What are your opinions about nuclear power?

In My Humble Opinion
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Opinion noted

DS and ne

Please note that my opposition to nuclear power is absolute only in East Asia, as that is where I am most familiar with the situation enough to give an informed opinion. I do have strong reservations about nuclear power is other places, including America, but it is not a complete rejection.

First and foremost, my objections to nuclear power in Japan are not primarily environmental, although that does play a large part, but rather they are the based on the failure of the Japanese government and nuclear industry to follow through on their legal and moral duty to follow the laws and guideline established to provide for the safety and security of the Japanese people as well as to protect the environment. They have also failed to provide an honest accounting of what has transpired and no longer have the trust of the Japanese people.

It is probably impossible to convey in words the distress and worry caused by the Fukushima incident upon the residents of Kanto. Although a certain amount is the natural result of the accident itself, the most aggravating factor was the complete incompetence of the government as well as the obfuscating, misleading information, concealing facts as well as outright falsehoods.

This is not just me (which the Japanese government could care less about) it’s the Japanese people. A headline from summer of 2011.

We could not get information on what was safe and what was not. I had small children, including a baby of less than 6 months, and this was the greatest concern for all of our fellow parents, many of whom were pregnant women.

My wife and I were on a committee for the parents of childcare centers for the city. The information provided by the national government and the city was worthless and openly considered as such by the daycare center staff and parents.

I was the “nuclear expert” of the committee as it was easier to obtain information from the foreign press, in English, than in Japanese.

DS provides a thought exercise on the number of deaths and possible risks in which the calculations are based on a given risk. The problem in that in Japan, we no longer know the risks, thus we are unable to complete the exercise.

From here.

This was last year, two years after Fukushima, the most expensive nuclear accident ever.

If you have ever played a game with someone who consistently cheats, at some point, you simply get up and walk away. This is that point with the nuclear industry and government in Japan.

This is a violation of the social contract. The citizens relied on the government to provide for their safety and the government reneged on it’s part of the bargain.

There are similar concerns for the rest of East Asia. I participated in the No Nukes rally last year here in Taiwan. The Taiwanese do not trust their government either. One of our friends, a Taiwanese diplomat agrees with the protestors, although he obviously could not attend the rally.

No one should be under the delusion that China does well with them. Korea is in the middle of its nuclear scandals, with over 100 people indicted, including a former state utility official. The fox is guarding the hen house.

If the subject were trivial, and the scale of the downside wasn’t so enormous, then one could perhaps ignore the shortcomings. But, it’s not.

For the States, as I’ve stated previously, I am not completely opposed to nuclear power, although I do have some serious misgivings.

As posted earlier, I know a nuclear safety engineer at GE, the manufacturer of the plant at Fukushima. His complete denial of any concern for their plants deeply worries me. As an engineer, I would think that anytime there has been a failure of that magnitude, there should be extensive reviews and a through search for lessons to be learned.

I don’t know how widespread this hubris is, although I suspect that it is not limited to this single engineer.

In contrast, the Union of Concerned Scientists have released a report which says that a Fukushima type accident could happen in the States. See a pdf file, Fukushima_UCS-Lochbaum_2012-07-19 for a summary.

And, again, the question of the spent fuel. The NIMBY problem must be solved and although I don’t necessarily oppose all nuclear power in the US, I believe that it would be justifiable for complete opposition to nuclear power until that is accomplished on the grounds that government is not fulfilling its responsibility for the safety of the people.

For the environmental aspect, there are dissenting voices. From here,

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Specific to East Asia - the question was asked and not answered: what do you see as the alternative right now and with what impact? Without nuclear their emissions have gone up … dramatically. And new capacity is planned to include lots of coal.

Deaths per kWhr? Coal is the worst. By far. And to date at least nuclear has been the best. By orders of magnitude.

The greenhouse gas claims of natural gas versus nuclear made in your linked article are different that those by a wide variety of other complete life-cycle analyses (see here and for a very critical analysis here).

The analysis offered seems predicated on predictions of uranium mine depletion, a speculation not shared by most other sourcesI can find.

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Japan is struggling with the very problem now. Nuclear power is not viable (in all caps for emphasis or not) with 80% of the people opposed to it. This is even after the terrible restrictions of power during the summer of the Fukushima incident.

Looking at your argument, if (XX) believes (YY) then VIABLE ideas must be presented now.

Let’s fill in the blanks for you: (or is this only for people who oppose your viewpoint?) If you (and people who support) nuclear power have VIABLE (all caps) ideas on how to assure 80% of the Japanese population that the government can be trusted with nuclear power then those ideas need to be presented NOW.

And, if you (and people who oppose) nuclear power have VIABLE ideas on how to solve the spent fuel and costs issuses in the States those ideas need to be presented NOW.

It looks like Japan is headed toward the other alternatives, including coal, as you pointed out. Which is really too bad. Unfortunately, Japan cannot allow another Fukushima, and the alternatives are not particularly good.

It also looks like Japan is still far below the US on the list of CO2 emissions per capita by country. This is the problem I see with your proposal of pricing carbon fairly. When one of the political parties doesn’t accept climate change, then that isn’t going to happen. (Unless you mean something different about “fairly.”

Are there good ways of getting the US to accept a Kyoto Protocol type solution? If not, we’re still back at square one.

When consumers are not voluntarily reducing energy usage, and governments are not taking adequate actions, then we have severe problems. Those of us (including 80% of Japan) who are opposed to nuclear power because of mistrust of the governments (specifically in Asia) are saying that we need to solve the problem, but without the nuclear option, until our concerns can be addressed.

I had run across that article in an earlier response, but deleted my comments because of time.

As you can see from that article, you cannot make the earlier comparison of deaths from coal in the millions per year to nuclear power in the first world. An apples-to-apples comparison would be looking at the US death rate of 10,000.

Yeah, I’m not completely onboard with the analysis from that study.

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Assuming the 80% of Japanese citizens who don’t want nuclear power also want a clean power source that won’t contribute to increasing Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), what are they suggesting to replace nuclear power?

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Problem is those numbers stop at 2008 and 2009 depending on the country. At that point Japan was at its nuclear peak. Since then they’ve had the lights and air conditioning off large parts of each day especially in summer (even allowing male office workers to not wear ties!) and are in the process of switching to coal and oil. And since then the US has switched a significant portion of its energy production to natural gas. (Which for CO2 at least is better although those methane leaks may actually cause more harm than good). The result is that the US has dropped pretty significantly. The United States’ CO2 emissions have not been this low since 1993 an has occurred with a growing economy - due to the switch off of coal to natural gas. Japan meanwhile is increasing theirs. 30% of its power had come from nuclear.

How do you get the US to accept carbon pricing, with or without an international agreement? Getting the big business players to endorse it is a start.

That from the bleeding heart greenies at … Forbes.

Again, I am skeptical that nuclear can compete in that environment. But let the market tell us that.

And as for the waste … the government made a commitment to handle it so they need to honor it. With that as a given the cheapest way out for the government might be to help fund new Integral Fast Reactors specifically as a means of recycling that waste into energy, considering that as a fee for disposing the waste they are responsible for per previous agreements.

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Do you agree that a large percentage of power that no longer comes from nuclear will come from hydrocarbons? If so, do you agree that the deprivations caused by the new power sources will be greater than that of the original nuclear plants?

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I’m in the middle of our move, so I can’t respond quickly. Apologies.

Well, you have to realize that there first priority is to not be poisoned by radiation, which is of greater immediate concern. In this way, it’s not that much different than much of the rest of the world which places a lower priority on actually taking countermeasures over other concerns, such as the economic impact of the countermeasures.
Alternatives are not there yet, but nuclear isn’t an option, so these alternatives will require continued development. I haven’t followed exactly what they are pursuing right now. In the meantime, Japan is had increased fossil fuels. Japan still has a much lower output of CO2 emissions per capita or based on GDP than the US.

This is the problem I see in your OP, that you have decided that nuclear is the only choice for AGW. There are several issues with this. For many　people, AGW is not a real enough problem to get people to act against their short term interests. Many people in the States simply don’t accept AGW, and refuse to take meaningful measures.

As others are not taking actions, for many of us who do not like the nuclear option, we refuse to be blackmailed into compromising our concerns when others are not. You have not made the case that the only solution is nuclear, you have simply stated that and then asked how to get people to agree.

Your OP asks how to persuade people into accepting nuclear power. One way is not to summarily dismiss or not address their concerns, argue the wrong points against their concerns, or to be dismissive and insulting. Not that you are all of these, but people are, in this very thread.

This is why I’m not optimistic about a real discussion concerning energy, an extremely complex and difficult topic.

Yes, I was there for all of that. The summer of 2011 was actually the worst, before they had enough measuress in place, and we had planned rolling blackouts.

You laugh, but actually more important than the “no neckties” are the relaxing of the requirements for suit coats in the summer. At least Japan is trying something, which is better than most countries.

Unfortunately, I’m really busy these days, trying to get the move and some projects done and I didn’t time for more than a quick glance through the 60 pages. It does show that Japan is still much lower for emissions per capita and per unit GPD.

Of course the biggest problem is with China and the enormous amount of CO2 which is being generated. This small amounts of increased emissions by Japan are completely dwarfed by those of China.

Are you comfortable with China’s safety record in things such as food safety, railroad safety and even plywood to be comfortable with them having massive amounts of nuclear power plants?

I donno. When it happens, I’ll believe it.

Without the US accepting carbon pricing, then there isn’t a way to tell. Is there a concrete plan in place?

A commitment that is not followed through isn’t a commitment. This is a major part of my opposition for nuclear power in the States. The US has known about this problem and its level of seriousness and has not solved it for more than 20 years. For many of us, enough is enough.

It seems so for the first question. At least for the time being. Japan has been looking into alternatives, but I’m not sure where they are at.

For the second, then no. Perhaps this is a case where it would require actually experiencing the problem first hand, but the unease caused by the Fukushima incident cannot be written off, as 80% of the Japanese agree. Nuclear power in Japan is unsafe, and there is no way to verify it when the fox is guarding the hen house. We cannot believe the Japanese government. Or, more technically, more than 80% of us believe we cannot trust the government.

As I wrote above, it came this close to allowing TECPO to withdraw their workers from the power plant, which would have meant that spent fuel pools would have lost all their water and there would have been more a far larger incident than Chernobyl and far, far worse economic damage.

Japanese are very aware of greenhouse gases and have taken many steps to reduce CO2 emissions. *Despite *knowing this, they refuse to accept nuclear power because of the impossibility of trusting the government. We (I’ll include me) are being forced into a very difficult situation and have to make this horrible decision. I have less empathy for countries which don’t address the CO2 just on cost issues.

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There may be two realistic ways to address waste. Theoretically, it might be possible to deploy RTGs on a large scale to capture some electricity from the residual heat of spent fuel rods (this means constructing huge thermocouple arrays to directly convert the heat to electricity –exactly like the batteries powering the Voyager probes). Yield would be pretty low, I think, but it should be enough to at least power pumps to keep the cooling reservoirs full for the spent fuel itself.

For “cold” spent fuel, vitrification looks like the most viable option to contain the dangerous trans-uranics. Waste is bad, but it does not appear to be unsolvable.

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The problem has never been technical, but rather political. NIMBY rears its ugly head.

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One of the links supplied above showed that the deaths per KWH of power produced by nuclear power is vastly lower than that of hydrocarbons. Doesn’t that mean that, while nuclear power is unsafe, hydrocarbons is even more unsafe?

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I know it isn’t a popular opinion to express here, but I’ve my reservations about nuclear power.

It’s just incredibly dangerous. A meltdown can have catastrophic consequences over a very large area. Espeically since nuclear plant are generally build in convenient (hence : populated) areas. For instance, there’s one 50 kilometers away from Paris. In case of catastrophe, what? We evacuate 1/5th of French population and turn Paris into an attraction for urban explorers?

I hear people saying that the danger is vastly overblown. Three Miles Island : contained, so why worry? Tchernobyl : that was a badly designed plant run by poorly trained people, so why worry? Fukushima : it was built in a seismic area, so why worry? What will be the next, and what will be the reason not to worry this time?

There are plenty of ways it could turn badly. To begin with, there’s no guarantee that nobody will try to cut corners, that nobody will ignore the regulations, that nobody will do something stupid, that nobody will design a reactor with a major flaw. Eventually, one of these things will happen somewhere, regardless how safe nuclear reactors are supposed to be.

Then there’s also the risk of a deliberate sabotage. For instance, following 9/11 they put temporarily missile launchers in French nuclear plants. They were designed to wisthand a small plane accidentally crashing, but can’t withstand an airliner crashing (it was considered too unlikely an event, that it could be done deliberatly had not been considered). Also, during wars, what is targeted (amongst other things)? Power plants. Ok, we don’t expect to be attacked in most western countries (and if we are, we expect it to be by nuclear missiles, at which point the issue becomes moot), but what guarantee do we have that it couldn’t happen 20 or 30 years down the road?
Yes, the risk is low for any individual nuclear plant to meltdown/be destroyed. But there are quite a lot of them nowadays, including in places that aren’t the most stables, be it politically or geophysically. So, you just can’t totally ignore the issue. And again the problem is that if this happens the consequences are dramatic.

