The nuclear industry has a history of creating plants which are "totally safe, really, you can trust me!" and ending up with really expensive accidents. If they can't get their shit together and get basically unlimited insurance for whatever accident might still happen, the government has to enforce safety rules for them so the taxpayers don't end up having to pay for their whoopsies over and over again.
Lets not forget the helicopter crews at Chernobyl knew they were flying to a certain, slow, painful death and did so without a complaint. Absent those heroes nuclear's mortality record would be much worse.
I agree that the people who stepped up are heroes. I don’t agree that Chernobyl’s failure has any place in the discussion about the safety of modern nuclear plants.
as mentioned, everything fossil fuel related has a massively higher death and injury cost than nuclear.
the california wildfires caused by the criminally negligent failure to maintain power distribution systems killed more people and cost more money that Chernobyl (look it up).
Normally this would be the kind of a situation where insurance is the right solution. But because the potential magnitude of the catastrophe is too great, the insurance sector is incapable of handling it. No one is willing to provide a sufficient insurance policy on a commercial basis.
Because the assets of the company operating the reactor are also insufficient in the worst case, that leaves the government as the ultimate insurer. And as with any insurer, they require you to take various steps to mitigate the risks.
How exactly is nuclear safer than solar or wind? Solar panels in particular are about as dangerous as an inert rock.
The only two others that even come close: Fukushima - one death, TMI - 0 deaths.
So that's at most a few thousand deaths for something like 100 Million reactor hours (napkin math, don't cite).
There is plenty of data and the data says it's safe.
Sounds about right, but when you factor in current designs and requirements it's 100x better.
LRF (large release frequencies) are required to be less than 1 in 1 000 000 per year of reactor operation [1], so roughly 10 billion reactor hours. The calculation of this considers at least 1 in 10 000 year levels of high winds and earthquakes [2].
Since the typical reactor is 1GW, so ~8TWh per year, and global energy consumption is ~23 000 TWh per year, we could use roughly 3000 reactors globally to meet most of our needs, which would put an event like this roughly every 100-1000 years.
[1] https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0909/ML090910608.pdf
[2] https://archive.opg.com/pdf_archive/Nuclear%20Licencing%20Do...
For Chernobyl the number is 4,000 deaths as the total number of projected deaths caused by the accident over the long term.
For Fukushima it's one direct death, and 2000 deaths due to evacuation.
Had we approached dams the way we approach nuclear power, not a single dam would be built in the world.
Nuclear has this same issue too, although almost entirely from the concrete poured for the containment building. Small modular reactors should mitigate this.
Regardless it’s apples to oranges. You are comparing your solar output to the mix of fossil fuel power the grid supplies. But a small modular reactor would be a carbon-zero power source.
Nuclear is also a very risky business (not in the sense of safety but in the sense of project delivery/nimby). So solar and wind are derisking weaning off fossil fuels.
just wait until they are abandoned by bankrupt companies and start to break down and all of the highly toxic substances they are made of leech into the ground water.
Any citation for that? It's a convenient villain to blame, but absent any proof regulators are deliberately trying to make nuclear less competitive, it seems much more plausible that regulations are driven by concern over accidents. If a wind turbine fails it doesn't make the entire region uninhabitable for decades.
https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/glossary/alara.html
https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/glossary/alara.html
It would be even more expensive if it didnt get a free ride on insurance - through disaster liability caps set at ~0.05% of the costs of one Fukushima.
IMHO it's a bit premature to talk about deregulating it without first making sure it shoulders full liability for the damage it would cause by neglecting important safety.
Nuclear is the only 'energy source' that is required to capture pretty much any of its externalities at all, so arguments that they don't capture all of them are a bit odd.
Nuclear power never pays for disaster cleanup and still can't compete with renewables.
It is safer, yes, but only once a lot of resources is spent on safety. So nuclear power generation is very inexpensive and expensive at the same time, depending on amount of effort put into its safety (with modern scientific knowledge on fission, I'd say like 90% of a reactor cost is ensuring its safety).
I honestly hoped that NuScale production could reduce some significant fraction of that safety costs by "commoditizing" the production. Kinda like airplanes are very safe in a big part because their production and maintenance processes are streamlined and actively practiced ("economy of scale").
https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1610/ML16105A136.pdf
ALARA, in practice, has been interpreted by the NRC as to mean "radiation levels as low as can be achievable while still being competitive with alternative energy sources." Which means that the cost of nuclear goes up until it matches or exceeds traditional baseloads (coal, gas, etc.).
It is not, the main costs are simply not included in the calculations. Operators are legally protected from most liabilities, and even setting liabilities aside they get bailed out if they fail to be profitable. You have to bail them out, there is no option not to. You can't simply turn off a nuclear power plant and leave it.
France recently had to bail out their nuclear operator to at least 50 bn euros. We reached the point where we're "the future" that had to pay for the energy that our parents got from nuclear. Our children will be the next to pay for it, and so on for centuries.
This means that even in a country that has had no disasters, nuclear power has operated under a cost model that was severely underestimated.
The cold truth is that nuclear power is not cheap even in a best-case scenario, and "not cheap" is the most precise estimate we are able to give.