[HN Gopher] California lawmakers vote to keep Diablo Canyon online
___________________________________________________________________
California lawmakers vote to keep Diablo Canyon online
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 63 points
Date : 2022-09-01 17:29 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.world-nuclear-news.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.world-nuclear-news.org)
| yodelshady wrote:
| Honest question for renewables advocates:
|
| Where would you rank US-west in terms of "industrialised places
| where its easiest to phase out fossils or nuclear for
| renewables"?
|
| Because for my money, it may be the _best-suited place in the
| world_.
|
| - Lowish latitude, so winter nights are never that long, and
| usage peaks are in summer; - Fair amount of land - even in CA,
| _especially_ if we cheat a bit and assume NV is playing ball; -
| _Lots_ of money.
|
| And even _there_ , nuclear or gas are still necessary. Maybe
| Australia beats it.
|
| I can say this, Europe - including the UK - has over the last two
| decades made the worst energy decisions, probably ever. Winter
| peaking with 16 hour nights, and last year we had _week-long_
| periods with generation of, to all intents and purposes, _zero_
| useful power from wind during that period. For what its worth,
| this year Germany restarted _8 GW of coal_ , and I'm sorry but no
| other country in the world should be listening to European
| lectures on climate _ever again_ after that. Wholesale costs have
| exceeded $500 per MWh, they briefly peaked in London at $9000,
| and the same amount of battery storage costs $100,000. I have
| talked to investors on the latter figure and _none_ expect that
| figure to decrease significantly. Raw materials will not humour
| your optimism.
|
| Pardon me, what the _actual fuck_ are we supposed to do?
| panick21_ wrote:
| The more relevant question is, how easy would it be to power
| the whole country with nuclear.
|
| The US has a long history of research, still has a huge amount
| of knowlage of nuclear inside the country. And the US has the
| scale that if they select 1-2 plant designs, the same plant can
| be built, over and over and over again. A luxury small
| countries don't have.
|
| If the US simple decided to invest money in transition away
| from coal and gas, you simple plan a nuclear plant next to
| every existing coal plant and use your currently existing grid.
|
| In terms of transitioning to renewables, the US is highly
| variable, and each regions need to do very complex analysis on
| what exactly it needs. How much wind and solar it has, what the
| current grid is and how to adjust it. And then also how much
| storage you need to keep reliability.
|
| If you are going to transport energy over long distances
| (something traditional grid designs tried to avoid) you need to
| then interlink all these complex island of renewable+storage.
| You make your region depended on wind energy from another
| state.
|
| > Pardon me, what the actual fuck are we supposed to do?
|
| Look at how NASA did the COST and CommercialCrew program. Pick
| 2-6 nuclear plant designs, grantee that each on of the winners
| gets to build at least 4 plants and and then build a sales
| pipeline in cooperation with all utilizes to plan form more.
|
| Then just build as many as you can, as fast as you can. Likely
| within a decade you will be finishing many reactors every year
| and you easily build enough electricity to power the grid, plus
| transportation, heating and even aviation.
|
| If France could mostly do this in 1970s with sub-optimal
| technology from the 1960s, why would it be harder now.
| linksnapzz wrote:
| It would be nice if they could re-open San Onofre with new
| reactors (aka the Dolly Parton National Monument).
| Victerius wrote:
| TIL There is a nuclear power plant named Diablo Canyon. I thought
| it was a reference to some game in the Diablo franchise and I was
| wondering why politicians would vote to keep a multiplayer video
| game's servers online.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The real power plant is right next to the exceptionally
| beautiful
|
| http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=592
| IntelMiner wrote:
| It's old enough to even be a Simpsons reference
|
| https://comb.io/H7qsWh (for some reason there's no English
| version on youtube)
| bagacrap wrote:
| don't they still make new Simpsons? hence something invented
| yesterday could be a Simpsons reference
| david2ndaccount wrote:
| Fun fact, the game series is actually named after Mount Diablo:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_(series)#Development
| S201 wrote:
| Now if only we could get more reactors built. According to the
| New York Times, Diablo Canyon provides 9% of California's
| electricity[1]. It astounds me that a single generating station
| like that can provide a whopping 9% of California's electricity.
|
| Assuming the same capacity, four more stations would take it to
| 45%. That's nearly half of your electricity for a state as large
| as California from a stable, reliable, and clean(-er than fossil
| fuels) source that drops into the existing grid. I know nuclear
| isn't perfect and building new reactors is a huge challenge but
| it's a great stopgap solution for the next 100-odd years until a
| sufficient amount of solar & wind can be deployed to replace the
| reactors.
|
| 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/01/climate/california-
| lawmak...
| panick21_ wrote:
| Diablo Canyon was supposed to be far larger then it ended up
| being. Would have been amazing.
|
| > I know nuclear isn't perfect and building new reactors is a
| huge challenge but it's a great stopgap solution for the next
| 100-odd years until a sufficient amount of solar & wind can be
| deployed to replace the reactors.
|
| I don't understand that? If you have functioning nuclear, why
| would you ever go to wind and solar.
|
| Do you just want your power supply to be less reliable and have
| a massive dependency of storage?
|
| If you have nuclear, why would you ever go of it? There is no
| reason what so ever to do so.
|
| Even fusion will not replace fission. Nuclear fission is the
| cheapest possible energy by in a first principles analysis
| (except maybe some Aneutronic fusion maybe but we can't really
| even analyise what that would be).
| tomatotomato37 wrote:
| I don't know where the idea of nuclear being cheap comes
| from. Yes, the fuel is miniscule and relatively cheap, but
| all it does is get far hotter than any type of coal or gas
| boiler would. You still need a heat engine on the higher tech
| end of material science to turn that heat into usable energy.
| And that's not even taking into account the oversized cooling
| system to cover the difference between the dynamic grid load
| and a reactor who's throttle response time is measured in
| days.
|
| That doesn't mean nuclear is a bad thing, especially when you
| consider the externalities and production costs of other
| systems. It's just not a miracle electricity device.
| Personally I'm looking forward to the point people realize
| you don't totally need the whole "electric generator" aspect
| of nuclear and start direct connecting it to things that need
| heat, like desalination
| panick21_ wrote:
| If you do a first principles analysis of the amount of
| material required and the complexity of the plant, nuclear
| looks really good.
|
| The turbine you use to turn heat into power can be the same
| as the one uses for commercial gas. Nuclear is not actually
| hotter. Current PWR are actually cooler then Gas/Coal plant
| (and that's part of why they are so expensive).
|
| Most high temperature nuclear reactors will run at
| comparable temperatures to gas plants, around 600C. I don't
| know much about gas plants so correct me if they run at
| lower temps.
|
| > higher tech end of material science
|
| High temperature doesn't necessary use high tech. Depending
| on the design, the main containment vessel can be pretty
| ordinary stainless steal.
|
| And the same can be said for airplanes, cars or rockets.
| They use high tech, but if you do it correctly and you
| build more then 1, it can still be cheap for the end user.
|
| > And that's not even taking into account the oversized
| cooling system
|
| High temperature reactors don't need huge cooling systems.
| The huge size of PWR is mostly related to its absurdly
| large steam cooling systems, but all of that wouldn't exist
| in a modern reactor.
|
| > reactor who's throttle response time is measured in days.
|
| Again, you are drawing conclusions from current reactor
| designs that were fundamentally designed in the 1960s to
| power submarines.
|
| Modern reactor designs can have very good load following
| capability. Specially if you make that a goal of the
| reactor design.
|
| A good reactor design is fundamentally load following, if
| you pull more energy it will produce more.
|
| > It's just not a miracle electricity device.
|
| I would sort-of disagree. I would suggest that most
| miracles (walking on water) are not as amazing as the
| discovery of a material that has many orders of magnitude
| higher energy density and the a device that has the ability
| to harness that.
|
| Of course its not a divine miracle but given a world that
| is powered by coal, finding uranium/thorium is basically a
| miracle.
|
| A nuclear reactor like we could build it if we do 5-10 more
| design iteration would be one of the closes things to a
| miracle device that we use.
|
| > Personally I'm looking forward to the point people
| realize you don't totally need the whole "electric
| generator" aspect of nuclear and start direct connecting it
| to things that need heat, like desalination
|
| Yes, very much so. If you look at the live of Alvin
| Weinberg one of pioneers of the nuclear age and the
| inventor of both the PWR and the Molten Salt reactor. His
| vision was far beyond just power generation.
|
| He had a whole vision of society driven by nuclear plants,
| nuclear desalination was on of them. I not sure if he
| talked about synthetic fuel or not.
|
| You could even imagine having a nuclear reactor per city
| super-block and then using solar salt to circulate the
| heating rather then using electrical heaters.
|
| But to get to these applications we need to build on the
| currently existing market.
| abc_lisper wrote:
| Nuclear is way more expensive than other renewables and even
| gas. It takes a long time to build too. What no one seems to
| be exploring is creating a world wide array of solar panels
| so that everyone has power when they need it. Atleast US,
| Africa, India and Europe could do it together.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower-
| idUSK...
|
| Edit: Hell, US alone could do and get over peak demand in the
| evenings by having panel array spread all over the country.
| panick21_ wrote:
| That is drawing short side conclusions from limited data
| drawn from a world that has per-selected against nuclear.
|
| If you look at the energy need of the whole world, and from
| first principle try to figure out what is the best way to
| generate enough power for the whole world to live a first
| world live-style, nuclear is by far the winner.
|
| And the result will be system far more reliable and robust
| compared to one built with solar/wind/storage and long
| distance transportation.
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| Doesn't that depend on how cheap fusion may eventually get
| though?
| panick21_ wrote:
| Well we can only speculated, but if you really think threw
| it, there is no reason what so ever that fusion should be
| cheaper. Maybe Aneutronic fusion but we are not even close
| enough to that do an even estimation.
|
| Lets go threw the major costs of a power plant.
|
| - Building the primary plant
|
| - Operations in form of maintenance and salary.
|
| - Fuel cost (including transportation and so on)
|
| Now lets start with fuel cost. If we are talking about an
| advanced breeder fission reactor, thorium or natural
| uranium is basically free. Thorium is a waste product of
| Rare Earth mining, we have far more then we could ever use
| already. This material needs to be devolved into some salt.
|
| Fusion on the other hand will need to breed its fuel. That
| would basically require to mine lithium and then circulate
| it around an already existing fusion reactor. That possible
| but doesn't sound exactly cheap, it would be an incredibly
| complex process.
|
| So on fuel cost, fission wins pretty clearly.
|
| In terms of building the plant, if you look at some basic
| assumptions about a bill of materials, its pretty clear as
| well. Many advanced fission reactors are not much more then
| a big bucket of some sort of steel alloy (stainless steal
| or some sort of nickel alloy). Not more complex then many
| advanced materials used in airplane or rocket construction.
| Its more of an issue with qualification then production.
| Inside of that bucket you are gone have some graphite tubes
| or some other metal tubes. That bucket is likely filled
| with some molten salt, not so much different from molten
| toothpaste.
|
| Now compare this to a containment facility that needs to
| literally contain the heat a small sun. Not only do you
| need a magnetic containment that consists of large of
| highly advanced materials but you also need a physical
| material that can be blasted by a small sun.
|
| What's cheaper to build, a bucket full of hot toothpaste or
| a complex shaped object that contains a small sun?
|
| In terms of operations, a modern load following breeder
| needs very little refueling. Depending on the exact design
| you might even just continuously refuel and all you would
| have to do is dump some additional thorium into the salt.
| In some designs you need a crane to shuffle around fuel
| tubes every so often.
|
| Not sure how commercial operation of a fusion reactor would
| exactly work and how automated you could do all of that. I
| don't think we have enough information to really estimate
| that. However its hart to see how much easier it would be
| then a fission reactor.
|
| So I think in all major cost aspects, fission looks better.
| The real advantage of fusion is 3 order of magnitude higher
| density. But fission fuel is essentially free and dense
| enough that transporting it is absolute non issue, so not
| sure how increase density really helps fusion.
|
| So I'm not against fusion research, I think its great. But
| we need to do research, not obsess about trying to build
| commercial fusion power.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Wind and solar have their benefits. I think it's always good
| to have a diverse supply.
|
| It's a common misconception that you have to run nuclear
| power plants at 100% output all the time. That was true in
| 1970 but newer plants can adjust their output to meet demand,
| some even do so on a continuous basis to stabilize the
| frequency of the electric grid.
|
| https://www.oecd-
| nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...
|
| The resulting changes in temperature put some stress on the
| parts of the reactor because of thermal expansion but it is
| something the reactor can be built to tolerate.
| S201 wrote:
| > I don't understand that? If you have functioning nuclear,
| why would you ever go to wind and solar.
|
| A few reasons: The amount of fissile materials on Earth isn't
| infinite. As far as I understand (please correct me if I'm
| wrong... this is not my professional background), there are
| only ~230 years of uranium available.[1] And that's at
| today's consumption rates; build the amount of reactors we
| need and it's even less. Maybe we'd find more or maybe
| there's some other fissile material to use (thorium?). I'm
| not knowledgeable enough about the specifics to be honest,
| but it is finite on some timeline. Whereas wind and solar
| will last as long as the sun lasts.
|
| Aside from that, there's always the small risk of
| malfunctions and nuclear proliferation. Even with newer tech
| that could greatly limit the possibility of accidents to near
| zero (it's already absurdly low) there's still the constant
| need of water for cooling and geopolitical issues causing
| problems like what is happening right now with the
| Zaporizhzhia plant in Ukraine.
|
| That's why I say it's not perfect but that it does serve an
| incredibly important purpose in the near term to dramatically
| lower CO2 emissions and buy time to either deploy more wind &
| solar, extend the life of nuclear, or maybe deploy fusion if
| we ever finally crack that egg. Exactly how that looks would
| likely be a question for our children to answer.
|
| [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-
| glo...
| panick21_ wrote:
| > A few reasons: The amount of fissile materials on Earth
| isn't infinite. As far as I understand (please correct me
| if I'm wrong... this is not my professional background),
| there are only ~230 years of uranium available.
|
| The idea of natural resources running out is always pushed
| about everything and is always wrong.
|
| However, in this case its wrong on an even more fundamental
| level. There is a gigantic amount of fertile (i.e. you need
| to hit it with one neutron to make it fissile) nuclear
| material around. Literally enough for 1000s of years. And
| volcanic activity is bringing up new such material from
| deeper in the earth.
|
| Any non insane nuclear strategy will eventually switch to
| breeder reactors and if you do, the amount of fissile
| material is essentially infinite.
|
| We already have gigantic amounts of fissile material in the
| form of spent fuel that we can use to start breeder
| reactors.
|
| This video goes threw how you can do this:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkZ0ZBAVDu4
|
| > other fissile material to use (thorium?)
|
| There is both a huge amount of fertile material, both in
| the form of thorium (T-232) and what is usually called
| natural uranium (U-238).
|
| The things consider limited is Uranium-235 if I'm not
| mistaken. This is the only surviving naturally fissile
| material. But should it get down to it, I'm sure we could
| extend the amount of known reserves, just as we did for
| almost everything else.
|
| There is a pretty interesting story here about 3 different
| strains of nuclear that exists and of these the naturally
| fissile material of 2 of them is 'extinct'. Only U-235 is
| still sticking around. If not for that, it would have been
| much harder to start nuclear age.
|
| In the beginning there was a lot of effort put into breeder
| reactors because the amount of known U-235 was considered
| really small. So breeders had to be developed however as
| usually happens more U-235 was discovered once people
| started looking. And this sadly lead to way less emphasis
| being put on breeders.
|
| > there's still the constant need of water for cooling
|
| This is wrong. Almost any GenIV reactor is perfectly fine
| with being air cooled. In fact most reactors are perfectly
| fine in the icy tundra and the hottest desert on the
| planet.
|
| Consider that for a reactor that runs on 600C even a desert
| feels like being in an ice bath.
|
| As with everything nuclear, the real problem is that we
| stopped progressing in the early 1970s and are still using
| blown up submarine reactors.
|
| The real problem is not nuclear, but technology stagnation
| because of societal issues.
|
| > nuclear proliferation
|
| An over estimate problem. Depending on the design you can
| make it practically impossible to do anything. And if you
| can do anything it would be about 100x more effort then
| just developing the bomb the same way everybody else has.
|
| There are absolutely nuclear designs that you can deploy in
| most places in the world.
|
| > the small risk of malfunctions
|
| While true, the same can be said for wind and solar. Even
| current nuclear doesn't kill people.
|
| Future GenIV reactors potential for harm is very local. You
| could potentially imagine some accident that kills some
| people inside of the power plant.
|
| But unless you combine the story of 3 evil bond villains
| its hard to see how with such reactors you could seriously
| harm people outside of the plant boundary.
|
| So I would say in terms of risk, building 1000s of large
| towers to harness the wind, this is much less dangerous.
|
| > or maybe deploy fusion if we ever finally crack that egg
|
| Practically it makes no sense and will not be cheaper then
| fission for a whole host of reasons.
|
| Also, it still has proliferation concerns and still has the
| potential of accidents that could leak radiation.
|
| Fusion might make sense for a few space application, but
| practically for earth is mostly irrelevant.
| meisanother wrote:
| >>> As with everything nuclear, the real problem is that
| we stopped progressing in the early 1970s and are still
| using blown up submarine reactors.
|
| The real problem is not nuclear, but technology
| stagnation because of societal issues.
|
| <<<
|
| About this, I wonder if the number of new works mean that
| we are getting over the bump of stagnation. Do you think
| enough is getting done on that end? Also, I wonder what
| type of work can have the most impact on this side. My
| Government (Quebec, Canada) closed our last nuclear
| reactor years ago, but there's still some knowledge base
| around smaller reactors in Universities.
|
| There's also plan to expand investment into private-held
| reactor development (https://www.cnl.ca/clean-
| energy/canadian-nuclear-research-in...). Is this an
| avenue, considering the legislative/regulation overhead,
| that will ever be sustainable or it should be spearheaded
| by governments like it was in the 50s?
| panick21_ wrote:
| Canada is actually the globally leading country in terms
| of commercial GenIV nuclear. Many nuclear companies are
| moving to Canada from the US and Britain because Canada
| has a sane legislator, utilities that want nuclear.
| Ontario is really at the core of global nuclear
| innovation.
|
| The CNSC is at the very lead in terms of GenIV (hate that
| term) reactor designs. They created an innovate new way
| of going threw licensing. See:
|
| https://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/reactors/power-
| plants/pre-li...
|
| Canada is also finally investing some amount of money
| into next generation fuel reprocessing. Canada might
| actually be the first country to really solve fuel
| reprocessing. Together with Moltex Energy they have a
| real plan of turning their CANDU fuel waste in fuel for
| next generation reactors. This kind of reprocessing is
| much better then the process used in France for example.
| It could be a model for the world.
|
| All that said, Canada is simple not the market that is
| big enough. Its not the US, India or China. So for real
| impact this technology has to move from Canada to the US.
|
| The US really did a horrible thing regulation, NRC is a
| terrible agency in a number of ways, specially when it
| comes to next generation reactors. The AEC had been far
| more active, since the NRC took over, almost nothing has
| been done.
|
| Thankfully the US DoE finally started to realize how bad
| they were doing in some aspects. They made some fantastic
| changes like the GAIN program.
|
| https://gain.inl.gov/SitePages/Home.aspx
|
| However turning the DoE is like turning a ship 100x the
| size of the titanic.
|
| So the real hope is that the DoE will look into the
| process of the CNSC and do a co-licensing. Meaning that
| if a plant gets a license in Canada. It will be very easy
| to do the same in the US. That would be the best outcome.
| Nuclear safety should have one globally process, at least
| for the west.
|
| There are also some interesting things happening in the
| US. NuScale is a interesting company and their efforts
| while still being focused on PWRs does actually have
| number of things in its license that other companies will
| be able to use and build on.
|
| In addition to that, Kairos Power is doing some pretty
| interesting things trying to 'hack' the traditional
| licensing process. They are trying to do fast iteration
| with nuclear the same way SpaceX does in space. And have
| the regulator follow along so when they are ready to
| build a full plant, the regulator already knows a huge
| amount about the design.
|
| There is also some hope that some countries in Eastern
| Europe (Poland, Estonia ...) might start buying advanced
| nuclear plants, giving these plants more of a market.
| Since these countries don't have the very high level
| regulators, they might just mostly reuse the Canadian
| process. So a single GenIV plant built in Canada could be
| globally transformative.
|
| So yeah good things are finally happening again. A lot of
| credit goes to ground up nuclear movements kicked of
| partly by Kirk Soronson. He rediscovered a lot of the
| molten salt work and published. And many of the nuclear
| companies, like Terrestrial Power, actually met at these
| early events about molten salt and thorium. He himself
| has Flibe Energy, their vision is somewhat more complex
| and longer term but very interesting and fundamental.
|
| Its hard to see what happening in China. India has every
| intensive to do nuclear and they have some of the right
| ideas, but India is pretty slow moving.
|
| Europe is just highly divided and every country is
| cooking its own soup. So its hard for Europe to serve as
| market. That is why the US is so fundamental. Its the
| only market driven state where you don't necessarily need
| focused central government driven push for next
| generation nuclear.
|
| You will never have some Canadian startup building plants
| in France. So France did great with nuclear but also
| their technology stagnated and they are somewhat of an
| island. They threw away promising reactors like
| Superphonex, a GenIV reactor that was 3GW thermal and
| actually connected to the grid. But of course it was
| killed by left/green alliance and never revived.
|
| So lots of stuff happening, finally also some actual
| button up support that politicians can point to.
|
| I still believe in 2100 people will use mostly nuclear
| power and will look back on these times thinking we were
| idiots. "They discovered all the technology in the 60s,
| why are they not using it".
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Today's nuclear reactors only extract about 2% of the
| energy in natural uranium, fast reactors could extract many
| times more by producing Pu239 and other fissile actinides
| from relatively abundant U238.
|
| Since uranium is water soluble there are large amounts in
| the ocean and if fast reactors were made economical it
| would be practical to extract from seawater, seawater
| uranium is a renewable resource because uranium is always
| eroding from rocks and making its way to the ocean by
| rivers.
|
| Thorium breeders do the same thing as plutonium breeders by
| converting Th232 to U233 except they can do it with a
| thermal spectrum. It's not so clear if terrestrial Th or U
| is really more abundant but Th is not in seawater because,
| like Pu it is not water soluble.
| S201 wrote:
| Thanks for the info. I figured there was more to it than
| that and there were ways to extract more fuel.
| mike_hock wrote:
| Based.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| If you're getting free money from the federal government, it
| makes sense. Not sure I'd recommend it if spending your own money
| though.
| r00fus wrote:
| Good news.
|
| Although I am wary of nuclear's sustainability due to usage of
| fresh water (another limited resource in our climate crisis
| days)... I mean look at France nuclear + dry rivers...
|
| I think Nuclear should be part of our basket of energy sources
| (as it's baseload) to combat climate change.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Most advanced nuclear would have been air cooled but after 50
| years of nuclear stagnation we are sadly still haven't managed
| to get there.
|
| The solution is to finally evolve the technology.
| nyokodo wrote:
| > I am wary of nuclear's sustainability due to usage of fresh
| water
|
| I feel like there should be ways to engineer around this
| especially for reactors near the coast. Use some of the power
| from the plant to desalinate sea water or engineer to use sea
| water?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Seabrook nuclear power station in New Hampshire (where I grew
| up) is cooled by ocean water and has no cooling towers
|
| https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6367683
|
| I seem to recall Jackie Srouji (a navy intelligence agent who
| got busted when she talked big to a reporter after Karen
| Silkwood died under mysterious circumstances) also got busted
| by Navy Seals when she went for a swim to check out the water
| intakes for the San Onofre power station near San Diego.
| ppierald wrote:
| Diablo Canyon is in an absolutely beautiful part of the central
| coast of California. Definitely visit the greater San Luis Obispo
| area. Californians want it all (green and plentiful), but lack
| the basics to make that happen (coalfire supplemented with wind
| and solar plus overloaded grids -- see what happens this weekend
| with FlexAlerts already called).
|
| Nuclear should be considered. I don't know how to make them
| perfectly safe and their have been incidents where unfortunate
| accidents occur, but newer technology and designs might make our
| society able to have their cake and eat it too.
| S201 wrote:
| > I don't know how to make them perfectly safe and their have
| been incidents where unfortunate accidents occur
|
| The issue I have with this argument is that if we don't
| dramatically reduce CO2 emissions far, far more people are
| going to die from climate change than nuclear _might_ kill.
|
| Plus, as another commenter already mentioned, the amount of
| deaths coal is responsible for is 470x higher than nuclear from
| air pollution alone. We accept these deaths for coal but
| somehow have a problem with a much smaller number of deaths
| from nuclear in the theoretical case of a massive incident. I'm
| not saying there's an acceptable number of deaths to just live
| with but pragmatically speaking I'll gladly take the proven
| option that kills orders of magnitudes fewer people than the
| status quo is already doing.
|
| > Compared with nuclear power, coal is responsible for five
| times as many worker deaths from accidents, 470 times as many
| deaths due to air pollution among members of the public, and
| more than 1,000 times as many cases of serious illness,
| according to a study of the health effects of electricity
| generation in Europe.
|
| [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/nuclear-power-is-
| saf...
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| Coal kills more people every year than nuclear ever has.
| 62951413 wrote:
| In a vast country like ours I'd expect the government to be
| able to find cheap secluded places (in states such as NV?)
| where new reactors can be built. And then rich states such as
| CA buy the electricity from them. And probably invest into
| building them too.
| nyokodo wrote:
| This is a pragmatic decision as California, like many other
| regions, tries to make a transition away from fossil fuels while
| also dealing with the persistent disinformation from the anti-
| nuclear lobby.
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