It has never been a problem in the first place. At least not a technical problem. Sure, it is nasty stuff, to be treated with respect, but not worse than toxic chemicals we regularly deal with. It is also potentially useful stuff: rare, exotic matter that gives off energy. Compare with coal plants that also produce nuclear waste (there are radioisotopes in coal), but that waste is dumped in the air you breathe.
> Are old powerplants properly decommissioned and replaced with new ones when the time comes?
The are properly decommissioned, and it is really expensive, and that's indeed a real problem with nuclear power: it is expensive. But the thing is: nuclear plants don't have an expiration date like bottles of milk, you could potentially run them forever with regular maintenance. The reason we don't do that is that is that over time, maintenance becomes more and more expensive, parts become obsolete and stop being produced, etc... At some point it is cheaper to build a new, better plant and decommission the old one instead of spending a fortune on obsolete parts and retrofitting.
> Can we really claim to be able to handle worst case scenarios well (e.g. Fukushima)?
No, they wouldn't be worst case scenarios if we could, but we are doing our best. In the end, even with Chernobyl, nuclear power is still one of the safest per unit of energy produced. It is no excuse, Fukushima shouldn't have happened, but if the only response to an accident was to stop everything, we wouldn't do much.
I'm not anti-nuclear at all, but I see this argument used a lot and I don't think it's a good one. The concerns with nuclear are all about tail risk. Comparing past results to other forms of energy doesn't address this since neither Chernobyl nor Fukushima were worst case scenarios for nuclear.
An effective pro-nuclear argument should address the tail risk concern head-on rather than talking past it.
The challenge with nuclear energy is we don't have a big enough sample to say with certainty, just from the data, what the odds are of a disaster 1000x worse than Chernobyl.
My understanding is Chernobyl itself could have been 1000x worse and rendered much of Eastern Europe uninhabitable if the appropriate steps weren't taken in time, so to a neutral, non-expert observer, that would seem to indicate the odds are greater than zero.
This is what many anti-nuclear people are concerned about, so if you want to get them on your side, you need to explain in detail why that kind of event is no longer possible. Just stating that it hasn't happened, as if that were proof it can't happen, isn't convincing.
We live with worse tail risks daily though: we have nuclear weapons in the center of Europe (could be misused, there could be an accident, etc.), we have labs that handle or create deadly pathogens (there could be a leak, etc.), we live near volcanoes or in earthquake/tsunami prone areas, and of course we are living through climate change with unknown tail risk (to crops, to temperatures, etc.).
If you accept that sort of question with no real probability of happening (“what if 5G renders us all infertile because we misunderstand high frequency radio waves?”, “what if the flu vaccine produced this year kills us all?”), you can’t really do anything. It’s impossible to prove a negative, we have to deal with expected values given our knowledge.
I basically agree that it's on the "worth doing" side given the right conditions are met. These conditions plainly weren't present in the USSR in the Chernobyl days, and probably aren't present everywhere nuclear plants are operating today either, but that's not a reason for a blanket anti-nuclear stance given its many benefits.
My point is simply that comparing historical results isn't relevant to the tail risk discussion. Pro-nuclear people should stop using this argument imo--it makes it seem as though they don't understand the position they're arguing against.
Sidenote on nuclear weapons: my sense is almost everyone does agree that the tail risk of a disaster is unacceptably high, but because game theory makes a drawdown extremely difficult, they're considered a grim necessity. If we could somehow destroy all nukes simultaneously and make it impossible to build new ones, we'd increase humanity's odds of survival quite a bit by doing that.
One consideration that comes to mind is if the scale necessary for operating nuclear is much greater than the examples you cited?
Thinking out loud, without taking a stance on either side, it seems we would need to scale nuclear power to the hands of many lesser qualified people than in the cases you mentioned, which would push the tail risk much harder.
That said, I haven’t thought deeply about the comparison here. If we need heavy magnitude of power, then we are bound to have to accept the risk of disaster as such concentrated power centers inevitably become unstable.
>Are old powerplants properly decommissioned and replaced with new ones when the time comes? Not a problem that you can solved today
>Can we really claim to be able to handle worst case scenarios well (e.g. Fukushima)? Yes, also Fukushima can't happen in geologically inert Western Europe.
However, what is clear is that the world needs consistent, plentiful, reliable carbon-free energy. The storage required to meet the first three conditions with renewables DOES NOT EXIST. It doesn't exist for anything outside of a few minutes. Nuclear power is: consistent, reliable and carbon-free; and humanity has known how to do it since the 1960s. In a contest between a technology we DO NOT HAVE, and one we DO, it is a no-brainer.
So we are in the situation where we live with old powerplants that are not up to standard and no way to handle that but we will definitely be in the future?
„Can‘t happen“ is always the argument until it does and it‘s a difference if we are talking about something that will be over in short time or will remain a problem forever. But my point was more in the direction of how to handle that, if the solution is bury it and move far away from it, it‘s not something that can be scaled.
Here it is. We just don't base the immediate future of the underlying infrastructure of our whole economies on a 'may'. We do it with proven, existing, scalable tech.
The literature on it is credible: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/12/wh...
Nuclear produces no air pollution. It produces no direct greenhouse gases. The actual amount of centuries-long waste is tiny: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c..., particularly compared to other industrial activities.
People have some kind of aesthetic / disproportionate fear-based response to nuclear and ignore the deaths that occur due to combusting coal and methane. Most people can't or won't think numerically but we should also try to do better.
Yes. It's not that dangerous, the whole reason it is waste is that it's no longer radioactive enough to power the plant. (And as plant technology improves, the threshold for "no longer radioactive enough" will get even lower)
> Can we really claim to be able to handle worst case scenarios well (e.g. Fukushima)?
Fukushima led to 1 death from radiation. Nuclear's overall safety record is far better that any alternative
People are mainly afraid of nuclear because the worst-case scenario is so insanely ridiculously bad, not because it maintains a high stable death rate.
_Hiroshima_ was re-inhabited just a few years later, and it was literally hit by a nuclear bomb.
They were "lucky", btw: "since the bombs were detonated so far above the ground, there was very little contamination—especially in contrast to nuclear test sites such as those in Nevada"
It's also not really an issue that nuclear is free from. It's very difficult for nuclear to follow demand and it is not as reliable as can be seen with France's current struggles.
All of that would be fine, there will always be extremists (and to a degree, we need them) and if you seriously believe in the cause, more power to you...
... the real problem is that left wing has adopted this extreme green position as one of its core elements. Now all the left wingers have to adhere to green extremism, otherwise they're not part of the team. In 2022, it is not acceptable for any member of any left leaning party to be climate moderate.
The right wing has abortion and guns, the left wing has green extremism and critical theory. Try to be openly anti-gun or pro-choice on the right wing. Try to be openly climate-moderate or anti-woke on the left wing... see what happens. THAT's the problem. Nuance in politics went completely out of the window in the last decade. It's either extreme A or extreme B. And the other side is not only wrong, it is evil.
Compare that with a coal-fired power plant where the waste is gaseous, toxic, and enormous. Thousands and millions of tons. And fly ash is radioactive. Far more radiation is produced by coal plants than nuclear plants because of the radioactive isotopes of carbon and other trace elements. And that's just blasted right into the air. Not to mention the CO2!
The same is for handling worst case scenarios, and here we got a prime example for which to base a minimum standard. Hydropower dams has very bad worst case scenarios if they burst. For the person who dies, neither radiation poisoning or drowning is pretty pleasant, so which ever regulation and liability we want to apply to both is fine by me.
One option to is to ban any energy source the release pollution, and any energy source that has a risk to human lives. The candle industry would be happy, through I suspect there would be an increase in house fires.
1) Keeping existing nuclear power plants running and making incremental investments in them. I'm a proponent of this for the next 20-30 years because they generate carbon-free base load electricity. I don't think we have a choice given climate change - when we turn off a nuclear plant, we spin up coal and natural gas.
2) Building new nuclear plants. I'm skeptical of this - the costs don't seem to pencil out anymore and the political capital isn't there. From what I've seen we're better off investing in wind+solar+storage.
The worst-case scenarios are a real issue and I wouldn't want to bet on nuclear forever, but to me the imperative to address climate change is bigger in the near term.