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[Raphael]

OK, on my count, that's four people in this mini-debate so far raising a nuclear vs. coal binary. For someone from a part of the world where the pro-coal people are usually pro-nuclear, too, and the anti-nuclear people are usually anti-coal, too, that looks and sounds pretty surreal.

[keenir]

Meanwhile, we're on course to make the entire planet uninhabitable, but sure, nuclear is the bigger threat.

"Well what can I say except, you're welcome." -Maui(sp).

granted, we humans tend to conflate "not somewhere humans want to live" with "uninhabitable by anything".....its an old tradition.

[keenir]

here's what I wrote up today, before looking at the replies to my recent post......I am curious if this addresses any of the replies made that I haven't yet looked at - possible, though not higly likely.

Perhaps a better analogy than lions or dogs or elephants, is fugu (and other, similarly-dangerous foods)...even in nations where a potentially-lethal food cannot be prepped or served without extensive special training, as happens in Japan with fugu chefs, some people still wind up in hospitals or even dead.

Any death is a horrible event, I agree with that sentiment; so why is fugu training still permitted in Japan? Is it a matter of numbers -- a handful per year for fugu &its ilk, vs the neighborhoods at risk when a power plant leaks?


Admittedly, the following is a reductio ad absurdum by any spelling thereof:
even if OPEC and the IAEA got together and succeeded in making all nuclear- and oil-based power plants safely shut down, it wouldn't matter if they jointly declared that/if they'd provide reserves for 24 hours or for 1 year -- the planet doesn't have alternatives set up to power hospitals and homes . . . a few nations do have alternatives for all their hospitals and homes, i grant you; a few other nations have alternatives for some of their hospitals and homes & may even be able to rush to get the rest of their homes and hospitals on the alternatives before year's end...

...but to the rest of the world? nope, not yet, sadly. We're still not ready to abandon nuclear and oil-based power, even if we want to.

[Raphael]

Perhaps a better analogy than lions or dogs or elephants, is fugu (and other, similarly-dangerous foods)...even in nations where a potentially-lethal food cannot be prepped or served without extensive special training, as happens in Japan with fugu chefs, some people still wind up in hospitals or even dead.

Any death is a horrible event, I agree with that sentiment; so why is fugu training still permitted in Japan? Is it a matter of numbers -- a handful per year for fugu &its ilk, vs the neighborhoods at risk when a power plant leaks?

Again, fugu would be a great analogy for nuclear power if every now and then, a serious fugu mishap would lead to the entire surrounding region around the restaurant in question having to be evacuated, and sometimes, the area affected in that way would be a lot larger than even that.

[keenir]

PS: did you enjoy the photographs of Pluto made during the recent flyby? pretty sure that was nuclear-powered.

Can we foresee everything that can possibly go wrong? We try to, but we can't predict everything. Can we try to prevent as many possible failures of equipment as possible? Yes, just as we do all we can to keep lions, crocodiles, and mistreated dogs from attacking people - or to keep humans from killing humans in peacetime. (not sure if dogs or Asian elephants are a better analogy -- the latter are tamed, not domesticated, and when things go wrong with them, people can & do die as a result...but, so far as i am aware, nobody uses that as a reason to stop harnessing the power of that genus of elephants)

When a tamed elephant goes rogue, that doesn't make large tracts of land uninhabitable.

Do you want to go live where an elephant went on a killing spree? Do you know anyone who would like to? So who is going to move in?

cue - I was about to mention that in the US, there are few problems on an official or public perception level with our mass shooting epidemic...but then it hit me: maybe the next time we have a nuclear problem, we just need to follow it up by a mass shooting on that site. /sarcasm

To expect a dangerous substance to have zero risk, is baffling. People learn through theory and things going wrong - look how long it took us to stop putting radioactive elements in things like skincare products. If and when we know what the problem is, we usually stop doing it, like we stopped putting radioactives in skincare products; while making buildings tsunami-proof is a bit harder, we try, and we learn and try again.

The difference between the unavoidable risks involved in dealing with other dangerous things and the unavoidable risks involved in dealing with nuclear power is that, with nuclear power, the bad things that happen when things go really wrong are so much worse than their counterparts in most other contexts.

Yes, quite true: when things go wrong, its worse...to use a term from when i was growing up, thats what makes nuclear power something sexy to protest against -- as used to be pointed out, far more people die (and with greater regularity) from car accidents each year, than from shark attacks, yet shark attacks are sexy, so they get reported more.

On the other hand, radioactives in skincare products was not much worse than actual illegal drugs' impact on the body.

That you mention tsunami-proofing illustrates the point I made above:

We can earthquake-proof houses and other buildings too...and yet, in the past few years, a couple of Italian towns sued the (company?) scientists whose job it was to predict where in Italy was due for an earthquake.

I suspect that those scientists were doing their job as well as they could -- and gave plenty of warning to the towns where they did detect earthquakes. That doesn't make it any less bad that there were casualties and wounds and deaths in the towns that didn't get a warning.

Or did you mean your point that, now that we've had a tsunami-related nuclear accident, we won't have another one...but we should still prepare and build for, as though we are at risk for more tsunami-related accidents - thats my point.

I used to know an equestrian who never walked behind horses, because he was taught that the critters could and did kick with immense power, sometimes to a person's death. This equestrian, however, walked beside a horse's front feet - one hoof stomping down on his toes. Fortunately, smart equestrians know to wear steel-toed boots, so he was fine.
(moral: you can't foresee everything; but you can make yourself as safe as you can at any given time)

The problem with that line of argument is, of course, that while the specific combination of circumstances that led to each of the previous disasters really is unlikely to repeat itself in the future, the more general fact of having some combination of circumstances that leads to a disaster is a good deal more likely to repeat itself in the future.

Yes, there'll be more tsunami-proofing of nuclear facilities now, and yes, many nuclear facilities are already in places with little or no risk from tsunamis. But that's besides the point, because the next serious nuclear disaster almost certainly won't be caused by a tsunami, but by something else entirely.

Great. If you can predict it, you can help prevent it.

If not, then what? We accept a degree of risk in everything about modern society -- food recalls and food poisoning rarely makes the front pages anymore, though airplane crashes do; sinkholes can wipe out roads and routes for people and goods; rare earth elements gouge out the Earth where they are excavated, yet they're vital despite the damage they do.

[keenir]

Perhaps a better analogy than lions or dogs or elephants, is fugu (and other, similarly-dangerous foods)...even in nations where a potentially-lethal food cannot be prepped or served without extensive special training, as happens in Japan with fugu chefs, some people still wind up in hospitals or even dead.

Any death is a horrible event, I agree with that sentiment; so why is fugu training still permitted in Japan? Is it a matter of numbers -- a handful per year for fugu &its ilk, vs the neighborhoods at risk when a power plant leaks?

Again, fugu would be a great analogy for nuclear power if every now and then, a serious fugu mishap would lead to the entire surrounding region around the restaurant in question having to be evacuated, and sometimes, the area affected in that way would be a lot larger than even that.

So, your objection is that the neighborhood gets evacuated? Makes sense - if a school gets irradiated or falls into a sinkhole, we can't use that school anymore.

(given that you ignored the question i asked, this is how my mind handles that bit of math of one point plus another point)

Because when a sinkhole happens, the land around that can also be at risk for generating more sinkholes.
...particularly when the land's aquifers have been drained.

Heck, agriculture can render acres and acres of land unuseable for anything - thank the salt for that. Are we trying to undo the damage salt-related agriculture has had in many parts of the world? Yes. Are we done? No, and we might not be done for a thousand years - should we give up because the time scale is nearly nuclear?

[Torco]

OK, on my count, that's four people in this mini-debate so far raising a nuclear vs. coal binary. For someone from a part of the world where the pro-coal people are usually pro-nuclear, too, and the anti-nuclear people are usually anti-coal, too, that looks and sounds pretty surreal.

Well, the coal vs nuclear binary is not unwarranted: politics aside they both fill a role in a country's power matrix that wind, solar, etcetera cannot, namely producing as much energy as you want, when you want it. solar and wind are great, but when the wind doesn't blow or the sun doesn't shine they don't work and, because we don't have good ways to store energy, that either means you have to let the lights go out (not fun) or send a signal to your friendly neighbourhood coal/gas/petrol/coke/biomass/whatever plant to "yo guys, turn the heat up, we're gonna need an extra seven megawatts in 20 minutes". those kinds of centrals then proceed to dump a bazillion tons of harmful stuff into the air that will, silently but surely, cause tremndous harm. if that signal was sent to a big ass thorium central instead, it's only possible, not certain (and indeed, not very probable), that down the road the resulting soup of glow-in-the-dark technetium 99 or whatever will escape into the environment and cause tremendous harm.

Like, for every fukushima, chernobyl and three mile island there's a great many other nuclear centrals that worked for 30 years or whatever causing little more environmental harm than the local river's fish population growing abnormally large as a result of warm water being dumped into their house.

[Travis B.]

All in all, I would be utterly shocked if the deaths/megawatt of fossil fuels didn't far, far outstrip that of nuclear, for one.

[linguistcat]

Personally, I'm not saying "We should only use nuclear and nothing else". I'm only pointing out that based on the overall harm they cause, even including catastrophic failures of nuclear plants, coal and by extension fossil fuels as a whole are by far a greater danger.

I would love if we could use nothing but renewable clean energy but at this point in time at least, we cannot do that for all our energy needs. So we have to have something to fill in the gaps left by renewables. And even green energy has its own negative impacts on the environment. Solar and wind farms have to be designed and placed very carefully to keep from disrupting environments they are placed in. There was a whole fight over placing solar panels out in the desert where I grew up, because it was the habitat for a bunch of endangered and at risk species, for example. Others have mentioned the impacts of hydro electric damns.

[keenir]

All in all, I would be utterly shocked if the deaths/megawatt of fossil fuels didn't far, far outstrip that of nuclear, for one.

I know that the places where hydrothermal and geothermal energy is obtained, usually had death tolls before the equipment was set up to power the power grids...but do places like Hoover Dam, Three Gorges Dam(s), or, say, most places in Iceland still have death tolls?

[Raphael]

On a general note, thank you for talking around my main point, keenir. That's a pretty good demonstration that you don't have a good answer to that.

PS: did you enjoy the photographs of Pluto made during the recent flyby? pretty sure that was nuclear-powered.

Radioisotope batteries are not the same as nuclear reactors. And I wouldn't mind moving the nuclear power industry to Pluto.

When a tamed elephant goes rogue, that doesn't make large tracts of land uninhabitable.

Do you want to go live where an elephant went on a killing spree? Do you know anyone who would like to? So who is going to move in?

That's a question of where people might want to live. Not the same as where they can live. But feel free to provide a list of places where people used to live that are now uninhabited because of rampaging elephants any time you want.

Yes, quite true: when things go wrong, its worse...to use a term from when i was growing up, thats what makes nuclear power something sexy to protest against -- as used to be pointed out, far more people die (and with greater regularity) from car accidents each year, than from shark attacks, yet shark attacks are sexy, so they get reported more.

On the other hand, radioactives in skincare products was not much worse than actual illegal drugs' impact on the body.

?????

We can earthquake-proof houses and other buildings too...and yet, in the past few years, a couple of Italian towns sued the (company?) scientists whose job it was to predict where in Italy was due for an earthquake.

I suspect that those scientists were doing their job as well as they could -- and gave plenty of warning to the towns where they did detect earthquakes. That doesn't make it any less bad that there were casualties and wounds and deaths in the towns that didn't get a warning.

Interesting, but I'm not sure how it's relevant to this discussion.

Or did you mean your point that, now that we've had a tsunami-related nuclear accident, we won't have another one...but we should still prepare and build for, as though we are at risk for more tsunami-related accidents - thats my point.

Of course there might be another tsunami-related nuclear accident. It's just a lot more likely that the next serious nuclear disaster will be triggered by something else entirely. Perhaps a rampaging elephant or something.