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I’m pro-nuclear, but I would prefer that we develop a proper storage site (Yucca Mountain or wherever) before expanding US capacity.

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Address the catastrophic argument, please. I’ve stated numerous times is isn’t about the number of deaths so far, it’s the potential.

Again, address the concerns we have, and don’t just repeat the same argument everyone else has given.

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No one is saying the danger is vastly overblown. What we are saying is that hydrocarbon power is worse and we’ve used data to demonstrate that.

Shodan’s analogy of fear of flying is a good one. It is vastly safer to fly across country than drive but plenty of people are afraid of flying and would rather drive.

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In most cases, the enemy probably does not want to make our territory uninhabitable, because either they want our territory or they realize that fighting people who having nothing to lose is not a good idea. It is possible to build nuclear plants that will not melt down but rather automatically stop the reaction when compromised (the first US reactor design required no intervention to shut down on its own). Alternately, if a bomb is powerful enough, it could obliterate the reactor core, dispersing the fuel over a relatively small area, which would prevent a meltdown. Or, more practically, they might just destroy substations, so that the power has nowhere to go. Hopefully, the enemy’s strategists will consider these things in lieu of nihilism.

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I missed the edit window.

ETA: Including the economic impact of 50 million people being displaced.

You asked a question in your earlier post. I answered. You are repeatedly going after one particular point and not addressing my issues.

Is there something you wish to discuss or is this just replaying your same talking point? Is there a reason to engage with you?

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The potential deaths in the hydrocarbon power industry is massive. What if every tanker truck exploded on the highway? What if every gas station exploded in a fireball? Every car accident has the potential to leak extremely flammable liquid on the ground and catch fire. What if every oil rig in the Gulf exploded or every monstrous oil tanker ran aground? The total potential is astronomical. Then add in the problems we already know about (like CO2). Yikes.

The future safety of nuclear power is probably going to be better than it has in the past. The likelihood of another Chernobyl is less than your local gas station exploding. If we are going to try to judge which of the alternatives is the best (or least worst, if you’d rather think of it that way) we should base it on the reasonable data we have.

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Not even close. Fukushima had a realistic possibility of being a horrific disaster. No one is serious about the danger of all gas stations exploding. I don’t believe you are arguing in good faith.

Again, 80% of Japan disagrees with you because we do not know. I’ve addressed this point repeatedly so I won’t again.

You’re wrong about the local gas station analogy. An oil fire in a refinery occurred in the tsunami and Fukushima also occurred. Which one wasn’t supposed to happen because it was supposed to be safe?

There is a myth that nuclear power is incredibly safe. This is because people are looking at the reactors and not the spent fuel pools, which contain a far greater amount of radioactive material, and according the US nuclear scientists in the study I linked to earlier, has the potential to be far worse than Chernobyl.

So, I agree with you. We need to go with the data we have and I cannot accept nuclear power until the spent fuel pool issue is resolved.

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I would very much like to have a good discussion on this topic. My OP was written as it was because that is very much how I see it; we have AGW, we are on the very brink of having gone too far with CO2 emissions, and nuclear power is indeed the only source of power that will provide for the world’s power needs without increasing CO2 emissions to the point where humans can’t live on this planet.

Of course there are major, serious, dangerous problems with nuclear power; in my opinion, they can be mitigated much better than all the devastation we’re causing world-wide with fossil fuels.

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I’m sorry, I don’t mean to come across that way. I was trying to make the point that worrying about what may happen with nuclear power but not worrying about what may happen with hydrocarbon power is not a fair comparison. Gas stations may blow up but they largely don’t. Nuclear power plants have a long track record of being much safer than hydrocarbon sources, even with Chernobyl included.

Fukushima survived (barely) one of the largest natural disasters in modern history and yet fewer deaths have been caused by Fukushima than a single oil tanker derailment.

First off, no one is saying nuclear power is incredibly safe. This is a straw man. What we are saying is that it’s less bad than hydrocarbon power sources, by a large margin. The spent fuel issue has (or should be) resolved in the US: Yucca Mountain.