“Why is it that the safest source of large-scale energy we have yet come up with is widely regarded by the public as the most dangerous?”
Part of the answer may lie in poor communication — and, particularly, an emphasis on the safety of atomic power rather than its benefits. After all, we tolerate in our society many things which are far from safe!
I would suggest the answer is largely a result of how this particular source of energy was introduced to the public consciousness. First, it was used to kill about 120,000 people in seconds. Then we treated atomic energy, and especially its radioactive bi product as almost a toy. Indeed radioactive toys were made and sold:
Then we used radioactive products in consumer products like lipstick and suppositories:
Some of us are old enough to remember the gadgets that were available until the 70’s that used x-rays (?) to help your shoe salesman fit your shoes better.
Then top it off with the handful of serious accidents at nuclear power plants, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents and you have a situation where people simply don’t trust the energy source.
Sure you want cheap electricity, but only if the nuclear power plant is far, far away from your backyard.
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Good points @wandrson
Also, the quote stating the safest source of LARGE-SCALE energy could be misleading in it’s specificity. As I doubt we would call Nuclear Energy the safest source of energy period.
I’m also not sure of the definition of large scale energy, as it could be a category that only incubuses Nuclear Energy. Which would change the meaning of the quote to something like “Your my favorite Dad, your also my only Dad, but your still my favorite!”
Thanks for sharing the quote @publius, I apologize if you were looking for responses like Hoo-Rah and You Go Boy! I appreciate your post and hope it leads to a fun conversation to follow.
I don’t have the references, but I believe it has been documented that the Russians ran psyops with an objective to convince the US population that nuclear energy is unsafe.
Lets also not forget the issue of the proper disposal of atomic energy byproducts. The current solution is to encase it and store it somewhere underground. Who wants this stuff in the neighborhood?
The real answer is efficient solar right? If every rooftop had solar wouldn’t that almost solve the energy needs for the US?
I have heard claims about that, but I have also heard claims that such calculations don’t include the energy needed to actually produce the solar panels. Which is substantial.
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It’s all depends on perspective. I remember watching a video that the deaths related to energy production. Nuclear was by far the lowest in that video. Yes there certainly is an issue of disposal, which nobody wants in their backyard. This day in age nobody wants anything in their backyard. The exide battery plant in Frisco is the perfect example. I personally have no issues with nuclear. A lot of the articles I’ve read was that there are better sources of nuclear but the AEC & the public doesn’t seem to want to explore them.
By the way, what ever happened to the the thin film solar that was supposed to be coming out several years ago?
All the solar and wind items rely on copious amounts of rare earths for various components in them. No one ever talks about the massive mining operations needed … which environmentalists oppose - yet fail to point out where they will get the needed materials. Oh and wind power is a killer of birds, beautiful vistas, etc.
Even LiPo batteries require mucho mining,.
I personally like nuclear as a resource: minimal mining for energy produced, virtually zero CO2 emissions, Mercury, etc. Disposal needs to be addressed - we had a solution that nearly finished being built but shut down and banned from use.
another ‘tin foil hat’ thing to pursue is if oil producing countries are so backing the green movement they stifle nuclear power and anything else that keeps them from selling us oil.
lets hope the Indians get thorium reactors to work. its more plentiful than lead, its not used much industrially.
I highly recommend watching Pandora’s Promise. It’s on netflix streaming service among others. My favorite quotes from the movie are:
The problem with all the proponents of renewable energy is I think none of them own a calculator
And
I didn’t realize that by protesting against Nuclear power plants I was voting for coal power plants
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I watched that sucker about a year ago & follow their social media links.
If designs such as travelling-wave ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor ) catch on, there will not be as much of a severe waste disposal problem.
A large part of the high cost of nuclear power remains that each plant is essentially custom designs instead of using a standardized blueprint.
As far as NIMBY goes, if the amount charged for electrical power is reduced or even eliminated within a specified radius of a plant, there may be communities begging to host one.
I just don’t see that happening in the US any time in the near future.
Most do not realize that leaving spent fuel in casks next to the reactors was not a lack of planning but an intentional part of the original plan in the 1950s. The original plan included development of replacement reactors that would use the spent fuel from the original LWR designs reducing the waste issue to a manageable level. In addition to the TWR reactor mentioned above there is also the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor design that can burn existing spent fuel leaving relatively safe byproducts. A quote from this Discovery.com article:
The reactor still makes waste, but what comes out is radioactive for only 300 years, as opposed to millennia.