I used to know an equestrian who never walked behind horses, because he was taught that the critters could and did kick with immense power, sometimes to a person's death. This equestrian, however, walked beside a horse's front feet - one hoof stomping down on his toes. Fortunately, smart equestrians know to wear steel-toed boots, so he was fine.
(moral: you can't foresee everything; but you can make yourself as safe as you can at any given time)

You can make yourself fairly safe from nuclear accidents by not using nuclear energy.

Yes, there'll be more tsunami-proofing of nuclear facilities now, and yes, many nuclear facilities are already in places with little or no risk from tsunamis. But that's besides the point, because the next serious nuclear disaster almost certainly won't be caused by a tsunami, but by something else entirely.

Great. If you can predict it, you can help prevent it.

I can't predict it, and neither can you, which is pretty much my point.

If not, then what? We accept a degree of risk in everything about modern society -- food recalls and food poisoning rarely makes the front pages anymore, though airplane crashes do;

Again, feel free to provide a list of places where people used to live that are now uninhabited because of food poisoning or airplane crashes any time you want.

Perhaps a better analogy than lions or dogs or elephants, is fugu (and other, similarly-dangerous foods)...even in nations where a potentially-lethal food cannot be prepped or served without extensive special training, as happens in Japan with fugu chefs, some people still wind up in hospitals or even dead.

Any death is a horrible event, I agree with that sentiment; so why is fugu training still permitted in Japan? Is it a matter of numbers -- a handful per year for fugu &its ilk, vs the neighborhoods at risk when a power plant leaks?

Again, fugu would be a great analogy for nuclear power if every now and then, a serious fugu mishap would lead to the entire surrounding region around the restaurant in question having to be evacuated, and sometimes, the area affected in that way would be a lot larger than even that.

So, your objection is that the neighborhood gets evacuated? Makes sense - if a school gets irradiated or falls into a sinkhole, we can't use that school anymore.

Do you have a list of 20-mile-diameter sinkholes? (Equivalent of Fukushima.) Or 200-mile-diameter sinkholes? (Probably the closest analogy for Chernobyl.)

(given that you ignored the question i asked, this is how my mind handles that bit of math of one point plus another point)

I didn't ignore that question - I pointed out why I think the underlying analogy doesn't work. To answer the question more directly, I'm perfectly fine with consenting adults accepting a small risk of death to eat something they find very tasty, if that's what they want.

Heck, agriculture can render acres and acres of land unuseable for anything - thank the salt for that. Are we trying to undo the damage salt-related agriculture has had in many parts of the world? Yes. Are we done? No, and we might not be done for a thousand years - should we give up because the time scale is nearly nuclear?

Of course we should try to repair environmental damage. Your point being?

[Travis B.]

Personally, I'm not saying "We should only use nuclear and nothing else". I'm only pointing out that based on the overall harm they cause, even including catastrophic failures of nuclear plants, coal and by extension fossil fuels as a whole are by far a greater danger.

I would love if we could use nothing but renewable clean energy but at this point in time at least, we cannot do that for all our energy needs. So we have to have something to fill in the gaps left by renewables. And even green energy has its own negative impacts on the environment. Solar and wind farms have to be designed and placed very carefully to keep from disrupting environments they are placed in. There was a whole fight over placing solar panels out in the desert where I grew up, because it was the habitat for a bunch of endangered and at risk species, for example. Others have mentioned the impacts of hydro electric damns.

Agreed completely. Solar and wind farms also have their impacts (e.g. wind farms killing large numbers of birds and bats), and hydro power has often been drastically negative to those who lived before the dams were built, which has very often been without their consent..

[Raphael]

And even green energy has its own negative impacts on the environment. Solar and wind farms have to be designed and placed very carefully to keep from disrupting environments they are placed in. There was a whole fight over placing solar panels out in the desert where I grew up, because it was the habitat for a bunch of endangered and at risk species, for example. Others have mentioned the impacts of hydro electric damns.

That's environmental triage, as far as I'm concerned - better destroy a few endangered species here and there, than ruining the planet. Yes, the same argument is made in favor of nuclear power - but nuclear power can destroy the lives of large numbers of human beings, either killing them outright, or forcing them to move with no advance notice.

(For the record, I'm probably less anti-nuclear power than most people I know. I don't think you have to be evil, stupid, or corrupt to support nuclear power. I'm just not entirely convinced by the arguments of its defenders. Especially not the ones along the lines of "It's perfectly safe as long as nothing unexpected happens!")

[Torco]

All in all, I would be utterly shocked if the deaths/megawatt of fossil fuels didn't far, far outstrip that of nuclear, for one.

statista says it's like one thousand times bigger, yeah.... or... is it 10 thousand times bigger? either way, big.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/494 ... gy-source/
also, i'm surprised about hydro: how does hydro power kill you? are they counting people drowning in a lake that otherwise wouldn't exist?

[keenir]

On a general note, thank you for talking around my main point, keenir.

Which main point? At no point did I intend to refute that radioactivity is dangerous for longer than other things -- at no point was that something I was discussing, because there is no refuting or fighting that fact.

That's a pretty good demonstration that you don't have a good answer to that.

No, its a demonstration that I saw no reason to argue the point...whereas you seem to hold the odd view that only nuclear power is dangerous, because only radioactivity is able to render swaths of land uninhabitable for a human lifetime or longer.

PS: did you enjoy the photographs of Pluto made during the recent flyby? pretty sure that was nuclear-powered.

Radioisotope batteries are not the same as nuclear reactors. [/quote]

Then why do they get called "nuclear reactors" in both public press releases, as well as in scientific books on the subject?

[linguistcat]

(For the record, I'm probably less anti-nuclear power than most people I know. I don't think you have to be evil, stupid, or corrupt to support nuclear power. I'm just not entirely convinced by the arguments of its defenders. Especially not the ones along the lines of "It's perfectly safe as long as nothing unexpected happens!")

I mean we do have other options, but those cases involve making much more efficient ways of storing energy OR greatly changing when, how and how much energy is used by developed and developing countries. And while that would be better in the long and short run, the one will happen when it happens, and the other is unlikely to happen just because of how most humans are.

Basically, it's the most likely option to a problem that is the least bad overall until we can change some things either technologically or culturally.

But I do understand still being wary about it.

[Raphael]

whereas you seem to hold the odd view that only nuclear power is dangerous, because only radioactivity is able to render swaths of land uninhabitable for a human lifetime or longer.

What else renders equally large swaths of land uninhabitable for a human lifetime or longer? Fugu accidents? Rampaging elephants? Sinkholes?

Radioisotope batteries are not the same as nuclear reactors.

Then why do they get called "nuclear reactors" in both public press releases, as well as in scientific books on the subject?

That's something you'll have to ask the authors of those press releases and scientific books.

[Travis B.]

All in all, I would be utterly shocked if the deaths/megawatt of fossil fuels didn't far, far outstrip that of nuclear, for one.

I know that the places where hydrothermal and geothermal energy is obtained, usually had death tolls before the equipment was set up to power the power grids...but do places like Hoover Dam, Three Gorges Dam(s), or, say, most places in Iceland still have death tolls?

Poorly designed dams can kill very large numbers of people when they fail, as was the case of the 1975 Banqiao Dam failures, where (according to the Wiki) an estimated number of between 26,000 and 240,000 were killed (and 5 million to 6.8 million houses were destroyed).

[Travis B.]

whereas you seem to hold the odd view that only nuclear power is dangerous, because only radioactivity is able to render swaths of land uninhabitable for a human lifetime or longer.

What else renders equally large swaths of land uninhabitable for a human lifetime or longer? Fugu accidents? Rampaging elephants? Sinkholes?

As had been mentioned, soil salinization can effectively render land unusable for many purposes indefinitely, and this dates back to the beginnings of irrigation.

[Linguoboy]

Just decided to ruin my entire day by watching a YouTube video about the UK television adaptation of Raymond Briggs' graphic novel When the Wind Blows. Jesus God.