this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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My only quibble with nuclear power is how irresponsible people are long term. The critical safety failure is always someone incompetent or cutting costs/corners.
Well and that I think distributed generation is more robust. Natural disaster can't take out power to half a state if there's energy being generated and stored all over. The means of production in the hands of the consumers.
Statistically nuclear is by far the safest form of power generation. Of course, it would be good to locate it in areas that are not disaster prone. As far as I understand it though, the issue with nuclear is the cost. But in a perfect world we would need something to smooth out the inconsistency of renewables, either battery tech or something like nuclear that you can turn on and off as needed.
Think less Fukushima and more Texas power grid.
And yeah it is safe, but if it becomes unsafe for whichever reason, it becomes really unsafe. I just don't trust humans to not eventually something stupid.
Well the problem with the Texas power grid is that it exists in the first place. Still, when it comes to safety, you have to multiply how bad it is by the number of people it will affect, and divide by the amount of power generated to get the right picture. There is a media bias towards rare, intense events which causes people to think they are more common than they really are. This explains people's views on nuclear power, school shootings, terrorism, shark attacks etc.
And what happens in the unlikely event of system collapse? If some major cataclysmic event wiped out the world economy and half the worlds population, what happens when suddenly thousands of nuclear plants are abandoned and melt down world wide? Nuclear is safer in a vacuum, but we don't exist in a vacuum. Anything that can happen, will eventually happen. Even if those power plants are able to be shut down safely, in a post stable world, the storage of the spent waste would be incredibly problematic as we would no longer have the capacity or knowledge to bury it 4 miles down. I would say that nuclear power is far more risky long term than people give it credit for. We are evaluating it's risk only based on the present stability and regulations of our current systems. Modern technological stability is really a tiny blip in earths history, we really can't guarantee a future that will know what to do with spent nuclear waste. Nuclear power is really an all-in bet on our own technological dominance of the future.
I say this as someone that is not against nuclear power, but I think people view it as some sort of quick fix when it just presents it's own problems. The truth is, you don't get something for nothing. All energy costs something and that cost should be distributed between several systems and our consumption should be reduced.