Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Asks: Do You Support Nuclear Energy? (gallup.com)
Reader mdsolar writes that for the first time a majority of Americans have told Gallup they oppose nuclear energy. Support peaked at 62% in 2010, but "as Americans have paid less at the pump, their level of worry about the nation's energy situation has dropped to 15-year-low levels," Gallup reports. Their latest poll found 44% of respondents still supported nuclear energy, while 54% opposed it, a trend which could eventually affect the future of nuclear power. The New York Times reports that operating licenses will expire for 36 of America's 99 reactors between 2029 and 2035. What do you think? How strongly do you support (or oppose) generating electricity with nuclear energy?
If you're asking for a blanket condemnation or endorsement of nuclear power, all I can say is, "it depends".
It depends on what specifically you're proposing to build, how you specifically plan to manage and monitor it, and how you specifically intend to decommission them when they're at the end of their usefulness.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Oh, look, another anti-nuclear story from mdsolar. @EditorDavid - are youbnew here?
Seriously folks, the only way to stop these demagogues is if we only ever post meta anti-story comments and keep the engagement minimal on these, so the story becomes unprofitable. If you argue the issue, it empowers mdsolar by encouraging the staff to post his crap.
Gallup interprets this as being about better alternatives.
Yes.
Unless we figure out fusion power quickly (which I'm doubtful of), fission power, combined with existing hydro and thermal solar is our best bet for stable baseline power in this country.
Renewables like PD solar and wind power, as well as power storage solutions, are best left to cover demand peaks.
The problem is that so few people know anything more than "nuclear = bomb" and "radiation will kill you", that it's created this vast climate of FUD around nuclear power.
And all they say when you mention nuclear power is "Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima".
None of these were failures intrinsic to the reactor.
Chernobyl: Idiots disabling safety equipment and fucking around with the reactor.
TMI: Human error compounded by bad control indicators.
Fukushima: A company cheaping out and not listening to civil engineering with regards to a sea wall meant to stave off large waves.
We're also talking about reactors based on decades-old technology and Rube Goldberg systems to stave off every possible problem an engineer could envision.
Rather than just designing a reactor with a default state of "off".
More modern reactor designs take this sort of thing into account.
Additionally, people gripe about the amount of nuclear waste being produced. Never mind that most reactors based on this older technology consume, at best, 5% of the actual "fuel" in the medium (rods, pellets, etc) before the medium is removed from the reactor.
With reprocessing, that fuel can continue to be used for extended periods of time. Resulting in far less long-lived waste, and the remainder being waste that is only being radioactive in the short term.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Meaning I'm fine with it existing, but don't have any particularly romantic notions about it either.
Nuclear power necessarily comes with a long list of downsides. The enormous expense of building a powerplant, the amount of care that needs to be exercised to properly run it, the problem with waste disposal, the problem with that a dismantled powerplant still needs maintenance, the problem that disaster preparation is absolutely essential, the problem that the critical parts of the infrastructure are so highly radioactive it's not even possible to have a camera in them, which means any work on that is enormously expensive...
And then there's the problem of that if things go wrong it causes the evacuation of a huge amount of the population. Now I know this isn't instant death of course, but it still means that accidents are enormously expensive and insurance is difficult.
Then there is that all of this critically depends on people, who in many cases have reasons to cut corners in dangerous places.
Once you take all of that into account, I think it becomes considerably less amazing than it is in theory. IMO, current nuclear power is something that will go away eventually. Many of its downsides aren't going anywhere, so it may well happen that we'll find a way to run a grid purely on solar and wind power, and just accept the downsides of that in exchange for not having to deal with radioactivity.
That said, I'm all for improving the tech as far as possible and looking into thorium and of course fusion research.
As safe as possible.
You realize there are roughly 100 nuclear reactors going in the US. And the majority of them have had not one major safety issue in their entire lifespan right?
And that newer reactor technologies are far simpler and have a default state of "off".
Adding the kind of safety precautions you require for current solid-fuel reactors to such devices is largely pointless.
And, believe it or not, physical security for such plants is usually not that expensive.
The expense in nuclear power comes from the hostile regulatory environment that's been created. And all the NIMBY legal challenges brought up for each and every reactor commissioned.
People need to stop thinking about nuclear reactors as bombs.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
how can you support something you don't understand, 95% of the population (to be generous) doesn't have the intellectual background to understand it...
do you support nuclear research? As it is, there are numerous aging nuclear plants, and not really much to replace them with except theoretical models and tired designs.
The worst part about the anti-nuke crowd is that they have effectively shuttered research, which means several plants are operating well beyond their intended lifespan. Even if you support going 100% wind and solar, it will have to be implemented piecemeal, which means at least some new nuclear plants will have to bridge the gap. Would you prefer something modern like a pebble-bed reactor, or something based on a 70s design like Watts Bar 1?
I would love to see lots more focus on nucleair energy for multiple reasons. First, it can be a safe and clean energy source for many years to come (think Thorium, MSR). The 'oh it will blow up' folks are hampering progress with outdated arguments. Most current power plants are the Ford Model T of designs. If their arguments would have been lodged against cars then we'd still be driving those. Modern nucleair reactors are inherently safe and can fix many of the waste issues we have from outdated installations today.
Second is removing the dependency on fossil fuels. Not only will this have positive environmental effects, it will cause a paradigm shift in geo politics. Can you imagine what happens to the Middle East if their stronghold on oil supply becomes irrelevant? When organisations such as Al Quaida and IS see their money supply dry up? It will be a much, much better world for it.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Ask me instead if I support yet another of mdsolar's endless anti-nuclear, pro-solar postings to Slashdot.
I get it, mdsolar. Nuclear = BAD! Solar = GOOD! Except for the fact that the sun is a giant nuclear reactor that kills tens of thousands of people every year from radiation-induced cancers. But hey, never let facts get in the way of anti-nuclear diatribes.
turns out most people are too uneducated
That's kinda the problem. The public is so uneducated that they make it hard to fund nuclear, which leads to engineers becoming less educated as old-timers retire and universities shut down their nuclear engineering programs because nuclear engineers can't find jobs (unless they go into the Navy, or are some of the very very few that make it into Los Alamos).
So, nuclear gets caught in a Catch-22 where it doesn't get enough funding to support the advancement of technology that would make it safe and reliable enough to compete. Instead, our collective knowledge of nuclear slips as, again, old-timers retire and youngsters pursue something more likely to pay those hideous education loans.
It's good that the stars have aligned to invest R&D into solar and wind. But it's not a good thing to allow nuclear to slip away... there's a lot of research yet to be done, with potentially great payoffs, if it wasn't so politicized by way of a public where a high-school education is becoming more and more worthless, again because of politics. A dumb electorate can be convinced of anything, like how supersonic transport causes skin cancer, and that was back in 1975. Today, politicians earn their pork-fat living by dumbing down science education, I figure to better guarantee re-election by the time the kids turn 21. These are the people who'll turn on Fox News and see "nuclear... bad ; fossil fuel subsidies... good", all because of fancy wine and caviar shared between the Koch brothers and Roger Ailes on a yacht in the Mediterranean.
The problem with nuclear is it requires smart people not only for design and build-out, but also for for day-to-day operation and maintenance. A poorly educated public is bad for all of this. But fail to keep educating and innovating in this technology, and it slips away (or goes overseas), and that sucks for us all.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
The biggest problem is that we keep running old nuclear plants well past their designed lifetime instead of building new, safer ones and shutting down the older ones. People are afraid of nukes, so they oppose new plants, and therefore we actually increase the risk by extending the old plants.
An even better "better question" is, "Why is the current nuclear industry eating its seed corn?"
Almost all existing nuclear power plants consume Uranium-235. Once it is gone, it will be exponentially more difficult to manufacture Plutonium 239 from U-238, and U-233 from Thorium 232, than it is currently easy to make those other fissionable substances from vastly-more-common resources. If one is going to support fission power, then one must either support breeder reactors, or recognize that fission power for civilization will have a rather short lifespan, just like fossil-fuel power for civilization is having a short lifespan.
If one is going to support nuclear power for the long term, then my personal vote is that we need fusion reactors even more than we need fission reactors. Fusion reactors are expected to produce only a fraction of the radwaste that fission reactors produce, be less risky to operate, cannot be a good source of materials for making terror weapons, and have much-less-expensive fuel costs, for just four reasons why.
Jimmy Carter, chief f the fear mangers. He killed breeders and reprocessing by imperial decree.