Some would argue that environmentalists and their scare tactics since the 1970s are directly to blame for the current waste issue and all the evils of the Yucca Mountain disposal plan. It was never meant to work this way. You might recall that President Obama came out in support of renewed nuclear power research at the beginning of his 1st term. He was immediately shot down by environmentalists and subsequently ran away from the topic. Without that funding we really are left with no workable plan to support our power needs other than more natural gas and coal fired plants. We are also left with thousands of radioactive “monuments” adorning our aging and soon to be too expensive to operate nuclear power plants.
I think it is more of a case of good communication of lies.
- Coal (world average) 161 (26% of world energy, 50% of electricity)
- Coal (China) 278
- Coal (USA) 15
- Oil 36 (36% of world energy)
- Natural Gas 4 (21% of world energy)
- Biofuel/Biomass 12
- Peat 12
- Solar (rooftop) 0.44 (less than 0.1% of world energy)
- Wind 0.15 (less than 1% of world energy)
- Hydro 1.4 (2.2% of world energy, but 0.1 if remove one horrific accident)
- Nuclear 0.04 (5.9% of world energy)
If an oilfield worker dies in an accident it’s an everyday statistic; if someone dies as a result of a rare nuclear disaster it’s a tragedy because nuclear.
This is true for a number of thin-film solar cells - CdTe and CIGS - but not for more common crystalline silicon.
As for wind turbines - rare earths are used everywhere because they’re so damned useful. Much like the outcry over nickel mining for the NiMH batteries in earlier-generation hybrid cars, other common uses outstrip the outcry bafflingly focused on all things “green”.
[quote=“Photomancer, post:8, topic:9262”]
Oh and wind power is a killer of birds, [/quote]
So do skyscrapers, picture windows, and domestic cats - generally in greater numbers. The first couple generations of wind turbines with rapidly-spinning blades, lattice towers, and being numerous since they were small were indeed tremendous hazards to birds. Modern towers spinning slowly at ~20 RPM (far easier to see and avoid) on monopole towers (nowhere to perch as opposed to lattice towers) are far less of a hazard.
What almost no one is crying about is how wind turbines continue to slaughter bats.
So do power lines, billboards, and plenty of other human activities.
The cost of living in an industrial society is mining. I’m less worried about mining kilotons of lithium that lives reasonably long working lives and can be recycled as opposed than the megatons of iron, oil, coal, etc; the fuel is obviously single-use, but so is much of the iron as well.
We should instead transition to reactors more amenable to reprocessing/breeding the fuel so as to extract more energy from the fuel and do away with the need to store long half-life elements for periods of time longer than human history.
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I just have to point out that while 20RPM sounds pretty mundane, the tips of those blades will be moving up to ~180mph (miles per hour). Here’s a calculator and an article.
Back to the scheduled nuclear discussion. 
The problem with nuclear is that the risk*consequences is much heavier on the consequences side of the formula than other forms of energy generation. So far we have Fukushima and Chernobyl to look to as examples of nuclear making large areas of land completely unusable. And that is with nuclear providing 5.9% of the world’s energy.
Here’s something I see :
Radioactivity is really, really easy to detect, measure, analyze, & trace back to its source. As a result, even a meaninglessly small release of radioactive material is quantifiable & can be assigned as a responsibility to someone. Many industries get pretty much a free pass because their toxic & dangerous releases, such as benzene, are much more difficult to sniff out & trace back, even when in quantities which actually hurt people!
In place of specific replies to individual posts, a few other thoughts, for more detail on which you might refer to a Web site I built, or any number of other good publicly-available resources.
The “waste problem” is more than a little exaggerated. If the average American were to get all his energy, including for transportation, & the embodied energy of food & manufactured goods, from current-technology nuclear reactors, it would take more than 70 years for his portion of spent fuel to fill a standard drinking glass. That’s easy to calculate : take an average primary-energy equivalent power of 10 kW, a typical burn-up of 45 megawatt-days (of heat) per kilogram of enriched fuel, & the density of uranium dioxide, roughly 11 times that of water. The actual waste products are only about 5% of that, & can be converted into various kinds of ceramics ; the remainder is uranium & plutonium which can be reused inefficiently in current reactors, or efficiently in other types of reactors designed for the purpose. Since the vast majority of the activity dies away in a few years, finding space for such a tiny amount of material isn’t very difficult. I’d gladly accept a spent-fuel cask in my back yard, if it came down to it, because the likelihood of something going wrong is minuscule, & the consequences aren’t that great, either.
