We have the power to work on both at once, denying one in the hope that magical fusion tech will just happen with the tiny amount of research being done today is just pointless and only holds up back in the greater scale.

Green is fine, but nuclear isnt the evil people make it out to be and we should be working on both of them.

>Modern reactors are foolproof

this is exactly the stupid-box that we need to be out of imo.

i remember that oil rig in the gulf that had a "foolproof" valve that would disengage from the well in case there was a leak. there was a leak and it didn't disengage and it leaked for months and they couldn't figure out how to shut it off (to my knowledge its still leaking today.)

I've studied engineering. nothing is foolproof.

try this: "there's absolutely no risk" -full stop stupidity.

or this: "passive protections" -institutionalized complacency.

try throwing in "modern algorithms" which are "foolproof" and have many "passive protections" in place.

i don't buy any of it and you shouldn't either. this mentality is what stops me from advocating nuclear energy because its the exact same mentality that gave us problems with fossil fuels.

imho.

>I’d argue the biggest obstacle is will.

And who's will specifically? Why do we allow those who benefit massively from the status quo to stymie any change or progress?

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>We certainly ended up with a nuclear weapons arsenal that is much bigger then the power generation industy with all the waste products to boot. ... The moon landing and interstate highway system come to mind.

All of those were in the interests of the powerful. Luckily most coincided with the interests of the people as well. Nuclear weapons both protected the country as well as allowed it to have massive leverage over others. The moon landing was invested in out of fear of loss to communism, not some noble good. But the science that came along was a nice bonus.

Coincidentally the interstate highway system just so happened to result in the final dismantling of the US passenger train network. So cars went from a luxury to mandatory for participation in the US economy. Great for oil interests.

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>Sometime in the 1970s, the US lost the will to bet big.

After the whole generation was locked into car culture and the banks got stuffed with middle eastern oil money (foreign money in US banks did not have to fall under US financial regulations).

Suddenly the extremely wealthy interests had sidestepped the US controls that had helped the US dominate in world growth since the great depression. Then using this power to outsource jobs from the US to undermine the accumulated power of the American middle class and employees.

A decade later, enough power and wealth had been concentrated to go after the tax base of the country and dramatically centralize economic power. The power of the American voter shrunk proportionally. Its no mystery why popular reforms and investments are seemingly impossible, yet unpopular changes sail through nearly unopposed.

Its not some magic that caused the US to lose its ability for large investments in the 1970s. It was an intentional strategy to concentrating power in a way that no longer required projects to benefit multiple economic classes. Instead only serving the interests of the same small group of wealthy billionaires.

The reason I said underground water is because that isn't set in stone, ironically.

Fault lines happen, drilling happens, erosion happens. And this isn't taking into account air currents if it goes that way, or if misplaced waste just sits in an area. I wonder how much was dumped in the ocean honestly.

Talking about the disaster that's already happening to justify turning the other way for the potential world ending disaster of radiation is just as bad as when they did the same for Oil, Lead, Coal etc.

>Solar, wind, geothermal, and hydro-electric are not really feasible means of space travel

So what % of greenhouse gases are from space travel? Is that what you think we are trying to solve here? Just make everything solar for fun?

If you want to make chemical rockets "green" the propellant can be made from bio-fuels that don't add total CO2 to the atmosphere. But given that it is in the 1-2% range for the entire world, its pretty low on the priority list.

If you want to look at a 100 year timescale, green tech for the grid is inevitable. Its just so much cheaper to produce than fossil fuels. The next generation will look back in shock that we allowed our world politics to be dictated by such a messy and inefficient supply chain, all while obvious alternatives were available.

I don't think your listing plausible disasters for nuclear disasters. How would a nuclear power plant contaminate the new york water supply? On the other hand I can think of a different source of energy that has contaminated the water supply in real life. Nobody is cleaning the air pollution that's responsible for so many deaths worldwide out of fossil exhausts either, and that's another worldwide disaster that's already happening and responsible for so many deaths.

It seems like a number of your "it's over, that's it" scenarios that you speculate could happen for nuclear have already happened because of fossil fuels.

Not to mention global warming, you'd need a lot of meltdowns to get anywhere near the kind of long term damage that's going to do to us.

And people can live on top an active volcano, that doesn't make it livable for a nation.

Modern reactors are foolproof, and nowhere near resembling the design of the Chernobyl ones. Meaning that even if nothing is done ( as in, "there is no human intervention possible, and/or no control available" ) the reaction will shutdown itself by lack of moderator. And even if a nefarious agent was to still force corium creation, the underbellies of reactor vessels now make the corium deposit thinner, stopping the reaction altogether.

And even if all these passive protections were folded by heavily modifying the powerplant at the cost of billions, you would still endanger "only" a 200km² area (size of the Chernobyl no go zone, and this is a worst case scenario as the Fukushima accident proved by only having a risk zone just around the power plant, and the city having residual radioactivity bellow safety standards.) If you weigh this against risking the destruction of all our support ecosystems; there's no need to be awfully bright to understand the non issue the is nuclear energy.

Stalkers literally live there and people have lived in the exclusion zone since the 90s and are alive and old as fuck. I know three such people who before the war lived there more often than outside of the zone personally, two of them were going to take me exploring there when I did my trip across the pond.

And Fusion is good, not the Nuclear we have now. I feel like people who advocate for Nuclear don't understand those are two very different things.

So because of politics they get wrapped up together when they should be seperate.

We have Hydro, Solar, Air, we can use those with Oil and Gas until Fusion is figured out.

Makes no sense to risk the world by putting hundreds of Nuclear Reactors everywhere.

The city is unlivable.....

You people can not be comparing the sun to possible radiation contamination.

No one is looking at the prospect of say that Ukrainian reactor melting down from Russia sabotage the same as oil spills.

And again it's not about numbers, you can say one disaster would double it, that's not the issue, the issue is that's it. it's done, you can't fix nuclear fallout.

Imagine if enough contamination got into the ground water around New York. What then? It's not just "oh the numbers are going to increase" no it's your done. That's it.

Planes are safer statically than cars but if you put half the worlds population on a plane and said planes almost never crash so it's fine. That's not a good bet.

I’d argue the biggest obstacle is will. We certainly ended up with a nuclear weapons arsenal that is much bigger then the power generation industy with all the waste products to boot. Sometime in the 1970s, the US lost the will to bet big. The moon landing and interstate highway system come to mind. We put our minds to it and did it. Problems came up and were addressed. You can’t start a huge project with all the reasons you can’t do it first.

Two.. but the second involved large-scale engineering to contain it, along with world-wide cooperation and fact sharing which was notably absent from the first incident

People are stupid and lazy. If something depends on people not being stupid and lazy to be safe, then it's unsafe.

The deaths statistic is power kWh so it's not significantly biased by the amount used.

I get what you're saying about the one big nuclear disaster, one more disaster would effectively double those numbers. However in that regard nuclear power is a victim of its own success. It's not some niche power source, it's been producing ~10% of the world's power for decades so it's not a question of small sample size. I think it's a bit silly to suggest that the lack of disasters is evidence of it's danger when it's been used so much.

This is such a bad faith argument.

There has only been one major nuclear disaster because you can engineer your way out of releasing nuclear waste into the environment, not because we dont use enough nuclear. Nuclear is the only form of power generation with enough capacity where you can contain the pollution. Solar, wind, natural gas, oil, coal(or the production of) all pollute the enviroment in normal operation. Nice try though.

Nuclear is preferable to fossil fuels, of course, but it runs into a fatal problem; it's incompatible with capitalism. Plants are expensive and time consuming to build, and the returns simply don't come within the timescale this economic system (especially in its late stage) allows.

It's also a very incomplete solution. Energy isn't just produced and then that's the end of it. It's used, and what it's used for tends to be in the extraction, refining, manufacturing, and transportation of goods. All of these activities are just as (or more) damaging than the production of energy itself, especially if we consider the extreme levels of energy one can acquire from nuclear sources.

Ultimately, the answer is degrowth, because the scale and speed of our economy is the true engine for climate change. It's extremely reductionist to view it as a problem of CO2 levels. Especially under capitalism, producing massive amounts of cheap energy simply saves companies on energy expenses and allows them to consume more energy for the same price. This is Jevon's Paradox.

The conversation about nuclear power, I believe, is more of a distraction than a real attempt at a solution to climate change. Ultimately, capitalism as a belief and practice is at the core of environmental destruction, and as a result, technological solutions will simply empower the capitalist system to sacrifice the health of the planet for the short term profit of the owning class. Even if nuclear didn't have the problems of potential accidents, nuclear waste, and nuclear weapons, it would still have more costs than benefits if we don't also radically restructure society to fundamentally change how we employ technology.

> And the whole point is if it does go wrong now you've just doomed how many hundreds of miles to a nuclear wasteland.

Chernobyl didnt result in this except for short term. People literally tour all but the very worst of remaining hotspots. The fact is all the problems and disasters we have had happen in history have been the result of human failure to remain vigilant. Back in the day, we could somewhat forgive this because we didnt know what we do now, but today we should be far more strict in nuclear plant operations and not have things like that even occur. Its called stop trying to push the boundaries with the production model and take the testing to the lab where it belongs.

Nuclear is also going to be key for our future development off world, to sit there and pretend otherwise is foolish. I won't even regard the argument of fusion because it isnt possible yet, and until it is its no more real than Jesus coming back and just snapping his fingers and giving everyone magical powered batteries. and even then fusion research will only increase as nuclear fission tech is researched.

Living in fear of some possibility is the same as never going outside because that sunlight could be the little bit which creates cancer in you and kills you.

That is such a bad faith argument.

Of course oil kills more we use it more and used it more and are more careless with it.

The data doesn't exist on this because we've only had one "major" nuclear disaster.

So you can't use data to math this out. You use logic, you know what it does, you know the effects radiation has, you know how hard it is to clean that's what matters.

But like I stated before, nuclear waste isn't always going to be the outcome of nuclear energy. We are steadily moving away from hot waste and modern techniques are considerably cleaner. Not perfect, but a resounding improvement. And if we ever get to cold fusion then there will no longer be nuclear waste or mining issues for that matter.

It is absolutely worth the risk. You can do the math on it, and find that statistically, oil kills a lot more people per kWh than nuclear, even when counting the nuclear accidents. Just because it kills by slowly poisoning the environment, and not with extremely rare but flashy meltdowns, doesn't mean that it's any safer. And that is without even going into the fact that modern reactors have gotten a lot safer over the last couple decades, and Chernobyl-style meltdowns aren't even remotely likely anymore - but even if they were, nuclear would still be safer than fossil fuels.

Solar, wind, geothermal, and hydro-electric are not really feasible means of space travel (panels are not efficient enough yet and we have never even built a solar wind styled craft. Im not sure we even could without fantasy technology for the sail), nuclear technology is a possibility though. We cannot just think of today and tommorrow, we have to look at things from a scale of 10 and 50 and 100 years from now.

>people being stupid and lazy that cause problems

That is not how safety engineering works.

If an individual being lazy or making a mistake means the whole thing blows up, you just made disaster inevitable because people will sometimes be lazy.

But good design and good organizational design can nearly eliminate entire classes of failure modes.

The real big problem is creating durable organizational culture that can last for the decades the plant is operational. Maintenance and training are annoying to deal with and get in the way of short term profits. The work culture has to be able to strongly resist these forces for a few generations of employees. From new plant with the builder available all the way to when it is deeply out of date and eventually needs to wind down operations and get decommissioned.

Life cycle management of major projects is challenging in governments with low turnover and long time horizons. Its extremely difficult in the private sector where management can change at the drop of a hat.

The problem with nuclear now is less technological, but startup costs and time.

You can spend 10 Billion for a decade and still need more time and money before its running. But then its good. We can just deploy solar/wind/batteries much faster and in smaller pieces, to save carbon immediately.

That said, we need a ton of power and we need to change with the speed and intensity of a Marshall plan. So it makes perfect sense to get 10-20% of world power from nuclear. That means we have to build a lot of it, right now.

But as governments drag their feet and pretend some new magic will save us in the future (not the working tech we already got right now), its doesn't make sense to invest limited budgets into it.