/sci/ - Science & Math

The risk is simply to high. There are countries who build reactors on geological faults because they didnt know they were there. And thats only a few decades ago. We simply dont know enough, or are capable to handle a accident to make it a viable option.

>>11463440
the risk is high if you only invest enough money to get it done. The existence of shitty, unsafe nuclear reactors is a reflection on inefficient government spending, not the ceiling of safety that can be achieved. If they actually put effort and money into it, they can create very safe, efficient reactors, but no politician is willing to die on that hill.

>>11463478
Thorium can't be weaponized though.

>>11463440
If the risk is so high, why has little actual damage occurred? The risk of using fossil fuels is much higher but I doubt you care since it's so widespread and accepted that no one even notices. But keep fearmongering about spooky nuclear radiation.

>>11463440
Put the Sierra club koolaid down and actually do some reading about the nuclear industry; it is one of the safest industries in the world.

>>11463052
Go away socialist shill. Nuclear is dead because capitalism killed it. Everything else is cheaper and faster to build.

>>11463052
A group of engineers from Toronto developed a way to dispose of radioactive waste so now its just a political struggle between the "we want to tax everything" crowd and the rest of the world.

>>11463775
>Everything else is cheaper and faster to build.
>Lets tax everything but solar and wind
>lets give solar and wind incentives
>Wind and solar is cheaper!!!
Next time don't miss economics 101

>>11463052
>i dont understand the hate towards nuclear energy
Decades of "Nuclear BAD!" from oil companies.

How hard do you think they're going to lobby against fusion, even though it's proven safe, efficient, and can safely process spent nuclear fuel?

>>11463788
economics is taxes and the more bigger the taxes the less ecomics it is

>>11463935
it's still insane that a bunch of people still believe the oil companies.

>>11463052
Yes it absolutely is. Nuclear is incredibly safe, incredibly efficient, and works everywhere. Nuclear energy is not used because treehugging hippie faggots hate efficient and clean energy sources, humanity, and prosperity. Don't take my word for it, read it in their own words.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_anti-nuclear_movement#Other_issues
It's much worse than you think it is.

>>11463458
if you're spending that much you might as well invest in technology with a future like renewables.

>>11463620
because of incredibly strict regulations.

>>11465215
nah it's simple economics, the very nature of the technology makes it a nightmare for private owners. It's why nuclear is a literal joke in every country without state controlled grids.

>>11465215
there's paranoia about the accidents that have happened and ignorance about how safe the current ones are, also I'm pretty sure solar and wind lobbyists and shills are gonna hedge up the way every chance they get. they've been gambling on global warming making them a trillion dollar industry.

>>11465302
There have been three major incidents since we've been using nuclear power
>one was monumental incompetence coupled with a poorly designed reactor
>one was after a tsunami
>one resulted in a total of zero deaths

>>11465305
>nuclear weapons aren't dangerous they've literally only killed people twice.

>>11465311
We're not talking about nuclear weapons which kill people every time they're used retard. We're talking about nuclear power, which has only failed under incredibly extreme circumstances, and which are otherwise much safer than alternatives.

>>11465315
yeah so much safer than those solar panels and wind turbines

>>11465321
Yes, it literally is.

>>11465311
>nuclear weapons
why are you on this board

>>11465328
>oh no someone fell off a roof!

>>11465337
>get btfo
>b-but it doesnt count!

>>11465334
If you don't understand the difference between potential for danger and historical bodycount you should probably not be on this board

>>11465339
include deaths from mining and see how that statistic looks.

>>11465343
>we don't need to mine for materials to make wind turbines and solar panels

>>11465346
turbines are almost entirely Carbon fiber so no, PV is 90%+ silicon, so much much less of a footprint. For storage, there's lithium which is pumped from underground brine reservoirs so it's about as safe as it comes. Meanwhile Uranium mining is one of the most hazardous things to mine. just look up the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act.

