This has the effect turning the nuclear power plant into a giant dirty bomb. Almost all the problems at Fukushima were caused exactly by these used fuel pools, and not by the nuclear material in the plant itself.
And then you have Ukraine where dry storage is shelled with artillery.
Someone's incentive towards some point of view is not evidence either way about an object-level claim. It's only useful for questions like attention allocation, or like how someone could be so wrong after you've established they're probably wrong.
Again, I chose nuclear specifically to fight climate change, not to make the most money.
Nuclear has failed to make a dent in emissions for 60 years now. Whatever the reason might be, rationally it's time to at least ask "can it ever make an impact"? But this question is almost never asked. I honestly believe there is a symbiotic relationship between nuclear and fossil fuel industry. Nuclear cannot survive without the threat of fossil fuels, but it cannot or at least has not for decades prevented fossil fuels dominating electricity production worldwide. So it's a guarantee for keeping the status quo. It's time for something else. Not merely another technology, but another way of thinking.
The bet that the previous governments in EU made the last decades was to switch generation to wind and solar when weather condition makes it cheaper than natural gas, and then use natural gas (primarily bought from Russia) for everything else. When green hydrogen become cheaper than natural gas (estimated 2050-2080) we can start replace that natural gas with hydrogen. The big event that changed that was the invasion of Ukraine and the climbing prices of natural gas.
The other way of thinking would be to consider other aspect than price. Those could be geopolitical, global warming, or pollution. I am however doubtful, and the events in EU this winter demonstrated how much citizen demanded government subsidizes and intervention when prices of energy went up. Energy prices are also tied to economic stability and growth, which makes changing the way people think difficult.
The reason is because it's been denied a chance by government regulation, due to a mixture of fossil fuel lobbyists and people's irrational fears stoked by propaganda designed to make it seem scary.
The answer to "can it ever make an impact" is yes, it can, using existing technology, right now. We just have to get rid of the regulations designed to destroy it.
Chernobyl was not a worst-case scenario, it is just the worst scenario that has happened so far. If it hadn't been handled by humans sacrificing their lives to stop the chain of events, it could have been much, much worse. Had the fire continued it could indeed have been a "wasteland" scenario.
The site you recommend makes claims about safety that are logically broken. Things are not safe based on what has happened so far, they are safe or unsafe based on what could happen in the future. Surely you realize this.
The claim this site makes is equivalent to saying that a gun is safe if it hasn't been used yet. I frankly find it to be a very dishonest argument, it seems designed to mislead rather than enlighten.
a) an unstable reactor
b) without a containment structure
c) that was put through a dangerous experiment overriding safety systems
means to me that it's very likely to be the worst commercial nuclear power scenario we'll see.
Compare with Fukushima where a whole area was inundated by a tsunami and a triple meltdown, leading to very few, if any, people receiving more than the minimum dose known to cause measurable harm.
And again keep in mind that we're comparing against fossil and biofuel, which power over 80% of the planet and cause 7 million premature deaths from particulate emissions every single year just operating normally.
I guess the term 'worst case scenario' isn't really useful since there's always someone who can come up with something else, regardless of how unlikely it is. Fair point on that.
The alternative is not burning things, it is renewables. Stop creating a strawman to argue against.
Fossil and biofuel make 80% of our energy. This is not a straw man argument.
Primary energy. That will shift dramatically as industries get electrified. No point cooling 70% of the produced energy in a nuclear or coal plant anymore.
Similarly, the question of interest is what to build. Fossil, or nuclear plants barely exist on that list globally.
It is simply too expensive. 5x the CO2 emissions get displaced by building renewables compared to nuclear, with a much shorter time to value.
Investing in nuclear today prolongs the climate crisis.
This kind of willfully blind thinking continues our reliance on fossil fuels. There is a need for reliable energy that cannot yet be met by renewable energy. For this specific reason, Russia funded German opposition to nuclear power.
The research finds it easily solvable today, but a holistic approach is necessary.
But that aside, just looking at the sheer magnitude of capacity mentioned in his papers, one can see that it's not even remotely easy or trivial. See eye-watering Table 2 in [2]
[1] https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/07/11/stanford-prof-ordered...
[2] https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/USSt...
Do you bet against this?
I'm pro anything low carbon. I love wind and solar and hydro and nuclear. These no-nuclear people are trying to get us to tie a hand behind our backs for no reason in the midst of a climate crisis. Energy generation choices are not a zero sum game.
Lots of antinuclear people mistakenly believe that pro-nuclear people are also anti-wind or anti-solar when in fact we are usually just anti-fossil and biofuel.
So you are telling me that a peaking nuclear plant will solve the last 10% when it comes online at earliest 2040? What problem are we even solving then rather than brute forcing nuclear into the solution?
Then try put that nuclear power plant on a marginal price market. What do you expect to happen?
Simply put, humans failed and caused a catastrophe. If you have c), a) and b) don't matter. And we will always have c).
Humans are currently failing by waging a war around nuclear power plants. How safe those plants are under normal operation doesn't really matter. Humans fail by performing terrorist attacks too. They fail by building nuclear plants that can't handle a tsunami in a tsunami-prone area.
Nuclear power provides centuries of opportunity for humans to fail in ways that have immense damage potential. This is clearly a very real risk, and makes nuclear power unsafe.
One can still argue for nuclear power, but not by saying it's safe. It simply isn't.
That isn't the issue, which is solely economics. Don't waste your time advocating and persuading. Bring the power of your nuclear engineering Ph.D. to bear towards making nuclear power profitable. There is nothing else is stopping nuclear power other than the economics. It's a deal-breaker. But make it profitable, and there is nothing on this Earth that could stop the proliferation of nuclear power plants. They'd literally be everywhere.
"Fossil fuel or nuclear" is obsolete since renewables became pertinent. Moreover our current capacity to deploy useful nuclear reactors isn't convincing.
'Our world in data' retains the Banqiao case. It is somewhat debatable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32492422
While nuclear power is commonly perceived as unduly dangerous, if you're interested in the numbers of it all in context, I highly recommend this page:
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
The whole wasteland argument falls apart quickly when you take a look at e.g. a worst case scenario like Chernobyl and compare it to the fact that fossil and biofuel cause 7 million premature deaths per year from particulate emissions (according to the WHO) and cause global climate change.
https://thoughtscapism.com/2019/05/08/what-about-radioactive...