We're not wired correctly when dealing with rare occurrences.
What people are afraid of is what they're told to be afraid of.
Maybe if we linked oil to fuel bombs or other explosives we'd get more headway.
You can say with confidence that there are 3 people in a room. Or about 20. Or roughly 100-200-300. Or a lot. A stadium filled with 10,000 people is not different from one filled with 100,000 people - for someone who sees them for the first time.
A million times bigger does not mean anything. What is a hair x 1M? No idea.
I am an ex-physicist and I leaned to just look at the numbers and compare them when needed. 10^-18 is fine for something because I learned that but I cannot imagine it. Same for 10^23.
This is also the reason why homeopathy does not sound bad to people when it is written 100 CH on the bottle. 100 looks good. It is a 10^-100 dilution ratio.
The only quibble I'd have is that dams serve multiple purposes -- they could help prevent flooding and help out with agriculture. So in some sense a dam could be helping to save lives (apart from the obvious benefits of... having electricity). This seems like a unique perk.
Edit: Oh -- I mean unique among power sources, not unique in general. Clearly other things exist to save people.
A few hours of improper use were sufficient to trigger a disaster at the Chernobyl's reactor, then the authorities' reaction (evacuation, liquidators...), albeit imperfect, was way better than at Banqiao.
A more accurate comparison would be Fukushima, where the design was wrong (backup generators in the basement, in a flood prone zone) that survived a 9 on the Richter scale earthquake and was only damaged by the resulting tsunami (but only because the operator had ignored all the warnings about the placement and protection of backup power).
Fukushima was designed to survive to earthquakes (all most things are in Japan). The mishap at this nuclear plant had, indeed, a very simple cause (a wall wasn't high enough) and it caused 2203 deaths https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... then a very expensive cleanup (which is considered as far from perfect) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup
The Onagawa plant, more exposed, survived: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant#20...
A non-maintained flawed huge dam copes with decades of major problems then a typhoon breaks it, while a nuclear plant missing a few bricks exposed to a huge tide breaks havoc in a few hours.
Indeed, and it shows that the design wasn't flawed to the point of condemning it: a fix was possible. Implication: even a non-major flaw can trigger a disaster.
> (with changes that had been proposed before Chernobyl)
Indeed, and it shows that even detected problems sometimes aren't fixed. This is not reserved to the USSR: Fukushima also showed it (it was well-known that the seawall/levee wasn't high enough, as recalled in my previous post here the nearby Onagawa plant had an adequate levee).
Technically: determining the health impact of radiation is difficult and the methods are disputed. Moreover every specialist agrees that waiting at least 15 years is necessary because most induced ailments have a non-neglectable latency. Solid cancers, for example, develop in up to 15 years.
This is hand-waving and scaremongering. We have models. The models we use are the most pessimistic (linear no-threshold). The dispute is about whether we should use the more optimistic models (threshold). There's a whole debate, but rest assured, we're incredibly pessimistic.
You can of course say the same thing about cancer caused by particulate emissions, etc. You know what's radioactive and blown around everywhere? Coal fly ash. It's full of uranium and thorium. The question I have for you is over the life of Fukushima, how many people were saved as a result of not burning coal or oil?
Let's run the numbers. Nameplate capacity 5300MW for 32 years (1979 to 2011). That's a grand total of almost 1500TWh. Remember, coal kills 25 people per TWh, so it saved 37,500 people. Sorry, 37,499.
In my opinion, the deaths from the evacuation are attributable to the tsunami, not to the power plant. But even if you factor them in, that's still 35,298 folks alive today because of Fukushima Daiichi.
Even at 2202 deaths is 1.4 deaths per TWh, which is 1.4% as many as a brown coal plant would have killed, ~5% as many as a coal or oil plant would have killed, 35% as many as a natural gas plant would have killed - and exactly as many as a hydroelectric plant would have killed. Only 3X as many as rooftop solar. Even Fukushima alone makes nuclear one of the safest forms of energy on the planet. The second-worst nuclear disaster in history - in isolation - is still one of the safest power plants we have.
These plants save lives. Don't fear the spicy rocks.
There are many subjects disputed, to begin with the way assessments are conducted, check for example http://csrp.jp/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/2013-UNSCEAR-Repor...
More fundamentally check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...
> Coal fly ash. It's full of uranium and thorium
Nobody here advocates coal. Renewables (wind, solar... power) don't emit such stuff.