>>11465337
>makes a claim
>has claim disproved by study
>'nooo, it must be because of something else'

>>11465365
>go back to epic reddit
le no loser

>>11465374
cringe

>>11465375
have sex incel

>>11465378
>(((incel)))

>>11463052
nuclear makes toxic substances, even if they were words, just look at this thread

>>11465365
Are you denying the dangers of uranium mining? do you have a study to back up your claim? Because I can't post studies about cancer rates in uranium miners before virtually all domestic mines were closed.

>>11465382
>J-Jews are the reason why any women don't wanna kiss me.

>>11465357
the blades are carbon fiber, the rest of it is mostly steel. know where steel comes from?

>>11463052
>i dont understand the hate towards nuclear energy
Someone doesn't want you to have clean, cheap energy.

>>11465357
>the process for PV crystaline doesn't produce a carbon footprint on its own
Check that argument and come back

>>11465541
but why? why from average people?

>>11465939
Because NPCs are slaves

>>11463783
Any names? I haven't heard of em

>>11463052
No, it's shit. Here are some of the less commonly-cited ways in which it is shit.

1. Economically: it is very expensive and time-consuming to construct a new nuclear reactor as opposed to a wind turbine or solar module. The economic risk that this causes is underappreciated by nuclear backers. It is difficult for a new nuclear plant to be financed without state support. Furthermore, even with massive investment it will take longer to iterate designs and reduce costs than it has with renewables.

2. Strategically: large nuclear plants are obvious targets in any conflict, both to knock out power generation and to tie up resources in mitigating radiation/fallout.

3. Politically: can you convince people of the safety and cheapness of nuclear when renewables are already safer and cheaper?

>>11463440
>The risk is simply to high.

When will this meme die?

>>11468309
1. The initial investment is offset by the cheaper production of electricity once running, renewables need substantial investment for construction and subsidization to remain competitive operating, and even when finally operational, renewables never run at full capacity, and I honestly can't wait for this "Nuclear Reactors take too long to build" thing to die, every pro-renewable/anti-nuclear study keeps referencing the same 2 fucking projects that were raped by regulations and court cases when citing construction times. That's just skimming the surface of the renewable woes.

2. ANY power plant is a target
>both to knock out power generation and to tie up resources in mitigating radiation/fallout.

No country will intentionally damage a nuclear reactor to cause Radiological contamination, especially when there's a chance when the aggressors territory could be contaminated too, fuck even in Nuclear warfare they try to reduce fallout by only doing airburst detonations.


3. That's a complete lie, Renewables are more expensive, every country where there is a renewables transition, power prices go up, without fail. Examples are Australia, Denmark, and Germany to name a few.

> renewables are already safer and cheaper?
>>11468516

>>11468309
>Economically
Electricity production is always dependent on state support. The entire green energy sector in Germany is backed by government subsidies because it literally wouldn't be profitable in a free market environment, so the entire thing is costing the taxpayer hundreds of billions of euros. Of course this hasn't resulted in a 100% green energy sector either, instead it merely offset the loss of electricity formerly produced by nuclear power, while the largest share of power generation remains coal.
>Strategically
Literally a non argument. Any conflict that would see the destruction of power stations would inevitably be a nuclear exchange, in which case it would mean precious little if your powerstations are a bit more dispersed.

>>11463052

Produces tons of waste that stays radio active for millions of years. Nuke power is fucking stupid. Especially since we can get super critical steam from solar now.

>>11465227

this. investing heavy into nuke is as stupid as investing heavy into coal.

>>11465328

this chart only incorporates "roof top" solar, which makes it a roofing job.

If you account for ground and water solar arrays solar goes wayyyyy under nuke.

Nuclear fags always exclusively use metrics like price per Kwh or deaths per kwh that fail to capture the big picture.

The capital needed to build a new power plant is enormous and it will be years and years before you see a return in your investment. Energy demands are growing slowly in the countries rich enough to afford them and in those countries the renewable sector is growing so rapidly and getting so much cheaper that by the time its built you're likely to have lost a big chunk of whatever advantage you have now. What if in that time something happens in another plant and yours gets cancelled? How much cheaper will renewables become in that time? What if new regulations come in? How could your budget and schedule grow over the time taken to build the plant? It's a massive financial risk that nobody is willing to take.

Safety wise, it's all very well pointing out the very low deaths per kwh, but these are global/nationwide averages. They will do little to comfort the people who are actually going to have to live with the reactor in their neighbourhood. If something does go wrong the effects could potentially be catastrophic, even if not fatal. Solar panels and wind turbines don't carry the risk of forcing you to evacuate your lifelong home and your community and your job.

Nuclearfags also like to pretend that things like human error like Chernobyl don't count and so will never happen again.

>>11468309
This gaylord has it right with 1 and 3, don't care much for 2.

>>11468627
>human error like Chernobyl
It wasn't human error. It was commies deliberately rushing the construction (muh 5-year plan in less years!) of a now obsolete design (which is less safe compared to modern ones), fucking up during an _experiment_, trying to sweep everything under a rug (muh international image!) by throwing bodies (mostly soldiers) at the problem and finally trying to cover up the extent of failing to sweep everything under a rug. It was systematic criminal negligence by the highest echelons of the government.

>>11463440
the worst accident was chernobyl which was caused by absolute bum fuck levels of retardation, and it wasn't even that bad

>>11468699
>rushing the construction
Human error

>fucking up during an _experiment_
Human error

>>11468701
>and it wasn't even that bad
Tell that to the people who's lives were drastically changed/ruined

>>11468726
No, you piece of neutron star. Human error is a guy trying to hammer a nail into a plank, not realizing that the plank is not fixed in place properly and getting hit by said plank as a consequence. Chernobyl catastrophe is like a guy ordering to build a blimp for public transportation but mandating it to be filled with hydrogen and attaching a long enough lit fuse before it takes off.

>>11463052
>nuclear energy is our best option
i agree

>>11468738
Nice pointless analogies
>a guy ordering to build a blimp for public transportation but mandating it to be filled with hydrogen and attaching a long enough lit fuse before it takes off.
That's bad management and human error.

Regardless of pedantic arguing over the exact meaning of 'human error', people like to pretend something like Chernobyl could never happen again and so it doesn't count, when in reality it could.

>>11468784
>Nice pointless analogies
Nice obtuseness.

>That's bad management and human error.
No, that's terrible management and deliberate setup for failure.

>people like to pretend something like Chernobyl could never happen again and so it doesn't count
No, people argue using analysis of what happened that for it to repeat it would take clearly deliberate actions governed by malicious intent. Something that can lead to disastrous events regardless of means being employed.

>>11468807
>for it to repeat it would take clearly deliberate actions governed by malicious intent
The maliciousness only started in the cover up, the incident itself was an accidental human fuck up

>>11468830
So building reactors using nuclear fission, something that have been clearly shown to be dangerous IF MISHANDLED, with gross violations of safety procedures is not malicious intent? Because it's perfectly normal for leaders of huge countries in possession of nuclear weapons (no, I'm not fucking bringing that up because nucular reeacturr = big bad boom but because of contamination potential) which have been tested multiple times over previous decades to make such decisions due to mere fallibility.
It feels like the average user of this site is getting mode retarded by the day.

>>11468871
>malicious intent
The people who planned the experiment didn't intent to create the disaster, nor did the people who operated the experiment and subsequently died. If they were violating safety protocol at the time, they probably were unaware else they might not have gone through with the experiment. Are you really convinced that they deliberately caused the disaster?

>>11468907
>The people who planned the experiment didn't intent to create the disaster
How can you be so certain? Soviets were perfectly fine with throwing unwitting bodies into meat grinders or into some kind of fucked up experiment scenario before and after that. If you care to consider the whole picture at once it's pretty clear that they wanted to test long term exposure on a disposable population.

>nor did the people who operated the experiment and subsequently died
First time you are correct and only because the operators were given partially incorrect training.

>Are you really convinced that they deliberately caused the disaster?
On the very small chance that it wasn't intentional, the fucks in kremlin wanted the common people to bust their asses building the things properly within unrealistic time span and conducting the experiment without a hitch using deliberately flawed knowledge. Because apparently "advanced socialism" (remember, communism is this unattainable dream we're always building towards, decade after decade) gives people magical powers that allow to discard the laws of physics.
Commies should've been tried at Nuremberg too for everything they done just in those 70 years.

>>11468925
>If you care to consider the whole picture at once it's pretty clear that they wanted to test long term exposure on a disposable population
Nice conspiracy >>>/x/

>the operators were given partially incorrect training
Human error

>>11463478
saved nice

>>11465939
this book has a great section on the subject

pg 141, Taking the 'bloom of the nuclear rose'

>In the postwar period, nuclear energy represented precisely the
same technological improvement over oil which oil had represented
over coal when Lord Fisher and Winston Churchill argued at the end
of the nineteenth century that Britain’s navy should convert to oil
from coal. The major difference in the 1970s was that Britain and
her cousins in the United States were fi rmly in control of world oil
supplies. World nuclear technology threatened to open unbounded
energy possibilities, especially if plans for commercial nuclear fast
breeder reactors were realized, as well as for thermonuclear fusion.
In the immediate aftermath of the 1974 oil shock, two organizations
were established within the nuclear industry, both, signifi cantly
enough, based in London. In early 1975, an informal semisecret
group was established, the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group, or ‘London
Club,’ as it was known. The group included Britain, the United States
and Canada, together with France, Germany, Japan and the USSR.
This was an initial Anglo-American effort to secure self-restraint on
nuclear export. This group was complemented in May 1975 by the
formation of another secretive organization, the London ‘Uranium
Institute,’ which brought together the world’s major suppliers of
uranium. This was dominated by the traditional British territories,
including Canada, Australia, South Africa and the United Kingdom.
These ‘inside’ organizations were necessary, but by no means
suffi cient, for the Anglo-American interests to contain the nuclear
‘threat’ of the early 1970s. As one prominent antinuclear American
from the Aspen Institute put it, ‘We must take the bloom off the
“nuclear rose.”’ And take it off they did.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/34a6/e234dde004c4af7f7e491df0d2a3448014aa.pdf?_ga=2.70864464.1129132649.1584216022-81050576.1583599916

>>11469462
interesting

>>11463052
Nuclear energy is safe if you don't safe money on it.

Everybody's around to safe a money, so it's not safe.

>>11468627
>The capital needed to build a new power plant is enormous

Based on what to be exact? Two cherry picked examples where projects were delayed by regulations and court battles?

> the renewable sector is growing so rapidly and getting so much cheaper

In Germany and other countries the renewables transition has stalled, there is no 'rapid growth'.
https://www.dw.com/en/german-wind-energy-stalls-amid-public-resistance-and-regulatory-hurdles/a-50280676

As for price, it has already been disproved >>11468544, anyone at this stage who assert renewables are 'cheaper' are just lying, what you've said is akin to a marketing gimmick that has been disproved time and time again through statistical and empirical data, in pic the nations who've invested the most in renewables are the ones who have the most expensive energy in Europe, it's a damning correlation to say the least.

>They will do little to comfort the people who are actually going to have to live with the reactor in their neighbourhood. If something does go wrong the effects could potentially be catastrophic, even if not fatal.

That argument falls flat on it's face once you consider the lives saved through air pollution by Nuclear energy, the appeal when Nuclear first came onto the scene was that it reduced air pollution, 3 million people die every year from fossil fuels, not even including the environmental damage, 'catastrophic' Nuclear has comparatively killed a fraction of that, when people say Nuclear has the lowest deaths per terrawatt hour its not bullshitting by any means.

>Solar panels and wind turbines don't carry the risk of forcing you to evacuate your lifelong home and your community and your job.

Depending on who you ask that's false too. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/can-wind-turbines-make-you-sick/


Nuclear is safer than renewables, has caused less deaths, is cheaper than renewables, and is environmentally friendly.

>>11463440
>The risk is simply to high
No it isn't, it's manageable, and with thorium reactors virtually non-existent. Fossil fuels are so damaging not just from climate change but pollution, air pollution and even nuclear waste (the fossil industry produces enormous amounts of toxic nuclear waste that it simply dumps in the cheapest way thinkable).
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/oil-gas-fracking-radioactive-investigation-937389/

>“A lot of guys are coming up with cancer, or sores and skin lesions that take months to heal,” he says. Peter experiences regular headaches and nausea, numbness in his fingertips and face, and “joint pain like fire.”
>He says he wasn’t given any safety instructions on radioactivity, and while he is required to wear steel-toe boots, safety glasses, a hard hat, and clothes with a flash-resistant coating, he isn’t required to wear a respirator or a dosimeter to measure his radioactivity exposure — and the rest of the uniform hardly offers protection from brine. “It’s all over your hands, and inside your boots, and on the cuticles of your toes, and any cuts you have — you’re soaked,” he says.
>The most common isotopes are radium-226 and radium-228, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission requires industrial discharges to remain below 60 for each. >Four of Peter’s samples registered combined radium levels above 3,500, and one was more than 8,500.
>It’s ridiculous that these drivers are not being told what’s in their trucks,” says John Stolz, Duquesne’s environmental-center director. “And this stuff is on every corner — it is in neighborhoods. Truckers don’t know they’re being exposed to radioactive waste, nor are they being provided with protective clothing.

>>11470709
>“Breathing in this stuff and ingesting it are the worst types of exposure,” Stolz continues. “You are irradiating your tissues from the inside out.” The radioactive particles fired off by radium can be blocked by the skin, but radium readily attaches to dust, making it easy to accidentally inhale or ingest. Once inside the body, its insidious effects accumulate with each exposure. It is known as a “bone seeker” because it can be incorporated into the skeleton and cause bone cancers called sarcomas. It also decays into a series of other radioactive elements, called “daughters.” The first one for radium-226 is radon, a radioactive gas and the second-leading cause of lung cancer in the U.S. Radon has also been linked to chronic lymphocytic leukemia. “Every exposure results in an increased risk,” says Ian Fairlie, a British radiation biologist. “Think of it like these guys have been given negative lottery tickets, and somewhere down the line their number will come up and they will die.”
>Peter’s samples are just a drop in the bucket. Oil fields across the country — from the Bakken in North Dakota to the Permian in Texas — have been found to produce brine that is highly radioactive. “All oil-field workers,” says Fairlie, “are radiation workers.” But they don’t necessarily know it.
>Tanks, filters, pumps, pipes, hoses, and trucks that brine touches can all become contaminated, with the radium building up into hardened “scale,” concentrating to as high as 400,000 picocuries per gram.

>>11470735
>Radium in its brine can average around 9,300 picocuries per liter, but has been recorded as high as 28,500. “If I had a beaker of that on my desk and accidentally dropped it on the floor, they would shut the place down,” says Yuri Gorby, a microbiologist who spent 15 years studying radioactivity with the Department of Energy. “And if I dumped it down the sink, I could go to jail.”
>As of 2016, fracking accounted for more than two-thirds of all new U.S. wells, according to the Energy Information Administration. There are about 1 million active oil-and-gas wells, across 33 states, with some of the biggest growth happening in the most radioactive formation — the Marcellus. And some regulations have only gotten weaker. “Legislators have laid out a careful set of exemptions that allow this industry to exist,” says Teresa Mills of the Buckeye Environmental Network, an Ohio community-organizing group. “There is no protection for citizens at all — nothing.”
>There is little public awareness of this enormous waste stream, the disposal of which could present dangers at every step — from being transported along America’s highways in unmarked trucks; handled by workers who are often misinformed and underprotected; leaked into waterways; and stored in dumps that are not equipped to contain the toxicity. Brine has even been used in commercial products sold at hardware stores and is spread on local roads as a de-icer.
>“Essentially what you are doing is taking an underground radioactive reservoir and bringing it to the surface where it can interact with people and the environment,”
>But the radioactivity in oil-and-gas waste receives little federal oversight. “They swept this up and forgot about it on the federal side,”

