off in either direction.
The US is already expected to add 66 MTPA of LNG export capacity by 2019:
http://analysis.petchem-update.com/supply-chain-logistics/us...
Were you perhaps estimating the numbers to replace all of Europe's thermal coal consumption?
> Its not feasible, unless you want the US taxpayers to pick up the bill and then subsidize it.
Oh, if that's possible, sure, thank you very much! ;-)
Langeled (1166 km) and Nord Stream (1222 km) transport gas under the sea, and a US-to-Germany pipeline would only be about 5 times that distance. I estimate Boston-to-Hamburg could be done for $60 billion, and it could make stops in Newfoundland, Ireland, and Britain.
That worked for German defence policy, so there's precedent...
I'll admit that domestic gas consumers wouldn't like this plan any more than they like other plans to increase foreign gas demand, raising domestic prices, but it's not clear that the faction benefitting from low domestic gas prices is more influential than the collective of the groups mentioned above.
They, however, certainly downplay the tail risk of nuclear.
> McBride and his co-authors estimated that individuals living near coal-fired installations are exposed to a maximum of 1.9 millirems of fly ash radiation yearly. To put these numbers in perspective, the average person encounters 360 millirems of annual "background radiation" from natural and man-made sources, including substances in Earth's crust, cosmic rays, residue from nuclear tests and smoke detectors.
I'm all for pricing-in the externalities. And if that makes nuclear a relatively better investment, hurrah! If new technologies turn nuclear into something supportable in normal capital markets, hurrah! But there is no proof-of-concept yet.
- https://phys.org/news/2017-10-greenpeace-fireworks-french-nu...
Or the still not practically solved used fuel problem. Or that Germany already now often does not run nuclear power plants (that are for now still allowed to run) because they are too expensive.
And every time we saw that it's not true.
After several decades of this we don't trust you anymore. As no sane person would.
You might even be objectively right. But your safety arguments werde wrong the first two hundred times. Why listen to your explanation of your two hundred and first attempt? Let's try something else where experience doesn't virtually guarantee us that we'll be burnt.
Nuclear has the fewest deaths per kWh, period. It's really simple. Now, the cost of bringing new ones online is prohibitive, but shutting down existing ones was really dumb.
After the accident, Chernobyl continued to provide power to Ukraine, up until it's last reactor was shutdown in 2000.
I'm not trying to take an anti nuke stand, just pointing out deaths isn't the whole of the risk.
Coal has made _three_ orders of magnitude more land uninhabitable for human habitation than has nuclear.
And whereas fish may thrive behind a dam, nothing humans can eat will grow in a coal strip mine, ash flow, or other coal-related topography change. Whereas in nuclear exclusion zones, wildlife flourishes.
But first, I agree there are always trade offs. We have alao been horribly slow in finding better energy.
As for hydro + coal and uninhabitable land. I think it depends on what you define as inhabitable in the first place. Much of it is done in obscure (?) areas that few care about. Of course, this contributes to out of sight out of mind. None the less, this should be considered.
On the other hand, nukes are closer to population, as well as near water. And, as mentioned, for these more people are more aware of them. You can also thank Hollywood for the fear(s).
It's very easy to dismiss any information you disagree with if you over-generalize like that.
For example: "You told us the earth was headed for a new ice age. Why should we believe you now when you say it's getting too warm?"
> And every time we saw that it's not true.
Every time? That seems a bit excessive does it not?
Fukushima? Three Mile Island (partial only, though)? That's a (partial) melt-down every 24 years, if we start counting the nuclear age with 1945 and count till today.
If we use the numbers for civilian power plants, we need to start with the commision date of U.S.S.R. power plant "Obninsk", wich was connected to the public grid in 1954. If ending the count today, that would be 21 years. Or, if we take the last melt-down as the reset value for our clock, we will find it at 19 years, for every (partial) meltdown. With more than 500 new nuclear power plants either planned or in production, well....
Let's see, whether Molten Salt Reactors are going to show as an overall positive development...They would make things, as far as I am informed, at least a little bit safer, till we have real fusion power.
