Nuclear energy is used a lot less than coal and kills a lot less than coal. Let's see how it goes when reactors replace power generation in third world with poor safety record and in upcoming warzones.
We nerds love technology and this is really the main reason for strong pro-nuclear sentiment in places like HN. Health effects or emissions footprint have little to do with it.
I think you imagine that a nuclear power plant would explode like a nuclear bomb, that is not the case. The fuel used is not the same as in the one in bombs either so you can't put some masks on and rob the nuclear plant.
> you are assuming that all reactors have failure modes of an RBMK reactor
All reactors have failure modes, no? Any reactor that depends on people for the continued safe operation should include the assumption that incompetent and malicious people will eventually take control.
That's not unique to nuclear power, but a lot less can go wrong if an evil person gets control of a wind turbine.
That said, I'd still vote for a politician that proposed building new nuclear power plants.
>All reactors have failure modes, no? Any reactor that depends on people for the continued safe operation should include the assumption that incompetent and malicious people will eventually take control.
There are designs to build reactors that can handle the case where no humans,electricity, water are present anymore, so we could build new safe reactors.
The bad people argument, the fuel in power reactors is not the same as the one in bombs, for bombs you need more "rich" Uranium, so the terrorists that would enter inside a safe reactor would have to have some super expertise to extract teh fuel and somehow make it a mass distruction weapon. You can have similar issues with chemical plants, those are not as protected and an explosion in such a chemical plant could do a lot of damage as we seen when accidents happen, or exploding a water dam, or putting poison in water... there are many bad scenarios you can imagine some evil terrorists could do
Anything with a serious gradient of energy can catastrophically fail. That's the thermodynamic nature of the things.
You can't have a completely safe power plant, period. You certainly can have one where you don't know a certain failure mode exists. For example RBMK prior to 1986, or a pebble bed reactor prior to THTR-300 incident.
And my war zone remark wasn't about fuel theft, but more likely things. Like dropping a buster bomb onto a live reactor.
I will need to research this, so if you can point me to the resource that made you have this opinion please share it with me, Thanks
I would imagine you can design a system that would have a fail safe, like when temperature gets to high it would melt a specific component and kickstarting a physical process that you could not stop.
>buster bombs
Those can also be dropped on chemical plants, water dams, fuel depos , it is not like the nuclear power plant would explode from a conventional bomb, I am not a physicist but I think it needs tons of neutrons to get critical so you would need maybe to drop a nuclear bomb on a nuclear plant so it is silly IMO, but if I am wrong link me reliable material.
I think the point is that operating power reactors have high inventories of dangerously radioactive fission products in the core. Under normal circumstances that is safe because containment is designed for normal operation and foreseeable natural disasters, so the fission products don't get into the biosphere. But nuclear reactor containments are not designed to survive attack with heavy weapons. Deliberate attack could cause catastrophic release of dangerously radioactive materials.
It's true that large hydroelectric dams have the same problem. If some party decides to commit a war crime and destroy the dam you live downriver of, it could be catastrophic. The same consideration doesn't apply with large fossil fueled or wind/solar facilities because they have a much smaller danger radius if destroyed by heavy weapons.
People fighting against the Syrian government blew up a large natural gas facility during the civil war. If Syria generated power from nuclear reactors instead of gas, would the rebels have declined to destroy a reactor? It would certainly have been a war crime. But the Syrian civil war already saw many war crimes.
I don't think that any organized military would deliberately destroy live reactors. There's always a chance for accidents. "Pilot visually confirmed the target, mistaking the nuclear cooling towers for the designated coal plant's cooling towers."
I don't mean that people should eschew nuclear power because of what might happen in extraordinary wartime circumstances. But it is possible to release large quantities of dangerous fission products from a reactor facility just by attacking it with conventional high explosive weapons.
>I don't think that any organized military would deliberately destroy live reactors.
I am not sure about that, US dropped actual nuclear bombs and even today there are many that excuse this so I think that in a war US would bomb not only bridges,factories,coal plants but they would also bomb nuclear plants and there will be no significant criticism.
I agree that there are risks and waste from nuclear, my main issue is that for some reasons coal plants have larger damage to the environment and population. My opinion is that we should not rush on building new nuclear plants but finish the ones that are already built, use them to full capacity , invest into research for the safer nuclear versions.
I would not like to have a nuclear plant near my house, but if you have to chose between a coal plant that is polluting and radiating all the time is running and a new nuclear plant design that it would fail only in super rare events (there are designs that would be safe even if the cooling system fails) then I definitely don't want the coal plant.
Btw nuclear is used in medicine, there are labs that use radioactive materials, I think the number of this would grow and it may end up in countries you don't trust but you can't stop progress,
Natural gas burns quite cleanly. There's a number of European nations that don't have a single active coal power plant and they get by somehow.
The reason nuclear crowd loves to focus on coal is it's the worst case conventional technology and hence the easiest to argue against. The arguments against hydro, wind or NG are a lot less convincing.
Burning gas still creates CO2, it may be cleaner then coal.
Ideally we would not have to chose and we can close all coal,gas and nuclear plants and replace them with renewable, if this is not possible then we should maybe use rationality and not emotions to dictate priorities. This means closing or reducing coal usage, keeping and using nuclear at full capacity .
so if they're at worst, both equal, at best, one that releases a small-size (compared to earth) contamination zone every 3 decades while the other incrementally worsens the climate and atmosphere everywhere, why are you arguing in favor of the worse option?
You failed to understand the point the person made above, there are equal only in the rare case that nuclear fails.
So you have nuclear plant that produces no CO2 and could produce radiation in a rare event , and you have a coal plant that produces CO2, other pollution in the smoke and radiation 100% of the time, similar with gas and other fossil fuels.
Honestly if you have 2 choices , live near the coal plant and it's smoke and radiation or live near a nuclear plant that will fail only of a super rare earthquake what do you chose ? Do you chose 100% harm vs 0.1(number I invented) harm ?
We nerds love technology and this is really the main reason for strong pro-nuclear sentiment in places like HN. Health effects or emissions footprint have little to do with it.