As a friend of mine says, who lives next to the rail line which would be used to take spent fuel to Yucca Mountain if we were actually doing that, she’d far rather have a nuclear flask car parked across the street from her house than the un-odorized LPG tanker which sits there a lot of the time, waiting to be moved to the insulation plant down the way. If, in some unimaginable circumstance, the flask were to crack, she could detect it easily, & simply walk until the inverse-square law made her safe. With the LPG, she might not know there was a leak until the explosion happened!
Rare earths are funny. These metallic elements aren’t “rare” in the sense of being particularly scarce, but they are very laborious to separate from each other. The way this is done in China is very dirty, although cleaner ways are known in the art. One of the things stopping production in America, which has substantial deposits of monazite, is that they are always associated with thorium, a nuclear fuel, and as a result, rare-earth mining & milling is treated as part of the nuclear industry, which is subject to occupational health & safety standards literally orders of magnitude stricter than any other industry. What really amuses me is a passage in a book I have on nuclear fuels from the 1950s, in which the author supposes that, if thorium is used on a large scale, some method of extracting it without separating the rare earths will have to be devised, since that’s expensive, & there’s no possible demand for such a quantity of those metals!
The idea of “environmental” groups as greenwashers or shills for the petro-fuel industry is far from being a tin-foil hat theory. Here’s one very definite case : the campaign against the Shoreham nuclear power plant near New York, propagated, like that against Indian Point, by totally baseless claims about evacuation in case of an accident. Just look at that leaflet. Even to this day, most of the electricity & heat on Long Island comes from burning oil. If you look at where, say, “green energy guru” Amory Lovins gets his money, names like Exxon-Mobil are near the top of the list. How did environmentalists become at least tacit apologists for fossil fuels, when the Sierra Club headed into the 1960s with the slogan “atoms not dams”? The answer, as usual, is complicated.
The “product of risk & consequences” is easy to mis-estimate. Oil refinery fires & explosions in the Houston metro area alone kill more people every year than the global nuclear power industry. There has never been an event on the scale of Bhopal. Chernobyl was perhaps comparable to Aberfan. Helen Caldicott’s claim that Fukushima would require evacuating the entire Northern hemisphere has to be classed with delusional rantings. I’ve rarely seen an argument against the peaceful uses of atomic energy which doesn’t rely heavily on gross misstatements of scientific fact, but she takes the cake.
Land taken out of use, likewise — think about the kinds of scars left on the landscape by coal mines, for instance. Or, at least as tellingly, think about the land requirements of solar (which takes land completely away from other uses) or wind (which limits the possible uses) installations. To actually replace the power generated by Fukushima Dai-Ichi would probably require a larger land area than the maximum extent of the evacuation zone! (Certainly larger than the present extent, since most of that land has been cleared for re-occupation.)
Moreover, most of the Fukushima evacuees would have been, according to evaluation by such authoritative bodies as the WHO & UNSCEAR, better off to stay where they were, & of the land which is still under exclusion orders, most of it is as a result of an arbitrary reduction in the radiation standards, which were already set on the assumption of avoiding any detectible level of harm to someone who ate nothing but local food. Anyone with the impression that the exclusion zone is any form of “wasteland” need not be concerned. Nature is thriving. —Ben Heard
Indeed, much of the Chernobyl exclusion zone is perfectly habitable, but due to the nature of what happened there, chunks of solid material were blown out of the reactor to rain down on the surrounding area. Although most of that is confined to the few hectares immediately around the plant, there are little “hot spots” here & there. The isotope of greatest concern is caesium-137, with a half-life of about 30 years, so by doing absolutely nothing, after 300 years the activity will have died away to essentially zero. Considering that this zone has become the finest wildlife preserve in Europe, with even Przewalski horses to be found there,
It’s been said, with good reason, that nuclear is safer when it goes badly wrong than coal is when it goes right.
For an impartial evaluation of energy options, something called Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air, by the late David McKay, FRS, is invaluable. He’s noted for saying “I didn’t mean to be pro-nuclear, I’m just pro-arithmetic.”
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