Even if we did consider deaths from catastrophic events somehow "worse" than the occasional, not-so-newsworthy death, look at the Banqiao dam breakage. That's rarely brought up as an argument against hydroelectric power.
Nuclear is hated due to superstition and fear-mongering. Please don't add to it; it's our only thoroughly demonstrated alternative to large-scale fossil fuel consumption.
[1] Nuclear is hated due to superstition and fear-mongering. Please don't add to it; it's our only thoroughly demonstrated alternative to large-scale fossil fuel consumption.
Germany is fucking boring. The rains here are moderate. One half of its coast line is a barely connected inland see that has almost no flood/ebb. The other half is protected by the UK from strong water movements. And earthquakes here, if they ever happen, are absolutely tiny.
You'd need to multiply your prediction there by maybe 100 to balance out just how much safer germany is as a country compared to japan.
Note that renewable electricity supply has actually grown faster than nuclear has declined.
https://energytransition.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/img3...
There have been significant investments in economic, political, and social support of renewables which have enabled that growth. Also, the rising price of oil has made it more competitive.
Renewable energy has been promoted. Nuclear energy detractors have only advocated against it, rather than fighting the more difficult "shut down the nuclear plants and also spend money on more renewables" fight, they went with just "shut down the nuclear plants". Coal was the unintended result.
There is discussion happening at high levels in government, for example the State Secretary at the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, Rainer Baake, used to be the head of Agora Energiewende who put out this coal phase out strategy.
https://energytransition.org/2016/01/proposal-for-a-german-c...
Note that Germany earns more $ per MWh exported to France than vice versa. This is because on average France tends to have surpluses at night and in summer when electricity isn't in high demand. France imports electricity at high prices during cold snaps in winter when German wind tends to be blowing.
Why not?
> Yes, I know: Chernobyl.
It's not only that, there are lots of problems with contemporary nuclear plants as well.
Can you maybe provide some back of the napkin math on why not, or a link to someplace that has done this?
The largest wind turbine being designed anywhere in the world right now would be 500 meters tall (taller than the empire state building) with 200 meter blades and at peak output would generate 50MW. Capacity factors for on-shore plants in the US average about 33%. So 50MW * 9258 hours per year * 33% = 0.152T KWh/year. The largest turbine currently built in the world gets 8MW not 50MW so 0.024T kwh/year.
I.e. we would need ~200 of the biggest wind turbines ever built to equal the amount of energy we get out of the smallest nuclear reactor currently running. And that is just to break even. Comparing the median nuclear plant to the median wind turbine makes the numbers even worse.
Hydro has the problem in the US that there aren't any good sites left. Solar costs even more per KW or per KWh than wind does (~1.5x is what I've seen at grid scale in the US) especially when you include the storage needed to maintain consistent supply throughout a day (~3x wind)
Not true. It was made into law in 2000. The current governing party put it on hold and reinstated it after Fukushima. Currently they are in the process of softening it up again, ie. today was announced that only 10 reactors need to be retired.
I can understand that nuclear has risks. But people seem to evaluate nuclear in a vacuum, rather than against the carbon sources which currently replace it.
“What do we do with the waste” is a better question when applied to coal.
East block countries trying to sell their contaminated food for consumption and it ending up in GDR school kitchens.
Additionally having two superpowers stationing a huge arsenal of nuclear bombs in your country. While at the same time beeing sure that you'd die first in a new world war that would almost surely start in your country and would probably devastate your whole continent beyond beeing suited for human surival.
Then the whole argument that its cleaner and cheaper energy. While you pay for transport, storage and security with your tax money and the company keeps the profits. By storage i mean temporar storage, because no one worldwide has figured out how to safely store the waste for hundreds of thousands of years (Pyramids are 4500 years old and we don't even know how they are build). Thats why most of this waste from the 80s and 90s lies a few km off our coasts in the sea where the UK, Russia and Italian mafia dumped it.
Tschernobyl was almost forgotten, at least by the politicians in power, but then Fukushima happend.
Chernobyl is the defining moment of the anti-nuclear movement (and I'm not only talking about active protestors like in Lüchow-Dannenberg, most Germens have some of it inside themselves, even if they don't actively march on the streets).
