I don’t think so. Really, it would depend on which regulations were eased up. You’d have to evaluate them. That said, the current level of regulation is much, much higher than it was in the past…in the past when, the fatalities in the US due to nuclear power were STILL ridiculously low. To get to a Chernobyl sized disaster you’d need to have a design that, frankly, NO ONE, regardless of the regulations, would build, and then have some idiots disable the few safety controls because some communist flack decided it was a good idea to test. IOW, it ain’t ever going to happen.
To get a Fukoshima sized disaster, you’d need to have a very old power plant hit by a 1000 year earth quake and tsunami…and then, you’d get basically the potential for a higher number of deaths in the future due to cancer and such and some nasty clean up. About every couple of decades…maybe. So, cost to benefit time…which is worse? A potential Fukushima maybe ever couple of decades, or global climate change? Is global climate change a ‘maybe’ for you? If not, the math seems pretty clear. MAYBE a potential for a problem if a really perfect storm of shit happens (that will kill 10’s of thousands alone, with the nuclear part being really a side show) or what WILL happen if we don’t start putting none CO2 producing energy on the grid at a scale to make a real difference?
This is the precise attitude that I was taught in the Navy leads to accidents, minor and severe. The ONLY way (psychologically speaking – and this was actually a big part of our training!) to consistently prevent nuclear accidents is to NEVER fall into the trap of feeling complacent with regards to operating a nuclear reactor. Operators must always be on their toes, and always be ready for casualties (i.e. something going wrong with the reactor systems). And they can never think “it won’t happen here”.
Thing is that you ignore what was said already to come with that. Again, the numbers are there to tell the wackos from the left to take a hike, but as mentioned before there is a good number of ignorants from the right that stop progress there. Even in Red Arizona while nuclear power is still going on, a proposed nuclear dump has been in limbo for ages. BTW I do not oppose adding more reactors in the Palo Verde area.
Well, that false choice can be disregarded as usual.
Things are rarely that simplistic in what I like to call “the real world”. One of the most important reasons that regulations are needed, broadly speaking, is to counter the natural inclination of private enterprise to maximize profits which often leads to priorities that are directly opposed to the public interest, such as cost-cutting that leads to unsafe products, unsafe working conditions, or environmental hazards. History abounds with examples despite attempts at regulation, because the attempts have sometimes been too little or too late.
But when government directly manages an initiative, there is no profit motive that needs to be regulated, and when properly structured things can be a lot more efficient. Despite what many may feel about the inefficiencies of “government bureaucracy”, having the government directly run certain kinds of operations can be a lot more efficient and productive than having a government bureaucracy trying to regulate private-enterprise bureaucracies who are ready to totally screw the public interest and public safety at the drop of a hat just to save a dollar.
One good example of this principle that comes to mind is the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the single-payer model of universal health care, but there’s a more immediately relevant example right here in the context of nuclear power. While you guys are arguing about how much regulation is necessary for nuclear power and how to go about implementing it, here in Ontario more than 60% of all the electric power in the province already comes from nuclear and has been for decades. Much of the rest is clean hydro-electric. The last coal-fired power plant was demolished years ago, and increasing amounts of power are coming from wind farms. Why? Partly because of government initiatives and regulation, but in no small measure because about half of all electric power in Ontario is produced by Ontario Power Generation, a government-owned corporation which has also been able to do all these things for about 40% less cost than the private sector.
I didn’t say anything about complacence. I said that no one (no one sane) would ever design a reactor like Chernobyl in the western world. Not only was it a dangerous design, but it was not cost effective. Basically, the current regulations we have are mainly designed and crafted to prevent new nuclear reactors from being built. To get a new design through would be such a ridiculous task that no one is going to do it. So, then we are back to old designs that are approved. Trouble is, those regulation make it very, very difficult to actually build on, especially on top of the resistance you will get from various groups even if you do manage to jump through all the regulatory hoops and get one approved. Look at what happened under Obama. He did actually do a few things to try and clear up some of the more ridiculous ones, and claimed the way was free for new reactors (well, ‘new’ old designs). Where are they? Have we build or are we building 10? 20? 50? That’s what we need. Hell, we need 100’s. So, how many are getting build do you expect and what are their expected completion times so we can start producing a lot of cleaner energy? Just take a guess at the above.
The thing is, no one is saying not to regulate nuclear at all. But other countries don’t put in all of the road blocks and regulations we do, and manged just fine to build new reactors. At this point, we are so far behind that I don’t think any of our nuclear energy companies COULD build a new reactor…we’d need to get someone else from some other country (the Chinese say…wonder how safe THAT will be? :p) to build them for us.
At a certain point, you need to look at this from a costs to benefits standpoint. What are the costs of not doing it, verse the benefits? What are the costs of cutting out some of the more ridiculous regulations and, perhaps, lowering safety standards to what they were when we still COULD build a reactor (or clearing the ridiculous bureaucracy and allowing new designs to be built) and the subsequent risk verse the cost of just going along business as usual and hoping solar and wind can do something substantial in a few decades while we build natural gas power plants instead and in the mean time?
I don’t have a problem with reevaluating regulations and getting rid of the ones that aren’t doing any good. I have a problem with easing up on the ones that are, just to make it easier.
Intellectually, you now that other countries are building new reactors, and the US isn’t. Why do you think that is? Is it that our regulations are better and theirs more lax and so they are taking on unacceptable amounts of risk while we are just being prudent? I’m curious what your thoughts are on this seeming disconnect.
You are missing the point. No one is saying “it won’t happen here” if we reduce the regulatory burden of building new nuclear power plants.
We are saying that the risk of an accident that kills a hundred people goes up if we reduce the regulations and actually build some new power plants. We are also saying that the risk of millions of people being killed by global warming goes down. A hundred people dying is better than a million.
We aren’t talking about ships and submarines. We are talking about nuclear power plants that generate electricity for towns and cities. The government has not done that, and that is what we need to do.
So things are more efficient when you don’t need to hold down costs? I don’t think that is generally the case.
What would be efficient is if the regulatory burden were reduced, accepting the risk that a few might die, instead of wasting millions and decades in trying to square the circle of absolute perfection, and the corresponding waste of the endless lawsuits of the environmentalist whackos and NIMBY noodniks who do not care about either science, or cost-benefit analysis.
As I said, you get your ignorant nutcases to shut up, and I suspect it will be a hell of a lot easier to convince Republicans to go forward on nuclear energy.
I’m disagreeing with your math, because I think that “hundred people dying” would lead to an end of the industry, and then the same harm from climate change.
Actually, navy reactors have powered towns and cities in many circumstances (usually natural disasters). Running a stationary power plant is easier in many ways than one on a warship, and harder in much fewer ways (chiefly that it’s not continually traveling through the cooling medium). There’s no reason to believe that the government couldn’t run civilian power plants as well as they do submarine and carrier power plants.
If that’s the case then there is no point. If 100 people dying a year (which would be, oh, 2 orders of magnitude more than die currently from nuclear power a year) is too steep a price then people aren’t using any sort of logic to assess the risk, and so, the answer is ‘guess we build natural gas power plants’. The risk of global climate change is many, many orders of magnitude more potentially deadly in terms of lives lost per year, yet you are saying that’s unacceptable and that it would kill the industry, so let’s hold out for that. But by so saying, you basically concede that nuclear energy is a dead end and we’ll just do what we’ve been doing, and I guess hope that the magic tech fairies will give us fusion, or magic batteries for mega-cities or some other magic tech. Which means…we build natural gas. I guess it will be ok, right?
Why don’t they? What’s stopping the government from building a nuclear power plant and running it? They have in the past. What’s stopping someone from using a Navy nuclear design and using THAT? Answer those questions and really think about the risk one and I think you’ll see what folks are getting at.
We aren’t building any new reactors now. Therefore we have even more harm from climate change, because we don’t have any of the non-GHG emitting power that nuclear energy generates, and no reasonable alternatives.
A stationary power plant is much harder to build, because of the unreasonable level of lawsuits and regulations and intentional delay that the NIMBYs and anti-nukes create.
What is it about government that makes it unable to “hold down costs”? How is that consistent with government-run health care costing an average of about half as much per capita in OECD countries as it costs in the US? How is that consistent with the statement I made about government-owned Ontario Power Generation incurring “40% less cost than the private sector” (cite for that here).
In fact, you seem to have completely ignored my entire last paragraph about the success of nuclear power in Ontario, which provides more than 60% of all electric power in the province. And incidentally, one of those nuclear plants is private (not owned by OPG) – though of coursehighly regulated by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. So clearly the challenges of viable, cost-effective, and safe nuclear power have solutions, and notably none of those solutions involve the things you’re advocating, which seems to be to let the private sector run loose with a minimum of regulation and hope for the best, because, like, the private sector has never let anyone down when it comes to safety or environmental responsibility.
