Random Thread

[Raphael]

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.

Do you mean that as in "That was a horrible made-for-TV movie", or as in "That was a really great made-for-TV movie, with a horrible, gut-punching psychological impact"?

Edited to add:

I vaguely remember watching parts of that movie on TV when I was over at a friend's house in elementary school, until the friend's mother informed us that it wasn't really an appropriate movie for children our age.

[KathTheDragon]

It's kind of funny that people keep bringing up Three Mile Island alongside Fukushima and Chernobyl, given that it was the least catastrophic accident possible. All that happened... was they vented radioactive elements into the air. No explosion, no meltdown, and it wasn't even that much radiation! If anything, the significance of Three MIle Island is just how well it handled the multiple failures that let to the accident.

[Travis B.]

It's kind of funny that people keep bringing up Three Mile Island alongside Fukushima and Chernobyl, given that it was the least catastrophic accident possible. All that happened... was they vented radioactive elements into the air. No explosion, no meltdown, and it wasn't even that much radiation! If anything, the significance of Three MIle Island is just how well it handled the multiple failures that let to the accident.

Conversely, Windscale and SL-1 are frequently forgotten.

[keenir]

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.

Thats like asking for a list of all the people who have been gored to death by nuclear power - since the answer is 00, clearly nuclear power isn't dangerous.

Nobody is saying that elephants (or sinkholes, etc) and uranium kill in the same way or over the same span of time or over the same swaths of land.....we'd have to invoke Hitler to get that level of death. Though given that he didn't render the land uninhabitable afterwards, I worry...

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.

?????

To which part? We Americans did put radioactive elements in our skincare products, our toothpastes, and other things...to massive disasters across society.

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.

Relevant in the sense that, you're castigating everyone in a field of research and generation, because of when things fail to be predicted or prevented...side-stepping all the times that nothing went wrong, or all the times problems were prevented.

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'd put money on nuclear power plants' walls already being elephant-proof even now. Thats called preadaptation.

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.

Only if everyone stops using nuclear energy in ways that have risks.

In my district and county, I'm pretty sure that there are people whose houses draw 90+ % of their daily power supply from their solar panels...and yet those same people suffered just as much as their non-solar neighbors when the coal ash disaster hit the region as a result of what Duke Energy was doing.

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.

I never claimed to be able to - but I haven't been advocating surrendering to what i once heard as "if its dangerous now, it'll always be dangerous, and we should give up now."

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.

Its strange that, to you, things are only dangerous if they are huge (see below) or render regions uninhabitable.

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.)

so...sinkholes aren't dangerous...because they aren't as huge as Fukushima or Chernobyl.

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?

We're still not done trying to repair it, and we've been working on that for longer than we've had nuclear power in any form. If you don't think we should give up on one, why do you think we should give up trying on the other?

[keenir]

(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!")

Bear in mind that this is the same species - and usually the same nations - who put their correctional facilities and their prisons in the middle of cities, and assert nothing can go wrong with that either.

[Raphael]

Nobody is saying that elephants (or sinkholes, etc) and uranium kill in the same way or over the same span of time or over the same swaths of land.....we'd have to invoke Hitler to get that level of death.

Why did you bring up elephants and sinkholes then? Sounds like you yourself admit now that they're a bad analogy.

To which part? We Americans did put radioactive elements in our skincare products, our toothpastes, and other things...to massive disasters across society.

That's very bad, but I don't think it's really much of an argument either for or against nuclear power.

Relevant in the sense that, you're castigating everyone in a field of research and generation, because of when things fail to be predicted or prevented...side-stepping all the times that nothing went wrong, or all the times problems were prevented.

If people near where I live do something potentially dangerous a thousand times, and 999 times their precautions work, and nothing bad happens, and the 1000th time, things go wrong, and I end up knowing that I'll soon die in a slow and painful way, then, yes, from my perspective, the 1000th time is more relevant than the 999 times before that.