>>11470747
>“The Nuclear Regulatory Commission does not have statutory authority to regulate naturally occurring radioactive material,” says NRC spokesman David McIntyre. The agency has authority over “materials stemming from the nuclear fuel cycle,” he says, adding, “My understanding is that the Environmental Protection Agency is the federal regulator for…oil-and-gas wastes.”
>“There is no one federal agency that specifically regulates the radioactivity brought to the surface by oil-and-gas development,” an EPA representative says. In fact, thanks to a single exemption the industry received from the EPA in 1980, the streams of waste generated at oil-and-gas wells — all of which could be radioactive and hazardous to humans — are not required to be handled as hazardous waste.
>In 1988, the EPA assessed the exemption — called the Bentsen and Bevill amendments, part of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act — and claimed that “potential risk to human health and the environment were small,” even though the agency found concerning levels of lead, arsenic, barium, and uranium, and admitted that it did not assess many of the major potential risks. Instead, the report focused on the financial and regulatory burdens, determining that formally labeling the “billions of barrels of waste” as hazardous would “cause a severe economic impact on the industry.” Effectively, the EPA determined that in order for oil-and-gas to flourish, its hazardous waste should not be defined as hazardous.

>>11470748
>The levels of radium in Louisiana oil pipes had registered as much as 20,000 times the limits set by the EPA for topsoil at uranium-mill waste sites. Templet found that workers who were cleaning oil-field piping were being coated in radioactive dust and breathing it in. One man they tested had radioactivity all over his clothes, his car, his front steps, and even on his newborn baby. The industry was also spewing waste into coastal waterways, and radioactivity was shown to accumulate in oysters. Pipes still laden with radioactivity were donated by the industry and reused to build community playgrounds. Templet sent inspectors with Geiger counters across southern Louisiana. >One witnessed a kid sitting on a fence made from piping so radioactive they were set to receive a full year’s radiation dose in an hour. “People thought getting these pipes for free from the oil industry was such a great deal,” says Templet, “but essentially the oil companies were just getting rid of their waste.”
>Another Times story that year reported that the radiation measured in oil-and-gas equipment “exposes people to levels that are equal to and at times greater than workers receive in nuclear power plants,”
>“may ultimately decide whether oil companies can be held responsible for billions of dollars in expenses associated with cleaning up and disposing radioactive wastes at thousands of oil-and-gas sites around the nation.”
So the FOSSIL fuel industry is dumping toxic radioactive brine and boatloads of other radioactive waste from drilling and fracking all over the place and it doesn't even qualify as hazardous waste, despite clearly being a (hazardous) waste product from FOSSIL fuel extraction.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/oil-gas-fracking-radioactive-investigation-937389/

JESUS CHRIST... GREEN TEXT EVERYWHERE!!!!!!!

>>11463935
>How hard do you think they're going to lobby against fusion
Probably not much since it’s stagnated research and unfavorable publicly. At the very least we’ll run out of fuel before it really threatens oil companies.

>>11471898
>GREEN TEXT EVERYWHERE
I’ve found that the level of discussion rises as the amount of green text rises. I don’t know of that many places besides 4chan where you both can, and is common to, point out every single instance in a post where the guy grew an extra chromosome. Without that it becomes too easy to ignore the better points of the the other side of the argument.