There is a micro/modular reactor that just got approved by the US DoE for prototype testing. It's design is probably the best bet we have for striking a balance between nuclear power generation and costs. I would recommend looking up info on the project.

I'm going to refrain from turning to debate on this subject because kids take alot of energy that I just don't have atm. Go look up Kyle Hills videos on nuclear history as well as the potential future. There's also a video or two by Kurzgezagt.

Absolutely

It’s just still more of a concern than meltdowns because of how crazy safe modern nuclear designs are

And then the universe will refine the fool and give us an even more foolish one.

Never underestimate the power of stupid people, especially when they're in large groups.

If Putin does it, it means he's launched enough missiles to be seen as a world threat. At that point, he wouldn't send that many missiles to a nuclear power plant, but to a strategic objective like a city instead. Not to say that completely blowing up a nuclear plant (which are designed to survive a military attack) that close to your country doesn't seem the best choice. Journalists are often only interested in making big numbers with exaggerated news just to scare people

If he does it, it means he's launched enough missiles to be seen as a world threat. At that point, he wouldn't send that many missiles to a nuclear power plant, but to a strategic objective like a city instead. Not to say that completely blowing up a nuclear plant (which are designed to survive a military attack) that close to your country doesn't seem the best choice. Journalists are often only interested in making big numbers with exaggerated news just to scare people

Keep in mind that there has, of yet, been no actual nuclear incidents connected with the Ukraine war, only threats. Just like with nuclear weapons, nobody wants to open the Pandora's box of turning nuclear plants into military targets, because that may very well backfire on them. Russia has its own nuclear plants that it doesn't want to see sabotaged either. This doesn't mean it won't happen, of course, but the risk is much lower than you present it to be.

Besides, in a thousand years it is very likely that we will have much better technology for containing and cleaning up radioactive fallout than we do now - and what we have now is already miles ahead of what we had during Chernobyl, as was made apparent during the Fukushima incident.

The main exception to this would be if there was nuclear technology that was useless for weapons production. (Ex: I've heard a lot speculated about Thorium fitting this but I'm not well-versed in nuclear tech enough to comment on the weapons side of things).

I'm still assuming that there is an implicit or explicit but not known agreement between a number of developed countries not to pursue nuclear energy programs further.

ex: If we all solve all our energy problems with nuclear it makes it look like "Why don't we give it to the little guys," / makes it indefensible not to / still talk about climate change. But we don't want to because giving every country in the world (or even a lot of them) the ability to make nuclear weapons means that you have even more chances for "something to go wrong," which can mean the end of the world.

So basically that's why most countries won't do it even though they could if they wanted to. The possibility of the world more or less ending outweighs the less concrete on the horizon maybe we can deal with another way threats of climate change.

Ukraine is definitive proof that as long as conflict is a possibility, nuclear reactors aren't safe because they will always be targets. And all those safety measures aren't guaranteed against direct attack or sabotage.

It doesn't have to occur constantly just once in one thousand years in a worse enough way is all it takes to make a country unlivable. That isn't worth the risk, no data represents this. It's common sense.

But common sense flies out the window when political and social narratives go against it.

> World ending asteroids rarely ever hit the planet, so they are actually safer than fossil fuels cause less people have died to them.

> THAT is the data legalism bullshit you people keep telling me.

That is not what I'm saying.

To keep going with your analogy, we are in a situation where an asteroid (actually two, for Chernobyl and Fukushima) has already hit the planet, and we have calculated how many people have died as a result of the impact. That calculation shows that oil use kills as many people as 38 asteroid impacts a year would.

Now, the probability of an asteroid impact is difficult to estimate, but we can say for certain that it's absolutely nowhere near 38 world-ending asteroids a year. This allows us to conclude that asteroid impacts are indeed safer than fossil fuels, even without knowing the precise frequency with which they occur.

Again, it's possible that the data we have is off by a factor of 2 or 3 or so, but it's not possible that nuclear disasters on the scale of Chernobyl actually occur every couple of months, and we have somehow failed to notice for 50+ years.

YEA you can certainly question it because it's bullshit. Here is the actual comparison you guys are giving.

World ending asteroids rarely ever hit the planet, so they are actually safer than fossil fuels cause less people have died to them.

THAT is the data legalism bullshit you people keep telling me.

Your data is ether wrong, politically driven and or probably done by companies who have their hands in the energy sector.

We can have multiple oil spills and disasters with fossil fuels all of that is fixable, you arn't playing with fire with radiation because burns heal. How is this hard to understand Chernobyl is SMALL compared to the Reactors we have now, what France has like a hundred of them too. Imagine if a World War actually happened.

We wouldn't need nukes to fuck the planet because our energy would do that for us once it starts getting targeted with strikes.

I agree. It can't be any worse then the nukes they exploded 90 miles north of my head, when I was a kid. Its as if science couldn't understand that the geology of the great basin is synonymous with ground water. I suppose living my whole life in the heart of the Las Vegas Valley water shed makes me bias towards fall-out.

[removed]

This comparison is based on reliable data - the data about the deaths caused by oil-based energy, and the data about the death toll of the Chernobyl disaster. It shows that, while you can certainly question the available data on the frequency with which nuclear disasters occur, that data would have to be off by a factor of more than a hundred before it would indicate the opposite conclusion. If that was the case, we would expect to see 2-3 Chernobyl-scale events every year with the amount of nuclear plants we have right now. It is technically possible that we've just been insanely lucky for the past 50+ years, but that's not really a possibility worthy of serious consideration.

> e can just deploy solar/wind/batteries much faster and in smaller pieces, to save carbon immediately.

No we can't. There's absolutely no way we can build enough batteries. No way.

> While both have long lasting impacts in their waste products

The impact of nuclear waste products is completely overblown. Consider: the whole waste of 50 year of French nuclear production fits in one (1) warehouse. It's not going anywhere, it's not going to leak, it's nicely packaged and, more importantly from an ethical point of view: it's only a burden to the user who benefitted from it.

Compare and contrast with fossil fuels, whose waste is a burden to everyone, including those who never got any benefit from them.

[removed]

The navy has 160 nuclear reactors and a lot of them run off that 40 year old technology. Yet the navy has not had a nuclear accident in the roughly 70 years it's nuclear program has been alive.

You'd have to target the reactor specifically and that would be an extremely bold statement. And I think even in Russia's case, they just wanted to force Ukraine to shut it down.

Physicist here. Fukushima is the second worst nuclear plant disaster ever and its result is so minisucule that we cant measure any adverse results on environment or population.

There also already exist nuclear engines underground naturally, so its already unavoidable to have nuclear waste there.

How do so many of you people not understand those comparisons make zero sense, you WANT this to be the case.

Its still not a big problem. You can just store them in the ground. There already exist natural underground nuclear engines and we can always place it away from ground water if that worries people.

This argument would work, in a world where the deaths caused by oil didn't amount to, by the most conservative estimate, 38 Chernobyl disasters every year. Even if we built 7 times more nuclear plants (which is how many we would need to cover the energy currently generated by oil), do you think that would result in over 38 Chernobyl-style disasters per year? And that's just oil - coal is even deadlier than that.

>The real big problem is creating durable organizational culture that can last for the decades the plant is operational.

More than anything, this is what worries me. It's not just operating the plants, it's the whole chain, including waste management. Can we trust that our safety culture will still be intact in 50 years from now? What about 100 years?

We can be optimistic and hope so, but there's just no guarantee.

That's a pretty bold bet with hazardous material dumped in various locations that can be dangerous for hundreds of years or even longer (and not just nuclear waste, btw).