Poll of the Day > With all the talk about renewable energy, I don't know why nuclear is ignored.

(+) Yeah! (+)

shadowsword87 posted...

To be honest, hydropower seems like a bad path to go down. They actually don't generate that much power, and they do a decent amount of damage to the ecosystem.

Obviously if a damn is needed, hey hydropower is great to tack on. But I don't think it's great to go looking at places looking for more hydropower, it's not ideal.

To say nothing of the environmental impact of producing that much concrete. As far as renewable energy goes, hydroelectric is pretty bad.

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We have multiple paths we can go down to solve any energy problems we have, and it's just a matter of time till the tech is developed to make it no longer a problem at all.

Obviously cold fusion would solve the issue completely, enable travel to other planets in our solar system on a regular basis (and therefore, allow us to easily teraform them and populate them (including moons).

Nucleor power though has come along way and is far safer now then it used to be, and while it's expensive to set up, it can be mostly automated as well at this point, meaning a newer plant would need far less people actually manning it (but not like just 1 homer with a button hehe).

There are even safeguards now to prevent a meltdown if a power plant is left unmanned for a long time (rods i believe would continue to heat up till you ran out of water/coolant and then melt down if not monitored in the past....which could cause severe environmental damage).

Honestly though, the main reason not to build more nuke plants is because there are better alternatives in the pipeline already, that don't cost as much and will probably be up and running before the investment in a new nuke plant actually pays off.

There are ways to combine Solar and wind for instance in 1 generator (large solar panels are used for the wind generator, gathering electricity from the sun AND also generating it from the wind at the same time).

Water generators are also usable in a more efficient way as well, using the initial kinetic generation of the water (from a dam etc) to create a perpetual generation of electricity via water/steam/water conversion (basically get many times the electricity output from the same dam as you used to).

As technology advances all forms of energy generation will improve, until we eventually develop cold fusion or something similar that enables you to get unlimited energy for free or very close to free. I imagine, if nothing catastrophic happens, that we will have unlimited free energy in the next 20-30 years for sure (basically before 2050).

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^
how about a dipping bird?
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^
how about a dipping bird to press the button?
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Why is everything I saw trolling according to Zeus? I literally hear conservatives in my life bitching about Fukushima wastewater after I heard them pontificating on nuclear a few months ago.

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ReturnOfFa posted...

Why is everything I saw trolling according to Zeus? I literally hear conservatives in my life bitching about Fukushima wastewater after I heard them pontificating on nuclear a few months ago.

Projection.

He accused me of trolling once for saying a movie wasn't terrible.

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shadowsword87 posted...

I'm saying that argument is dumb, people get stuff they don't want in their backyard all the time.

People also complain that windmills are loud, but they're still going up.

To be fair, there's a HUGE fucking difference between "that dump/plant smells" or "those windmills are annoying" versus "That nuclear plant can theoretically give me cancer and shave years off my life, or potentially suffer a catastrophic accident and lethally irradiate a thousand square miles worth of land for essentially the next 20,000 years."

I'm fairly sure no coal plant or windmill has ever exploded and rendered an area nearly the size of Rhode Island completely radioactive for decades. About the closest you really get to a comparable disaster with non-nuclear plants is Centralia, which a) is a waaay smaller area, and b) is something the average person doesn't even know exists anyway. For fossil fuels in general you could point to stuff like the BP oil spill, but that's very much a "not my problem" sort of vibe for most people, in the same way most ocean dumping (whether trash or chemical) tends to get ignored.

The likelihood of a major accident actually happening or the degree to which safety is much, much, much higher in the average plant than it was in Three Mile Island or Chernobyl is utterly immaterial when you're talking about how people FEEL about something. Sure, the odds of a local nuclear power plant actually melting down might be lower than your odds of getting struck by lightning three times on the same day you win the lottery, but that's not going to matter to someone who is being asked to live within the potential radius of the plant.

Related to the "everyone wants one, not one wants one near them" comment earlier, it's sort of like the problems with self-driving cars - everyone can TALK about how much safer they are, or how much better they'd be in general, but almost nobody actually wants to be the first people to OWN them. Polls consistently show that tons of people who strongly support the introduction of automated vehicles are also more than willing to vote that they're completely unwilling to be early adopters themselves. So essentially they want OTHER people to have to make the sacrifices to accomplish what they see as a worthwhile goal, but will back down the moment they're expected to make the sacrifice themselves.

Which is fairly common in most socio-political and ideological discussions, honestly. The people who are always the most keen on the idea of change are almost always also the people who have absolutely nothing to lose, or stand to gain while other people lose. It's part of what makes compromise such a hard thing to really achieve.
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ReturnOfFa posted...

I always hear Conservatives talking about Nuclear power one day and then bitching about Fukushima the next.

Most of the conservatives I know never bitched about Fukushima unless they were pointing out how stupid it was to build such a massive nuclear plant so close to a major faultline in a fairly tectonically unstable country, or how it was probably a bad idea to build so close to the shore when the potential for tsunamis was significantly high (something they were literally warned about before they built it). Both of which are actually pretty good points, when you think about it.

Then again, most of the conservatives I know have never really been overt advocates of nuclear power in the first place. Most of the ones I know tend to lean more into the "we need better solar generation/battery storage/transmission technology" camp for greener energy. It might be an age thing, or a regional thing.
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ReturnOfFa posted...

Why is everything I saw trolling according to Zeus? I literally hear conservatives in my life bitching about Fukushima wastewater after I heard them pontificating on nuclear a few months ago.

He cant comprehend that some people view things differently than he does. In his mind if you express any view that is different than his own you are either virtue signaling or trying to troll him.

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Most older physicists I know who have spoken about nuclear energy are against the use of nuclear energy. The younger ones are more for it.

Not that it means anything.

trodi_911 posted...

I'm not fully blaming it but the Simpsons didn't really help nuclear power's image either.

Lol, good point

blu posted...

Not that it means anything.

Or does it?
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Because it's not renewable and the waste product is highly toxic.

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ParanoidObsessive posted...

I'm fairly sure no coal plant or windmill has ever exploded and rendered an area nearly the size of Rhode Island completely radioactive for decades. About the closest you really get to a comparable disaster with non-nuclear plants is Centralia, which a) is a waaay smaller area, and b) is something the average person doesn't even know exists anyway. For fossil fuels in general you could point to stuff like the BP oil spill, but that's very much a "not my problem" sort of vibe for most people, in the same way most ocean dumping (whether trash or chemical) tends to get ignored.

So, actual explosions? No.
But, we can talk about the environmental damage of coal, which is the largest producer of energy right now.
There are plenty of places in west virginia that are straight up abandoned because of fears of it collapsing due to the mines. Pollution is also just as bad. Loss of life of nuclear is incomparable to coal deaths from its just... everything from mining coal to the burning of coal. Every step in coal production is covered in blood and cancer.
The reason why people don't care is because west virginia is full of poor people, and nobody cares about poor people unless it effects them personally.

SunWuKung420 posted...

Because it's not renewable and the waste product is highly toxic.

the waste can be used up to make more energy
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it's normally safe
but don't forget chern gave lots of people cancer afterwards that weren't even working there like 4k

it's ok in places like NY
in LA there's earthquakes, in other parts of the country tornados

you dont' want a nuclear power plant up stream or on some remote location
that nobody wants to work at
it's either millions spent to keep it going
or 1 guy to fix the turbine for wind
obviously wind if it's in the middle of nowhere which is like half the country

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There have been incidents of nuclear reactors melting down which is why using nuclear is a touchy subject. Radiation can stay present for hundreds of years so that is one issue with using nuclear energy.

Google Three Mile Island! Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania was a nuclear power plant that experienced a partial reactor meltdown that leaked radiation back in the late 1970s.

It still remains the most significant accident in U.S. commercial nuclear power plant history. It cost $1B and nearly 20 years to clean up.

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shadowsword87 posted...

But, we can talk about the environmental damage of coal, which is the largest producer of energy right now.

Like I said, though, "environmental damage" doesn't really mean shit to most people.

It's a question of visceral threat. Saying "this thing increases toxins in the environment, which can raise risk of cancer over the long term", is something that doesn't really impact most people on the visceral level. It's an intellectual threat rather than an emotional terror. Similar to the metaphor with the frog in the boiling pot, it's too easy to say "Yeah, but that's Future Me's problem" (and that's a documented facet of human psychology - we're MUCH more likely to view problems we have to deal with in the future as someone else's problem, because our brains actually think of "Future Us" as if they were different people). Add in bits of "Ehh, that's someone else's problem" or "Ehh, it's not so bad" or "Well, you have to take the good with the bad" or even "Well, we'll figure out a way to fix it eventually if it gets too bad", and it becomes super-easy to dismiss.

It's part of why most discussions about climate change hit such a solid wall of apathy. And why no one really cares about things like massive swathes of microplastic in the middle of the ocean or Kessler Syndrome eventually fucking us all. It's not immediate, so it's not worth caring about it. Especially if we're being asked to sacrifice in some way to fix it.

Conversely, a nuclear plant down the road from my house could explode tomorrow, doing direct, irreparable harm to my life and health almost immediately. THAT'S something worth worrying about.

And again, it doesn't even matter if the fear is realistic - what matters is people's perception of it.

People fear nuclear power because it can (and has) cause(d) immediate damage, and therefore might again. Coal pollution and hydroelectric power do less obvious damage over a much longer period of time, so it's far easier to ignore the consequences and risks.
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