> In my opinion, the deaths from the evacuation are attributable to the tsunami, not to the power plant
Most of those victims were attributed to the tsunami, the estimation quoted (2202 victims) quoted is only the small fraction of the victims (about 10%) which was attributed to factors (panic, effect on infrastructures of the evacuation...) induced by the nuclear disaster.
Many reactors did continue to operate, in many sites. It shows that the design wasn't flawed to the point of condemning it: a fix was possible. Implication: even a non-major flaw can trigger a disaster.
Also the positive void coefficient was clearly a major flaw lol
This is not true for nuclear energy: even very remote bystanders unwilling to take the risk are majorly exposed. In other words those who build or agree are exposing those who don't (along with many generations to come thanks to plant decommissions and nuclear waste).
Moreover traveling to very distant places by land or sea is way slower, and more difficult/dangerous than by using a jetliner.
This is not true for nuclear energy: we already use other types of equipment (wind turbines, solar panels...) offering the same fundamental service (and we know how to alleviate their intermittency), without any measurable risk of major accident, no long-term dangerous waste, no dependency towards a combustible... Those very equipment, and this should not come as a surprise, are more and more preferred to nuclear: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/nuclear-renewables-electr...
Iterating/improving does not guarantee constant enhancement, nor a progress on the long-term, as any software development specialist knows. The keyword here is 'side-effects' (discovering a bug, then fixing it... and by doing so inducing a latent and more dangerous bug). Even if it did there is no way to be absolutely sure of our risk assessment because being sure implies to know each and every defect/flaw, therefore the very decision to take (or refuse) the risk would entirely lay on trust towards the specialists, leading to a vast array of major challenges (to begin with: specialists will be both judges and defendants).
No, given the RBMK architecture the positive void coefficient isn't a major flaw. It simply implies that some ways to operate the reactor (letting it gain thermal power after reaching a given low-power stage) is strictly forbidden. Each and every reactor has limitations of this sort, mainly defined as dangerous maneuvers or states duly declared to the operators as forbidden.
This approach (positive void coefficient) is intrinsic to RBMKs, there is no way to operate a RBMK reactor under another principle, and (I repeat) many of such reactors ran for decades after Chernobyl, and some operate right now. Therefore the positive void coefficient isn't a critical flaw (which would imply to immediately quit exploiting all RBMK reactors).
Nah. We're all responsible for the choice. That's how democracy works.
> No, given the RBMK architecture the positive void coefficient isn't a major flaw.
The results speak for themselves.
The data on nuclear speaks for itself. Even Fukushima alone in isolation was one of the safest power plants we have, and it was the second worst nuclear disaster in history.
> Nah. We're all responsible for the choice. That's how democracy works.
If citizens directly decide upon a given subject then a referendum about nuclear energy is necessary. In nearly all nations there was none. Therefore we aren't all directly responsible.
In practice elected people decide, and in Western democracies they theoretically bar the majority from oppressing any minority ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority ).
However it could not work this way for nuclear energy because dismissing concerns (about safety, about dangerous waste long-term effects...) is sufficient and was easy: at first by declaring that all those reactors are under control, that any real problem is so highly improbable there is no real risk. Nuclear experts convinced many politicians.
This stance was tainted after each mishap (TMI, Chernobyl, Fukushima...), and the approach mutated into minimizing the effects of mishaps. However less and less politicians were willing to take the risk.
Renewables then began to gain traction, as more and more citizens and politicians see them as adequate and alleviating many challenges (risk, waste, dependency towards uranium...), and renewables quickly gains terrain while nuclear is more and more stuck.
The new approach is to pretend that renewables aren't adequate due to their intermittency, albeit many studies and existing technologies do offer efficient ways to compensate it.
The effect on democratic nations' choices will be clear in 5 to 10 years. However in such a context whatever the result will be pretending that we will all be responsible for it is IMO highly debatable.
>> No, given the RBMK architecture the positive void coefficient isn't a major flaw.
> The results speak for themselves.
I repeat: each and any existing nuclear reactor car suffer a meltdown, this is absolutely not specific/proper to RBMK. Moreover there is no perfect containment, in some configurations they may isolate the reactor for only a few days.
> The data on nuclear speaks for itself
It highly depends upon which data one considers, in other terms which ones are describing reality.
Brown coal kills 100 people per TWh generated, coal on average about 25. [2]
Chernobyl killed 4000 (31 immediately, the rest were computed over the full course of time including forward looking estimates and counting the people who committed suicide because they feared they were 'contaminated'), Fukushima killed 0, Three Mile Island killed 0.
The US generates about 960TWh from coal per year, or 24,000 deaths. The US' coal consumption alone is equivalent to 6 Chernobyl's per year.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy