How will history see the climate change denialists?

Great Debates
201

Perhaps this is the thread where all post to reply to my points will only show that they miss the point. :slight_smile:

In this case that part of : “Now, since I think we are getting better in many fronts what I expect in this case is not that drastic [as in putting the perpetrators to the wall], The people will vote the rascal deniers out of power and like the tobacco industry make the fossil fuel industry pay for the new industries that will help educate humanity to better mitigate and/or adapt to the changes.” that you replied to.

Again, that is because I can be a cautious optimist; and I also posted before what you mentioned about the tobacco people, I did use it as an example of how asinine the fossil fuel industry is by denying or funding the denial of the issue among politicians. Because, no, they will not be punished as they should, but at least they will be paying a lot of costs due to the results of their past behaviors, as in paying states and government for the cancer costs of less well to do individuals and to fund advertisements against their products.

I also pointed before at the relative lack of punishment over damaging industries, but as example of how on top of a crime against our environment one should add a charge of being greedy up to the level of assholery. Because on top of that, they even deny that in reality, very little liability will fall on them. Indeed, in the end the tobacco industry had to finally just add the cost of the damage they are/were doing to the cost of doing businesses and still get a profit, oil and coal will continue to be used in other industries and for awhile while we de-carbonize our energy sources.

202

Massively overblown.

Actually a problem, but was due to flawed design and flawed operations. We don’t build them that way anymore, and there are no one online with those faults.

Hanford isn’t a commercial reactor, it is where we experimented with radioactive substances before we really knew anything about them. Yeah, we made a pretty good mess there, and it is still a bunch of fun stuff to clean up, but it is not due to continuing operations of a plant, it is specifically because we didn’t know what we were doing at the time. We do know much better now.

Fukushima really only became a problem in the first place due to safety policies that were put in place where they shut down the reactors at the detection of any earthquake. If they had still been running, it would have been fine. If the backup generators hadn’t been vulnerable to flooding, things would have been fine.

And finally, if it were not for the fourth strongest earthquake ever recorded along with a giant tsunami that killed at least 15,896 people, completely destroyed 150k homes and buildings, several damaged another quarter of a million, and partially damaged nearly a million more.

It did release more radiation that it was supposed to, and that may be a problem, but everyone focused on that, rather than all the other damage and death wrought y this tragic natural event.

There are a number of nuclear incidents that happen from time to time that you are probably not aware of, as they also cause no health or environmental issues, just an expensive repair and/or costly cleanup. If you were aware of them, and how they also have no effect on your health or safety, would you list them as well as reasons why nuclear is a risk to your health and safety?

203

Hanford is not the name of a reactor, it is a large site, which does have a single 1.1GW[sub]e[/sub] commercial reactor currently in operation. The biggest concern with the site is the large amount of waste material stored in drainage proximity to the major waterway of the PNW, where leakage could potentially have serious consequences for well over a million downstream residents.

204

My point was that the complaints about all of that is that most of that waste came from before we knew how to properly handle and secure it.

We were talking about nuclear power, and “Hanford” was used as a counter. Like I said, Hanford isn’t a reactor. Yes, it has one there, but that reactor, which is the sort of thing that we are discussing in this thread, is not the reason to be concerned about “Hanford”. The reason that Hanford is a mess has absolutely nothing to do with future nuclear development.

205

I disagree. Hanford is instructive in a number of ways.

206

Well, instructive, yes.

Predictive, no.

Once again, in speaking of commercial nuclear power generation, the word “Hanford” was given as a concern.

Is that concern the operating commercial power plant, or is it the waste that was stored improperly decades ago when we didn’t know what we were doing?

If the former, then fine, make the case that the Columbia Station Generating plant is releasing quantities of nuclear materials. If the latter, then it is an irrelevant to the problem of nuclear power generation.

207

My point was not to discount nuclear as an option. The point was that simply stating that nuclear power is not a problem because the companies are “required” to account for radiation and waste due to regulation, is simplistic and not really acknowledging the full scope of challenges and risks.

Let’s just focus on Fukushima. You responded something along the lines of “well, if X or Y did or did not happen then we would have been ok.”.

That is exactly what I’m talking about. It’s challenging to create safe nuclear reactors because of the number of variables (human and nature) that need to be accounted for.

208

I did not say it is “not a problem because the companies are “required” to account for radiation and waste”, I said that it is much more expensive than coal because the companies are “required” to account for radiation and waste.

The post was entirely about a comparison in cost structure and financial challenges based on the differing regulations. You would note that that of mine post that you responded to specifically called upon coal plants to be regulated to release less radioactivity into the atmosphere. Just because you didn’t quote that part doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.

If the point you were trying to make is as you state in this post, that you are objecting to “simply stating that nuclear power is not a problem”, then you have fundamentally misunderstood the words that I have posted, as I did no such thing.

Coal plants release more radiation into the environment during normal operations.

Now, if we want to talk about non-normal operations, then coal plants also have the problem of having the wastes that they do capture from the stack held in pools that have dams that can break or be overtopped if they have a hurricane, spilling all that waste directly into the environment.

Waste pools overtop or break far, far more often than we have releases of radioactive materials from reactors.

We can do that, but first, real quick, why did you bring up Three Mile? Was it because you thought that there was actually a dangerous level of radiation released? If so, did you learn something new today that you didn’t know before that may change your perception of nuclear power? If not, then why did you bring it up as an example of radiation released to the environment?

No, I responded with a (brief) critical analysis of what went wrong, and what could have been done to prevent it. That it would have been easy to prevent this problem with just a bit of foresight means that we don’t need to scrap nuclear, we just need to have a bit of foresight.

I also pointed out that the nuclear concerns were actually a very small issue compared to the 15k+ dead, and the million structures destroyed or damaged. This includes oil refineries that created quite a bit of environmental damage over much wider areas, but no one talks about that, because they only want to talk about nuclear.

Ask someone on the street how many people died in the tsunami that damaged Fukushima, then ask them how many of those deaths were related to he nuclear plant. I bet they get both quite wrong. That is the problem with nuclear, people think it is much scarier than it actually is.

It’s a challenge, to be sure, but one that I think that we can easily meet. There is also the fact that we have newer, more efficient, safer designs to try out. For one, spent nuclear fuel pools are designed to be passively cooled now, preventing what happened at Fukushima from happening again, even if they did end up losing power.

We should be building new reactors that are safer, and taking these older ones offline that are not only showing their age, but are also showing the limits of our technology and understanding when they were built.

209

When we didn’t know what we were doing? Good god, man, it has been over 70 fucking years since the Manhattan Project. We have had all that time to deal with what we were supposedly ignorant about (which is probably a great deal less than you give credit for). Nothing has changed, to speak of. No one has tried any interesting strategies, like, say, vitrification. The problem of the leakage has not been solved, barely even addressed. That is pretty inexcusable, except, you know, no one lives up in that remote corner of the country, so who cares. That sounds predictive to me. Unless you figure that somehow we are suddenly going to stop being irresponsible.

I mean, I can advocate for nuclear power if I think it will be done with due diligence. But, this is America, the nation with rounded edges because we keep cutting corners. Prove to me that we can do it properly and I am on board, when the historical evidence clearly shows that that is not how things go down.

210

This kind of reaction gives the anti-nuke types ammunition. Fixing the flaw does not mean that there are no more flaws in other designs.
TMI is a good example. One problem they had was that the operators missed important information from the control boards. The response did not just fix that particular problem, but redid the entire strategy for displaying information. That’s a root cause fix, not a cosmetic fix.

211

You are correct. I focused on one sentence of your post as I was reading through the thread but on rereading I can see I misjudged what you were trying to communicate (I have a tendency to do that).

Agreed there are newer designs and possibly we can arrive at one that has the appropriate level of safety. I would disagree with the term “easily”.

212

Those messes were made when we really didn’t know what we were doing, (we didn’t know what type of products would be in fission waste, we didn’t know what kind of radiation they would produce, what their half lives would be, we didn’t know the chemistries of actinides that are produced, and we didn’t really know exactly how harmful radiation was) and we made enough of a mess that we really don’t know of a good way to clean it up. The whole area is contaminated, you can’t get people in around it, and electronics get damaged by radiation. It’s a giant mess that will require many, many billions to clean up, and will require inventing some technologies we don’t really have on the table yet.

What we did learn was how to avoid making that sort of mess again. And yeah, the fact that it is up in an area that is low population does make it a lower priority than it should be, but now you are talking pure politics, and not anything at all about the actual engineering challenges.

If you are waiting for us to stop being irresponsible before progress can be made, we will never make any progress, ever. I will say though, that IMHO, we have become more responsible.

We have 100+ reactors, and the vast majority of them operate every day safely and properly, and they are all based on 70 year old technology, and many of them are actually nearly that old themselves.

I’d say that that track record alone should prove that we can do it properly, we have been doing it properly. We can also improve how we do it, in terms of efficiency of the fuel, the cost of construction, the cost of decommissioning, and of course, safety to the workers and the environment.

But that is exactly what I said. We don’t make nuclear reactors like Chernobyl anymore. It really is a root cuase fix that we have completely differently designed cores than that, not a cosmetic.

Can we say that there are no flaws in the new design? Well, no, we cannot ever say that, as a flaw is something that we were not aware of when we made the design, or we wouldn’t have designed it that way. Same as how you cannot guarantee that the new strategy for displaying information won’t leave out some other critical piece of information that no one ever thought would be as important as it is.

But, that is why we do extensive testing before we make these things commercially available. We try to work out any flaws we can before they are baked into the design. One of the problem with the very slow rollout of nuclear power plants is that every one of them is essentially a prototype, using different procedures and technology in design, building and operation. A modular “prefab” design would decrease this complexity enormously.
Back to relate to the topic of the thread, nuclear simply needs to be an option and a part of a sustainable energy infrastructure. We really need to develop better plants and start putting them online as fast as we safely can.

I see that we have only a few options.

  1. Cross our fingers and hope that MIT or Skunkworks figures out this fusion thing. I’ll keep my fingers crossed, and maybe tomorrow they will announce a breakthrough that puts commercial fusion on the grid within a decade, and all our problems are solved. Yaay!

  2. Keep doing what we are doing, and increase the amount of CO[sub]2[/sub] pumped into the atmosphere every year, and we’ll see just how bad we can make the environment before it manages to wipe us out.

  3. Cut back massively on our energy usage. Ration ourselves to a few kilowatt hours of combined energy usage a day. That is for our entire footprint, including both personal transportation and transport of goods that we consume. That is where we will be if we try to rely solely on renewables.

  4. Cut back massively on our population. We can maintain our high energy lifestyles powered by fossil fuels if we have maybe 10% of the world population that we have now.

  5. Develop and roll out more nuclear fission power to the grid. This can scale up to produce as much power as our power hungry civilization can demand.

213

No problem.

I did not mean easily as in “this will be easy”, but easily in that we can meet the demands of these challenges by a significant, or an “easy” margin.

214

It depends on your definition of “progress”. As I see it, a lot of our progress involves maximizing the speed with which resources move from their source to the landfill. There are some significant negatives to that paradigm, and moving away from it would greatly reduce our overall energy demand. It seems as though such a move is likely to happen one way or the other; starting on it now would probably be better for our children than pushing us all to the edge of the cliff where there will no longer be a choice.

While you do have a valid point, you should work on your numbers. There are not a hundred operating reactors in the US, and none of them are anywhere close to 70 years old. Due to radiation damage, it is pretty rare for a reactor to last half a century.

215

Life exists to increase entropy. It’s what we do. The trick is to do something useful in the process.

We may be able to reduce out individual energy demands, but there are many people in the world who are not even at a quarter of what we use now, and they would like to improve their standard of living. Even if we end up only using 10% total energy each, we will still need to develop more sources of energy to meet the growing population demand, and we obviously need to replace as much of our production that is based on fossil fuels as quickly as possible.

That’s a bit sad, last I looked into it, we were at 104. I figured the number had changed, just not that it would have dropped that much.

I did say “nearly” which may be a bit of a stretch, but if I am talking about the number 70, then 50 is “nearly” there, certainly the best part of it.

Most reactors are older than 40 years.

216

That is like saying fish exist to create water. Life does not have a purpose. It exists pro se (well, unless you want to ascribe to it some supernatural plan or something).

217

Not a supernatural plan, a perfectly natural plan. Fish do not create water, they exist in it. Life may exist in a world with entropy, but it also explicitly creates entropy, decreasing the order of its external environment in order to increase the order of its internal structures.

There were places on ancient Earth where you had entropy gradients that were not going anywhere on their own. Life was created in these niches, and the effect is to decrease the gradients. To say that it was an intent is to ascribe an intelligent actor to the proceedings, but to show that life is the natural consequence of the tendency for entropy gradients to be decreased is just looking at the history of life on earth, and probably the history of life other places when we get a chance to take a closer look.

It is not a purpose, it was not its intent, it just is the way that it is. Life exists only by decreasing entropy gradients.

It is a controversial view, but it is not an isolated one, that life originally arose to perform the specific task of turning carbon dioxide into methane.

Anyway, the point is, is that we are naturally predisposed to increase the entropy and disorder in our environment for the purpose of improving ourselves. That is something that we need to curb and keep in check, as we have the ability to really increase the disorder of our environment to inhospitable levels, but it is not something that I think that we can really just stop or reverse. It is too ingrained in, not just out culture, or our species, or even in our DNA, but in the nature of life itself.

218

Using another design is not a root cause fix. Understanding why the bad design got installed and probably tested and mismanaged is. Sure you are smarter than the Russians, but are you sure you’re not cutting corners also?

True, but analyzing what information is required by operators and how it will be displayed and seen rather than having a bunch of numbers to push out there will lower the risk quite a bit.

How do you measure how good your testing is? I worked in the testing of digital chips for 35 years, and in that time being able to measure how many manufacturing defect we could detect with our tests increased quality levels tremendously. We can’t measure how much we test designs nearly as well, so every microprocessor takes 3 or 4 tries to get right. And that is with running tests on their simulation models on thousands of CPUs.
I don’t see how you can possibly do as well.
I’m still for nuclear power, and would be much happier if designs got more money and less pressure from profitability so corners did not have to be cut.

219

And, like clockwork, another report comes out detailing just how fucked we are.

The Trump administration rushed the release in order to bury it on Thanksgiving weekend. And of course, the white house lied about it being a “worst-case scenario”. A few excerpts from the article:

And, perhaps most importantly:

So yeah. The latest major climate report continues to say the same shit the last few dozen have said - “HOLY SHIT GUYS, WE NEED TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS NOW!”

220

And not many years before that, people were just starting to take overpopulation seriously, but then the movement to address that got besmirched with the taints of racism and cultural superiority. Just imagine how much less of a threat climate change would be today, if a program to make contraception available to everyone everywhere had been successfully put through.