Comment by littlecranky67 8 hours ago
Edge cases don't count?
The truth is, all reactors ever built were considered safe at their time with whatever definition of safe. No one builds unsafe reactors. Yet they turned out not to be safe.
Those figures seem very optimistic. Uranium miners die early, often of horrific cancers.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33232447/
But the bottom line is that renewable costs are trending down, hard and fast, battery tech is just getting started, and development time for wind and solar is comparatively fast.
Future nuke costs at this point are speculative, development time is very slow, and even if new reactors were commissioned tomorrow, by the time they came online it's very, very likely solar and wind + storage would make them uneconomic.
IMO the attachment to nukes is completely irrational. There are obvious economic downsides, no obvious economic benefits - and that's just the money side.
Again I don't know why people do this framing that its either renewables or nuclear. We can and should develop and have both - they provide different energy products to the grid. Solar and storage ARE NOT viable at scale for 99.99% uptime requirements or industrial facilities that are in remote locations.
Nuclear is up against against nat gas, diesel or coal (in the rare states that still have coal power plants) for the most part for "baseload" or "firm" power.
Nuclear is by far the most advanced technology that we have ever developped on the planet at this point. Fusion is just 10 years away (every ten years) ;)
Thanks for the reply! I think you're arguing with the wrong person in the second half, though. I agree that renewables could potentially be more economically viable than nuclear power[1]. My reply was disputing the "people can die from nuclear therefore we should never use nuclear" argument, not arguing about economic viability. Also I think that broadly claiming that your opposition is "completely irrational" is not a very tactical rhetorical move.
[1]: although since you're basing your claims on the speculative future state of solar technology 10 years in the future, I don't see why the same shouldn't apply to the speculative future state of nuclear power, but that's besides the point
Apart from the deaths from workers falling off the roof or from wind turbine towers (though these might be the only type of deaths included in these figures):
If mining deaths are included, coal, oil, gas and uranium probably do not look favorable at all, but renewables aren't perfectly safe either: there was a bridge collapse at a copper/cobalt mine in Congo two months ago that killed 32. Solar and wind use more copper per energy unit than other technologies, and solar and wind indirectly require battery technology. Lithium batteries contain lithium and cobalt. (Lithium mining seems relative safe, but 70% of cobalt is mined in Congo, which is known for artisanal mining, and the above-mentioned accident indeed seemed to happen at such a mine.) Wind, especially off-shore wind uses more concrete and steel than other power generation technologies (hydro seems like it'd use a lot too?), which could be explored too. (Course, these metals are recyclable, so you only mine them once.)
Battery factories also produce deaths sometimes, e.g. recently https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwaseong_battery_factory_fire, and batteries in operation as well as discarded batteries sometimes produce deaths too.
They count as a different type of failure.
We knew what to do but screwed up hard is a operational failure and we didn't plan for it is a design/planning failure.
The people who are hurt might not care, but understanding the root cause is important to address them.
> Edge cases don't count?
Constrained edge cases are fine. Particularly when contrasted with coal and natural gas, which are, in practice, what everyone is competing against in America.
Nothing is ever perfectly safe and a lack of perfect absolute safety is not a valid objection. All sources of power have associated risks, even renewables. Wind power has 0.04 deaths per terawatt hour and solar has 0.02 [1]. Nuclear power has 0.03 deaths per terawatt hour (safer than wind), and it's worth noting that almost all of those are from Chernobyl, which was considered unsafe even at the time (they knew about the positive void coefficient). I'm not arguing that nuclear power is perfect, mainly because it isn't. But it's not like all other sources of power are idyllic havens of safety. There are always tradeoffs.
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy