There's some kind of logical fallacy in this line of argument, but I can't put my finger on a name for it.

It's situations where the emotional terror of acute risks forces you to default to a behavior that has less tractable, long term, systemic risks. Mitigating the acute risks is too expensive, so instead, you accept being the frog boiled alive because long term risks are harder to quantify and more nebulously terrifying. You're terrified of a nuclear meltdown, so instead you subject global civilization to decades of unnecessary fossil fuel burning. A nuclear meltdown that kills hundreds or thousands is terrifying, but coal burning that quietly kills millions from air pollution is silent.

Other examples...

* When you're terrified of Covid, so you suspend most of your activities and spend two years mostly staying home, gaining 50 pounds and decimating your fitness which drastically increases your risk of cardiovascular disease and overall significantly increasing your likelihood of dying young far in excess of the acute risk that Covid actually posed to your demographic.

* When we're so scared as a society of the Covid death spike that we stunt the social and educational development of children by years, which is potentially unrecoverable.

* When a small group of religious radicals kill 3000 people in a fantastical way, so you set yourself on a trillion dollar war to lose thousands more of your young people to combat deaths and directly and indirectly kill hundreds of thousands of poor foreigners, coming away not practically any safer than the basic changes to airline security policies would have done for a fraction of the dollar and human life costs.

> When you're terrified of Covid, so you suspend most of your activities and spend two years mostly staying home, gaining 50 pounds and decimating your fitness which drastically increases your risk of cardiovascular disease and overall significantly increasing your likelihood of dying young far in excess of the acute risk that Covid actually posed to your demographic.

This example (that I suspect you shoe-horned in to rant) undermines, but also fully demonstrates, your entire point because you've just casually and conveniently ignored the reduced risk _to society as a whole_. I.e., those actually vulnerable from getting sick in the first instance, but further still overwhelming the health and welfare services to the detriment of *everybody*.

But also reeks of FY;GM.

Why so offended to suggest that some people could have overdone it to the overall negative? Parent isn't necessarily suggesting that the reaction was the typical one.

This is a complex topic, mostly emotional ones (since cold hard facts can be presented on both sides but they don't sway most people at this point).

I was all for various covid measures, did all the vaccines, didn't travel, practiced social distancing meticulously... to no avail, we caught it 3x by now, all the times through our small kids. At this point its milder/similar than common cold for us, unlike those being hit for the first time.

Looking back, many governments around the world applied ridiculously strict restrictions, which just highlighted how badly incompetent in the best headless chicken form they are in SHTF scenarios. You couldn't travel more than 1km from your home (ie France), you couldn't be out after 6/7/8 pm even if you just want to go for a stroll or run in the forest, alone (which I do a lot). Things like these were completely needless and heavily infringed on common folks basic rights, not even going into the topic of fucking up population physical health massively down the road. Not surprisingly population's overall mental health decreased significantly too.

Forcing education of kids from home is seen as failure of even greater proportions. Not only was the system utterly unprepared in first months, but this form just doesn't work as well as direct physical contact. Kids missing tons of societal development that will never work well in digital form. We should have just put extra care into protecting vulnerable and otherwise move on with our lives. If I would be an old fart and somebody would give me choice of fucking up my grandkids lives for some potential extra safety for me, I would choose my grandkids anytime, everytime.

When we could have handled it ie like Sweden (from what I've heard), without any significant basic rights restrictions, and with resulting covid numbers very much the same. Next winter will show how missing 2 cold/flu seasons will bode for us, I suspect mortality stats will jump through the roof (within these diseases number ranges of course). Diabetes, cardiovascular and mental issues are already up.

And one more point I haven't seen much mentioned - society as a whole completely fucked up its approach to healthcare workers. Yes there were evening claps for few months. While a nice gesture, they won't fix the burnout many had. So anywhere I look, health systems have much less medical personnel, mainly nurses simply left their jobs. The situation ie in France is so bad some big cities have to close emergencies through the weekend (!!!). Some emergency doctors left too. There is no quick fix for this. An example - I've recently spent 4 hours to get 1 blood test done (something taking 15 mins before) - and that is already optimized for timing and location since my wife is a doctor.

This period won't be judged nicely by our descendants.

It’s worth remembering that the US and many other healthcare systems around the world got absolutely slammed by COVID and stayed that way throughout most of the pandemic. Restrictions kept being tightened and loosened not out of incompetence but in response to actual hospitalizations and deaths.

In the end, US casualties only being ~1 million was actually a positive outcome, things could have been a lot worse even if exactly the same people got sick but they did so even slightly faster. Worse suffering 5+ times as many casualties in 2020 would not have prevented the variants which would happily reinfect people.

There wasn’t any great options, but many of them where far worse.

This really annoys me, because I see the following chain.

1) Healthcare is too important for light touch regulation =>

2) Big political fight over regulation =>

3) Competition in healthcare largely disappears =>

4) Oh no something went wrong, now we have to adjust what human rights are available based on how prepared the government is for a rather predictable crisis (COVID wasn't/isn't even the bad-case for a highly contagious respiratory disease).

There are people seriously trying to argue that walking more than single-digit kilometres from a body's home depends on what the government's hospital policy was 5 years ago. In complete seriousness, this is crazy. I thought we'd agreed that basic rights were a thing but it turns out large segments of the population and bureaucrats seriously don't believe that.

And exactly what we got to show for this is questionable. Border controls are the only government tool that I have faith in after that pandemic. Even the vaccine we only managed because people agreed that the usual safety procedures would take to long and that we could skip them because the economic damage caused by fearful people was too great. The governments of the world caused a lot of problems these last few years.

Curtailing freedoms due to disease is a very old thing and it works with COVID being no exception.

Mary Mallon was forcibly quarantined, let go resulting in 2 additional deaths, and then permanently quarantined in the US because she was an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever in the early 1900’s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mallon The most common versions historically was locking people in their homes or isolating a community from the outside.

As to your complaint, walking outside does carry the risk of infecting others as people demonstrably have gotten COVID from walking past each other. It’s a low risk which why it was generally acceptable, but officials where balancing even this vs more people dying.

> Curtailing freedoms due to disease is a very old thing and it works with COVID being no exception.

If you look at agency budgets you’d think our money would’ve bought a better plan.

It’s all trade offs, there isn’t an objectively better plan.

The US for example encouraged but didn’t mandate the general public get vaccinated. It’s easy to say that’s the wrong choice, but people would have seriously objected.

People did seriously object, lost their jobs, and lost their faith in the system so much that a recession follows sooner than that those now unemployed try again to be humanized.

Are you saying people objected to something that didn’t happen?

I wouldn't speak about it in the past tense personally!

Off topic I know but I can't let the idea that Sweden's death rate wasn't significantly different to other similar nations with stricter restrictions slide - that was true only for people under 70. I don't know about you but I intend to be fully fit & healthy and living a meaningful existence at 70 that I don't wish to have cut short because public health measures in a crisis are insufficient. Further, talk to some frontline healthcare workers about the extreme case load they had to deal with.

Sweden's total COVID death rate per unit population is three times that of neighbouring Norway. 190 per 100k versus 65 per 100k It wasn't just the over 70s in Sweden who were dying.

See https://www.vg.no/spesial/corona/verden/

That’s death attributed to Covid. If you look at total excess mortality you will see that Sweden mostly did fine and it’s probably be even better if you look at long term trend. Obviously no country wants to talk too much about it. Who wants to tell their population than the sacrifice they made were useless?

I don’t know about the situation in the USA where everything seemed very political and what was done was far less stringent than in my own country but here in France it was pretty obvious that most of the measures were taken haphazardly mostly to placate an ageing population. It was very funny. The media kept blaming the young socialising for cases when it was painfully obvious that most contaminations came from schools.

Got some numbers and a reference?

I can only assume your Norwegian is a lot better than mine. But I had read from a reliable source that excluding those over 70 the excess death rate (all causes) in Sweden wasn't notably higher than other Nordic countries.

I can't say anything about the excess death rate. My source is the VG webpage I included. It seems unlikely that there are enough people over 70 to make a 3 to 1 difference between the two countries. Perhaps someone can provide a reference to correct me.

It's likely to be somewhere in the order of 20% (that's the figure for over 65s for Europe as a whole). Excess deaths is definitely a better measure than those attributed to Covid - e.g. it was reported in Australia deaths were recorded as due to covid in any case that a hospital patient tested +ve even if the immediate cause of death was unrelated - i.e. they almost certainly would have died anyway regardless of Covid.

Our excess death rate in Norway was negative.

Yeah, let's exclude the numbers for those over 70. Not like they're actually people or anything...

So if you exclude the largest category of deaths and cherry-pick from the remaining data you think a point is being made? Sweden and Norway has similar covid death rates for children aged 6-8, therefore the public health policy differences between the two countries had no effect? Do you know what actually was the same among the various Scandinavian countries? The economic impact of covid. Swedish policy failures that ended up killing more people did not provide the expected economic benefit. Sweden fucked up and their population paid the price.

I think you need to go back and re-read what I wrote. I quite clearly objected to omitting deaths of those over 70.

The death rate for elderly people was attributed to poor safeguards in care homes by the Swedish Health Authority.

What % of people over 70 are in care homes (in Australia it's about 6% and we apparently have one of the highest rates in the world)? Pretty sure if it were just those in care homes dying from COVID it would barely show up in the stats.

> to no avail, we caught it 3x by now, all the times through our small kids. At this point its milder/similar than common cold for us, unlike those being hit for the first time.

That parahraph seems to contradict itself. By locking down we slowed down transmission, until treatments and vaccines were available. That is why the effects were so mild for you vs the people who caught it in the earlier waves. How was it to 'no avail', when you state the benefit right afterwards?

> Next winter will show how missing 2 cold/flu seasons will bode for us, I suspect mortality stats will jump through the roof

The reason we have annual flu shots is because influenza mutates so readily, so it's not like most people have a highly developed immunity to whatever common influenza strain is going around anyway. And fun fact (truly, it's awesome), at least one strain of influenza appears to have gone extinct. It seems possible that your prediction is completely backwards, and that our scattershot headless chicken COVID mitigation policies have managed to permanently improve flu season.

https://www.npr.org/2021/06/03/1003020235/certain-strains-of...

> This is a complex topic

It really, really, isn't.

Hospitals the world over were completely and wholly overwhelmed with patients sick with COVID-19. Lockdowns reduced transmissions, hospitalisations dropped.

That's it. That's all that needs understanding.

Is there no room for consideration of tradeoff between safety and freedom?

During a pandemic? No. Not while your freedom can pose a direct threat to the safety of the community.

Sometimes you have to put on your adult pants, realize you live in a society and not n million individual states of nature, and give up a bit of individual freedom, temporarily, for the safety of the whole.

Surely' you yourself enjoyed _some_ freedom during "lockdown". How did you come to the conclusion that it was the proper amount? Why didn't you give up more?

>Why didn't you give up more?

Because I didn't need to, and no one required me to? Because I didn't believe having to wear a mask, get a vaccine and not being able to eat out at a restaurant was an intolerable violation of my rights, given the alternative?

The alternative being the increased chance of getting COVID and the increased chance of spreading it to others. Not the permanent state of pharmaco-military-industrial complex imposed tyranny the anti-maskers kept insisting we would all inevitably descend into because "when governments take away your rights they never give them back voluntarily." Nope, here I am, not in a globalist labor camp, with all the rights and freedoms I had prior to the pandemic.

Obviously the balance between liberty and safety leads to anarchy on one extreme and authoritarianism on the other, but the question of whether governments can justifiably take temporary measures which interfere with individual liberties in order to mitigate a pandemic outbreak isn't an open one.

With similar logic, we should ban all the cars (say apart from firefighters and ambulances). Think about all the lives we will save, few hundred thousands every year globally, ignoring injuries and damages. Let that number sink.

And once it sank, we can add few other easily bannable cases (random examples - sugar, no exercise) which will put the number of saved lives in few millions, per every year.

Yet suddenly all those internet warriors who feel righteous and know by heart what needs to be done for society and by society are quiet about these. Nobody is arguing government should force people to exercise, yet school showed us how easily it can be done. It would save more lives than any covid measure ever taken, it will measurably improve people's lives, its quality and happiness, and no adverse effect apart from US HFCS industry.

Where do you draw the line? Certainly elsewhere than I do. But I am not showing that line down your throat and forcing you to live by it, do I. Can you please righteous people like you let people like me take a walk in the forest, alone? Is it really that hard to understand?

This is typical internet discussion for 21st century - few people are very vocal, and they give the impression their voice is consensus. Yet reality is a bit more complex.

You're being to conceptual and that's why you can be so confident. Of course government can set limits on freedoms. Literally nobody is arguing that except the most extreme anarchists/libertarians. The dispute isn't that the government _can_ draw a line, it's over _where_ they drew the line.

This isn't an objective argument.

> Because I didn't need to... Because I didn't believe...

I agree with all the things you mentioned here. However, you failed to mention a myriad of things the government imposed that were, at best, worthless and, at worst, counter-productive. Did you agree with closing beaches/parks? Closing outdoor gatherings is and was known to be anti-science at the time. It had the nice side effect of having people gather indoors because people are social and you won't stop them from gathering.

> The alternative being the increased chance of getting COVID and the increased chance of spreading it to others

Would you be on board with the sealing in of doors as happened in China or is that too much imposition on your freedom? Would you agree with the travel restrictions placed on people in Australia? Both of those instances achieve your goal of reducing your chance of getting and spreading COVID.

There is an entire population of people who have different, subjective, opinions. You're going to have a bad time if you think yours is the _one true opinion_ and fail to tolerate any descent.

You and I seem to be of similar minds in what restrictions are reasonable (and I tolerate a bit more or less because I know I'm not objectively correct). The difference between us is that when some people think the line should be drawn elsewhere, I don't derisively refer to them like this:

> Not the permanent state of pharmaco-military-industrial complex imposed tyranny the anti-maskers kept insisting we would all inevitably descend into because "when governments take away your rights they never give them back voluntarily." Nope, here I am, not in a globalist labor camp, with all the rights and freedoms I had prior to the pandemic.

> but the question of whether governments can justifiably take temporary measures which interfere with individual liberties in order to mitigate a pandemic outbreak isn't an open one.

And (nearly) nobody thinks it is because that's the easy question. The hard question is always how much and you've done a masterful job of acting like people who have a different answer to the hard question instead have a different answer to the easy question thereby making your disdain of them justified.

darn, I wish I was so well expressive in english as you, but clearly not being native shows itself when complex topics are debated

Sweden did not fare as well as you appear to think it did compared to its closest neighbors and cultural analogs, either by number of infections or per capita death rate. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8807990/

> * When we're so scared as a society of the Covid death spike that we stunt the social and educational development of children by years, which is potentially unrecoverable.

This sounds a lot like "we should ignore warnings about pollution because the cost of moving away from fossil fuels would be too expensive," actually.

