Well, I mean, a lot of the planetary and moon surfaces in thr solar system, compared to Earth. But shipping costs are high.

[1] I just Googled and of course there's a Wikipedia page for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver#On_Earth

And, more than 2/3 aboard at the time survived. Hard to say where this fits into any proposed analogy.

Please no. A launch failure with several tons of radioactive dirt as a payload is about as bad as it gets.

* There are 6.3 million tonnes of thorium in reasonably assured deposits (World Nuclear Thorium)

* Uranium exists in seawater at an average concentration of 0.003 ppm (also World Nuclear Uranium)

* There are about 332 million cubic miles of water on Earth, 96.5% of it is in the ocean (USGS). At a density of 1 gram/cm3, this comes out to 1.4 yottagrams of water, or 1.4e21 kg)

* At 0.003 ppm, this means there are about 4000 million tonnes of uranium in seawater

There is effectively zero thorium in seawater. Seawater uranium extraction with breeder reactors is likely to be more economical than harvesting low-grade thorium from the crust.

"But YellowApple!" I can already hear someone saying as I type this on a half-broken phone while sitting on a toilet, "That's a terrible idea!"

Yes, it is, but hear me out:

Let's suppose someone does skim nuclear material off the line. What's the likelihood of that nuclear material actually making it out of the facility? Geiger counters ain't a new invention; surely someone would notice if an employee is unexpectedly radioactive. If our thief opted to shield the material, we're talking a box that's probably too big to even carry, let alone sneak out in a pants pocket or something.

So by some magical miracle (or enough bribes, maybe) someone manages to snag a piece of nuclear material and escape. Now what? Nuclear weapons ain't exactly easy to build at home. Maybe sell it? Good luck advertising that: "FOR SALE: 1 gram of weapons-grade plutonium. Don't ask how I got it. NO FEDERAL AGENTS PLEASE! $42069 OBO 234-867-5309"

Aight, so let's say you somehow managed to figure out how to build a nuke (or you somehow managed to sell it to someone who does and not instead to an undercover cop). Now what?

- You could go be a terrorist, I guess. Good luck getting away with it, seeing as how that material you pilfered will almost certainly come up in a variance report and you're suddenly near the top of the suspect list.

- Strongarm some rival nation? If you're able to steal weapons-grade material, chances are they can, too. Congrats! You've rediscovered the art of mutually assured destruction!

- Let's say you don't give a damn about MAD and launch your nuke anyway. So now you're nuked back. A bunch of people die. That sucks. But! On the bright side, there's at least one less unhinged dictator in the world. Possibly two, if your rival was also a dictatorship. Do this enough times and we might end up with world peace.

All this being to say: yeah, sure, by some unlikely chain of events maybe there's a risk here, but considering the alternative right now can range from "millions of people displaced due to rising sea levels" to "billions of people dead due to global famine" to "humanity extinct because Earth is now Venus 2: Greenhouse Boogaloo", I'll take my chances, thanks.

No, India appears to ave gotten plutonium from a small research reactor, not a CANDU reactor (though it was provided by Canada):

>...The test used plutonium produced in the Canadian-supplied CIRUS reactor, and raised concerns that nuclear technology supplied for peaceful purposes could be diverted to weapons purposes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India_and_weapons_of_mass_dest...

>...CIRUS (Canada India Reactor Utility Services)[1][2][3] was a research reactor at the Bhabha Atomic Research Center (BARC) in Trombay near Mumbai, India. CIRUS was supplied by Canada in 1954, but used heavy water (deuterium oxide) supplied by the United States. It was the second nuclear reactor to be built in India. It was modeled on the Canadian Chalk River National Research X-perimental (NRX) reactor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIRUS_reactor

* India: FBTR (operating)and PFBR (under construction)

* China: CEFR (operating) and CDFR (under construction)

* Japan: Joyo (Monju is shut down)

* Russia: BN-600, BN-800

Shut down ones include:

* US: EBR-1, EBR-2, Fermi-1, FFTF

* France: Phénix, SuperPhénix

* UK: Dounreay, PFR

* Germany: KNK-2, SNR-300

The shut down ones mostly shut down because uranium minerals were found to be sufficient for the world nuclear demand for now. We really only need to go through the complexity of breeding when you have 1000 GW-scale nuclear plants or more. Today we have only about 400.

Yup. As shown in data above, current nuclear is about as safe as you can get. On top of that most breeder reactors operate at low coolant pressure, enabling even more robust safety. For example the Experimental Breeder Reaction-2 did two famous demonstrations in 1986 where they turned off the coolant pump without inserting the control rods and the reactor both shut itself off anyway and removed the afterglow heat with passive natural convection.

> How to prevent people taking some plutonium on the side?

Same way we do today. Inspections and safeguards. You have to remember that it's wayyy easier to just buy natural uranium and enrich it than it is to steal radioactive plutonium from quasi-military guarded facilities. Furthermore, the latter can be done whether or not we have any commercial nuclear power so it's basically a moot point.

> bad publicity

Sure, but we can try to show people statistics to convince them that scary-looking things can sometimes be appropriate and good. Air travel would be a good example here.

> Also I do not think that anyone seriously accounts for the excess deaths caused by isotopes/heavy metals polluting the downstream farms of the Hanford site

They absolutely do. Hanford impact is extremely well studied. These are WW2/Cold War era nuclear weapons sites, which are not necessarily comparable in mission to civilian power generation.

> As for China and Russia: Is it fair to compare with these countries, considering their current standard in terms of environmental safety and concern for human life versus monetary interest of a few?

Do you say the same regarding current low solar manufacturing prices, driven almost entirely by the Chinese? If you want a more US-focused example, consider that the US Navy regularly constructs 300 MW nuclear power plants to power submarines and aircraft carriers in shipyard environments with excellent cost and schedule performance.

> Are there positive effects too? For example, will certain plants be able to grow under the shade photovoltaics provide in a desert?

Surely there are, but most people like to take the precautionary principle about such dramatic and vast geoengineering efforts.

> If we could truly build perfectly safe "nuclear batteries"

The "perfectly safe" standard you're applying to nuclear but not other energy tech is very perplexing to me. Why not 'anything 2 orders of magnitude safer than fossil and biofuel is safe enough'?

> How is all that fuel shipping to and from these mini-reactors going to be handled?

Like this [1] ;)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mHtOW-OBO4

> That which is asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.

When nuclear plants were built in Germany you couldn't get green electricity for $33 / MWh.

>It's not. Please compare which countries have nuclear weapons and which have nuclear power.

This is equally true of everywhere else. It's not about who built them 30 years ago. It's about who still wants to build them.

>Anyone who claims that nuclear power is a step towards nuclear weapons has no clue about the history of nuclear technology and has no clue how Uranium and Plutonium for nuclear bombs is made. Hint: It's not made with BWRs or PWRs, that would be way too inefficient and expensive.

I didn't say that nuclear plants are being built to create plutonium. I said that they were being kept around because of the skills and tech - it's a more or less cost-neutral way of keeping a ready supply of nuclear engineers and a supporting industry.

In the UK it's partly about nuclear submarines, too (which are PWRs).

You don't really believe that, don't you?

> Anyone who claims that nuclear power is a step towards nuclear weapons has no clue about the history of nuclear technology and has no clue how Uranium and Plutonium for nuclear bombs is made.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_nuclear_weapon_progra...

"Japan was reported in 2012 to have 9 tonnes of plutonium in Japan, enough for more than 1,000 nuclear warheads, and an additional 35 tonnes stored in Europe.[37][38] It has constructed the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant, which could produce further plutonium.[37] Japan has a considerable quantity of highly enriched uranium (HEU), supplied by the U.S. and UK, for use in its research reactors and fast neutron reactor research programs; approximately 1,200 to 1,400 kg of HEU as of 2014.[39] Japan also possesses an indigenous uranium enrichment plant[32][40] which could hypothetically be used to make highly enriched uranium suitable for weapons use."

So, let's not build shitty soviet designs (which were known to be bad even back then). Got it. If that's all .. can we get back to work now? We have coal power plants to decommission.

Sorry, I was asking for a source that supports the claim that "nuclear has _*much worse failure modes*_", not if a disaster exists. That's why I provided a source where I'd argue that the failure mode was worse than Chernobyl. I can point to more if you want, but the question was about a comparison.

> And yes uranium for power plants is still enriched, even if it’s not to the degree that weapons-grade uranium is enriched.

My criticism of this is that you're claim suggests that other energy sources don't have harmful byproducts. I've stated clearly that nuclear has worse, but FAR less. For comparison, a bomb is ~97% enriched uranium where a fuel rod is about 3%. This is exactly why I brought up the Iran deal. There's plenty of byproducts that we have in many common industries that also easily enter aquifers, never degrade (at least radioactive material degrades), and are extremely dangerous to humans. Many of these things are used in sources like solar (PV). The difference in nuclear is that the quantities are far less. Several orders of magnitude. Here's a picture of all of France's radioactive waste[0]. This is decades of waste for an entire country. Here's a video of Russia's equivalent[1]. The numbers are just tiny. Yearly PV waste is 150x that of nuclear. There's just nothing else out there that you can put decades of industry waste in a single building. I won't even bring up that coal does more than this every day. You have to account for the difference in waste levels.

> False equivalency strikes again. You’re trying to deflect to the issue of securing the plant. Compare what can be done with a ton of nuclear fuel or nuclear waste vs a ton of whatever goes into or comes out of a coal plant.

Our worry in both cases is state actors. But you're probably thinking "terrorists could just steal nuclear material and make a bomb". If you're thinking a dirty bomb, I'll refer you to this thread[2]. If you're talking about a warhead, well remember the huge differences in quantities and why Iran is pretty far away from being able to create a warhead. Such an operation would be incredibly difficult. You're much better off stealing from a weapons plant. (I should note that you can also create a dirty bomb out of coal waste)

> You also call the waste footprints of nuclear fission power “small”. Well it’s partly small because nuclear power is small. To scale it up to the level where could actually displace fossil fuel use would multiply those numbers and problems by 10-100x.

France is the obvious counter example to this where they produce 413TWh, which is about half of what the US does. Those pictures are half a century's worth of storage. To get waste sizes equal to coal you'd have to scale up 500,000x, and if you had that much nuclear running you could produce enough energy for the world many times over. Even scaling up the 150x to match solar you'd be producing 6x the world's energy consumption. You'd need 5x to do the US, nowhere near 10x-100x (nuclear is already 20% of US energy production, where are you getting 10x-100x??!?!?!). I'm not even suggesting that. I'm suggesting like 2x and let renewables grow 4x (it isn't nuclear vs renewables, that's a real false equivalence).

> And I’ll not to completely skipped over the biggest problem of all: it requires humans tasked with building, maintaining, operations and monitoring plants in a way that just doesn’t seem realistic or scalable.

Well for one, if it was the biggest problem you should have brought it up if you expect me to respond to it. For the second point, we have a track record of nuclear being far safer than any other energy production to date. So yeah, I'll ignore it. If you can find me a source that says nuclear kills more people I'll bite, but right now this is insane[3]. Having this argument is costing lives. Nuclear, along with renewables, are orders of magnitude safer than gas, biomass, and fossil fuels.

This is insane that we're having this debate. People are dying. The planet is being severely harmed. And while we continue to have this argument the fossil fuel companies win and get to continue to kill people and the planet. So sorry if I'm a bit pissed, but I don't like the fact that hundreds of thousands of people are dying every year that don't need to. That millions go without power that could have it. That could have hospitals (which wasn't considered in our deaths above), education, access to the internet, and a modern world.

I'm providing sources, if you're just going to spout hearsay then expect me to treat you like someone who is promoting deadly propaganda (i.e. pissed).

[0] https://twitter.com/Orano_usa/status/1182662569619795968

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5uN0bZBOic&t=105s

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26605085

[3] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

There are vehicles that use highly reactive fluid called gasoline. Many people drive them safely because we are smart and designed them to be safe enough to be worth the benefit of travel. There are homes heated by explosive fuel (natural gas). People even cook with it. Sometimes people bring water to a hazardous boiling condition in order to cook or make tea.

The utilization of hazardous material in safe ways to benefit humanity is old hat, and wholly appropriate in many cases.

Stop throwing up and shooting down strawmen. Nuclear energy was never going to replace all energy sources. Only the worst ones, like coal and gas power plants.

Wind $26-$54 Nuclear $129-$198

> By 2003 the U.S. Navy had accumulated over 5,400 "reactor years" of accident-free experience, and operated more than 80 nuclear-powered ships.

They've been sailing nuclear subs since the 1950s without major safety incident. The big carriers supply grid power when they're docked in Hawaii.

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

> https://www.orano.group/en/nuclear-expertise/from-exploratio...

It's not that they are doing the recycling in a cookie factory.

Are you kidding? What kind of nuclear waste has even the remote possibility to go critical that is produced by a VVER reactor that is pretty common?

Other forms of recycling are very viable and have much less problems and much less side streams.

The problem is of course that anti-nuclear crowed have stopped practically all technology development so they can claim all problems are solvable and nuclear should be abolished.

As everything with nuclear, we as a society barley got to first generation technology and then halted all development.

Canada is doing some create work with recycling of CANDU fuel, Moltex Energy is in development of a reactor to use that fuel and its a much better process then what the french use.

There is this one very anti-nuclear Stanford professor, who has managed to publish some estimates where the carbon footprint of nuclear power is way larger than in other estimates. These numbers are probably now forever part of the literature, and they make the range of published numbers quite large in every literature survey.

Sometimes this activist professor also sues people for libel, if they publish results disagreeing with his.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Z._Jacobson

Also when comparing nuclear to “renewable” energy, you are really comparing distributed low density investments with monolithic ones. Nuclear is 1e6 the energy density of chemical reactions. And wind/solar is basically heat exchangers positioned 8 light minutes from the nuclear reactor. The Sun incidentally, is just as renewable as that Uranium we are discussing.

What really boggles my physicist brain is how we expect a bunch of volatile solar and wind stitched together with fragile infrastructure and lithium piles to ever become a stable base load alternative. I put my hope on the Engineers knowing better than me :)

Added to which, being a baseload power source is not nearly as useful as being dispatchable (like hydro and natural gas are), and it's insanely capital intensive (which leads to cost overruns - see hinkley point c, corruption & fat profit margins).

It's got real lobbying muscle though, especially from defense and military.

> Is it really so hard to cooperate with or convince the nations involved who own the biggest deserts?

In a word, yes. These are some of the most unstable countries in modern history. Then you also need to secure the cables going north from Africa. Take the Suez canal risk and multiply it with a factor of 100-1000x.

Then we also have China currently being busy colonizing Africa...

Nuclear energy without subsidies is not sustainable at all. Just do the math if you need decades to dismantle and decontaminate an old nuclear power plant alone.

well, a lot of people simply refuse to air travel because of perceived safety issues

It is not. Why is it one straw man after another in this discussion?

The response is that countries like Germany have already spent a lot of time looking for a suitable place, and haven't found one. At this point it seems likely there isn't one.

If a place is found, by all means, go build nuclear reactors. But sort the waste problem out first. We've already done the "build first, figure the waste problem out later". Many decades later, here we are.

Pity that it got closed, I hope technical issues are fixed and a new device based on better understanding replaces it.

If anything, communication networks are even spikier, which means that they need to be more overprovisioned than a power grid.

It might be more thermodynamically favorable to use the gas as input to a carbon capture process. Even if that is the case, bootstrapping a market for biogas will lower the cost of biogas. In turn, that will lower the cost of biogas-based carbon sequestration.

The reality is that it's a hypothetical problem. Even the simple real problem of storing spent fuel is not that of a problem, because there's not that much of it. And while it's hot it needs water then moving air anyway.

Long term storage is a nice idea, but in reality it's easy (dump anywhere down enough that it doesn't matter) and the later we solve it the more certain we can be that we did it right (more data, more time spent on finding the right solution).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

An objective discussion would be nice, but it can only be objective if it is based on available facts.

With the contract TVO signed with Siemens and Areva for the plant they will never end up having to pay all the cost overruns. It was basically a fixed price contract.

What ended up happening is Siemens got the fuck out of the deal (it was originally a Siemens and Areva joint project) and French government broke up Areva Group into smaller entities and took a hit on the failed project. From the legal fighting Areva agreed to pay TVO 450 million due to failing to deliver on time with some extra money going one way or another based on if it will deliver in the new revised timelines (ended up Areva having to pay TVO another 450 million).

According to TVO at the end of the day the project cost them 5 billion instead of the original 3.2 billion with Areva saying it cost the 8.5 billion so Areva took a huge hit on making a bad contract and/or failing to deliver.

Solar and wind are expensive too if they are overbuilt 5x or backed up with enough batteries to be a firm source of power.

How can anyone argue against nuclear being part of the solution of reducing carbon emissions just because it takes more imaginary monetary tokens to build?

Who cares who is building the reactor? Russia and China have the skill and the will to make it happen while everyone else is wringing their hands and continuing to pump out co2.

However, also 50% over budget.

The people involved in these plans aren't idiots, they know what the time scale of nuclear waste is and they look for sites with that in mind [0]. They appear to be considering obvious problems like earthquakes and less obvious problems like ice ages.

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

it is.

drill a few miles down into the miles-thick crystalline salt in the permian basin. it will not go anywhere for millions of years.

It's like all the people who didn't understand grade 7-9 physics conspired to make us all miserable.

A nuclear power plant that's finished in 10 years is not gonna provide you with the baseload to stop climate change.

That's only possible with expanding the existing tech we have.

Nuclear is the _only_ technology where the fuel and the waste for decades can be stored on-site. It's just extremely dense.

The Russians have a single hall for all their waste plus the waste of other countries such as Bulgaria or Ukraine:

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5uN0bZBOic&t=105s

The US even had a nuclear power plant with full fuel reprocessing on site:

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp1Xja6HlIU

Funnily enough most of these loans are from German banks and various export agencies backed by the French government. Even still all these loans were given at market rates so EU would not kill the project (Greenpeace etc did make a complaint to EU and a investigation was done)

This kind of seller arranging some part of the loans is very normal in large infrastructure projects like these.

The other new project I mentioned is Hanhiviki in which Rosatom won the bidding. Areva and Toshiba also left their bids but as I understand it Areva was thrown out due to their failure to deliver Olkiluoto 3 in time/budget and Toshibas bid was not competetive. Though this Hanhikivi plant is still waiting for permits and there has been some obvious issues with it being built by Rosatom and the Russian sanctions going around. It also has some American and UK interests as Rosatom contracted the turbines to some GE subsidiary and Rolls Royce.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanhikivi_Nuclear_Power_Plant

This is apparent looking at how much energy prices change throughout the day / month based on usage and cost of production, and how predictable those changes are.

If storing energy were cost effective you could make a killing buying low and selling high on the national grid.

Doubt. Weather systems/patterns are often extremely large.

> Also what is the cost of storing that energy?

Insanely high compared to the cost of producing it.

For one common naive case: Storing the energy in Li-Ion batteries in e.g. a Tesla Powerwall: $437/kWh.

Also, 17% of France's energy comes from recycled nuclear (70% from nuclear)[0]

[0] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...

[1] https://unis.unvienna.org/unis/en/pressrels/2021/unisous419....

Good to know. I wasn't aware of that. What does that mean for our supply of blood diamonds, copper and similar? Maybe they are more needed in China, now that manufacturing has and is still being outsourced to that piece of two countries?

If not, than you must accept there exists some necessary base load. That can be provided from base production like it is today, or it could theoretically be provided from storage and over-production in a hypothetical renweables-only grid.

That is as dishonest a take as it gets.

First, the "rescued from bankruptcy every few years" is simply not true. The company has been paying dividends every year for decades, and I can't think of a bailout of company debt in recent years.

Second point: Like most french state-owned companies, EDF is a vessel of "creative" accounting from politicians, but you'll find out that it's not tied to operating nuclear plants specifically. It's just that as a public-owned company, EDF is a tool for public policy. Sometimes it takes on debt to do so.

For instance, EDF is legally forced to buy back green energy at fixed rates as part of a package to help develop green energy. EDF is also forced to sell nuclear power to its competitors (ARENH policy) at fixed price, when they ask it. This means EDF competitors can arbitrage this agreement by buying nuclear power below market at times, and selling green power when market is saturated at other times. From the state's perspective, it's an OK thing to open the market and promote renewables, but from the company perspective it makes no sense. Thus, the company "pays" for a public policy.

This kind of accounting is usual in other former public companies such as SNCF.

That being said, nuclear costs figures should be accurate, since they come from the work of the french finance watchdog, the "cour des comptes", as well as from parlementarian investigations. You're right that these figures would probably not be possible without the scale economies of the initial rollout and without state-backing, but as you cite, this is also true for renewables or any other large industrial policy.

US irradiated large areas of Pacific Ocean and atmosphere (US) with its testing program, harming people living there and contaminating whole world with radioactive isotopes. UK dumped radioactive waste in barrels into Atlantic ocean, has bad record on nuclear safety (Windscale accidents) and continues to run old nuclear power plant that does not pass old safety tests, so they make the test less and less restrictive [1].

The lax approach to safety has been observed on all sides. It has to improve but it is no reason to stop development of nuclear power.

Soviet-build power plants near cities aren't as bad as people think, if run safely by competent people. Chernobyl was a preventable disaster, not solely due to technology, but mainly due to incompetence and dysfunctional society. Also, the disaster wasn't as bad as people think. Few people died when you compare to other industrial accidents.

The really badly polluted installations in Russia are the military/research ones in restricted areas - Mayak, Lake Karachay.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hunterston_B_nucl...

"Dispatchable generation refers to sources of electricity that can be dispatched on demand at the request of power grid operators, according to market needs. Dispatchable generators can adjust their power output according to an order.[1] Non-dispatchable renewable energy sources such as wind power and solar photovoltaic (PV) power cannot be controlled by operators."

https://www.nmppenergy.org/feature/dispatchable%20resources

"Dispatchable fuel resources include nuclear, coal and natural gas. These fuel sources are highly reliable because each fuel is a constant supply. These are known as baseload resources."

https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Nuclear-stands-out-a...

"Nuclear stands out as clean, dispatchable firm power, says Kwarteng"

You are confusing dispatchable with flexible.

> Insanely high compared to the cost of producing it.

Ok, how about you share your numbers on the cost of production for 1kwh.

Your use of "insanely high" leads me to believe you are comparing the capital outlay for batteries, vs operating costs of a power station. It's important to compare like for like.

I think you underestimate how 'temporary' many seemingly strong structures are and how high the temptations to cut costs are. Its very easy to be like "welll...this'll probably hold. I'm sure of it."

This means waste must be sorted somehow, but this is a rational thing to do anyways.

And it pisses me off immensely to see some idiots throw plastic bags or non-food waste to the biowaste bins. There are signs in many languages and even with pictures, but some people still manage. Such biowaste cannot be used for gas generation, so it's kind of hurting all the inhabitants.

You can also burn them (pyrolysis), collect the carbon and start from scratch. Of course this is insane (economically and thermodynamically), but hey, you are "recycling" the same carbon.

[1] https://cen.acs.org/environment/recycling/Plastic-problem-ch...

Base load exists on the consumer side, as the minimum power the grid needs to operate during a cycle of X hours/days/weeks/years/whatever. It used to exist on the producer side since the cheapest power plants were also inflexible regarding ramping their power up and down coupled with high fixed costs and low marginal costs. Therefore, nuclear and coal was termed as base load providers, although it was purely an economical coupling leading to a term existing.

Nowadays with renewables undercutting everything they are the new base load providers, but it also brings new challenges for adapting the grids and consumers to more variability in the supply. This is our current world were the high fixed, low marginal cost power plant is pushed out of the market, as we are currently seeing globally. This is unless they can find a way to get their prices below renewables, but that is getting more and more unlikely with the steam cycle itself soon adding more to the KW/h cost than an entire renewable operation.

In this case the units (for speed²) you want are m²/s² = J/kg

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage#/media/File...

However our largest energy creation mechanism is absolutely destroying the planet in non-linear and difficult to measure ways. Coal is not a dramatic killer but it kills us in droves, now and long into the future.

Nuclear waste, in comparison, is more of a “known” issue, and were scared of what we know.

I’m talking about coal because Sweden is displacing its nuclear power draw with mostly coal.

The weird thing is that you're taking a shit in your neighbor's yard. I mean if they do it in their own yard it's weird, but there's nothing wrong with it. I mean this is what we do with dog shit.

The problem is that everyone shits. Sure, nuclear shit smells a lot more than solar shit or coal shit, but there's a hell of a lot less of it. We're talking a cat vs herd of rhinos. If I had to clean up one of the two I honestly don't care how much that cat's shit smells, I'm picking that job every single time. And you know what, the researchers seem to agree

> The analyses did not reveal any science-based evidence that nuclear energy does more harm to human health or to the environment than other electricity production technologies

Saying we should only use methods that don't provide waste is saying we should reduce energy consumption to 1-5% of current global and ditch all cars, ships and airplanes. Even if you are 100% morally right you're never going to convince humanity of that.

The earth's carrying capacity before fossil fuels was far, far lower than the 7 billion current population, especially with current living standards.

The only reason we can support that many is because of a complex web of economics that causes the earth to produce far more food than it otherwise could, and then enables distribution of that food to where the people are.

Without fossil fuels, we couldn't even produce the fertilizer needed to support the food. You could argue that there is some alternative set of lifestyles that would enable to eliminate fossil fuels without asking 90% of the population to die, but that would similarly require some sort of top-down totalitarian regime in order to get there and keep us there.

At this point, we do need the energy. The only way to maybe not need it would be to somehow put a global version of Stalin in a position of absolute power.

Failing to understand just how critical energy is to any sort of non-apocalyptic future is one of the biggest dangers in our current political debate about what should come next.

> In any case it's no law of nature.

Yes it is. It's a law of human nature :-)

This is premised on the idea that some future civilization would dig kilometres deep in some random and remote location and just happen to come across some nuclear waste stored in a space that is no larger than a small house. It's also presumes that future civilizations will have no recollection whatsoever of humanity storing nuclear fuel, and thus take no measures to avoid it.

This seems really unlikely to me. Given that we're faced with the threat of apocalyptic climate change today, it's a risk I'm willing to take.

Something that takes several hundred thousand years for decay isn't actually dangerous.

Short half-life: High radioactivity.

Long half-life: Low radioactivity.

Furthermore, spent nuclear fuel can be recycled up to 95%:

> https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlMDDhQ9-pE

> https://www.rosatom.ru/en/press-centre/news/the-first-serial...

> East germany choose the salt mine closest to the west german border. And in retaliation west germany build theirs right next to it, in the closest saly mine that they had to the east german border.

East Germany never put any spent fuel into their own soil. They sent the spent fuel back to the USSR. Spent fuel is a resource with a market value. The GDR and the USSR didn't just threw that away.

> Nuclear tech is awesome and great, and too dangerous for careless, political, corrupt, humanity to be trusted with.

It's actually pretty safe and has among the lowest numbers of deaths per TWh:

> https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

> So I'd rather spend that money on renewables, where the worst thing that can happen is someone hitting you with a PV cell.

Actually, the worst thing is that it causes Germany to build new gas power plants and stop shutting down coal plants:

> https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_geplanter_und_im_Bau_bef...

> https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream#Nord_Stream_2

> https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Sachgebiete/Elektrizitae...

> https://www.wa.de/hamm/kraftwerk-westfalen-in-hamm-uentrop-i...

> https://www.stuttgarter-zeitung.de/inhalt.grosskraftwerk-man...

> https://www.stuttgarter-zeitung.de/inhalt.energieversorgung-...

> https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/muenchen-kohleausstieg-...

> https://www1.wdr.de/nachrichten/ruhrgebiet/datteln-vier-geht...

Compare Germany's and France's emissions in the energy sector:

> https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-emissions-by-sector?t...

> https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-emissions-by-sector?t...

Germany emits SEVEN(!) times as much as the French for producing electricity and heat. The nuclear phase out is causing 1100 premature death every year in Germany and causes additional costs of $12 billion per year:

> https://haas.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/WP304.pdf

And Germany has the highest electricity prices - worldwide:

> https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/

Renewables have actually caused multiple deaths during the Texas blizzard because they couldn't provide enough electricity during the cold.

So does literally every other power source. Nuclear is, if anything, among the least bad options in this regard.

> and it just does not scale to solve the problem.

It absolutely does, if we're willing to actually try.

Evidently, we'd rather just keep killing ourselves with coal.

And almost all of the alternatives have costly problems too, like causing more deaths for most of them.

Large scale solar might be less lethal, but pretty much every other power source causes more short term deaths.

I'm not arguing against renewables. I'm arguing that this fear of nuclear costs huge numbers of lives by extending the lifetime of e.g. hydro and fossil fuel plants, all of which are far more dangerous.

The fear mongering over nuclear has killed more people than nuclear ever has.

Also building enough nuclear to replace fossils would take too long anyway, it's not even an option.

Some mines use ISL techniques which is similar to fracking. Canada does have Cigar Lake, the highest grade uranium mine in the world (15%), but due to the dangers of high uranium concentrations and the challenging geology, it has not been the easiest to extract.

This is to say, you don't just dig up some ore and stuff it in a reactor(it takes a lot of ore to power a reactor), nor is uranium mining a clean process.

Update: Thankfully, it looks like it has started to slow. https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/

The video describes what happened, and summarizes the cause as:

> Basically, the entire system was ill-prepared for a storm of this magnitude.

The video addresses only what happened, and (intentionally) does not address why it happened - why the system was ill-prepared. but it's absolutely true that there are "renewables running in far worse weather conditions" (and natural gas). all of these systems can be winterized.

j-pb thinks that the system was unprepared due to "capitalism and greed," which IMO is not an unreasonable idea. Why do you think the various Texas organizations basically ignored the FERC/NERC recommendations for cold weather preparedness from 2011?

Germany was not 'panic closing' nuclear. The nuclear exit was hotly debated for decades and decided long before Fukushima.

Germany was doing a lot more than just closing 'some' of its nuclear reactors and setting a timeline for closing the rest. Germany also removed the centralized monopoly business model around the big nuclear&coal-based electricity companies. The electricity production was in the hand of four large companies who had divided Germany into four monopolistic regions. These large companies had zero intention investing into renewable, since that already owned all the market and were free of competition. The government opened up the market and reduced the influence of the companies.

Germany has in sum now not more coal power than in had then. It has less coal capacity.

Ancient Egypt was a super advanced civilization continuously existing for 4000 years! Yet shortly after the decline nobody could read Hieroglyphs anymore.

We don't know what the future holds. Lets say in 50 years a low intensity Gamma Ray Burst hits earth and destroys all digital information but fries only half of all living creatures. The survivors dig trough the trash of the past to get to the rare earth metals they need to rebuild their civilization and find this really neat bunker with those funny signs...

CO2 has a half life of ~ 10 years in our atmosphere btw.

> However, even a storage space hundreds of meters below the ground might not be able to withstand the pressures of one or more future glaciations with thick sheets of ice resting on top of the rock, deforming it and creating internal strains.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository

We have made surprisingly little progress in the regard of long term storage, because the timespans involved and the potential dangers are not manageable by humans atm.

The question is do we want to put more on the pile or not? If the alternative is to destroy our planets with coal and co the answer should be clear.

But take Germany for example. We've built up wind energy from 0 to more output than nuclear energy in 15 years. I think this is preferable to nuclear energy which is not that dangerous but has the potential to become a unmanageable catastrophe at some point.

When we look at global warming there are two nations that need to act. China and the US, producing around 50% of Green House Gases. Both have more wind, way more space and potentially more money than Germany (China announced last year that they are gonna spend 1.5 Trillion USD in the next decades to become greener).

To me, it's like someone asking where me to choose which part of my house to infect with wood rot:

1. A single scrap of wood, extremely badly affected, stored in a sealed box under the stairs

2. My entire roof mildly affected by rot.

I'd take the box under the stairs.

Is wood not a carbon store?

http://energimyndigheten.a-w2m.se/FolderContents.mvc/Downloa...

By non electric heating methods I meant CHP and biomass based heating.

But yes, old energy inefficient houses in cold climates should be replaced. There's no need to get dramatic over it, houses are machines for living and it depends on circumstances how far to extend their lifespan. (Except some historical houses of course)

The US had been one of THE major proponents of nuclear technology. If the country lost interest, there must be a deeper reason than 'we did not try hard enough'. I would guess that the US invested more than a trillion dollar (in todays money) in its nuclear industry.

Instead lately the US invested in fracking with huge climate impact and President Trump was supporting coal mines...

godelski is arguing that terrorists who can be convinced to try and use dirty bombs will be less effective than if they had chosen other, more damaging, options.

Sounds they better write blog posts about google and facebook tracking

These people are smart, but are still indoctrinated. Despite the “religion of peace” propaganda, a clear reading of the Koran shows certain duties that cannot be avoided if you accept the premise that (unlike most of the Bible) it God’s exact words and also the final truth. The proof of the pudding is in the eating and the smarter the reader, the more inescapable those conclusions become.

It’s also not a fringe idea. Imagine if everyone in the US or everyone in the EU suddenly started believing suicide bombings of civilians is at least sometimes justified. That’s around the total number of people who actually believe that across the globe (even more believe in terrorism when targets and/or methods are changed).

More generally though, lots of very smart people get indoctrinated into cults every day. If our life history were just a bit different, you or I probably would have joined one too no matter how smart we are.

Terrorists want blood and guts on national TV, not a statistical raise in cancer over 30 years.

That is, of course, presuming civilization does no collapse because of climate change. Fingers crossed!

The overwhelmingly vast majority of American transportation gets its power from oil. Anything that could disrupt that - like, say, nuclear power making electricity sufficiently ubiquitous and cheap to make electric vehicles practical - is a threat to the oil industry. Further:

> What had an impact was 'cheap' fracking gas

Which (as the name "fracking gas" would suggest) derives specifically from fracking as a means to extract oil from deposits otherwise inaccessible. That is: gas and oil come from more or less the same place, sold by more or less the same people with the same reasons to want to suppress alternative energy sources like nuclear (and solar, and wind, and geothermal).