First, point out that Chernobyl, 3 Mile Island, and Fukushima amount to extremely small numbers of deaths relative to the power these plants generated. For three mile island and Fukushima this figure is zero among the public. Less than two dozen among the plant workers (all of which died due to the hydrogen explosion not radiation). The areas that were evacuated are now safe to return. Chernobyl was worse, but th Soviets didn't even bother with secondary containment. They didn't bother to put a concrete dome over the reactor. Even then, ~200 people died. This is a fairly small death toll for a worst-case failure. Contrast this with hydroelectricity, for example, which has resulted in the deaths of tena of thousands of people and the displacement of millions due to dam collapses [1].
Competition in the form of wind and solar are intermittent, requiring storage on a massive scale to offer a path to decarbonization. With 12 hours of energy storage, the US could reach 80% renewable generation. To get to 100% we need 3 weeks of storage according to estimates [2]. Currently, we have 8 seconds of battery storage compared to our 11.5 TWh daily electricity consumption. We have 4 minutes of hydroelectric storage, but hydroelectric storage is geographically limited. Increasing this by a factor of 180 is not feasible.
In short, if the goal is decarbonization wind and solar don't actually present real competition.
> the areas that were evacuated are now safe to return.
is this true for Fukushima?
As far as I understand, 8% of the "Difficult-to-Return zones" have been cleared up for access to people, but that is a far cry from "all cleared up, everybody goes back home".
The "difficult to return zones" are exactly that: the subset of zones that are represent the greatest challenge to resettle. Most of the exclusion zones with less severe categories have been lifted [1].
The point is, people assume because of Chernobyl that a nuclear disaster will render land uninhabitable permanently, or at least for decades. That is not the case. Chernobyl remains excluded because there's no real incentive to clean it up and reopen. The city was built to support the power plant, so with the latter gone there's no real reason to put in the effort to decontaminate the former.
> First, point out that Chernobyl, 3 Mile Island, and Fukushima amount to extremely small numbers of deaths relative to the power these plants generated.
I keep seeing justifications like that and it makes me want to puke.
First of all: The total number of victims is unknown and it is still rising. Even for Chernobyl.
Second: It costs tens of billions of dollars to clean up these messes. Paid for by the cow you can milk forever: tax payers.
In short, if the goal is decarbonization wind and solar are the only game in town.
Add medium and long-term storage to the mix and there's nothing stopping us from a truly green future other than politics.
> I keep seeing justifications like that and it makes me want to puke. First of all: The total number of victims is unknown and it is still rising. Even for Chernobyl.
The total number of victims was unknown for Chernobyl. We didn't know what the impact on cancer rates would be. But it isn't the 1980s anymore. We can compare the rates of cancer and other radiation related illnesses among the people who experienced Chernobyl and the general population. The radiation exposure due to Fukushima and 3 Mile Island was insufficient to cause adverse health effects. Yes, we do know the impact of these failures.
3 Mile Island took $1 billion to clean up not 10 billion. The exclusion zones around Chernobyl and Fukushima represent greater economic tolls, but the latter has since been lifted. By comparison, what is your cost estimate to build 3 weeks of energy storage in the US?
Sure, wind and solar could work if there's a scientific breakthrough that makes energy storage extremely cheap and scalable by several orders of magnitude. But until that scientific breakthrough in storage happens, nuclear and renewables aren't even playing the same game.
A number of people did die because of the Fukushima evacuation, though, through things like interruption of medical care. And if there hand't been an evacuation there would have been a few radiation deaths. The total is still only 10x the number of air pollution deaths you'd expect from a coal plant providing the same number of megawatt-years and very few nuclear plants melt down but lets be accurate.
The attribution of deaths as being due to evacuation lies on shaky ground. Many of these deaths are attributed to ambiguous causes like "exhaustion". Many of the counts for deaths supposedly due to evacuation are in fact just presenting deaths due to natural causes that occurred in the evacuation time frame. Remember, out of a population of 300,000 people, 3,000 people will naturally die each year assuming everyone lives to 100.
Certainly, if someone was tied to life support and had to be taken off to evacuate then that's a death attributable to evacuation. But most of the figures I've seen have counted people who died of natural causes during the evacuation time frame and attributed it to evacuation.
