Dangerous doesn't mean too dangerous. Nuclear energy is dangerous but any projection of energy use that accommodates growing population and energy usage AND expects carbon reductions AND doesn't include growing nuclear use is simply impossible.
EDIT: Also worth noting that there is a clear correlation between the increase of electronics/battery recycling in the West and lead poisoning cases in Kenyan children where the recycling is done. America cleaned up its sooty and smoggy cities by exporting the freedom to pollute to China and Mexico. No such thing as a free lunch.
Burning fossil fuels in perpetuity is dangerous too.
The point is, fracking can be done safe, it can be done properly. The only reason we see these hyperbolic results in places like Oklahoma is that states that tend to allow fracking just so happen to be the ones that couldn't give a rat's ass about effective and proper regulation.
We've come a long way from rope seat belts, haven't we?
Nuclear power can be done safe, but we also have many examples of it not being done safe. Saying, "well it will be different this time. We will build systems to make corruption, laziness, and dangerous actions impossible!" is believing in a pipe dream.
We have come a long way from Chernobyl. Most of the people posting here probably weren't even alive when it happened. Nuclear power is so well-controlled (unless you build reactors on earthquake hotspots or tsunami zones, I mean c'mon Japan) that you can't even use regular statistical models because the only probable risks are human. Reactors are really, really well-designed these days to seal themselves off in the (super-rare) case of a critical malfunction. The real risk with nuclear right now is the boogeyman fears of a meltdown keeping us from updating our ancient reactors.
So I ask: how do we provide energy to a rapidly growing global population without surging carbon emissions using readily deployable technology? Renewables might work - if people stopped having kids for a while - but aside from truly revolutionary advances in energy efficiency, generation, and storage, we are left with an unfortunate but undeniable fact: we need nuke.
One thing that really ought to be stressed about Chernobyl is that it was a really shitty reactor design (probably just about the most unsafe reactor design ever) manned by poorly-trained and incompetent people.
With the outlier of Chernobyl, nuclear energy has a very good safety record. Shoddy and dangerous Soviet engineering has a very bad safety record. The operative variable here is shoddy and dangerous Soviet engineering.
You wouldn't say that because Eastern Bloc cars would have ludicrously awful[0] results in a crash test, therefore it's unsafe to travel by car. You wouldn't say that the safety record of the Ilyushin Il-62[1] proves all passenger planes are unsafe. You wouldn't say the combat record of the T-72 means the Army should immediately retire that useless deathtrap M1 Abrams.
There are inherent dangers to nuclear power, as with cars, passenger planes and combat vehicles. However, these dangers are all well-understood and easily mitigable. In the Soviet Union safety was not a priority or oftentimes even a consideration, in America it is.
Not only that, but nuclear power is not remotely even the most potentially dangerous form of power generation. That easily, easily belongs to hydropower. The Banqiao Dam disaster[2] killed 171,000 people.
But I'm not worried about hydropower and neither should you, if you live in the first world. Dams are, inherently, incredibly dangerous. But we understand the dangers, and we know how to make dams so that the danger is reduced to near-zero. That a dam built in Mao-era China was unsafe doesn't mean that it's impossible to make a safe dam.
FINALLY! Someone who understands the reality of the situation and backs it up with FACTS!
If people weren't so terrified of nuclear energy by movies like Silkwood or TV shows like The Simpsons they might actually look past their own emotional hinderances and do some trivial comparisons, like, say, the extraction-to-power-generation death rates of nuclear energy versus coal and oil (not to mention air pollution) of the last 50 years and come to a simple conclusion: nuclear energy is perfectly safe if you do it right.
One way to look at media like Silkwood is that one of the differences that lets nuclear power be safe in the U.S. even if it wasn't safe in the U.S.S.R. is a well-functioning nuclear regulatory, press, and legal system that lets people act on knowledge of problems and defects, and allows Feynman's hope that "reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled" to be better borne out in practice.
These media strongly questioned those institutions based on stories of cases in which they seem to have failed.
If operators of nuclear power plants manage to reduce the effectiveness and autonomy of the institutions that are working to guarantee safety, the situation gets more like the Soviet Union. One way of thinking about this is that the most useful lesson of the 1970s anxiety about the nuclear industry is less "nuclear power is dangerous!" and more "how effective and independent are our institutions, and how do we know?".
So what do we do with the waste that takes 10,000+ years to become safe, given that the average corporation has a lifespan of less than a hundred years?
Modern LFTR reactors produce almost no waste and low grade at that. Current stockpiles of nuclear "waste" are in fact immensely valuable resources as fuel stock to modern reactors.
With the outlier of Chernobyl, nuclear energy has a very good safety record.
Fukushima is another example showing that fission power is dangerous and expensive - because of the safety precautions, insurance, disaster recovery and cleanup costs, and worse it shifts those costs and dangers from the power plant to the host country and surrounding countries. It's far more expensive in those terms than most other ways of generating power save coal (which has worse problems), maybe it should be part of the mix but only if there are no simpler alternatives like hydro, wind, wave and solar.
Fusion will be far better when we work out how to contain it. It's amazing to think of the progress we could make if energy was almost free.
Accidental deaths is a very poor measure of cost to society. For example coal kills far more with pollution than with accidents, and fission disasters render huge swathes of land uninhabitable for decades.
> unless you build reactors on earthquake hotspots or tsunami zones, I mean c'mon Japan
Prior to the Fukushima disaster, how many proponents of nuclear power considered it to be an example of a nuclear plant that was too dangerous to operate, and how many treated it as an example of modern, safe nuclear power and dismissed criticism as anti-nuclear fearmongering?
Exactly as you said: old plants. We don't update them as we should to make them as safe as they can be. That's not an engineering problem, that's a political problem.
Waste storage? Same story. We have plenty of useless desert in the US, but people don't want to be anywhere remotely near them.
Recent advances in solar and wind technology might make it within reach...if we were dealing with 1-2 billion people, not close to 10 billion people in our lifetimes. All of these people want to live like we do: they want to eat meat, they want light at the flick of a switch, they want heat at the turn of a dial. Assuming prices will go down and efficiency will go up to match skyrocketing demand is greatly misguided.
Not to mention, extracting and refining the rare earths necessary for a lot of these devices is unfathomably ruinous to the environment, and recycling is just as bad (see my other comment about lead poisoning in Kenyan kids).
You have brought up 2 political problems and 1 technological fantasy. Nothing about economics. Nuclear is fine.
I don't understand the nuclear waste "problem". Anything that is radioactive for thousands of years is also not very radioactive because it has such a long half-life.
More concerning would be the chemical toxicity hazard, but that is void because nuclear waste is vitrified (turned in to glass), which makes it extremely chemically inert.
Then there's the possibility of recycling the spent fuel (waste?) in fast spectrum reactors, if we can work out how to do that reliably / economically.
It's radioactive for that long because it /is/ waste. We haven't finished extracting the valuable energy from it yet. (that's what 'waste reduction' (breeder) reactors are supposed to do; concentrate up the useful stuff and leave most of it clean enough to either decay really quickly, or so slowly that it's not harmful.)
> It's radioactive for that long because it /is/ waste.
I'm not sure what you're saying here? How does being waste make it radioactive?
If it still contains valuable energy it isn't waste. By virtue of the fact that nobody wants it I'm assuming that energy can't be extracted economically at this time?
> how do we provide energy ...? Renewables might work - if people stopped having kids for a while
It seems like you haven't done the math. I have. You're ridiculously wrong.
US marketed energy consumption per capita is 9.5 kW (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_co...). That's 9.5 square meters of sunlight. If we pessimistically assume that we can only site solar panels on land (29% of Earth's surface) and only 10% of that, and that we're only using the currently common 16%-efficient polysilicon photovoltaic panels (rather than, say, solar thermal collectors or multijunction cells), then we receive enough solar energy for 60 billion people at current US levels of consumption, according to units(1):
That's about eight times Earth's current human population.
Is it too costly? Currently, photovoltaic modules cost about US$0.50 per watt (see http://www.solarserver.com/service/pvx-spot-market-price-ind...), so, for everyone to consume as much marketed energy as USAns, we're talking about an investment of about US$4800 per person, or about US$160 per person per year, assuming a 30-year lifespan for the panels, even if costs didn't drop further. That's only about 1.6% of the nominal world GDP of about US$10k per year per person (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...).
Your comment would have been reasonable ten years ago, when solar PV was still expensive. The facts have changed. When the facts change, I change my opinion. When are you going to change yours?
Erratum: that's US$0.50 per peak watt. Although capacity factors vary by latitude and mounting (electronics are now cheap enough that some new utility-scale solar PV boosts its capacity factor with heliostats), a typical capacity factor is 20%, which means:
- US$24000 of panels per person, or
- US$800 per person per year, assuming 30-year lifespan, which is
- 8% of nominal world GDP of US$10k per year per person.
Worse, though, is that this reduces the carrying capacity calculation to some 12 billion, which is a number we might actually reach, although not soon. We're projected to reach 10 billion in 2083 by the UNFPA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth
What's actually going to happen, though, is that PV prices will start dropping again; the majority of marketed energy consumption will be from photovoltaic cells starting sometime in the 2020s; energy prices will drop well below where they are now; we'll increase our per capita marketed energy consumption far above current rich-world usage, but much of that will be thermal, not electrical; and we'll use a lot more than 10% of the land area for solar energy gathering.
Despite the laziness and corruption, human fallibility and mistakes, the fast majority of nuclear power is safe now.
We don't have to do it differently in the future ("this time"), we just need to do it marginally better over time. Every new power plant built, whether goal or gas or nuclear, or solar / wind, is marginally better than the previous design because of what we've learned.
Coal power can be done safe, but we also have many examples of it not being done safe. Saying, "well it will be different this time. We will build systems to make corruption, laziness, and dangerous actions impossible!" is believing in a pipe dream.
Nuclear is safe, affordable and the only alternative to non-renewables that doesn't require us to drastically reduce our energy usage. Because realistically, we all know that's just not going to happen.
Not to mention, throughout the 20th century, we in the first world reaped the benefits of readily available energy to drastically boost our living conditions. To deny that benefit to developing countries by restricting them to wind solar and hydro would be immoral.
250 B gallons in, 210 B gallons out. So net-net 40B gallons for the entire industry between 2005 and 2014. Call it 40,000 swimming pools worth.
The "out" is completely treatable.
"Large though those numbers seem, the study calculates that the water used in fracking makes up less than 1 percent of total industrial water use nationwide." - FTA.
"Gasland" is a bad movie.
Now, in some places, the available water is sufficiently short that it probably should not be used for industrial use at all.
EDIT: Also worth noting that there is a clear correlation between the increase of electronics/battery recycling in the West and lead poisoning cases in Kenyan children where the recycling is done. America cleaned up its sooty and smoggy cities by exporting the freedom to pollute to China and Mexico. No such thing as a free lunch.
Burning fossil fuels in perpetuity is dangerous too.
The point is, fracking can be done safe, it can be done properly. The only reason we see these hyperbolic results in places like Oklahoma is that states that tend to allow fracking just so happen to be the ones that couldn't give a rat's ass about effective and proper regulation.
We've come a long way from rope seat belts, haven't we?