You say the Chernobyl failure mode is "huge", but I would argue the opposite. If you compare the number of deaths across types of energy, nuclear is only slightly higher than solar/wind (about 2x) but when compared to deaths due to fossil fuel it's effectively zero. The big picture must be kept in mind. The other thing to note is that nuclear reactor design has improved a lot since Chernobyl, so it's not honest to say that the probability of that incident occurring again hasn't declined substantially. You can also build the plant far away from cities and send the power via lines fairly efficiently, if you must reduce an extremely small risk to a zero risk situation.
I agree with you in general, but I think the massive failure mode is less about deaths and more about making large swaths of land in the world entirely uninhabitable by humans.
I also agree the probability is way lower now, but the failure mode is huge nonetheless.
> I think the massive failure mode is less about deaths and more about making large swaths of land in the world entirely uninhabitable by humans.
Are you talking about the land required by solar/wind generation? I wouldn't say it makes it uninhabitable by humans, but I wouldn't want to live under a big turbine.
I'm talking about the failure mode of a nuclear plant exploding.
Windmills and solar farms can be dismantled and moved. Nuclear plants, once a catastrophic failure happens, infect all the land around them for many miles and there is ~nothing you an do about it. See: Chernobyl.
That said, this is extremely unlikely given everything we know now and how technology has progressed. But the 'uninhabitable wasteland' is the failure mode people are worried about.
In fear of making small area's of land uninhabitable by humans for a short period of time, we are making the entire planet uninhabitable by humans permanently.
don't have the numbers on hand, but if you compare energy output per acres, wind/solar farms are no competition to nuclear. I wonder what those numbers look like once you amortize those failure modes.
Many people live in the exclusion zone just fine. Their rates of cancer are not higher then anywhere else. Much of that area could be inhabited just fine.
And again, that's like saying 'Early Zepplins destroyed to much stuff we can never use airplanes again' as if the reactors there are in any way comparable to modern reactors.
This would be news to me! Sources please? I'd love to learn more about that.
Also, your analogy doesn't hold; the failure mode of 'early zeppelins' or pretty much any other technology is very temporary. Nuclear fallout is very long.
I agree technology has gotten better. To be clear, I think we should build more nuclear plants.
But it is false to state that the failure modes of wind/solar and nuclear failures are ~equivalent.
Actually look into modern GenIV reactors and try to come up with scenarios where a large numbers of people die. Its basically impossible. Maybe if you use multiple terrorists and multiple natural catastrophes in a coordinated you might get somewhere.
Any practical failure mode would not leave the exclusion zone of the plant. And even those are incredibly unlikely.
The thing is there is simply nothing that convince you otherwise. If you believe the only relevant argument is the very maximum damage possible no matter the circumstance then I lost the debate. The question to me is what is the practical danger and how many people would die if you powered a whole country of 300 million people with a technology.
With GenIV nuclear plants you could power 300 million people for 100 years and the expect times you would have a Chernobyl style event would still be far below 1. The expect number of people to die would be far smaller then wind as well. If you include home solar, it would be less as well. Maybe centralized solar is comparable.
Edit: You can lots of articles and reporting on them. Its mostly people who just never left. The area is depopulating as people die of old age and there is no migration to the area.
I think a more accurate comparison would be number of deaths per unit of electricity generated. Yes, in absolute numbers, there have been more deaths due to fossil fuel burning, but we've also generated a hell of a lot more electricity by burning fossil fuels then we have anything else.
I suspect nuclear will still come out as being safer, but I think we should be a bit more rigorous with how we do comparisons.
I don't believe an honest person can look at that chart and think nuclear safety is a a real problem, especially since the majority of those nuclear deaths were with old reactor designs. It seems like one of those misplaced, irrational fears like fear of flying.
There is that, but we KNOW what is going to happen with climate change. People are not going to change their ways before it's too late. We LOVE energy, and upcoming countries are only going to use more fossil fuel and it's going to get worse. Unless there is a 10x increase in our capabilities in renewables in the next 10 years we're done.
A fair point, but I feel that we are making good progress towards being able to solve the energy supply without nuclear.
If we develop solar and wind (and other things such as battery banks, pumped storage etc) to a point where installations are cheap, well known and reliable enough, then developing nations might choose to use those before investing heavily in fossils.
Your point is that there is a long tail risk which exists which might not show up in the historical data. I think this is wrong because Chernobyl is that tail risk and it is already inside the data, and moreover the odds of that tail risk happening again have declined and so it's exaggerated.
A better analogy is the stock market, where the GFC and the great depression are tail risks that are already inside the data. Or data on pedestrian fatalities across an entire country, where tail risks are represented due to law of large numbers across many people.
If you think building modern reactor designs away from cities presents a bigger tail risk than Chernobyl, you're going to have to outline how that is a plausible situation rather than going for analogies.