Coal plants kill more people each year during normal operation than Chernobyl, 3 Mile, and Fukushima killed over all time.
"In 2008 the World Health Organization (WHO) and other organizations calculated that coal particulates pollution cause approximately one million deaths annually across the world"
"Long-term death estimates range from up to 4,000 (per the 2005 and 2006 conclusions of a joint consortium of the United Nations) for the most exposed people of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, to 16,000 in total for all those exposed on the entire continent of Europe, with figures as high as 60,000 when including the relatively minor effects around the globe."
>>” The total number of victims is unknown and it is still rising. Even for Chernobyl.”
- This is false. Total number of victims who can be reliably linked to the disaster is two digit number.
Source: lived there most of my life (grew up there) and still have friends and family working there
> I keep seeing justifications like that and it makes me want to puke
This kind of justification is _indeed_ a bit cynical and morbid. I suspect it is a way to respond to the sometimes overly emotional argument from nuclear opponents.
I don't think it helps having a cool-headed debate on this complicated topic.
However, I do think mentionning that all form of electricy productions have risk trade-offs, and illustrating it with the insane number of casualties caused by other sources of energy production is relevant. (Eg: https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...)
But a bit of "tact" is warranted.
> First of all: The total number of victims is unknown and it is still rising. Even for Chernobyl.
The total number of victims from the direct events (explosion, short term exposure) is largely "known" (although the Soviet numbers might not be trustworthy, if you want to go this direction.)
The long-term numbers are of course harder to estimate. Again, it's going to sound morbid; but, to know if it's "still rising", you have to determine if someone who dies from a cancer 34 years after the event died because of the event.
I'm in no way qualified to say so.
I have to revert to the same method I use when I don't know stuff: I find scientists to trust.
It is entirely possible not to trust UN on this, but not really helpful.
> Second: It costs tens of billions of dollars to clean up these messes. Paid for by the cow you can milk forever: tax payers.
That's absolutely true. It's also the tax payers who invested money to build the plant, and reap the benefit of having the energy. Again, this is a cost-benefit analysis. It's perfectly possible to not come to the same conclusion depending on your level of risk averseness.
However here, again, it's not irrelevant to mention that all sources have this kind of trade-off.
And, to put it bluntly, I assume it would also be the tax payer would who have to clean-up after a broken dam. Or an hydrogen storage tank that explodes. Or burying the child mining the rare-earths needed for solar panels. Or curing the respiratory diseases caused by fossil fuels as we speak. Not even mentioning the various climate events.
> In short, if the goal is decarbonization wind and solar are the only game in town. Add medium and long-term storage to the mix and there's nothing stopping us from a truly green future other than politics.
I would love the situation to be more simple. The same science that tells us the climate is changing it telling us our energy situation is not easy to solve - yet.
In the meantime, we'll have to use all tools available (including the dangerous but efficient ones.)
I'm in no way an "absolute fan" of current nuclear (Although I'm much more concerned about the long term storage of waste - not so much because it's dangerous, but because no one wants it in their backyard. And proliferation, a bit.)
I'm all for investing in doing nuclear fission differently. If the design presented here does lower the risk of accident, as they claim, that would be for the best.
I don't think you're trusting the claim, and I can say that I'm rather skeptical too - but mostly because I don't know much. If enough scientist tell me this kind of nuclear plant is safer, I can accept that.
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Off-topic: If I was very cynical and very pro-nuclear, I would fund a massive superproduction about a giant dam collapsing. The super-vilain could be a corrupt entrepreneur helped by an ambitous greenwashing politician.
Competition in the form of wind and solar are intermittent, requiring storage on a massive scale to offer a path to decarbonization. With 12 hours of energy storage, the US could reach 80% renewable generation. To get to 100% we need 3 weeks of storage according to estimates [2]. Currently, we have 8 seconds of battery storage compared to our 11.5 TWh daily electricity consumption. We have 4 minutes of hydroelectric storage, but hydroelectric storage is geographically limited. Increasing this by a factor of 180 is not feasible.
In short, if the goal is decarbonization wind and solar don't actually present real competition.
1.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
2. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora...