Personally, I agree that nuclear is probably not anti-fragile enough to be a widespread solution. Political instability is the norm, not the rarity, throughout history.
Actually, coal irradiates the surrounding area when it is working properly, and it adds to global warming at the same time, it can do both!
To be clear, the major concern with nuclear disaster is ground water contamination. That is, the reactor melts through and the corium gets into the groundwater, contaminating it with radiation.
After initial evacuation, most of the elements that spread have a relatively short half life and decay quickly. The heavy elements are too heavy to get blown around, but they can irradiate other things (like water) that can get around fairly easily.
Chernobyl was a special case because they actually blew up the reactor, and their graphite moderator caught fire, so you got lots of radioactive smoke. Most plants use water or heavy water as a moderator, so at least it doesn't catch fire in a disaster (the steam cloud isn't that great either, but at least it doesn't stick to stuff).
Anyway, agree with your anti-fragile opinion in terms of the current (ancient) reactor designs. We really need a new design if it is going to be viable over a longer term.
The worst nuclear disasters pale in comparison to what we did with fossil fuels.
It is much easier to ask people to reduce tuna consumption, than to relocate 100,000+ people, as happened in Fukushima.
I'm not sure that point is a very strong one.
If I was a contractor faced with solving the coal ash problem or the nuclear waste problem, I'd avoid the latter like the plague even if just for the political difficulties, notwithstanding the engineering part of the problem.
Which is pretty much only going to happen if you invest a lot of money into nuclear facilities dedicated to this. 1GJ is about 280 kilowatt-hours.
Radioactive byproducts (steel and such) are a bigger issue, but hopefully you only see a lot of that when you are actively decommissioning a plant.
I'm not sure that irradiating the surrounding area for hundreds of years is as big a blocker as people believe; the earth is huge and we have a surplus of land in places people don't want to live. Most of the earths surface is already practically uninhabitable for humans and we are doing just fine.
Ironically, the places where it does matter (island nations like Japan) are almost forced in to nuclear because they have no space. They are probably doing more damage long term going back to fossil fuels than Fukushima did.
Moving to cities for economic opportunities is not a neutral choice in any sense. I’d question that most people actually prefer crowded cities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_London
https://popularpittsburgh.com/darkhistory/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollution_in_China
It seems pretty absurd to suggest that anyone neutrally "chose" to live in such miserable surroundings. Clearly they moved there for lack of economic opportunities elsewhere.
This is how powerful the draw of cities are. People will happily sacrifice seeing the sun for an opportunity to live and work in a city - if the alternative was living in the country.
And I think it is pretty obvious that between city-no-sun, country and city-sun the ranking is going to be:
1) City-sun
2) City-no-sun
3) Country
By the numbers, nobody chooses to live in the country. Your counterargument is essentially that people have good reasons to live in the city - yeah, that is obvious. That is why they are making the choice that they are. I dunno what this 'neutral choice' concept is but I don't believe it is a real thing. Yeah they move for economic opportunities. That is why sterilising large areas is irrelevant. People have been tested and nobody cares about the environment when the economy is on the line; they are all going to be crammed together in cities.
> By the numbers, nobody chooses to live in the country.
Again, by the contemporary numbers. Contemporary trends cannot be translated into broad sociological statements about human beings. This is basic historical knowledge. In the US alone, the return to cities is a fairly recent phenomenon. Cities were considered undesirable and suburbs were heralded as having a better quality of life as recently as the 90s.
Historically, movement to cities has been driven almost entirely by economics. No one wanted to live in a cramped city slum and there was no "choice" between two equal options, one in the city and one in the country. It was more a choice of continued rural poverty, bordering on starvation, or a polluted, miserable, economically-better existence in a city.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fracturing_and_radio...
If the energy industry had to follow the regulations of the nuclear industry - we'd be back in the stone age. Nuclear is the only way we can reach our co2 targets in time. I think renewables and nuclear need to be implemented at the same time.
I don't think there can be any doubt about this.
given how concentrated energy output from nuclear power plants is there are significant other considerations like terrorism, or sabotage, in particular in regions like Africa and Asia which is really the only place where massive expansion of nuclear energy still makes potential sense.
There's also the economic costs in case of catastrophy. Depending on the source Fukushima has costed Japan several tens but more likely several hundreds of billions, devalued private property and land or has made it unusable, and so forth.
increased cancer rates in Belarus (especially in Mogilev and Homel regions - the regions which took the brunt of Chernobyl and where the breast cancer rate for example is double) produce several thousand extra deaths per year. I wonder how a natural gas power plant - the present day alternative to nuclear - would be able to kill so many people.
Also, can you substantiate your claim of several thousand extra deaths per year? I'm reading an estimated 5,000 additional cases of cancer (not all of them fatal) in all of Europe over the span of 20 years [2].
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Cancer_asse...
So, no, nuclear disasters did actually kill people and objectively more than coal power plants.
> Deaths: 42 acute and delayed (several months), less than 100 at present, possibly several thousand long term extra cases of cancer
In other words, if you just count people killed at the site, Chernobyl killed less people than Nigerian oil pipe explosion of 1998, or 2000, or 2003, or 2006. (Damn, why does Nigeria have so many disasters?) Hardly nobody remembers them, because fossil-fuel deaths aren't newsworthy, unlike radiation deaths.
Of course, if you count the number of extra cancer deaths attributable to Chernobyl, it becomes much higher - maybe thousands, which is basically what you called "according to some models do some other stuff that if you squint hard..."
Compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges, and nuclear always comes out safer.
How much worse could it possibly have gotten?!
> But people don't actually die because there's ash in the air or mercury in tuna fish.
Just because it doesn’t go out and visibly stab them to death doesn’t mean people don’t die from them.
And please don't give me "we should all use less energy." Even if we should all use less energy, it's still better to generate this less energy from nuclear, as long as we're using fossil fuel now.