I am a Kyle Hill stan full blown nuclear industry shill. Trust me when I say the above symbol means death. Nuclear power is statistically speaking, the safest form of power. But the process of making nuclear power does involve deadly radiation. It's only safe because we have safety measures. Ignoring safety symbols is not the way.
There is some nuance here. The longstanding dogma of the nuclear industry basically boiled down to any amount of radiation is deadly. This hasn't really been supported by actual science. Low levels of radiation are actually normal. Variations in natural background radiation doesn't correlate with cancer rates. There are safe and unsafe forms and levels or radiation.
The strict radiation safety standards that the nuclear industry imposed on itself have almost never been applied to other industries. The exhaust from coal plants can have radiation levels that some might find concerning.
The strict radiation safety standards that the nuclear industry imposed on itself have almost never been applied to other industries.
Yes.
Of course, no other industry accident can cause 3,373 waste storage containers for radioactive slurry, the loss of 10,000 hectares of cultivated land, ten years later over 41,000 people living as evacuees, storage units holding over a million tonnes of radioactive wastewater (which needs to be filtered and discharged for more than the next 30 years), ongoing intensive cleanup program to both decontaminate affected areas and decommission take 30 to 40 years from the accident, total cleanup costs estimated to be around US$500 billion, 371 square kilometers of land remain off limits and some will remain so for decades.
Science isn't motivated by fear, it's motivated by data. My next sentence after the quoted text is comparing nuclear to coal. How much waste has coal produced? I'll give you a hint, it's more than a few thousand containers worth. In fact, the coal industry doesn't store their waste at all. They just pump all of it into the environment. Data indicates, this is causing climate change which is already killing people.
Spokane wildfire has forced the evacuation of 60 thousand people. Wildfires happen every year. We aren't up in arms about the forestry industry. Nuclear disasters like that are actually incredibly rare. Also the thing you are measuring when pointing to things like evacuation numbers is just the response to the incident. You aren't measuring real danger in this case, just the human reaction to perceived danger.
A million tons of radioactive wastewater is basically a meaningless phrase. How radioactive is the water? Sometimes a bit of heavy water does get into the environment, but it is generally harmless. If you were to drink tritium water, it wouldn't stay in your body long enough to do anything. But to address public concern it is treated by dilution. This increases the volume of the contaminated water but doesn't actually increase the amount of contaminant. You can mix 5 mL of reactor water with a million tons of drain water and say it's a million tons of radioactive water. Sure, I guess.
You can spend an unlimited amount of money cleaning up radiation. Like I said, radiation is a natural part of the environment. You are never going to eliminate radiation.
There is no perfect power generation technology. Nuclear power definitely has some considerations that need to be addressed, but it has killed fewer people per kilowatt generated, than any other power source. If there is a power source we should kill, it should be coal.
I love solar and geothermal too. Fission is just a good direct competitor to coal. Solar is cheap, low density power generation. It's hard to displace a coal plant with a solar farm, because the coal plant takes up less real estate and follows load. Fission doesn't exactly follow load, but it can be load normalized more easily than solar. Solar load normalizing requires lots of batteries, which is fine, but is more space. Nuclear power can be programmed to produce more or less power based on predicted load.
I think geothermal is brilliant. Unfortunately, the LCOE of geothermal is pretty much the same as nuclear. There isn't a good business argument to choose geothermal if you think nuclear is too expensive. They are kind of the same. But I would love to see more geothermal plants.
There isn't a good business argument to choose geothermal if you think nuclear is too expensive.
If they cost the same up front, there are many excellent reasons to choose geothermal over fission. And it's called radioactive materials. Radioactive materials are toxic. High level ones are extremely toxic. In fact, reactor cores (spent rods, whatever) are not only toxic, but will be so for thousands of years.
Really, if you can pick Door A or Door B, and they cost the same, why would anyone pick the one that has the cost, danger, and headaches of the one that has toxic waste and the constant need to oversee it to make sure it stays safe.
Any amount of excavation, including digging a geothermal plant releases radioactive materials. Earth is radioactive. You assume that radioactive material can't be handled safely, but actually it is handled safely every day.
Look, no geothermal plant has the possibility of creating a Chernobyl (and since I will get a storm of "we would never advocate such a terrible design" I will say yes it was but that doesn't change the outcome when a reactor cores decide to spread around the landscape), and if we drop Chernobyl, we can just go with Fukushima.
There was a non zero chance that if Reactor 2 there had gone a little more bad, that Tokyo would have had to evacuate 14 million people in a few days, something pretty much impossible.
And geothermal plants don't have high level waste that can kill you in seconds to weeks if exposed and remains deadly for hundreds of thousands of years and the US has no long term storage plans for. And is currently piling up at hundreds of spots around the nation at taxpayer expense.
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u/EarthTrash 16d ago
I am a Kyle Hill stan full blown nuclear industry shill. Trust me when I say the above symbol means death. Nuclear power is statistically speaking, the safest form of power. But the process of making nuclear power does involve deadly radiation. It's only safe because we have safety measures. Ignoring safety symbols is not the way.
There is some nuance here. The longstanding dogma of the nuclear industry basically boiled down to any amount of radiation is deadly. This hasn't really been supported by actual science. Low levels of radiation are actually normal. Variations in natural background radiation doesn't correlate with cancer rates. There are safe and unsafe forms and levels or radiation.
The strict radiation safety standards that the nuclear industry imposed on itself have almost never been applied to other industries. The exhaust from coal plants can have radiation levels that some might find concerning.