Picking such an open-ended thing like this really undermines your point here. You want people's Covid-prompted behaviors (exaggerated into stuff like "two years mostly staying home, gaining 50 pounds") to be compared to "fear of nuclear meltdown." But you can't substantiate those long-term risks in anything like the same way we can those of burning coal at this point. Is Covid more "potentially unrecoverable" for kids and young adults than themselves or family members being drafted for a world war and dying en masse? Than school shootings that we tolerate for vague "protect our liberty" talk?

Show your work, do the cost justification, and make your assumptions explicit. Until either of you do that, you’re just guessing.

I'm not sure it's reasonable to expect someone to do that work, or even have the tools or data sources to do that work.

Sure, I think it's reasonable to expect people to provide sources to support ideas when possible, but it's a little unreasonable to expect people to do extensive first-party research to support their opinions.

I think there's value in the discussion either way. Most of the time I don't think we're going to change people's minds with this sort of discussion, but I do enjoy seeing what people's positions are on these sorts of topics, and find that I learn things from it.

If they’re unwilling to do the work, then they should stop pretending to be certain that their opinion is correct.

Why do you require sources from majormajor and not anonporridge? Neither presented supporting data for their opinions, but majormajor was simultaneously pointing out that anonporridge didn't. You seem to be showing your bias in favor of anonporridge's positions by who you choose to demand evidence from.

Amen

Just like the comment that he was replying to did?

Seems like a close cousin of the effect described here, the "drip drip drip" effect, where problems that arise as a sequence of discrete events and that are easy to solve with a simple top down approach get solved, while problems that are more serious in total, but that are continuous is nature and require a more distributed bottom up approach to solve, don't.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/7/5/heres-why-we-re...

> There's some kind of logical fallacy in this line of argument, but I can't put my finger on a name for it.

"Cowardice"? From an old version of the Wikipedia article, "Fear and excessive self-concern lead one to not do things of benefit to oneself and one's group" [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowardice

> When you're terrified of Covid, so you suspend most of your activities and spend two years mostly staying home, gaining 50 pounds and decimating your fitness which drastically increases your risk of cardiovascular disease and overall significantly increasing your likelihood of dying young far in excess of the acute risk that Covid actually posed to your demographic.

It's funny because I was actually able to lose 50 pounds by establishing an exercise routine at home.

I understand your argument but it doesn't work for COVID: if anything lockdowns gives people more time to exercise instead of commuting via car.

>You're terrified of a nuclear meltdown, so instead you subject global civilization to decades of unnecessary fossil fuel burning.

It's kind of fair enough to be afraid with a chances of meltdown projected at 1/3704 reactor years:

https://lemielleux.com/what-are-the-chances-of-a-nuclear-pow...

Those odds are why not a single insurance company will insure a nuclear reactor for more than 0.3% the cost of a nuclear disaster.

Speaking of fallacies, your argument squarely falls under the false dilemma fallacy. Nuclear is not the only form of green energy. In fact it is by far the most expensive one as well as the only one that imparts a small chance of catastrophe.

It isnt needed to provide reliable power either. Wind, solar, pumped storage, batteries and demand shaping can, together, do it cheaper:

https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/3539703-no-mi...

https://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/anu-finds-530000-potent...

> chances of meltdown projected at 1/3704 reactor years

That is for existing reactors. The point of new designs is to do better:

"The likelihood of core damage due to NuScale reactor equipment failures while at full power conditions is 1 event per module every ~3 Billion Years."

https://www.nuscalepower.com/benefits/safety-features/emerge...

And I'll believe it once the price-anderson cap is eliminated and they can still buy insurance.

Otherwise it's all talk. Manufacturers will always claim on that their product is 99.9% safe.

The closest realistic measure is how much financial liability their insurer is willing to shoulder and at what cost.

Which is still capped at 0.03% of 1 fukushima in the US because the government thinks pushing it any higher would spook them.

That would be progress, but I don't think we'll get there until the new reactors have a proven operational safety record, and enough are built to retire the old reactors.

The key distinction here is that the (low!) long-term risk of nuclear power is well quantified, while COVID represents an unknown long-term risk.

Isn't this true of all new strains of all contagious pathogens? They are constantly undergoing change. We estimate low probability that mutated viruses or bacteria descended from strains we are familiar with will have dramatically more harmful long-term effects, but we don't actually know for certain that any given year's new strains won't have very different risk profiles until much later. We can make probabilistic models based on historical data, but they are unavoidably vulnerable to underestimating the risk of black swan events.

One could argue that certain features of covid make it riskier with regard to long-term effects, but that is not a proposition that is well developed in the public conversation, especially by proponents of the zoonosis hypothesis. The lab origin hypothesis with its accompanying assumptions of serial passage and direct gene modification would in my eyes strengthen the case that covid's long-term effects were less likely to conform to historical data on other viral infections, though interestingly the intersection of those who find the lab origin more convincing with those who have serious concerns about long-term harms is a pretty small set.

> Isn't this true of all new strains of all contagious pathogens?

Yes. The distinguishing factor there is that most new strains do not kill millions of people within the first year or two of discovery. Compare, for example, the H1N1 variant that caused the 2009 flu pandemic, which killed "only" around 300,000 people (based on best excess death estimates).

> One could argue that certain features of covid make it riskier with regard to long-term effects, but that is not a proposition that is well developed in the public conversation, especially by proponents of the zoonosis hypothesis.

This has long been an established part of the messaging: we're more or less confident that short term effects to young, otherwise healthy individuals are minor. The guidance has still been to avoid infection, because we're not confident that mild short term guarantee or protect against serious long term effects. Chickenpox (and subsequently shingles) exemplify this.

I understand the intuition that a non-zoonotic origin would lend credence to the possibility of long term risks, but I don't think the epidemiology actually supports the intuition: my understanding is that viruses that jump the species gap tend to have higher variability in terms of their harm to the new species.

I've noticed the same strange misaligned covid explanation/behavior. Lab leak would make me more fearful of the virus itself, pure zoonotic origin and I say Jesus take the wheel and by that I mean countless generations of evolution tuning my immune system against similar virus for familial survival take the wheel.

This mis-states the relationship between your immune system and novel viruses, especially ones that cross species boundaries. Viruses adapt to avoid the adjustments the immune system makes, and zoonotic transmission means that your immune system is "seeing" all kinds of novel adaptations for the first time.

to be clear : the events of 9/11 were the impetus for war; not the motivation.

that trillion estimate, one of the lower ones by the way, is a cost figure without the associated profits and revenue. As horrible as it is and was, the 'military industrial complex', as a whole, profited incredibly -- this 'trickled down', a phrase I hate to use , all across the United States in the form of jobs from market players and call-for-bids across the nation to fill in niche topics (like airport security, for example) that were otherwise un-worked beforehand.

Another aside : the proof that airport security has changed anything for the better is scant at best, and corrupt at worst.

tl;dr : if you think any of the wars in the middle east were fought for the sake of 'American Safety', whatever that might be, then you're just not paying enough attention.

I mean, a trillion spent is a trillion spent: it'll trickle down regardless of how you spend it, the question is if you could have spent it some other way that would have given more jobs?

A trillion spent building factories, highways, public housing, schools, etc. may employ exactly as many people as a trillion spent building weapons, dropping bombs, and killing people.

What you end up with after spending that trillion is a bit different though.

> it'll trickle down regardless of how you spend it

That's an article of conservative dogma dating from the Reagan and Bush eras, and it's pretty-much discredited now. For most major capital expenditure programmes, the majority of the money trickling down stops trickling once it reaches shareholders and executives.

It was Bush - if it hadn’t been spent on Iraq it would have gone straight to tax cuts for the upper brackets.