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

Only if everyone stops using nuclear energy in ways that have risks.

In my district and county, I'm pretty sure that there are people whose houses draw 90+ % of their daily power supply from their solar panels...and yet those same people suffered just as much as their non-solar neighbors when the coal ash disaster hit the region as a result of what Duke Energy was doing.

I meant that as a very general "you". As in, all of us.

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

I never claimed to be able to - but I haven't been advocating surrendering to what i once heard as "if its dangerous now, it'll always be dangerous, and we should give up now."

Oh, if the risk from nuclear energy can be reduced to absolute zero, of course that would change calculations.

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.)

so...sinkholes aren't dangerous...because they aren't as huge as Fukushima or Chernobyl.

Of course they dangerous. Just a lot less so than Fukushima or Chernobyl.

We're still not done trying to repair it, and we've been working on that for longer than we've had nuclear power in any form. If you don't think we should give up on one, why do you think we should give up trying on the other?

I do think we should be more careful about which forms of agriculture we use.

[keenir]

Nobody is saying that elephants (or sinkholes, etc) and uranium kill in the same way or over the same span of time or over the same swaths of land.....we'd have to invoke Hitler to get that level of death.

Why did you bring up elephants and sinkholes then? Sounds like you yourself admit now that they're a bad analogy.

Now? Now?? I've been saying this whole time that its an analogy, or better, a comparison. One of the first things I learned in school, was that there are no perfect analogies.

Relevant in the sense that, you're castigating everyone in a field of research and generation, because of when things fail to be predicted or prevented...side-stepping all the times that nothing went wrong, or all the times problems were prevented.

If people near where I live do something potentially dangerous a thousand times, and 999 times their precautions work, and nothing bad happens, and the 1000th time, things go wrong, and I end up knowing that I'll soon die in a slow and painful way, then, yes, from my perspective, the 1000th time is more relevant than the 999 times before that.

By that logic, how do you manage to leave your house, knowing that, at any time, you might experience the 1/1,000th "things go wrong" - be it a rabid dog biting you, a building falling on you, or a gunman taking you out alongside a crowd of people?

Or are those acceptible because they may be painful, but they aren't slow and rendering the neighborhood uninhabitable?

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

Only if everyone stops using nuclear energy in ways that have risks.

In my district and county, I'm pretty sure that there are people whose houses draw 90+ % of their daily power supply from their solar panels...and yet those same people suffered just as much as their non-solar neighbors when the coal ash disaster hit the region as a result of what Duke Energy was doing.

I meant that as a very general "you". As in, all of us.

Same here.

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

I never claimed to be able to - but I haven't been advocating surrendering to what i once heard as "if its dangerous now, it'll always be dangerous, and we should give up now."

Oh, if the risk from nuclear energy can be reduced to absolute zero, of course that would change calculations.

Nothing has ever had its risk reduced to absolute zero. Not even Dr Freeze.
(sorry, i had to go there)

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

so...sinkholes aren't dangerous...because they aren't as huge as Fukushima or Chernobyl.

Of course they dangerous. Just a lot less so than Fukushima or Chernobyl.

ah, but are they less dangerous simply because they don't destroy as much land or for as long?

We're still not done trying to repair it, and we've been working on that for longer than we've had nuclear power in any form. If you don't think we should give up on one, why do you think we should give up trying on the other?

I do think we should be more careful about which forms of agriculture we use.

Agreed. But both long-ago agriculture and present day agricultural practices run the risk of soil salinization.

[Torco]

three mile is just the only one i know besides fuku and cherno, but yeah, it was less dire

i don't think 'nuclear is safe as long as no accidents' is a correct position here: even though it's true (and not true of coal, which under normal operation kills people, no accidents needed). even with what accidents have happened, it's many many many many times less harmful than coal/gas/blabla

[Raphael]

By that logic, how do you manage to leave your house, knowing that, at any time, you might experience the 1/1,000th "things go wrong" - be it a rabid dog biting you, a building falling on you, or a gunman taking you out alongside a crowd of people?

Or are those acceptible because they may be painful, but they aren't slow and rendering the neighborhood uninhabitable?

[...]

Nothing has ever had its risk reduced to absolute zero. Not even Dr Freeze.
(sorry, i had to go there)

Again, my whole point is that, with nuclear energy, when things go wrong, they go really wrong, for a really large place and really a lot of people. Which IMO means comparisons to risky activities that kill some people when things go wrong don't make sense.

Of course they dangerous. Just a lot less so than Fukushima or Chernobyl.

ah, but are they less dangerous simply because they don't destroy as much land or for as long?

Yes, that has been my point all day long.

[xxx]

the main advantage of nuclear power is to have put an end to world conflicts
and the mass killings they engender in order to acquire the necessary oil resources
(and soon rare earth elements or hydropower)...
must we put the corresponding saved deaths in the scales...

our energy orgies, led by information technology and globalization,
won't be satisfied with soft energy any time soon,
and to avoid total asphyxiation by fuel oil and coal,
nuclear power is the only way forward in the short term,
provided we stop being governed by economics
rather than by the culture of safety it demands...

[Moose-tache]

I've never understood why arguments about nuclear power always devolve into arguments about nuclear power.

None of the issues with nuclear power are a ticking clock threatening to destroy our civilization. Climate change is. Here, I will make it simple. This is the only question about nuclear power that really matters:

Does a mix of solar, wind, and nuclear allow us to transition away from fossil fuels faster than solar and wind alone?

If the answer to that question is yes, investment in nuclear energy expansion is necessary. Full stop. I don't care what misgivings you have about the imperfections of nuclear power. I don't care if nuclear power plants require adorable children to be thrown down the cooling tower at regular intervals. Its goodness or badness is of no consequence, and whether you find nuclear power to be good or bad is of no consequence. You are free to dislike it all you want, for any number of reasons. But your evaluation of the safety of nuclear energy has no more bearing on the calculation than your evaluation of its aesthetic appeal. What is at stake is global extinction, not the politics of waste storage or the cesium levels in tuna.

I have spoken to a lot of anti-nuclear activists over the years, and literally not one of them could tell me how much it costs to build a solar farm or a nuclear power plant. Not one of them knew that the latter is cheaper to build. Not one of them could tell me what fraction of their country's annual GDP would be needed to build enough batteries to serve an all-solar/wind economy (hint: the numerator is higher than the denominator). The limiting factor in not giving our grandchildren an uninhabitable planet is construction funds. Nuclear energy is surpringly cheap to build. Until recently, solar farms were about 50% more expensive to construct than nuclear plants of similar output. That gap has narrowed, but it doesn't take into account the cost of batteries, which will increase as the share from solar/wind increases.

I say this to people over and over, and it just never sinks in. You can show people how nuclear can prevent global extinction, and they'll nod as if they're listening. But then when they're done waiting for you to finish talking they go back to some point about coolant water disposal hurting the fish in French rivers. I think I know why this is. Deep down, it's not about nuclear power. It's about social and political identity.

The anti-nuclear movement grew out of the environmentalist movement of the mid 20th century. This was the Age of the Atom, where the mascot was a giant personification of the hubris of man. Cut it down, mine it, grind it, blow it up, assert yourself against nature, at any cost, for its own sake. It's easy to imagine how the push back against this vision of modernity would look suspiciously on the boffins cracking open atoms for fun and profit. The environmental crisis in those days was seen in terms of waste, garbage, and pollution. There was litter piling up alongside every major road, brown smog, flammable rivers. A barrel of viscous, glowing green liquid became the symbol of nuclear energy in this context. We forget that some of the climate sceptics rolling their eyes at invisible killers like CO2 accumulation are people who supported the EPA in its mission to make the Cayuga River stop catching fire. They grew up in an era where the problem was that when you throw a stick in the East River, it bounces. When people from that era look at nuclear power, they don't see it as one of the strings holding up the Sword of Damocles; they don't look up at all. They see irradiated gloves that need to be buried, coolant water that needs to be vented, radioactive spent fuel rods that can contaminate the ground water.

Much like TERFs are second wave feminists that never learned or grew, the environmentalists who never evolved since the 70s are now out of touch. Their ideas have been left behind by scientific understanding and have become a belief system. Someone who dresses like a creative writing professor in the Bundestag is not going to become an apostate and look at nuclear power objectively. They cannot, without feeling like a traitor to themselves and their movement. It's a lot like Neoliberalism, in a way: your conclusions can never fail; they can only be failed. But if they ever feel the need to peek outside the cave, the one relevant question will be there waiting for them:

Which one allows more of your grandchildren to live: solar, wind, and nuclear, or solar and wind alone?

[Travis B.]

By that logic, how do you manage to leave your house, knowing that, at any time, you might experience the 1/1,000th "things go wrong" - be it a rabid dog biting you, a building falling on you, or a gunman taking you out alongside a crowd of people?

Or are those acceptible because they may be painful, but they aren't slow and rendering the neighborhood uninhabitable?

[...]

Nothing has ever had its risk reduced to absolute zero. Not even Dr Freeze.
(sorry, i had to go there)

Again, my whole point is that, with nuclear energy, when things go wrong, they go really wrong, for a really large place and really a lot of people. Which IMO means comparisons to risky activities that kill some people when things go wrong don't make sense.

Of course they dangerous. Just a lot less so than Fukushima or Chernobyl.

ah, but are they less dangerous simply because they don't destroy as much land or for as long?

Yes, that has been my point all day long.

The key thing is that what really matters is deaths per megawatt hour, and by that metric nuclear beats the pants off of coal any day. Yes, nuclear when it fails may fail spectacularly, but everyday, pedestrian deaths brought on by air pollution or mining accidents (not that uranium mining does not have risks, but far less mining is needed per megawatt hour) are no less significant even if they are easy to overlook and dismiss.

[Moose-tache]

the main advantage of nuclear power is to have put an end to world conflicts

This is false. Niger is in chaos right now because France wants their uranium at special prices. Not because they want uranium, mind you, because they want it at a special-birthday-boy price. Capitalism (and its cousin, Colonialism) cause resource wars, not the nature of the technology.

[xxx]

yes it is, I'm not talking about stopping the war but limiting it to much less deadly regional conflicts...
and colonialism is nothing compared to its monstrous cold-blooded killer, globalism...
and Niger, like the rest of Africa's current troubles, is the result of globalist democracies replacing by authoritarian Asian regimes as resource plunderers...

[Raphael]

Interestingly enough, the second half of Moose-tache's post is actually a quite good analysis of the mindset of many anti-nuclear people. That does, however, raise the question of what makes Moose-tache think that telling people with that mindset "I am right, and you are wrong. Full stop." is going to achieve anything. Then again, trying to respond to the points made by someone with a track record of taking part in a discussion for a while and then suddenly making a point of announcing that they didn't read the latest posts of those who disagreed with them is probably a fool's errand.

[keenir]

By that logic, how do you manage to leave your house, knowing that, at any time, you might experience the 1/1,000th "things go wrong" - be it a rabid dog biting you, a building falling on you, or a gunman taking you out alongside a crowd of people?

Or are those acceptible because they may be painful, but they aren't slow and rendering the neighborhood uninhabitable?

[...]

Nothing has ever had its risk reduced to absolute zero. Not even Dr Freeze.
(sorry, i had to go there)

Again, my whole point is that, with nuclear energy, when things go wrong, they go really wrong, for a really large place and really a lot of people. Which IMO means comparisons to risky activities that kill some people when things go wrong don't make sense.

Except that your method of argument is giving the impression that not even mass murder is a problem, for the simple reason that, unlike nuclear incidents, it doesn't render the site of the mass shooting/etc uninhabitable for generations. (except in special cases, like Germany keeping the death camps around so nobody forgets - which means that that land can't be used for residential sites)


Not even that horrific time that gave us the phrase "he drank the kool-aid" managed to stop people from being able to move in afterwards.

So the only things that humans need to worry about are:
1. soils getting salty
2. sea levels rising & flooding homes (already doing - its not a future thing)
3. nuclear power having an accident.

[bradrn]

This recent review of Wellock’s Safe Enough largely changed my mind about the tradeoffs of nuclear power. The gist of it is that, well, so far most nuclear accidents have been relatively manageable, but if you look at the details it quickly becomes obvious that this was largely due to luck. For instance, if it hadn’t happened to rain at the right time at Fukushima, the whole of Tokyo would have had to be evacuated. The worst-case effects of a nuclear accident are almost unbounded in magnitude.

Now, nuclear reactors can be made ‘safe enough’: just look at American nuclear submarines. But it requires a huge amount of effort and care, which historically is not something humanity at large has been known for. I’m now undecided about whether nuclear power is a good idea or not — maybe if designs can be made sufficiently small and foolproof (so the worst-case damage is limited), but otherwise it doesn’t seem like a great idea.

[Torco]

i mean, i cant say it better than moose. perhaps i can say it shorter, though: you know what's not safe enough and humanity hasn't a track record of surviving? +12 celsius in a hundred years. "it's not perfectly safe" is just not weighty enough. sure, we *could* have a large, global catastrophe on account of some nuclear reactor going bad in a bad way? yeah it's possible. but we *certainly are* going to have a large, global catastrophe already on account of all the coal.

[bradrn]

i mean, i cant say it better than moose. perhaps i can say it shorter, though: you know what's not safe enough and humanity hasn't a track record of surviving? +12 celsius in a hundred years. "it's not perfectly safe" is just not weighty enough. sure, we *could* have a large, global catastrophe on account of some nuclear reactor going bad in a bad way? yeah it's possible. but we *certainly are* going to have a large, global catastrophe already on account of all the coal.

I don’t disagree. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that we should jump to nuclear power as a cure-all. Instead, if we can solve the crisis using renewable sources only, then that’s what we should prefer. We should only use nuclear power if there is literally no other way to eliminate coal and gas — and we should use it with great care and as little as possible.

(That being said, +12 °C in 100 years is implausible. In the most recent IPCC report, even the very worst case has only +4.4 °C, and that’s with greenhouse gas emissions doubling from current levels. Not that that’s much better, mind you.)

[keenir]

i mean, i cant say it better than moose. perhaps i can say it shorter, though: you know what's not safe enough and humanity hasn't a track record of surviving? +12 celsius in a hundred years. "it's not perfectly safe" is just not weighty enough. sure, we *could* have a large, global catastrophe on account of some nuclear reactor going bad in a bad way? yeah it's possible. but we *certainly are* going to have a large, global catastrophe already on account of all the coal.

I don’t disagree. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that we should jump to nuclear power as a cure-all.

I don't think anybody in this thread has suggested using it as a cure-all, only as a power source to draw power from.

Instead, if we can solve the crisis using renewable sources only, then that’s what we should prefer.

That would be the ideal goal, yes - a green solution to the energy crisis. But that finish line is not close at hand...yet.

We should only use nuclear power if there is literally no other way to eliminate coal and gas — and we should use it with great care and as little as possible.

...and until then, right? Because right now, with the possible exception of nations like Iceland, who have most of their cities sitting on or beside geothermal energy sources, most nations on Earth need to either buy their renewable energy-obtaining equipment from other countries, or make their own equipment - and both of the latter groups don't have enough such equipment to power all their homes and hospitals (to say nothing of military sites and other energy-using locales)