So uh, turns out the energy companies are not exactly the most moral and rule abiding entities, and they love to pay off politicians and cut corners. How does one prevent that, as in the case of fission it has rather dire consequences?
Easy. Have nuclear power plants operate as government run and backed corporations (what we’d call a “Crown Corporation” here in Canada).
That way you can mandate safety and uptime as metrics over profit. It may be less efficient from an economic standpoint (overall cost might be higher), but you also don’t wind up with the nuclear version of Love Canal.
Since you can apply that logic to everything, how can you ever build anything? Because all consequences are dire on a myopic scale, that is, if your partner dies because a single electrician cheaped out with the wiring in your building and got someone to sign off, “It’s not as bad as a nuclear disaster” isn’t exactly going to console them much.
At some point, you need to accept that making something illegal and trying to prosecute people has to be enough. For most situations. It’s not perfect. Sure. But nothing ever is. And no solution to energy is ever going to be perfect, either.
I mean it’s not the companies operating the facilities we put our trust in, but the outside regulators whose job it is to ensure these facilities are safe and meet a certain standard. As well as the engineers and scientists that design these systems.
Nuclear power isn’t 100% safe or risk-free, but it’s hella effective and leaps and bounds better than fossil fuels. We can embrace nuclear, renewables and fossil free methods, or just continue burning the world.
I think it’s fine to think of it as imperfect, even if those imperfections can never be truly solved.
We only need nuclear to bridge the gap between now and a time when renewable CO2 neutral power sources or the holy grail of fusion are able to take the place the base load power that we currently use fossil fuels for, and with hope, that may only be a few decades away.
Plants absorb that nuclear energy and whether we eat them, or eat animals that ate them, that is still energy from a nuclear source.
Some of those plants ended up rotting for millenia underground, and we dig that up, now in the form of coal, oil or natural gasses- then burn it…thats still just nuclear power.
Even the wind is nuclear power, as is its mostly caused by the uneven heating of the air by the sun, as the earth rotates, leading to the creation of higher and lower pressure areas.
The podcast (which was about solar energy- i work for a solar panel company, thats why it was on in the work van, lol) went on to say that logically, nuclear, solar, to an extent wind are therefore the best ways to ‘generate/ harvest’ power- everything else is just laundering nuclear energy through an inefficient, and usually destructive battery.
Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this simply isn’t true with established nuclear technologies. Expanding our currently nuclear energy production requires us to fully tap all known and speculated Uranium sources, nets us only a 6% CO2 reduction, and we run out of Uranium by 2100. We might be able to use Thorium in fuel cycles to expand our net nuclear capacity, but that technology has to yet to be proven at scale. And all of this ignores the high startup cost, regulatory difficulties, disposal challenges and weapons proliferation risks that nuclear typically presents.
Good!
Anti-nuclear is like anti-GMO and anti-vax: pure ignorance, and fear of that which they don’t understand.
Nuclear power is the ONLY form of clean energy that can be scaled up in time to save us from the worst of climate change.
We’ve had the cure for climate change all along, but fear that we’d do another Chernobyl has scared us away from it.
imagine how much farther ahead we would be in safety and efficiency if it was made priority 50 years ago.
we still have whole swathes of people who think that because its not perfect now, it cant be perfected ever.
So uh, turns out the energy companies are not exactly the most moral and rule abiding entities, and they love to pay off politicians and cut corners. How does one prevent that, as in the case of fission it has rather dire consequences?
Easy. Have nuclear power plants operate as government run and backed corporations (what we’d call a “Crown Corporation” here in Canada).
That way you can mandate safety and uptime as metrics over profit. It may be less efficient from an economic standpoint (overall cost might be higher), but you also don’t wind up with the nuclear version of Love Canal.
Force the Board of directors to live in close proximity to the plant
Since you can apply that logic to everything, how can you ever build anything? Because all consequences are dire on a myopic scale, that is, if your partner dies because a single electrician cheaped out with the wiring in your building and got someone to sign off, “It’s not as bad as a nuclear disaster” isn’t exactly going to console them much.
At some point, you need to accept that making something illegal and trying to prosecute people has to be enough. For most situations. It’s not perfect. Sure. But nothing ever is. And no solution to energy is ever going to be perfect, either.
a wind mill going down and a nuclear plant blowing up have very different ramifications
I mean it’s not the companies operating the facilities we put our trust in, but the outside regulators whose job it is to ensure these facilities are safe and meet a certain standard. As well as the engineers and scientists that design these systems.
Nuclear power isn’t 100% safe or risk-free, but it’s hella effective and leaps and bounds better than fossil fuels. We can embrace nuclear, renewables and fossil free methods, or just continue burning the world.
The worst nuclear disaster has led to 1,000sq miles of land being unsafe for human inhabitants.
Using fossil fuels for power is destroying of the entire planet.
It’s really not that complicated.
Except that nuclear isn’t the only, or even the cheapest, alternative to fossil fuels.
I think it’s fine to think of it as imperfect, even if those imperfections can never be truly solved.
We only need nuclear to bridge the gap between now and a time when renewable CO2 neutral power sources or the holy grail of fusion are able to take the place the base load power that we currently use fossil fuels for, and with hope, that may only be a few decades away.
Solar the fastest growing energy and the battery storage is cheaper every year.
I heard a bit from a podcast that stuck with me:
ALL Energy is nuclear energy-
The sun is a nuclear power source.
Plants absorb that nuclear energy and whether we eat them, or eat animals that ate them, that is still energy from a nuclear source.
Some of those plants ended up rotting for millenia underground, and we dig that up, now in the form of coal, oil or natural gasses- then burn it…thats still just nuclear power.
Even the wind is nuclear power, as is its mostly caused by the uneven heating of the air by the sun, as the earth rotates, leading to the creation of higher and lower pressure areas.
The podcast (which was about solar energy- i work for a solar panel company, thats why it was on in the work van, lol) went on to say that logically, nuclear, solar, to an extent wind are therefore the best ways to ‘generate/ harvest’ power- everything else is just laundering nuclear energy through an inefficient, and usually destructive battery.
Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this simply isn’t true with established nuclear technologies. Expanding our currently nuclear energy production requires us to fully tap all known and speculated Uranium sources, nets us only a 6% CO2 reduction, and we run out of Uranium by 2100. We might be able to use Thorium in fuel cycles to expand our net nuclear capacity, but that technology has to yet to be proven at scale. And all of this ignores the high startup cost, regulatory difficulties, disposal challenges and weapons proliferation risks that nuclear typically presents.