Politics. I’m with you that we should build more nuclear power plants, and that fighting climate change without nuclear power would be exceedingly difficult, if not impossible. We’re just disagreeing on the best way to get there.
I have to mention that you only show ignorance of what I have posted before, I did criticize Bernie for not looking at nuclear power, so yeah, while I do, your side does need to tell the yahoo in chief to shut up.
I honestly don’t know what the best way is…or if there is a ‘best’ way. Maybe it’s just the best of bad choices at this point. What I do know is that if the emergency is as dire as people make it out to be (and, I actually believe it IS btw), then we need to explore all options, including those that might increase local risk in some cases. Nuclear is clearly something we could use, an use as a mainstay, if we were willing to pay the price (or maybe the prices…it is VERY expensive, on top of everything else, especially the up front capital costs). But when I see people who are supposedly beating the drum about how dire things are and they aren’t even mentioning a viable option, it makes me wonder if THEY are really taking this seriously, or if this is just another political move for them. The NGD (since that’s the topic of this thread) talks about a lot of things that don’t have anything to do with climate change, yet doesn’t even mention something that could help. And others in her party…presumably the party of adults who ARE supposed to take climate change deadly seriously…haven’t called her out on it. If the Democrats are serious about climate change…and I think they are…then they need to start including nuclear power as a serious move, not lip service. If things are really as dire as they seem, we need to do everything we can. And, frankly, nuclear is something that we can do, if we can get a shift in public attitude (an attitude that’s been crafted for fear for decades by the left and by the anti-nukes) it’s something that’s do-able on the time frames and on the scales that could actually make a real, measurable and potentially life saving impact. I’m not saying we should do nuclear to the exclusion of everything else…I say we should be doing nuclear AND a lot of other things, including more wind, solar, geothermal, perhaps even hydro (sacrifices and all)…whatever it takes. I think the market is shifting, and battery cars are going to gain an increasing market share in the coming years. I wouldn’t be surprised if, in the next 10 years or so they overtake ICE vehicles in total sales. I wouldn’t have thought that even 5 years ago, but it’s happening.
While a rise in emissions is bad, there was an AEI misleading stretch coming from that Forbes Magazine contributor; sure, emissions did rise 16% from the 90s, but the numbers should had been based from the time the nuclear plant was closed… in 2014.
So, where is that talk about alarmism? As I noticed many times before, the alarmism comes by the Gigaton from right wing sources when they exaggerate the effect of removing a nuclear plant while not mentioning what else is happening in the state too.
So Trump is a dumbass who doesn’t believe in global warming and supports nuclear energy. Sanders is a dumbass who believes in global warming and wants to phase out nuclear energy. We need nuclear energy to combat global warming.
Therefore you would like to condemn the dumbass who is doing the right thing for the wrong reason, and not the dumbass who is doing the wrong thing because he doesn’t understand the science.
You are going to have to decide which is more important - actually combatting AGW, or just hating Trump.
Trump is doing far, far more to exacerbate climate change (and stifle the fight against it) than the pittance he might be doing, by accident, to do good against it. Bernie’s proposals would do much, much more in the fight against climate change than Trump’s actions so far. That Bernie’s proposals have flaws is a rather silly reason to go with the incompetent buffoon whose policies have barely anything good going for them.
I’m reading the link provided about Bernie, and I’m wondering how you come to this conclusion? According to the article linked:
Honestly, Bernie sounds, at least from this article (which are results of his actual actions) like the environmental equivalent of an anti-vaxer. I’m not going to jump on the Trump train, as, yeah, it’s good that Trump is pushing for a loan to complete the ONE nuclear power plant under construction in the US, as that seems fairly weak too, but I’m not seeing any glimmer of light concerning Bernie either, and in a straight comparison between the two stated issues (i.e. Trump pushing for a loan to complete a nuclear power plant and Bernie pushing to shut one down) I’d have to say Trump comes out ahead there. But, the problem is, it’s still bad both ways (also, Trump has done quite a bit of other things that have not only not helped but have hurt, like his ridiculous populist push to keep coal going, which is a two-fer for him…not only is it against the market but it’s bad for the environment)…neither side is actually DOING A FUCKING THING. Helping finish a nuclear plant isn’t what we need…we need someone to be pushing, hard, to build freaking 50 of the things. Certainly, shutting one down just because you don’t like nuclear is bad, but it’s sort of a lesser of two weevils thingy from where I stand.
According to the article linked: