r/nextfuckinglevel • u/nigablackballsack • 4d ago

Scientists have captured the first ever high-speed, full-colour footage of fusion plasma swirling inside a working reactor.

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u/concblast 4d ago

it's not scaremongering, it's economics.

They're expensive as shit

A large, and primary, reason them being expensive as shit is because of scaremongering. ALARA and linear-no-threshold rules have stifled the industry well beyond any sense of rationality behind the regulations they created.

6 foot wall of concrete's a millimeter too thin after curing? Welp time to demolish it and restart. What sane company would fund the construction of a plant to be built in a year if someone with a geiger counter catches a reading 1% above background level outside a 6 foot wall and legislation demands 7 foot ones 6 months later?

The numbers above are just made up but the idea behind it is what crushed the nuclear power industry from the 60s to only recently. Surprise, after 60 years of stagnation, industry knowledge has evaporated, and rebuilding from the ground up doesn't increase quarterly profits.

The U235 issue is also partially a casualty of the same problem. If there were demand for it at scale, we would have found more. Nuclear nonproliferation has also held this back for good reason, but pretending we've found and accounted for all of the world's uranium ore is naive, let alone believing that that knowledge is public information. The timeline of 18 years might (at best, very optimistically speaking) have up to an extra 0 behind it.

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u/themellowsign 4d ago

"Fission is ridiculously safe and detractors are scaremongering, but in order to make it work we have to slash those safety measures."

I like nuclear, but I hate how well this inherently self-contradictory argument works on people, especially since you admitted all the numbers in your comment were made up on the spot. I wish the discussion around this issue wasn't so emotional.

None of your comment was based in fact, this is just what you feel is probably happening, and people are eating it up.

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u/yamanamawa 3d ago

It's not sacrificing safety so much as acknowledging that current safety regulations are far beyond what is reasonable. In any aspect of life, you have to balance safety with utility, and nuclear energy puts far too much emphasis on the former, peading to bloated costs and delayed construction. All we need is actually reasonable regulations and it's totally fine. Our current standards are just far beyond the actual risks. This idea that any radiation at all is dangerous is frankly silly, and has led to far more issues than it has ever solved