This. Thisthisthis. All the people whining about not liking nuclear power because it's unsafe ARE THE SAME PEOPLE ENSURING IT STAYS UNSAFE. Get over yourself, let the next gen reactors be built and your complaints practically disappear. The only reason we're still running the shitty old reactors is because you won't let us build new ones!
Nuclear energy (from fission) has a very large number of disadvantages. Here are just a few:
- It's inherently and obviously risky --- even its greatest proponents know that, but they just choose to minimize the importance of that risk and its deadly consequences. There have been more than enough nuclear reactor disasters already, yet some people just don't learn. Even with better designs, accidents will happen from geophysical causes and through human failure, as well as by deliberate action. You can't prevent this from happening, so don't create such deadly installations (and juicy targets) in the first place.
- Radioactive waste from fission accumulates a massive liability for future generations. It forces our own chosen risk onto our descendents without giving them any choice in the matter. This is unethical even in the best of cases, but in the worst case it's downright criminal because some of those radioactive stores will unavoidably release their contents (even explosively with human help) and result in human casualties and suffering --- maybe your own descendents. Don't gamble with the lives of others.
- Nuclear energy is out of step with a world that is rapidly converting to clean, inexhaustible energy harnessed from the environment. Nuclear is not just unclean but deadly unclean, and it's very demanding on the planet's resources as well. It adds to our debt on the planet instead of reducing it.
- According to a growing number of climatologists who are witnessing first-hand the unfolding climate disaster in the Arctic and Antarctic, our existing several hundred nuclear reactors could quite possibly be the direct cause of our extinction in the decades ahead, after the indirect cause (CO2 and methane) lead to death by starvation of billions and make the world's economies collapse. Nuclear reactors can't be rapidly turned off and made non-radioactive --- the full process of decommissioning takes some 50 to 60 years as an industry average, and it takes a LOT of money. There will be no money available under conditions of economic collapse, cooling will be interrupted, and many will go into meltdown. Even if you choose to disbelieve the warnings of specialists, the risk remains. Knowing what we already know about rising sea levels and epic storms, we should not be adding to the risk.
Dr. Brice Smith of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research summarized this very well:
The whole idea of adding more nuclear power is hazardous and ill-considered, and it's also unnecessary.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I am against nuclear power for the same reason I am against the death penalty. Both require a level perfection and infallibility that humans are incapable of reaching.
You are mixing up risk with chance.
The chance to get hit by a truck into the rear of your car during 50 years might be 2%. ...
The risk you have is:
- neck injuries (with a chance of 80%?),
- total loss of the car (probably 50%?),
- death (probably 0.5%?)
- death/server injury of rear passengers (probably 50%?)
Living near a nuclear plant your chance during 50 years is that it goes boom, perhaps 0.00001%?
You risk:
- evacuation and loss of all your property (chance 100%)
- death or injury in the mass panic or evacuation (chance probably 5%?)
- contamination with server health issues (chance probably 50%?)
Even ingesting a small amount of material that is biologically 'sticky' is only a tiny risk adder
No it is not. The chance might be low. The risk if you "catch it" is extremely high, close to certain death. The only question is: do you care if you die due to cancer 50 years after such an incident caused by digesting/breathing radioactive material? Or the other question is: do you die before that because a truck hit you? Or do you die before that because you get lung cancer for no apparent reason?
Or: do you die to the same radiation exposure after 3 years already? As the time frame for cancer or if you get cancer at all, might look pretty random from the outside.
I suggest to read up what the lethal dose of e.g. plutonium is, and how it works.
In medicin they usually talk about a "50% death dose", which means: the amount of "poison" you have to give per kg weight of the subject to each subject that 50% of the subjects die.
The amount of plutonium to kill 50% of the test subjects is so incredible low, you won't believe it: go google.
What you do is wagering the chance, not the risk.
In simple words: ... the chance to lose and to win is the same. Only the payoff is higher if you win
You place 10 bucks on the number 13 in roulette: you risk 10 bucks. You have a chance of 1:37 to win 360 bucks and a chance of slightly higher than 35:37 to lose your money.
You place 1 million bucks on the number 13 instead: you risk 1 million bucks
In other words:
Both bets have exactly the same chance to win or lose.
The second bet has a much higher risk.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Risk = probability x severity, not just the latter. Do some reading.