We’re talking about the guy who managed to tank the worlds healthiest budget

I thought we were talking a miniature nuclear reactor…

Not if it is stashed away secretly avoiding tax and other contributions to society.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2012/07/23/super...

Why did you have to derail nuclear discussion with covid denier/antivaxx nonsense? Sigh.

Why replace one type of antiscience/antiintelectualism (anti nuclear people) with another (antivax)?

How did you make the leap to covid denial/antivax from my comment? I am extremely pro vax and consider covid to be a very serious problem.

People aren't black and white in their beliefs, despite what the political duopoly would like you to believe.

> It's situations where the emotional terror of acute risks forces you to default to a behavior that has less tractable, long term, systemic risks.

Good thing nuclear doesn't produce hazardous waste we need to store safely for thousands of years. That would be a pretty horrible, long term risk.

But OTOH who gives a fsck about generations to come, storing the waste safely while I'm still alive should be doable.

So, instead of nuclear waste we can package up and store away where it won't hurt anyone, we have plenty of coal and gas plants, whose waste goes into the atmosphere where it hurts everyone.

But we can't! There have been several issues with stored nuclear waste already, and we only had to do it for like what, 70 years? How can you project that to even just a couple hundred years and not expect total desaster? nuclear would be great if every single person involved were reliable, diligent engineers and scientists. But at the end of the day, the most important decisions always get made by greedy managers and CEOs, and clueless politicians.

I’ve never understood why just storing them in a big pool next to the power plant is a bad idea. The radiation is not a concern because the water filters it all out, it’s stable for long periods of time with very little maintenance, what’s the downside exactly?

As in literally dig a hole the size of an Olympic swimming pool, store literally all the nuclear waste that has ever been produced (maybe you’ll need a few pools, I haven’t checked), and spend a few million a year maintaining it for the next century or so.

To be fair, if they did go ahead we would've had decades less coal burning and potentially could've provided electricity cheap enough in combination with hydro and renewables that would've seen some big industry shift away from burning coal.

NZ has a very green power grid but it's not perfect and suffers from reliability issues dependent on snowfall to fill the hydro lakes. Nuclear would have and still could provide a lot more security in that area.

I'm hoping NZ sees the light and accepts small nuclear as a decent method of going to 100% green sources (currently it's 85%)

> if they did go ahead we would've had decades less coal burning

If they did go ahead without safety measures, and had an incident, the plant would likely be shut down, and then you have the domino effect that Fukishima had (e.g., Germany shutting down all their plants). Nuclear can be viable when both proper safety can be ensured economically, and when that surety can be shared by its voting population

> If they did go ahead without safety measures, and had an incident, the plant would likely be shut down

Three Mile Island had two close calls. The first was the reactor was only 30-60 minutes from going into complete meltdown. The second was potentially using a faulty crane to remove the lid of the reactor vessel. Either one of those would have made large areas of dense urban area unlivable.

Why is nuclear judged by near misses while coal pollutes like crazy daily and causes real lung damage and no one bats an eye?

* real death.

Quick googling shows wildly different numbers, but the lowest study in top results says 1 million per year from coal alone.

All global warming + pollution is way higher. One study estimated 1 in 5 deaths. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00139...

Because coal is not an alternative today, renewables are and they have miniscule external pollution in relation to everything else.

No, renewables are not an alternative to fossil fuels. That’s why natural gas and coal fire plants are still being cranked out today.

Seems to work just fine? This will of course penetrate down to less ideal locations as costs continue to decline.

> South Australia is at the vanguard of the global energy transition, having transformed its energy system from 1% to over 60% renewable energy in just over 15 years.

> By 2025/2026, the Australian Energy Market Operator forecasts this could rise to approximately 85%.

> South Australia’s aspiration is to achieve 100% net renewables by 2030. In 2021, South Australia met 100% of its operational demand from renewable resources on 180 days (49%).

https://www.energymining.sa.gov.au/industry/modern-energy/le...

Your examples don’t support your point. 60% renewable isn’t enough and they aren’t even into the hardest part of replacing the base load at that level.

> South Australia’s aspiration is to achieve 100% net renewables by 2030

That link you sent is bleak. They just now are hitting the point where renewable generation causes excess energy during peak solar hours sometimes. They have no concrete plans to store at the scale required to actually get through the troughs. They are just now beginning to kick the tires on storage projects which is where much of the southwestern US was a decade ago.

1 to 60% was possible in 15 years. All the while we have had these cost curves for wind and solar. [1] So you're saying the last 40% is going to be completely impossible and wreck the grid?

Like, I just don't understand your negativity. Projecting to reach 85% renewable penetration in ~3 years and it is a bleak outlook? You're looking for a magic finger snap and it is 100% tomorrow?

[1]: https://www.lazard.com/media/451886/grphx_lcoe-09.png

>So you're saying the last 40% is going to be completely impossible and wreck the grid?

Without massive storage, yes. The 60% it picked up is the easy part of the demand that follows the renewable production. The last 40% is 95%+ of the difficult work.

The difference here is making a rocket that gets to space vs one that achieves orbit. They seem similar but they aren’t even in the same league.

>Like, I just don't understand your negativity.

It’s not negativity, it’s what has happened in every country that is a decade or more ahead of Australia here. Australia is not magic, it has nighttimes and slow winds like every other place on the planet. This problem has plagued everyone at the head of the technology curve here and there still isn’t a solution. What do you think Australia will do differently?

When was this crane thing? It would have been long after the reactor had reached cold shutdown, so what exactly was the accident it was supposed to have almost caused?

Not the OP but the crane incident was shortly after the first incident. The higher ups wanted to use the polar crane to lift a bunch of radioactive debris out of the core that almost melted down. At least one of the workers (Rick Parks) ended up whistleblowing over it because the crane was the same one that was there during the incident and most likely had taken damage. He was concerned the crane would fail while lifting the radioactive debris out (around 1000 lbs of it) and fall back onto the core. Check out the Netflix document Meltdown: Three mile Island for more info.

Yeah, that "shortly after"... the reactor top wasn't lifted off until FIVE YEARS after the accident.

So I ask again: just what horrible public-relevant accident is supposed to have nearly happened here? I can't imagine anything that would have caused anything catastrophic. The lid falling back onto the reactor vessel wouldn't be that.

Sorry for the late response. The fear was that the crane would fail and drop the debris back into the core and set off a nuclear explosion.

They added large amounts of borate to the water before opening the top. There was no way it was going to go critical (and if it had, it would at best have been a steam explosion, not a nuclear bomb, as the chain reaction if it could have occurred at all would have been with slow thermal neutrons.)

This is also in Moral Mazes somewhere, if you prefer a written summary.

The natural disaster was responsible for killing people, not the nuclear meltdown... maybe if we had been consistently building nuclear since the 60s we wouldn't be in this global warming catastrophe? Obviously speculation, but I'm curious what our global CO2 levels would be if all the major industrialized nations transitioned to 100% nuclear Over the last 60 years. Anyone happen to have some charts?

The majority of the man-made CO2 in the atmosphere today comes from power generation IIRC. A lot also comes from transportation, but less than power generation.

If what you say took place, along with the solar and wind power advances that happened, we'd at least be looking at a lot longer warming runway than we are today.

The plant couldn’t deal with an electricity outage for 24h.

An outage that was caused by something that, through a rare confluence of events, also destroyed their outage-backup-plan. The plant could have easily dealt with most power outages.

Not to say there isn't a lesson to be learned, obviously, but to say the plant couldn't deal with an outage is ingenuous at minimum.

> but to say the plant couldn't deal with an outage is ingenuous at minimum.

Did you mean "disingenuous"? "Ingenuous" means lacking in guile or craftiness. "Disingenuous" means having the intent to deceive, and is used much more often.

Battery backup was good for 8h. Seems pretty risky to me, there are many scenarios thinkable where a power outage for more than 8h could occur.

For example some natural disaster, which across ubiquitously deployed nuclear would occur every day somewhere on earth.

>there are many scenarios thinkable where a power outage for more than 8h could occur.

Sure, and they thought of them, which is why they had generators as well as batteries.

I feel like the biggest benefit of small nuclear is that it can be put anywhere and you don’t have to build extremely costly transmission infrastructure. Just dot these things around. It surely isn’t cost-effective enough for the first 85% or whatever of a state’s needs, but for that last mile problem? Sounds good.

The electricity grid does not have a last mile problem for supply. And just putting them anywhere will just raise costs. Better to put multiple units next to an existing substation on the backbone. Then those units can supply electricity to potentially millions, not just the city at the end of the last mile.

I don’t think dotting nuclear reactors around everywhere would be politically very acceptable. Each plant will also require some level of staffing, operational and security staff. Seems more likely that small modular reactors would just be deployed in large batches to lower the fixed costs, and accept the transmission losses.

The NuScale design requires 3 people on shifts to operate a 12 reactor fleet.

I would be a bit worried about physical security with lots of small plants. What do you think? I suppose in theory there is nothing preventing having similar levels of physical security from today's large plants.

Up to 12 x 60 MWe per station reactors means 720 MWe, as much as a CANDU plant. Yet it looks like a bunch of warehouses on the outside because the reactors are stored in underground water pools. I guess you'd need similar security as for any power plant. The NRC also requires that all new reactors designs post-9/11 are able to withstand impact with a commercial airplane.

https://www.ans.org/news/article-1913/first-steps-into-a-new...

Bit of an aside: Nuclear plant security should not be comparable to fossil fuel plant security, it should be much much tighter.

Yes agreed, given the risks of meltdown or the theft of radioactive material I would think security should be much more important.

Radiation alone provides security. The plant diagram already has two fences with coresponding checkpoints. One needs to stop potential looters, so basically checkpoits with a guard each and a patrol vehicle with a team of two. Make it armed guards if you're in the US where everyone and their grandmother owns not one but several firearms. That plus the usual access cards and CCTV. This isn't a military nuclear weapons lab, it's a civilian power facility.

I'd still feel safer with the number of armed guards being nearer the 'nuclear weapons lab' end of the scale than the 'power facility' end.

Cost always comes up around nuclear, and maybe justifiably so, but I think it shouldn't be such a large factor. The U.S. for example could easily afford this. We just passed a $700B bill for clean energy and heavily subsidize oil & gas.

What matters more imo is reliability and energy security and in those respects nuclear makes me a lot more confident than renewables such as solar or wind.

The problem with all these costs is that we only get to know the real costs in hindsight.

With oil and gas, the hidden cost was climate change. Although global climate change was imagined as early as 1896 by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius [1], it was not publicly acknowledged by the "7 Sisters" [2] until April 2014 [3]. We think we know what oil and gas costs with what we pay at the pump, but those costs usually miss the $500 billion in direct subsidies [4], the military costs of protecting those interests and of course the costs of neutralizing climate change.

With nuclear, the hidden cost is both long-term storage of waste and the cost of nuclear accidents. The merchants of nuclear power plants do not list those costs on the sale price. Again we get the sticker shock once it is too big to fail. I still have not met anyone who is prepared to have nuclear waste stored in their "neighborhood" for the next thousands of years. So it accumulates on-site, where there was no real planned long-term storage accommodation.

I'm not arguing for or against one form of energy. Rather I am arguing for more transparency in our presentation of the costs.

[1] https://www.livescience.com/humans-first-warned-about-climat...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Sisters_(oil_companies)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_cont...

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiCvGQnweAg

> long-term storage of waste and the cost of nuclear accidents. The merchants of nuclear power plants do not list those costs on the sale price.

Actually they do. The US has been collecting money from nuclear plants for disposal for literally 50 years.

In fact, they have an absurd amount of money since this money has been collecting interest. It it political deadlock and systematic incompetence that prevents the solving of this problem.

And in addition, long term storage is an incredibly dumb solution for most of this 'waste' and is a fundamentally flawed policy that again, is simply systematic incompetence.

> I still have not met anyone who is prepared to have nuclear waste stored in their "neighborhood"

Disagree, put it in my garden. I don't care. You can leave it there for the next 100 years. Seriously, its not hard to store, it just stands there and does nothing and is 100% harmless unless you come up with some plot of Armageddon style logic.

> So it accumulates on-site, where there was no real planned long-term storage accommodation.

Its accumulates on-site because of systematic incompetence in the federal government.

> and the cost of nuclear accidents

The likely hood of such accidents is incredibly small, even if you assume 100 years of nuclear power for 100% of the population the chance of really series accidents is very low. And even lower if we consider next generation nuclear.

One thing to remember about nuclear waste, or radioactive material in general, is that the high-level waste has the shortest half-life, and the longer half-life waste is low-level radioactive.

With waste with a half-life of 10,000 years for example, each 2 atoms will on average emit one particle or photon in that time. Many generations of people could eat or drink those atoms safely. You could live your life next to a pile of it, and get very little radiation over your lifetime from long half-life radioactive atoms.

The long term storage of this waste is a concern, for sure. But it is a concern for the far future, and we can delay addressing it for decades with impunity (which we have been doing, actually). But we are facing a climate emergency that must be addressed right now. Nuclear waste is the least of our worries at the moment.

I appreciate your overall point, but it's probably also worth considering the concentration or dilution of that waste. When you mention eating or drinking the atoms, or living next to a pile of them, the radiation dose will obviously depend both on the atoms' half-lives and on the overall number of atoms.

There's an extra Avogadro factor of around 23 orders of magnitude when going between atoms and grams, so those atoms really add up -- if they are highly pure and concentrated, at least.

Ok, but you could dilute the waste to make this problem go away (which sort of happens automatically if the waste is not contained).

Firstly, I applaud your YIMBYism.

Secondly, regarding waste, I share your view, and I think there’s an additional travesty that we’ve had breeder reactor technology for decades. That can significantly shorten the volume and half life of waste while also producing new nuclear fuel. Non proliferation concerns are cited for why it’s not used, but I don’t see why America can’t operate them within its own borders.

I believe most waste isn’t spent fuel but rather other contaminated stuff, which isn’t going to be helped by breeder reactors.

My understanding is most of this waste also isn’t as dangerous or as long-lasting.

> Non proliferation concerns are cited for why it’s not used, but I don’t see why America can’t operate them within its own borders.

Yes, its insane to suggest the US in its own boarders can't handle it. They do a lot of things much more dangerous in every way to build nukes.

The US is not, in fact, collecting money for disposal, and has not been for years.

The US is, instead, handing back all the money that was collected to the remaining nuke operators.

Not, notably, to the ratepayers it was collected from.

This is fallout from a court case where nuke operators argued that disposal was flimflam, so the money was collected fraudulently. The court agreed, and ordered the money returned. Not to those it came from, but just to whoever was still operating.

These are important points you're raising that change the course of the conversation significantly, so please also add citations so that folks can see them, otherwise, the argument falls flat and gets dismissed.

Wikipedia is right there, if you care.

Links or your argument is just noise. Here is the closest I could find to what you are talking about, explicitly saying an appeals court ruled against a nuclear operator trying to get the refund you are talking about:

https://flarecord.com/stories/511480139-appeals-court-rules-...

""" NextEra is still not entitled to a refund because federal law requires the DoE, not NextEra, to actually dispose of the spent nuclear fuel. """

I went to research this for you and couldn’t find the sources. I’ve dismissed the original argument outright.

I knew you would.

I did not know of this development. I have researched these topics quite a while ago.

Its truly sad that these resources were not used to actually develop the advanced reactors and technologies needed to solved the problem.

Non of this is in the least bit convincing. And your sources mostly provided by the US highly political and mostly nonsensical discourse that ignores a whole bunch of very relevant information.

Waste is an incredibly easy problem to solve: bury it in impermeable bedrock. That said, there's no real point in storing existing nuclear waste since we don't reprocess our fuel. So the existing waste is a source of fuel in the future.

Solar and wind should also be transparent in the fact they require fossil fuels to fill in gaps in production. Thus, they do not represent a solution to climate change but merely delay it. Thus the cost of solar and wind includes the cost of climate disaster.

Solar and wind currently use fossil fuels to fill in gaps, but they don't require that. It's just that while we're still burning fossil fuels without CO2 charges, using them for gap filling is the cheapest thing that will do it.

It does until we achieve many times cheaper storage technology. Existing storage solutions don't provide nearly enough capacity to scale (especially since Li is very scarce, and is also required for cars and other modes of transport).

Hydrogen (or Methane) are an existing storage solution that scales very easily. The truth is that currently we have so little renewable generation capacity that we save more CO2 by building more wind turbines and PV per dollar than by building storage.

No, hydrogen and methane storage do not scale easily. Almost all hydrogen production is done through steam reformation, which emits carbon dioxide. Electrolysis has continued to be difficult to do at scale, due to inefficiency and difficulty in getting reliable electrolysis sytems. Then there's the issue of storing and transporting that hydrogen, which is mostly handwaved by assuming there's a salt cavern handy wherever people need to store hydrogen.

Synthetic methane requires hydrogen as an input, so all of the above applies to it, too. It also requires as source of carbon dioxide. Extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is not viable, which leaves either scavenging CO2 byproducts from industrial processes and biofuels. Both of those are not in sufficient availability to produce synthetic methane at grid scale.

We already have excess renewable generation in several energy markets. And it's been the case for years, but the promised energy storage revolution has not come to pass.

Electrolysis can easily be done at scale. A couple of megawatts of electrolysis equipment is about the size of a shipping container. Many such systems are in operations right now and have been for a decade. The technology is fairly mature and reaches efficiencies of 70-80%. You also don't need salt caverns to store the hydrogen. You can store it underground without a salt cavern. Sure, there are losses, but they're not unmanageable.

We're also not going to run out of industrial processes that produce large amounts of carbon dioxide, at least as long as we still build things out of concrete, so if for some reason hydrogen is too hard to transport or store, we can pay the extra price of turning it into methane and use all the infrastructure that we already have for natural gas. We can even recapture most of the carbon when we burn the methane again.

This really doesn't scale to the level of a whole country, or continent, having to contend with low power output for months, as recently happened with wind in Europe. And even if it can in principle scale, it's unproven and requires much more complex ops than a nuclear plant, which has been a well understood solution for decades.

Not to mention, this requires huge over-production, which is a problem in areas with already high land usage, such as Europe. It is probably much less of a problem in the USA, so maybe there the calculations are different.

Nothing can ever happen for the first time. If something hasn't been done now, it can't ever happen.

I just love reactionary conservative nuclear logic.

I'd you're going to be the future of the planet on something, getting on a solution that has worked for over half a century is a lot safer than something that has never been done outside of prototypes.

"Let's just use fusion for all our energy needs. We don't need fission, nor do we need wind and solar. Just because it hasn't been done now, doesn't mean it'll never happen. If you don't support this you're just an anti-fusion conservative reactionary!"

But you see, going with renewables is not betting the future of the planet. We absolutely know that renewables can do it. The technologies all exist now. All that we're doing is quibbling over how much it would cost.

The worst case for renewables would be that costs stop declining. Stack the deck just right and nuclear might end up a bit cheaper. But this is just a financial risk, not a risk of the planet. And if one is looking at financial risks, one must also look at the risk of cost overruns in nuclear. Unlike with renewables, which typically come in within 10% of the contracted cost, nuclear plants are famously subject to enormous cost overruns. Factors of 2, 3, or even more.

Pretending that the promises of nuclear will absolutely come true, but that renewables haven't absolutely demonstrated their cost declines will continue, is a blatant double standard and not how one does proper analysis. That's why utilities and financiers have walked away from new nuclear, especially in markets where they're not allowed to foist overruns off on the ratepayers.

> But you see, going with renewables is not betting the future of the planet. We absolutely know that renewables can do it. The technologies all exist now. All that we're doing is quibbling over how much it would cost.

We have lots of experience with hydroelectricity. So we can just build more dams, it's all just a question of cost right? With more money we can just build more dams until we reach 100% hydroelectric generation right? This is the kind of logic you're using.

Possibility and feasibility are two different things. Lithium ion batteries exist, but we'll never deploy a day's worth of battery storage. The scale just isn't there. No amount of money thrown at the problem is going to make it possible.

Sure things like hydroelectricity and electrolysis exist, but they have significant barriers to feasibility. The likely path for an attempt at solar and wind grid is to build a bunch of solar and wind, try to build storage, fail, and keep using fossil fuels. Nobody, and I mean nobody has ever built grid scale storage for more than an hour's worth of electricity use (let alone total energy use). Energy storage remains an unsolved problem, and it's not just a question of cost. There's no telling if it can be done even with unlimited financial resources.

By comparison we just need to build 4 nuclear plants for every existing one in the US. No massive 10,000x increase in storage capacity required. No reliance on technology that's never been deployed at scale.

No continent currently runs on nuclear power, not even a single country currently runs on nuclear power. Nuclear power is hence unproven at scale by your logic.

France generates over 70% of it's power from nuclear energy. At it's peak it was over 80%, with the remainder fulfilled by preexisting hydroelectricity.

France gets 70% ef its electricity from nuclear. It only gets about a third of its primary power from nuclear. Clearly, the technology can't handle the task if the country can't even run its electric grid on 100% nuclear. /s

By comparison, the largest share of wind and solar in any country is only 43% in Denmark. Germany comes in second only 33%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewable...

So if 70% is insufficient to demonstrate feasibility, then solar and wind are even worse off.

In this thread I'm making fun of the assertion that proven technology can't scale. I guess I should've added more sarcasm markers.

Does not scale, I hear that a lot about everything that isn't nuclear. Maybe people said that to the semiconductor industry before the explosion in person computers or smart phones.

Nuclear has got to have the worse scalability story of any hyped technology ever. Very monolithic system with tight integration between components. Hazardous materials. Complex science and engineering that needs lots of different highly trained people. Exotic materials. High temperatures. Enabling works with quantities in the millions of square metres. Processes that are difficult to model. Endless secrecy for national security. Very strong buildings. Harsh design margins. Sites in remote areas with absolutely no night life.

We should be optimistic about nuclear. But also apply optimism to other technologies and industries. If the petro-chemical industry want to make hydrogen work they will succeed. So will the battery industry and solar. If nuclear can scale than so can they.

And yet for all the complaints about nuclear, France powers over 75% of it's grid with nuclear. Several other countries have it at around 40-50%. Nuclear continues to produce more electricity than wind and solar combined.

And yet for all the scepticism about renewables it has almost caught up with nuclear in a much shorter time.

