1. Accidents contaminating large areas of land. These are events that occur infrequently and can negate the lifetime profits from many reactors. (example, fukishima price tag at 187 billion)
2. The very nature of what it means to innovate or cost reduce a product. In any other industry, when you try to make something cheaper, you change the design to remove parts, or cheapen a part that is better than it needs to be. Even if you accept that the NRC is over-zealous, the risk of #1 is a strong incentive not to do either.
Other competing sources of energy, the worst case scenario is acceptable. If you notice, grid-scale battery installations are outdoors and separated by a gap between each metal cabinet. This is so that a lithium fire will be limited to a single battery cabinet. That’s an acceptable failure. Ditto the worst case for other forms of power generation. “Contaminating a nearby city and making it permanently unusable if things go badly enough” is not an acceptable scenario.
Anyways, what this means is that solar/wind/batteries are going to keep getting cheaper. And they also have the potential to decarbonize the planet as well. And you can keep innovating and reducing cost wherever possible because the worst case scenario when a solar panel/battery/wind turbine fails is a warranty claim or small fire.
What is your definition of contaminate? If Devanney is correct that low doses of radiation are acceptable—and I believe he is—then much land which is described as ‘contaminated’ is in fact perfectly liveable. (Also see the people who illegally live in the Chernobyl exclusion zone). For a reasonable definition of ’contaminate’ then, it follows that a nuclear accident contaminates much smaller areas of land and is less expensive.
Your anti-nuclear argument also ignores the status quo of non nuclear energy. In America alone, fossil fuels (read coal) kill tens of thousands every year. So if you replaced all coal power with nuclear and had a Chernobyl every year (unrealistic extreme scenario), it would still save lives on net.
That said, I can see the argument that renewables are safer than both today, but OP is absolutely right to analyse the decades-long failure to replace coal with nuclear in the period before we had renewables.
Other competing sources of energy, the worst case scenario is acceptable.
I read this was a nod to the status quo bias of nuclear regulators. Millions(?) Of quality-adjusted life-years lost per year from fossil fuels are basically ignored in the cost benefit analysis.
What is your definition of contaminate? If Devanney is correct that low doses of radiation are acceptable—and I believe he is—then much land which is described as ‘contaminated’ is in fact perfectly liveable. (Also see the people who illegally live in the Chernobyl exclusion zone). For a reasonable definition of ’contaminate’ then, it follows that a nuclear accident contaminates much smaller areas of land and is less expensive.
One issue is that it is not possible to rigorously prove it’s livable because the parameter you are trying to measure—extra cancers and subtle damage—won’t show up for 20-30 years. Over such a long timescan it is difficult to even tease out causation. Your data will be incomplete, your subjects won’t all have lived long enough for any radiation damage to matter, some of them smoke, etc. But for the sake of argument I will let the conclusions be conclusive that radiation is harmless below a threshold.
I agree with you that the NRC’s decision making is not rational in that it is not factoring in the consequences of a decision to the host society. It’s factoring in the consequences of the decision to the NRC. This is true for most regulatory agencies, at best they are captured by not wanting to do something that endangers their own reputation.
Anyways even if all of the above is true the innovation cost I mentioned above isn’t there. Nuclear is also small market size in that many advancements do not make economic sense because few reactors are being built, and this would remain true if more were being built up to a point.
Solar and batteries are enormous market scales, and thus many improvements make economic sense.
One issue is that it is not possible to rigorously prove it’s livable because the parameter you are trying to measure—extra cancers and subtle damage—won’t show up for 20-30 years.
We could measure the effects that radiation has on rats in the lab to get a better model of how the dose of radiation relates to the frequency of effects.
To the extend that your model predicts that radiation causes DNA damage, DNA sequencing could also uncover that damage.
Other competing sources of energy, the worst case scenario is acceptable.
The numbers for people killed by coal every year world-wide is about that of the Rwandan genocide. I don’t hold that to be acceptable and that’s the average scenario.
Fair enough. Unfortunately you can walk around with a geiger counter and perceive the dangers of nuclear in the 2 disaster areas. You can’t perceive the coal pollution in most areas except when it gets bad enough.
You can’t perceive the coal pollution in most areas except when it gets bad enough.
While you can’t measure it without devices, you can also measure pollution if it’s not bad enough to be visible to everybody.
A geiger counter doesn’t perceive dangers. It just measures radiation. The problem is that the value that it measures gets combined with pseudoscientific models of what radiation does to the human body.
If you eat a banana every three days that exposes you to more radiation then living near Chernobyl. BBC gives 0.1 micro Sievert per banana which gives you 12 micro Sievert per year if you eat a banana every three days. On the other hand living in the exclusion zone only gives you 8.8 mirco Sievert per year.
Agree with everything but the last bit. It is possible to find fragments of the core itself still in the area with a kilometer or so of the reactor. These tiny fragments are high level nuclear waste.
To the extend that you can currently find fragments of the core, that’s the result of it not being worthwhile to clean those up. Cleaning up an area of a kilometer is not that hard if you want to do it.
Things you have neglected:
1. Accidents contaminating large areas of land. These are events that occur infrequently and can negate the lifetime profits from many reactors. (example, fukishima price tag at 187 billion)
2. The very nature of what it means to innovate or cost reduce a product. In any other industry, when you try to make something cheaper, you change the design to remove parts, or cheapen a part that is better than it needs to be. Even if you accept that the NRC is over-zealous, the risk of #1 is a strong incentive not to do either.
Other competing sources of energy, the worst case scenario is acceptable. If you notice, grid-scale battery installations are outdoors and separated by a gap between each metal cabinet. This is so that a lithium fire will be limited to a single battery cabinet. That’s an acceptable failure. Ditto the worst case for other forms of power generation. “Contaminating a nearby city and making it permanently unusable if things go badly enough” is not an acceptable scenario.
Anyways, what this means is that solar/wind/batteries are going to keep getting cheaper. And they also have the potential to decarbonize the planet as well. And you can keep innovating and reducing cost wherever possible because the worst case scenario when a solar panel/battery/wind turbine fails is a warranty claim or small fire.
What is your definition of contaminate? If Devanney is correct that low doses of radiation are acceptable—and I believe he is—then much land which is described as ‘contaminated’ is in fact perfectly liveable. (Also see the people who illegally live in the Chernobyl exclusion zone). For a reasonable definition of ’contaminate’ then, it follows that a nuclear accident contaminates much smaller areas of land and is less expensive.
Your anti-nuclear argument also ignores the status quo of non nuclear energy. In America alone, fossil fuels (read coal) kill tens of thousands every year. So if you replaced all coal power with nuclear and had a Chernobyl every year (unrealistic extreme scenario), it would still save lives on net.
That said, I can see the argument that renewables are safer than both today, but OP is absolutely right to analyse the decades-long failure to replace coal with nuclear in the period before we had renewables.
I read this was a nod to the status quo bias of nuclear regulators. Millions(?) Of quality-adjusted life-years lost per year from fossil fuels are basically ignored in the cost benefit analysis.
What is your definition of contaminate? If Devanney is correct that low doses of radiation are acceptable—and I believe he is—then much land which is described as ‘contaminated’ is in fact perfectly liveable. (Also see the people who illegally live in the Chernobyl exclusion zone). For a reasonable definition of ’contaminate’ then, it follows that a nuclear accident contaminates much smaller areas of land and is less expensive.
One issue is that it is not possible to rigorously prove it’s livable because the parameter you are trying to measure—extra cancers and subtle damage—won’t show up for 20-30 years. Over such a long timescan it is difficult to even tease out causation. Your data will be incomplete, your subjects won’t all have lived long enough for any radiation damage to matter, some of them smoke, etc. But for the sake of argument I will let the conclusions be conclusive that radiation is harmless below a threshold.
I agree with you that the NRC’s decision making is not rational in that it is not factoring in the consequences of a decision to the host society. It’s factoring in the consequences of the decision to the NRC. This is true for most regulatory agencies, at best they are captured by not wanting to do something that endangers their own reputation.
Anyways even if all of the above is true the innovation cost I mentioned above isn’t there. Nuclear is also small market size in that many advancements do not make economic sense because few reactors are being built, and this would remain true if more were being built up to a point.
Solar and batteries are enormous market scales, and thus many improvements make economic sense.
We could measure the effects that radiation has on rats in the lab to get a better model of how the dose of radiation relates to the frequency of effects.
To the extend that your model predicts that radiation causes DNA damage, DNA sequencing could also uncover that damage.
The numbers for people killed by coal every year world-wide is about that of the Rwandan genocide. I don’t hold that to be acceptable and that’s the average scenario.
Fair enough. Unfortunately you can walk around with a geiger counter and perceive the dangers of nuclear in the 2 disaster areas. You can’t perceive the coal pollution in most areas except when it gets bad enough.
While you can’t measure it without devices, you can also measure pollution if it’s not bad enough to be visible to everybody.
A geiger counter doesn’t perceive dangers. It just measures radiation. The problem is that the value that it measures gets combined with pseudoscientific models of what radiation does to the human body.
If you eat a banana every three days that exposes you to more radiation then living near Chernobyl. BBC gives 0.1 micro Sievert per banana which gives you 12 micro Sievert per year if you eat a banana every three days. On the other hand living in the exclusion zone only gives you 8.8 mirco Sievert per year.
Agree with everything but the last bit. It is possible to find fragments of the core itself still in the area with a kilometer or so of the reactor. These tiny fragments are high level nuclear waste.
https://youtu.be/ejZyDvtX85Y
To the extend that you can currently find fragments of the core, that’s the result of it not being worthwhile to clean those up. Cleaning up an area of a kilometer is not that hard if you want to do it.