I understand your argument but disagree about Chernobyl being the tall risk.
This is basically the the same logical errer again, Chernobyl is only the worst incident that has happened /so far/.
It is well documented that Chernobyl itself could easily have been much worse, and the real tall risk is something like a ”dirty” bomb made possible by negligent handling of radioactive materials.
There are several known incidents where discarded radioactive materials have killed people and contaminated buildings, this happens regularly even without malicious intent.
> This is basically the the same logical errer again
It's not necessarily a logical error. Extreme value theory should be the default tool for understanding tail risks (e.g. earthquake magnitude), unless we have good theoretical/logical reasons to depart from an understanding that's mostly informed by historical data.
Nuclear weapons are where I agree with your perspective. The tail risk is significantly larger than what is present in historical data, and attempts to understand this risk by looking at historical data are flawed.
Nuclear energy, like earthquake magnitude, is where I disagree with your perspective, unless you can present a coherent rationale about why nuclear power tail risk is drastically underestimated by the historical data, especially after taking into consideration modern plant designs which are safer than Chernobyl + the possibility of building them in the desert with nobody nearby.
Hey first of all thanks for the constructive replies, much appreciated!
"Attempts to understand this risk by looking at historical data are flawed" is a good summary of my main point, you got it. Basically I think we can't ignore the possibility of large incidents just because they haven't happened yet.
We can extrapolate from known small incidents, some of which are listed on wikipedia:
Other incidents mentioned without separate stories include radioactive waste finding its way into road pavement, apartment building materials (hundreds of contaminated flats, nobody found out for years).
Incidents such as these have killed many people over several decades in many countries, and that's just through sheer negligence. What if someone adds malice to the mix?
That's actually my main concern about nuclear power, not the safety of the reactors.
But since you mentioned building them in a desert in order to be safe I feel the need to mention my perspective there too. First of all, Chernobyl had 4 reactors and only one exploded, thanks to heroic effort. (Meaning it could at the very least have been 4x worse than it was).
The event was actually discovered in the west by sensors in Sweden, which is very far away. Fallout from Chernobyl made certain grazing animals surpass legal radiation levels for over 30 years (and counting) in areas as remote as Lapland and Bavaria.
To put the distances in perspective if you are American, it means that a similar event as Chernobyl taking place in Florida would make pigs from Texas and Caribou from Ontario be unsuitable for human consumption, for many decades.
So distance does not really help. In order to be safe by putting power plants in a desert, the USA would basically need to put it's reactors in the Sahara.
The safest place for a reactor would be inside a very stable and peaceful country with a very high level of mental health in the entire population. Maybe Switzerland?
I'm not saying we shouldn't even consider it under any circumstance, but if there's any other option (which I believe) then that option is probably preferable.
Let's take a step back. What about molten salt reactors? I feel like it is a mistake to think future nuclear reactors have the same safety profile as old ones when thinking about tail risks.
Better reactor designs that can’t basically self-combust through accidents or operational errors are an improvement of course, but I’m not aware of any design that eliminates the need to produce relatively large quantities of waste. That in itself poses a large risk.
Ok but what is the tail risk here. Can you outline a series of causal steps where a molten salt reactor will cause more than 100,000 to 500,000 deaths? If you're just saying that perhaps maybe there will be 2,000 deaths, well that's still an incredible safety profile compared to the number of deaths caused by other energy sources.
Sure - Creating the fuel for molten salt reactors requires a series of steps where highly radioactive materials will have to be handled, stored, transported and controlled by humans.
As shown with the examples given earlier (which are just a few of many), such situations will inevitably provide opportunity for the materials to be lost or stolen. (IAEA has documented 18 cases of stolen radioactive elements from various sites that handle radioactive materials).
One of the elements needed for molten salt reactor fuels is plutonium. 500 grams of plutonium is estimated to be enough to kill up to 2 million people by conservative estimates.
Presumably you will need more than 500 grams regularly to run a salt reactor, so any number of malicious methods can kill 100 000 to 500 000 people, if someone gets their hands on even small amounts of plutonium.
I think that when people reach the conclusion that the benefits of nuclear outweigh the downsides it is usually because they haven't really considered the real downsides fully. The benefits are huge, to be sure, and tempting.
Now that being said - if a reactor design appears that would significantly /reduce/ the amount of dangerous materials that have already been created, and not require any more of it to be created, I think it would be a good idea to build such a reactor to get rid of the waste we already have.
Speaking of molten salt, I find it more interesting as a concept for energy storage. Solar power can superheat salt and use it to genereate energy even at night. A solar power plant in Spain has generated electricity continously (day and night) for over a month using this technology.
I believe that we have an abundance of very promising - sometimes already proven - technologies that will let us generate stable electricity from intermittent, clean sources with comparatively insignificant risk to human lives.