But my wider point is that we need to be more consistent in how we apply scepticism and optimism to different technologies. In some dimensions that gives a benefit to nuclear and in others the benefit is with renewables or storage.

That hydrogen is currently produced by SMR is irrelevant. Electrolysis is of course trivial to scale, you just build more electrolyzers. There is nothing that prevents arbitrary numbers of them from being operated in parallel.

Would this cost money? Yes. But it would likely cost less than a grid based on nuclear power plants. The key insight is that hydrogen can feed combined cycle power plants, which cost a factor of 10 less than a nuclear power plant of the same power output. So, one could (if necessary) back up the entire grid with CC plants at a fraction of the cost of powering the same grid with nukes. If desired, one could use simple cycle power plants, which (while less efficient) are even cheaper by another factor of about 2, or 20x cheaper than the nukes.

What? How on earth is it irrelevant that almost all of our hydrogen comes from steam reformation? We have very little experience with large scale electrolysis, and its proven to be difficult and expensive to do at scale.

Those gas plants may be cheaper build, but if the electrolyzed hydrogen is expensive the total operating cost is higher since the fuel is too expensive. If you're using single cycle gas plants you'll need even more of this hydrogen, and thus driving up costs. Are you really just comparing cost of construction and ignoring the cost of electrolyzed hydrogen fuel? And remember this is on top of the solar and wind that needs to power this electeolysis in the first place.

Also again, to convert hydrogen to methane you need a large source of carbon dioxide.

A summary of this comment is, "it's cheaper if we just ignore all the technical challenges of synthetic methane."

It is irrelevant because the proposition is to use hydrogen to store surplus electricity, not to use hydrogen made from natural gas.

This is exactly the point I'm making: storing hydrogen for electricity storage has to be done through electrolysis, because steam reformation emits carbon dioxide. But we don't currently use electrolysis for our hydrogen production, because it's not cost competitive with steam reformation. It's not cost competitive with existing energy storage either.

Dude, we use natural gas because that is cheap. Why is it cheap? Because we externalize the costs of climate change. By that argument we should ditch nuclear and burn lignite. It's a lot cheaper and proven technology.

Nobody claimed electrolysis is cheaper than using natural gas. Nobody even claimed that electrolysis is cheaper than batteries at small scales. The claim is that electrolysis is proven technology that is a lot simpler to scale that lithium batteries.

I agree we should include the cost of climate change. That's why nuclear is cheaper than solar and wind: because solar and wind require either energy storage or fossil fuels. And since energy storage at grid scale does not exist, solar and wind contains the cost of climate change.

> The claim is that electrolysis is proven technology that is a lot simpler to scale that lithium batteries.

And my point is that this is false. Electrolysis is not proven technology at scale, almost all hydrogen is produced through steam reformation. No, it does not scale better than lithium ion batteries. If we try to build it at scale it'll make solar and wind more expensive than nuclear power.

You provide zero supporting arguments for your point. Megawatt electrolyzers exist today. They existed ten years ago. They don't use anything in large quantities of which supply is limited. You give no reason why we can't just build more of them.

A megawatt is basically nothing. Average load for electricity in the US is 500 GW. How much did that megawatt electrolyzed cost? Does it also include the cost of converting that hydrogen back into electricity? And remember this cost is on top of the cost of generating the stored energy in the first place.

You still didn't explain how "build more" is not an option, which is, you know, the original claim that we're debating in this comment chain.

But is it cheaper to build more electeolysis storage, and lots of overproduction in renewables? Well, until someone actually offers hydrogen storage commerically, there's no price. If it were cheap, we wouldn't be using steam reformation.

So at least now you accept that it does scale and it's just a matter of cost. Glad we could reach an agreement.

Maybe? So far titanium electrodes are the most promising solution, but titanium is a rather precious resource.

Oh good grief. Titanium ore is literally dirt cheap. Titanium has been pricey because of how it's made from the ore, not because the ore is scarce. Titanium is the 9th most abundant element in the Earth's crust.

The fact that it's scarce because it's so difficult and expensive to perform the chemical processes to isolate titanium doesn't chance the fact that it's scarce. Unless you have some novel way to drive down the cost titanium, building huge public projects using large amounts of titanium will remain infeasible.

Yes, because we can rely on fossil, nuclear, or hydro to give us reliability and pick up the slack when renewables falter. Just look at Germany, which just approved new coal plants because it needs more energy, and they are stuck to their demented plan of decommissioning nuclear plants.

It's also worth noting that France is producing less than half the greenhouse gases of Germany, despite having significantly less renewables, because it has a serious nuclear infrastructure.

It is also worth noting that a sizeable fraction of France's reactors are currently offline and France is dependent on imports to cover the gaps.

They will continue to require fossil fuels until energy storage comes along and we have no idea when that will occur. So far, all of our storage systems have proven inadequate.

You can't adequately model energy with a single price per MWh. There is more to it than that and that is true of all energy types. But the low cost of renewables is still a feature that grids can exploit. It will make storage viable when it otherwise wouldn't have been.

No source of energy is a silver bullet for climate change. Wind and solar aren't. And neither is the nuclear industry. There just isn't a serious plan for scaling up quickly enough. The supply chain and expertise just doesn't exist and will take years. And moaning about mistakes in the past is irrelevant to the present.

> With nuclear, the hidden cost is both long-term storage of waste and the cost of nuclear accidents.

Long term storage is actually trivial, just requires actually storing it.

Counterintuitively, best way is glassing it and dumping it on the abyssal plane in the sea.

This controls the temperature and acts as a radiation shield and there's more a hundred times more life on the surface than in the abyss. Also, no humans who get prissy about 1 in 100 chances of cancer than animals don't fare about. The ocean's also big enough that a your case corroding and some material being dissolved and spreading in the water is irrelevant (unless all your nuclear waste you ever dump manages to escape and spread throughout the ocean rather than just sit in a sullen pile you'll be under EPA limits).

> best way is glassing it and dumping it on the abyssal plane in the sea.

You say as if it's a done deal. Hanford is 14 years behind schedule on this, and now it looks as if it will off-gas toxic chemicals. Original budget was $4B and now is $17B.

The chemical they're using easily ignites and turns into hydrogen cyanide.

https://crosscut.com/environment/2022/04/hanford-report-reve...

> Counterintuitively, best way is glassing it and dumping it on the abyssal plane in the sea.

That's how you make Godzilla!

I, for one, welcome our new anglerfish overlords.

Money is fungible.

Each dollar spent on a nuke is exactly that dollar not spent on renewables, instead. But it takes with it another dollar spent on coal while waiting for construction to complete.

The amount spent just on coal and coal plant operation during those ten long years is enough, by itself, to build enough renewables to displace the nuke. The cost of building the nuke itself is enough to build several times enough to displace the nuke, beyond.

And the renewables would come on immediately, displacing carbon immediately.

Without radically increasing build-out of renewables, we will fail to avert climate catastrophe. The exact mode of civilization collapse in that case is debatable, but global thermonuclear war punctuates many.

100% renewable isn’t enough right now. Batteries cost too much. 70% renewable and 30% nuke isn’t a bad mix though.

In comparison against renewables and storage, new nuclear isn't competing against batteries and storage right now, it's competing against batteries and renewables that could be installed during the operating lifetime of the power plant (earlier in the life more so than later.) So the question is what will renewables and storage will cost in (say) 2030 or later.

Batteries have been falling in price by 27%/year recently, and PV by nearly that much, so it's a bold position to assert this will suddenly stop.

Past advancement is not necessarily an indication of future advancement. Battery tech is still exploring ways to improve Li batteries, but capacities have stopped increasing dramatically as far as I know. Even worse, even at the theoretical maximum capacity for these types of chemical batteries, there just aren't enough resources on Earth to build enough to cover the storage requirements of a huge grid.

Now, is it possible that a new type of battery will appear and take over the market by 2030? Yes. Will there be enough of them to compete with the stabilizing power of a nuclear power plant? Maybe. Will there be enough nuclear + storage so that the best use of that storage will be to shut down the nuclear plant? Absolutely not.

Basically, we need massive amounts of new electrical power (so we can transition transportation to electrical), and we need to shut down all fossil fuel power generation yesterday. Since we can't have enough storage yet for an exclusively green grid, nuclear shouldn't be competing with green energy in this discussion. Our choices are not "all green by 2030 VS green by 2030 + nuclear", they are "green + coal/gas by 2030 vs green + nuclear + less coal/gas". If we're instead talking about 2100, or 2200, then yeah, well probably be able to shut down nuclear as well.

Lithium batteries are adapted for cars, where weight matters. Anything happening with lithium has no relevance to utility power.

The best use of a nuclear power plant is not to build it at all. Having not built it, the storage built instead at a tiny fraction of the cost will certainly be more than enough to replace it.

Building any nukes means, for each, building several times less new renewable generating capacity than could otherwise be.

Then what storage of some good few hundreds of megawatts would you build for a tiny fraction of the cost of a nuclear power plant, that also fits where a nuclear power plant could be built?

Space requirements for storage are not dictated by optimal nuke construction site criteria. In particular, no storage method has the potential to render a whole region uninhabitable, and does not need the square-mile exclusion zone.

There are many alternatives to batteries, for longer term storage. Tanked anhydrous liquified ammonia may be common, particularly for smaller and more isolated utility districts, in part because tankage can be topped up from imports if it runs low.

Underground or sea-floor compressed air are practical, as is buoyancy, in many places. Many more places can use pumped hydro than have an existing dam, or watershed; either up a hill or down to an underground cavity.

The method used will be whatever is cheapest in the place and time constructed. Cost for most methods is falling fast.

Building a nuke is by far the most expensive baseline alternative, provided it can even be approved and built on a useful schedule.

Let's compare the largest pumped water storage plant in the world - Nant de Drance in Switzerland [0] - with reactors at one of the largest nuclear plants in the world - Hanul in South Korea [1].

Nant de Drance has 900MW of storage, and took 14 years to build. Each of the last generation reactors in Hanul generate 950+MW of power, and took 5 years to build. The first newer generation reactor is 1340MW, and (assuming it keeps its schedule) has taken 10 years to build. They've done the first tests so they have some chance of connecting to the grid this year, but let's be pessimistic and say that it will take another 4 years - matching the construction time for Nant de Drance.

That's still ~50% more power, and it is actually generating it: for Nant de Drance to help, it also needs >900MW of actual renewable power generation plants to be built and operated.

[0] https://www.nant-de-drance.ch/en/the-plant

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanul_Nuclear_Power_Plant

You mean the most expensive pumped water storage.

There is little economy of scale, in pumped hydro. California stores a much larger amount of energy in numerous reservoirs all over the Sierra Nevada range.

Let's look at simulation/optimization results as to what it would cost to use renewables + storage to produce "synthetic baseload" to compete with nuclear, using real historical weather data.

(The "synthetic baseload" comparison is favorable to nuclear, as dealing with variable demand can only help renewables as it already requires storage, and that storage can serve double duty in the variable demand case. Similarly dispatchable demand and transmission between countries also only helps renewables.)

https://model.energy/

It's difficult to get nuclear to compete with wind+solar+batteries+hydrogen in the 2030 cost scenarios. Nuclear does least worse in places like Poland then.

Thermal storage, for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage

The overwhelming majority of utility storage will not be in batteries, so battery cost is immaterial. Batteries will be useful for load-smoothing, and short-term storage in smaller grids.

It's striking to me about the US's fuel 'dole' and comparisons to the Roman's grain dole. Not the same at all, but the similarities and how different governments through time prioritize the goods and services to achieve their ends is fascinating.

Safetyism in regards to nuclear power is nothing more than the environmental lobby attempting to derail the only viable solution to climate change. They will lose an excellent source of political capital if climate change is solved, so they will always fearmonger nuclear power.

Fewer than 50 people have died from nuclear power in its entire history, meanwhile an estimated 8.7 million people die each year from fossil fuels [0].

[0] https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-essentials/what-are-the-ef...

I wish there were a way to both upvote and downvote your post:

The environmental lobby does not exist, but pressure from NatGas producers to "orient" the Greens towards fear of NP did & does.

However the idea that climate change is political capital for them is ludicrous: clearly their activism totally failed...

>The environmental lobby does not exist,

does the renewable industry magically not have the same politico-economic incentives to lobby politicians like every other industry?

The renewable industry is still incredibly nascent and does not wield (much) power (yet). In the future, that may not be the case, but to compare this with the existing fossil fuel industries is really quite disingenuous. There's orders of magnitude difference between the two as of yet. Will they become similarly corrupt? Perhaps. Likely, even. But it will shift the profit from massive, world-changing effects to something different, and we're already more tuned into the issue that energy production, consumption, and use has serious side effects.

they already conspired with the fossil industry to kill nuclear power in germany. their minister for energy is "Green" and they're busy reopening coal plants and opening new coal mines to make up for the shortfall of russian gas. they wield immense, malign power.

Does political lobbying have to be done by business, or do the efforts of religious groups to influence policy count as lobbying? If there is a Green lobby then it has more in common with the, I dunno, "Christian lobby" than lobbying from big business.

Ah yes, it’s a sinister plot by the evil “environmental lobby”…

No, it’s just that the roots of the green movement are mixed with the nuclear disarmament movement, and the rejection of nuclear unfortunately got carried on to civilian power plants :(

This is an important point. The green movement agenda is obviously mixed with something other than environmental concerns, or they would embrace nuclear.

> nothing more than the environmental lobby attempting to derail the only viable solution to climate change

How about the oil and gas lobby?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-f...

the environment doesn't have any money to lobby with. we make money out of it.

fossil fuel lobby though... they have billions of reasons to lobby against nuclear, to the point that they may give eco-terrorists money to do their work for them. can't say this happened, but see Germany - it's the least effort rational explanation.

The design maybe? This quote from the article may be a part of it

> In addition, they're structured in a way to allow passive safety, where no operator actions are necessary to shut the reactor down if problems occur.

I wonder what strategies need to be employed to feel confident that you have even surfaced all the problems. Presumably there is a list of unmitigatable problems or worst defended attack vectors. But that is probably the hidden success of our last century, that and tight machine tolerances it's everywhere.

Well, to some extent it is a simple calculation. Depending on the amount and radioactivity of an isotope, you get a certain amount of heating.

If you go past some amount, you start requiring active cooling to stop it from increasing faster and faster in temperature and reacting more violently - this may happen in traditional power plants. If instead you limit the reactor to a much smaller amount of fuel, it starts losing more heat to air than it produces from radioactivity, and this problem goes away.

Of course, the problem is then to obtain that heating while the reactor is operational, but I understand the solutions are known.

This is similar to why fusion reactors are not a risk of becoming nuclear weapons: the system requires external power input just to keep the reaction going. So, in the event of a problem, you'll lose the reaction, instead of it running away uncontrollably.

Of course, there are other risks. For example, a fusion plant may suffer a breach of the reaction chamber, and all that energy will violently explode, releasing radioactive tritium and bits of radioactivated materials from the reactor structure around. I would guess MMRs have similar bad-but-not-catastophic failure modes.