It is really hard to overestimate the effect of the word "Chernobyl" in Germany.
The movement is much older. I remember, that the anti-nuclear movement was already very active and in heat around 1980-82 (Biblis). The broad public, the mainstream, started accepting this threat with Chernobyl.
In addition I might add that we are sourrounded by countries that we don't trust to be able to feed their citizes reliably. Less so when it comes to reactor security.
I beg your pardon?
Countries like France and Japan didn't have an alternative, they had to go all in on nuclear reactors. I think nuclear is a lazy cop out. Until every roof in Europe has solar cells we should not even be thinking about building new reactors.
;D
On the French and Belgian side of its borders Germany got some very old reactors that had some serious security related incidents within the last few years. [1] In the city of Aachen the government even distributed iodine tablets if it gets worse.
Additionally Germany doesn't have locations to store radioactive waste indefinitely. The current location for intermediate storage, called "Asse", is known to be leaking contaminated water into all kinds of directions and nobody is really sure how to stop it. [2]
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tihange_Nuclear_Power_Station#...
Chernobyl, Asse, Aachen, Gorleben all didn't change anything in our politics. But Fukushima did. Immediately.
The Merkel government was on its way to change that, against protests (2010). Shortly after that Fukushima happened (2011), and Merkel had to return to the Atomausstieg (also 2011).
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20928053.600-fossil-f...
The death toll from coal is staggering compared to nuclear. It is not even close.
The number basically tells you that according to a specific model, that is hopefully a good approximation of our understanding of the risks, a certain percentage of the death rate should be due to that factor. However I think these numbers carry not much more information than 32 other bits of the same sentence and to really use them you have to look at the specific model and you need to develop an opinion if the model reflects the relevant arguments well.
Alternatively there are studies that correlate various pollutants with respiratory issues, and then compare that with the pollution emitted by coal plants.
Ideally one would make many such estimates, yielding a range that one could have high confidence is close to the truth, similar to how we use multiple methods of dating fossils, and then know something is wrong if there is a large disparity.
Humans seem to almost universally do poorly at judging those two pools of risk against one another.
People are terrified of being murdered or crashing in an airplane (both sudden death), yet they die by the droves at 10x, 100x or 1000x the rate from poor lifestyle habits (food, smoking, drinking, lack of exercise, etc). The fear of sharks is likewise similar (sudden violent death, and extremely rare).
With some of these there is also the control aspect that comes into play (having control, not having control, or having an illusion of control). For example with sharks, you're in their environment, heavily lacking control, almost helpless by comparison to their ability. With passenger airplane crashes, it's kiss your ass goodbye, you have basically zero control over the situation (not even the ability to pretend you do). People die by the millions driving cars, yet they don't seem to fear that nearly so much as dying in a plane crash. I chalk that up to the partial illusion that drivers have a very large amount of control as to whether they die in a car crash or not.
I believe coal generates the same fear response as the gradual lifestyle threats do, it's perceived as a gradual threat/risk. Nuclear is perceived as a sudden dramatic death threat (decades of miseducation, propaganda, and of course generalized fears over all things nuclear derived from the bomb).
Most physical violence (assault, murder, rape, ..) is between people who know each-other, but typically people are more afraid of different-looking strangers.
I think it has more to do with fear of unusual situations than suddenness or drama.
That's offset by the illusion that people believe they're in a very high degree of control over the situation. It enables the brain to create an illusion and say to itself: I won't make that mistake, my actions dictate the outcome, I'm a good driver (as the comical studies always demonstrate, people tend to dramatically over-estimate their driving skill).
> Most physical violence ... is between people who know each-other
You don't actually think that's going to happen, that's the issue. If you told someone their pal is about to rape or murder them, they would not believe it, they'd be far more afraid of the menacing looking stranger. That's where ignorance of risk - as with sharks - comes into action. I would guarantee a low percentage would believe they're more likely to be murdered by someone they're close to than a stranger. If a person doesn't have a meaningful comprehension of the risk (as with nuclear), the risk context inherently can't be judged properly. I suspect there's a big illusion of control that is involved between two known relations as well, you think you have some influence over whether a friend will murder you (surely they like you, surely you could talk them down from a violent confrontation, etc.); versus that almost entirely missing from the menacing stranger scenario.
That (the belief that this is an error) is itself a statistical fallacy, one that's isomorphic to "most traffic accidents happens near your home" (most of your driving is near your home). But the relevant danger metric is "risk per mile driven". That's lower near your home. You are right to use less caution there.
Likewise: most of your conflict is with people you know, but most of your interaction is likewise with acquaintances! The relevant danger metric is "crimes committed against you per unit of interaction time". On that measure, strangers are in fact more dangerous.
Raising your guard around acquaintances will lead to costly false negatives. Raising your guard around strangers will lead to a small number of false negatives and save you from costly false positives. Do you deliberately go by yourself down dark alleys filled with strangers, since "if I'm going to be a crime victim at all, it'll be from someone I know"? Then you understand the basic fallacy there.
(Before you make the point about the coat check, ask how much prefiltering you do before you give someone your coat.)
Your model, by contrast, doesn’t seem to represent why that dark alley is dangerous. Because you only care about the raw crime count rather than the crime count per time interacted with. It would equally imply that the stranger in the alley is no risk to you, because “if a crime happens at all, it will be from a family member”. That is not good statistical reasoning.
When we see that most crime comes from acquaintances, that’s after applying significantly more countermeasures to strangers and after getting into more conflicts with acquaintances after we’ve focused our interactions on them.
If strangers really are safer per unit of interaction, then start saving your seat by leaving your wallet.
Lots of people won’t let their 10- or 12-year-old kids walk around town by themselves, because the parents are afraid they will be abducted or assaulted or something. But such tragedies are extremely rare. If anything, if they are really worried about child abuse the parents should be carefully examining their priest, sports coaches, teachers, family members, friends’ relatives, etc.
Obviously if you take the random strangers off the street and invite them to your home, have a deep personal conversation, lend them money, ask them to take care of your kids, start kissing them, or whatever your definition is for a “close interaction”, they sort of stop being strangers at that point, and you are more likely to get into some altercation.
In other words, you agree that you shouldn't lower your defenses for a random stranger, you only disagree about where the stranger/acquaintance boundary exists.
As for the other point: do you actually know that the risk is lower conditional on you not using standard countermeasures (that probably exist because of the legit risk)? Have you stopped locking your car, and started leaving your wallet out where it's easy to get to? Walked home alone through dangerous neighborhoods? If not, why not?
Don't equate the post-countermeasure crime rate with safety.
Actually that's not my model; I'm not the OP. I was just pointing out what I saw as a flaw in your presentation. Y
You keep talking about things like "unit of interaction" - which is a handy thing to talk about in the abstract, but gives the impression that you've actually quantified human interaction - a concept I am highly skeptical of.
I can see that there is a reasoning flaw in looking at crime that has happened and seeing that it mostly happens between people who know each other and concluding that the greatest risk to yourself is from people you know.
One possible explanation that has nothing to do with "interaction time" is simply the fact that you apply more countermeasures to strangers than you do to people you know. Perhaps the real cause is a matter of trust, not time.
A precise quantification is not necessary to recognize the core point, that however you define interaction, you are in fact interacting with acquaintances much more than strangers. You don't need to put numbers on eye contact or anything like that. It's enough to go by e.g. physical unbarriered proximity.
>One possible explanation that has nothing to do with "interaction time" is simply the fact that you apply more countermeasures to strangers than you do to people you know. Perhaps the real cause is a matter of trust, not time.
That's saying the same thing: people apply more countermeasures to strangers because they (correctly!) recognize them as being more dangerous in the practically-relevant sense. After that filter is applied, and after swamping your interactions with acquaintances, the end result is a relatively low proportion of crimes from stranger-in-the-bushes. That doesn't mean predators in bushes aren't dangerous!
And, once someone has become trusted, they're no longer a stranger and likewise are less dangerous because they have more to lose from hurting you. Either way, by the appropriate metric, acquaintances/friends/family are less dangerous. The greater incidence comes from being around them more and from not using the same countermeasures.
Either way, it simply doesn't follow (as the OP suggested) that the rational thing to do is to be less wary of strangers!
Right. But nobody is talking about reducing that number, or reducing our reliance on cars. Drivers kill over a million people every single year, but that is acceptable death.
There exist countries where automobile deaths are not considered acceptable, or where not all policy planning takes an ironclad need for automobiles as the exclusive mode of transportation as a basic premise.
Which is not even to mention the daily occurrence in the USA of young children accidentally shooting other children (typically siblings or friends) or themselves to death.
Having a gun in your house is one of the biggest possible risks you can bring to your own life and the lives of people in your family.
For the purposes of comparing evaluating people's fear of things that could kill them that they don't have control over suicides (60% +/- some depending on which party's sand you bury your head in) and intentional non-criminal (defensive) gun deaths should not be counted because they are not something people do not have complete control over. Don't try to kill yourself and don't try and commit a crime against someone who's armed and you have basically nothing to worry about.
People are afraid of gun accidents in the same manner in which they are afraid of other forms accidents that they have some degree of control over (like car accidents). They take steps to reduce their likelihood and encourage (through various means) others to do the same (i.e. social disapproval of people who do unnecessarily dangerous things).
For the purposes of discussing public perception of the risks of nuclear power "gun deaths" as a lump sum is not useful and the effort to pick it apart and analyze the components is not worth the risk of derailing any useful discussion with politics.
I think it's more about the association with nuclear weapons, plus the fact that we've known fire and water for as long as modern humans have existed, while radiation is a new danger that's invisible and spooky.
And nuclear accidents tend to be widely covered and sensationalized, even ones without casualties, but fires or accidents at coal plants that actually kill people are not.
If you ask someone where nuclear power can damage the environment, they say yes it can. They understand the damage from fallout because it is local.
But the same person may not believe that coal can damage the environment globally. There is a huge cognitive bias against effects we can't physically see, and understanding the scale of the planet.
This is the same reason we have some people who still believe in the flat earth conspiracy.
The only answer real is education. If educators had a way to help children better create visual models of these things inside their heads, maybe we could all agree on these issues we can't see with our eyes. Maybe VR will help? I don't know. But I would definitely donate to any think tank that was A/B testing educators lessons on global warming.
Is the rapper B.O.B. trolling with his GoFundMe Campaign to build a satellite and find the truth?
Maybe they are media savvy ploys to generate free attention, but they have thousands of fans that aren't in on the joke.
I used to think exactly what you do, but that is the definition of liberal bias. I couldn't imagine a world where someone would be so stupid enough to think the world was flat.
I also couldn't imagine a world where people were stupid enough to elect Donald Trump. But the divide in this country is real, and beliefs like ours are making it worse. Some people's scientific literacy really is limited to what they can see in front of them.
Apparently this "movement" is really small though and shut down entirely for long periods throughout history. The most recent resurrection being only a few years ago and the Flat Earth Society claims its membership grows by a couple hundred people a year. Well, there are millions of people who believe in Noah's flood despite there being no evidence it ever happened and lots that it didn't, so I can well believe a few hundred people believe in a flat earth. The world is a big place.
I don't think you can compare flat earthers to Trump voters though. Lots of people voted for Trump because they have different priorities to you (e.g. hating political correctness, hating Clinton, really wanting immigration controls), not because they disagree on basic laws of physics.
For the record, I was thinking of this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth
... the false belief that the belief in a flat Earth was common in the past.
http://assets2.motherboard.tv/content-images/contentimage/no...
(If your grid can supply twice your need at full power it will still be enough with half the sun and wind, and the storage will be filled faster and used less. We actually ran the numbers.)
1 terawatt (TW) = 10e12 watts. Then 1 watt-hour (Wh) is 3600 joules.
Or maybe you meant to say they misspelled the word? But then you would have just said it was a misspelling, so I assumed you asked about the unit itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix#List_of_SI_prefi...
I won't claim that radioactive waste is more problematic than burning coal here, because I don't know enough about the topic. But it needs to be taken into account in the discussion.
Calling nuclear energy "emissions free" is just wrong in my opinion: it just generates a different kind of emissions, nuclear waste.
The current "solution" to that radioactive waste? None whatsoever. We're breathing it up as we type.
I'll admit that nuclear waste is more dangerous due to being concentrated, but, if the standards were the same as with coal, a reasonable solution would be to dump the waste in the ocean and take steps to ensure it mixes up.
Its only a 'problem' because anti-nuclear people demand totally unreasonable requirements and managed to put them into law.
Plus the waste majority of the problem would go away, newer reactor types could consume lots of the old 'waste'. The US alone has enough 'waste' to power the whole US for years and years. It is of course not allowed to even research these reactors in many places.
While it might not be 'emission free' it is free of uncontrolled emission. You know exactly where and how much radiation is produced and you can easily set it up so that not a single human or animal is hurt by it.
These reactors don't exist in Germany, and they won't exist in the next two decades and they need a whole new industry around it. These types of industries (reprocessing plants, fuel production, etc.) nobody wants to have in a dense European country and which are extremely expensive.
Setting up these new reactors and the corresponding new fuel industries far away. If somebody wants to invest the many billions, good luck - but hopefully not anywhere near Germany.
If nuclear energy development would not be stopped and opposed on every step both in development and deployment these things would have been solved long ago. The needed technology essentially exists for 40 years.
Basically the problem only exist as long as people are determined to not develop nuclear technology any further.
As for your 'dense population argument' that is essentially another 'nuclear is very dangerous and needs to be far away from people' argument. Every reasonable large country in Europe has enough space for these things, if you use real rather then fantasy risk assessment.
Also, in a global market there is no reason why any of that stuff has to be in your country.
These generations are far away and spent fuel piles up. Many countries have huge amounts of spent fuel near reactors. See Fukushima -> lots of spent fuel in pools in reactor buildings. This caused lots of problems in combination of the poor design (pool high in the building), failing backup electricity and failing outside electricity delivery (-> failing cooling of the pools).
> If nuclear energy development would not be stopped and opposed on every step both in development and deployment these things would have been solved long ago.
That's why nuclear thrives in China. Nuclear depends on and supports top-down authoritarian government and decision making. I'm happy that we have stopped this early.
> Every reasonable large country in Europe has enough space for these things, if you use real rather then fantasy risk assessment.
The faulty steel in the not yet running and extremely expensive French EPR is real and not a fantasy.
http://www.french-nuclear-safety.fr/Information/News-release...
As result, it either has to be reprocessed expensively in France, or stored directly.
> Also, in a global market there is no reason why any of that stuff has to be in your country.
You do know how prohibitively expensive transport is, and how many legal requirements there are (to avoid hijacking by some rogue nation)?
There is a (unilateral) German law against such facilities and (regular private law) contracts to use the British and French ones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing_plant_Wac...
For me, the biggest drawback for nuclear power is that it is expensive. Nuclear fuel is cheap but building, maintaining and decommissioning power plants is not.
It is especially apparent as power plants approach their end of life. The choice is to either decommission it, an expensive and unproductive process, or to extend its life. Unlike what many people think, there is nothing wrong with the second option, however, maintenance costs increase exponentially, so passed a certain point, it is no longer viable.
I suspect Germany moved away from nuclear because of a combination of several factors : public perception of nuclear power following Fukushima accidents, power plants approaching end of life and sufficient coal reserves. Their policy seem to be a mix of highly variable solar+wind backed up by on-demand coal plants, and nuclear, while ideal for baseline, doesn't seem to fit this policy.
Late 2010 the then-current government decided to weaken this and added run-time extensions, against popular opinion which wanted to stay with the 2000 plans. Fukushima pushed this back up to public attention, which caused the government to turn 180 degrees, force the worst reactors offline temporarily and re-implement the 2000 plans.
For safety reasons, nuclear plants are very complex, take a long time to build and require a ton of capital. The physics make these work out long term, but only if you're willing to build a large enough facility that you can take the place of 2-3 comparable coal facilities.
Part of this is because they produce power more efficiently, but also because the largest startup costs for these are from finding a site and going through all the safety and other regulatory requirements. Once you have approval for single reactor, you're better off adding a few more at the same site than trying to find another site for a new reactor.
The bottom line is the utility company is on the hook for a huge investment for 30 years or more before it breaks even. That's what stalled the development in the 70s and 80s and it's even more unlikely to get started today, what with the extreme uncertainty surrounding fossil fuel sources, the rapidly decreasing cost of renewables, etc.
The most common response to this fact is that we can replace huge facilities these with lots of much smaller/safer Thorium or other alternative fuels. From a physics standpoint, this may be true, but utility companies don't want to have to manage the fuel chain for (potentially) dozens of facilities, governments don't like having to guard that many small sites, and there are a limited number of communities that are comfortable living near a reactor of any kind, even a "tiny" one. I don't know if this is smart or not, but it's not going to change anytime soon. The bottom line is that unless we have a huge leap in the amount of technology required to manage a nuclear reactor, or in the potential safety factor around the fuel and other risks, nuclear is not going to ever become a majority power source in most countries.
Still, n * 1000 deaths (in n years) may rationally be preferable to m deaths once, even if n * 1000 >> m
Risk assessment is a funny thing. Economists and psychologists have done great experiments along these lines.
It's not even spread out that much. Worldwide, coal kills more people in two months than nuclear ever has, and that's including nuclear bombs.
Do you have a source for this?
Quick summary of figures: in 2013, Germany suffered 1,860 deaths due to coal plants in Germany, 1,770 deaths due to coal plants in other countries, and German coal plants also caused 2,490 deaths in other countries.
There are probably too many significant figures on those numbers, but the general idea of "several thousand" should be more or less right.
It is hard to get away from that energy density, yeah. I remember seeing an old black and white photo in a book as a child where each pellet of uranium was equal to like a ton of coal in terms of electrical production.
The good news is that it looks hopeful that renewables will be in a position to take over before too much longer, giving us emission-free energy without the emotional baggage of nukes.
I did a study abroad in Germany in 2000, and one of my classes was on the energy crisis. We visited a strip mine that was going to become the largest lake in Germany after they were done extracting the coal, because they were planning to fill the huge hole with water. It's hard to describe the scale of the thing in words. "Enormous" doesn't even start.
As part of that same course, the Germans were also nice enough to tour a bunch of foreign engineering students around inside one of their nuclear reactors. That was quite a trip. After 9/11 I doubt they did those tours anymore, and now the reactors will be gone anyway..
Merkel always goes with the popular sentiment, the only exception was the refugee crisis and her party suffered dearly for that.
Movement for it started in 1986. Complete exit was made into law in 2000. Softened up and reinstated after Fukushima.
> I understand not wanting to build new reactors, but shutting down running reactors, with all the capital investment involved, just doesn't make any sense.
Many reactors are old and wouldn't have been running for any longer anyways. Other than that I agree that it does not make sense on a economical level.
> Especially when there is little risk of natural disasters in Germany.
Like in every other country that has nuclear power plants, severe hazards are a weekly occurence. Aditionally Germany is close to many countries which nobody trusts when it comes to nuclear security. Ukraine already had a nuclear catastrophe that cost ~1 million lifes until to date. Belgium has one of the most dangerous reactors running, Tihange 2. Etc. If you google for it you can find pictures of nuclear plants that fix their pipes with duct tape and catch radioactive water with kiddie pools.
Aditionally there is the very real and exisiting risk that all our sourrounding seas and oceans have the nuclear waste of a couple decades dumped into them with happy involvement of governments, militaries and organized crime. Then there is the waste which is temporarily stored. Worldwide. Since nobody can figure out how to store and keep it save for the next couple hundred thousand years. I mean we're not even on the level of knowing what really happened 2000 years ago.
> If people are serious about maintaining the same quality of lifestyle that we have today without burning as much coal,
The people in Germany have will and currently do accept sacrifices in this regard when it comes to saving the environment. We pay high taxes on energy and transportation. Our industry is on the forefront of environment friendly production. This was a push that started as a grass roots movement in the 80s. Now its German mainstream politics. Germans actually invest a lot of money in the environment. So do other countries.
> the current solution is Nuclear Energy.
Yes. But its not the optimal solution and it can be phased out. If my country is on the forefront of phasing it out I'm all for it. I'm also for phasing out coal. Especially since for example in our domestic coal production, every employee is subsidized by the state with ~ 500 000 € p. year.
> Yes it does pose many risks but so does burning coal, and the latter seems to be destroying our environment.
Both destroy our environment. All that nuclear waste in our seas will start to leak out and will probably kill off many species and large parts of the oceans. Its already killing millions of people and we don't know what is going to happen.
Nuclear could be a clean solution to our current energy needs if its managed correctly. On the other hand it could well be a suicide technology where we wake up one day and realize that its too late for our species or planet.
I honestly believe that if we had focused more on building smaller and smaller nuclear power plants, and putting them in more and more cities, that we wouldn't have had this problem. If you look around at the areas that have high support for nuclear power, they're all areas that have had nuclear power plants for decades without a problem. Make them small enough that people don't notice them, and when they find out one has been in their backyard for 20 years, they shrug it off like if they found out their neighbor was a lesbian (maybe that's a bad example but whatever).
That's simply delusional. Yes, maybe well-maintained nuclear power plants are an acceptable risk. But pretending there's an alternative reality where we all casually refill our backyard reactors with enriched uranium on the weekend is really somewhere out there.
Did you know the lethal dose of absorbed ionising radiation is only about 10 joules per kilogram? It would be great if it wasn’t so low. We’d already have nuclear powered manned space flight for one thing.
"Move fast and break things"…
Yes, nuclear should not be a total free for all, but there is absolutely no reason why people should not be allowed to make small research reactors and small reactors to iterate on the technology.
We essentially still use age old concepts for our reactors and one of the reasons is that its almost impossible to bring something different to market. Its literally stifling innovation.
Canada's newest operating reactor, Darlington 4, took 8 years from construction start to commercial operation. Russia's newest, Novovoronezh 2-1, took 8 years. Civaux 2, France's newest, took 11 years. Kudankulam 2, India's newest, took 15 years. (All numbers from the IAEA's Power Reactor Information System).
That's a long time for billions of dollars to be tied up in construction before producing a single watt of electricity or a single dollar of revenue. The advantages of going fast are obvious. So why has no other country developed small modular reactors that you build in 2 years, like a natural gas plant?
I think that the most parsimonious explanation is that building reactors quickly just isn't easy, even without American-style regulation. Many countries take almost-a-decade to decade-plus times to build large reactors. No other countries have yet deployed small modular reactors. Why not? India, Russia, Brazil -- none of them have the slightest obligation to imitate American-style nuclear regulations, and they are not generally known for excessive attention to environmental protection or worker safety. Why don't they have cheap, quick-build reactors?
It cost a lot to develop these things and because regulation only governments can really do these things in most countries. Its a simple fact that it is practically impossible to develop a new reactor type and bring it to market. All the startups that try these things have to figure out some way to get to do something in China or Indonesia. America is not unique at all.
The reality is that other reactor types have been build and they have been built small. If you think based on first principle there is really nothing that makes a reactor follow different laws then air planes, rocket engines and other high precision, high material complexity object.
Also there is a large amount of space between a modern PWR and a small modular reactors idea. The new reactors that China now offers commercially are 650MW, they have passive safety and are way less complex to build then current PWRs. They will also sell Molten Salt Thorium Reactors in about 10 years.
But the point is that non of the things China is now doing was impossible in the US 30 years ago. It simply didn't happen because of institutional and legal issues.
Even if you figure out all this stuff and you actually managed to develop the tech, its incredibly hard to get countries to allow you to actually deploy them.
If people are serious about maintaining the same quality of lifestyle that we have today without burning as much coal, the current solution is Nuclear Energy. Yes it does pose many risks but so does burning coal, and the latter seems to be destroying our environment.