> To produce as much electricity with solar as Hinkley Point C would use a plot of land almost fifty times bigger than Hyde Park.
Hyde Park is about 1.4 km2, so that would be 70 km2, which even in a dense country like the UK is not that much. It seems like a no-brainer to go for solar instead.
Nuclear actually is safe by pure incident metrics, even when counting higher casualty estimates for Chernobyl.
The safety, of course, is not intrinsic: nuclear material is obviously very dangerous, especially in a running reactor.
The safety record stems from the considerable regulation around building and operating these reactors, and the fact that the reactor has so little external surface area once running:
* A very small fuel acquisition operation in comparison to fossil fuels.
* Likewise, no externally released pollution outside of accidents, which is rare.
* sites chosen for construction are picked for their stability, and are heavily engineered, meaning you also don’t have the
installation worksite deaths which run up numbers for wind and solar.
But again, this is only realized if the operational safety onsite is maintained. That said, it’s not the only dangerous power generation site: dammed hydroelectric can be a considerable danger depending on what is downstream.
In general, I think nuclear would be very popular if natural gas and solar were not available; however, the costs to keep it safe are too high for it to be economical compared to those two sources.
I remember reading a list of industrial disasters, and Dam breaks always had absurdly high death tolls. I remember reading one from China that had several hundred thousand IIRC.
I couldn't find the exact Wikipedia article, but this one is still a pretty interesting read.
Generally I consider nuclear to be an incredible potential, hugely capable.
But civilizationally I don't see us as being able to keep doing the right thing with it. If windmills mess up and come crashing down in 20 years, there's negative impact, but locally and short term. If nuclear waste of contaminated decommissioned sites have a particularly bad day in 300 years, it could cause massive long term widescale problems for potentially centuries.
I want this to be something that governments get behind and do, want it to be a high priority that we put beyond the whims of the market. I want better realistic views of pricing in & maintaining the very very very long lived negative externalities. I want intense research in what makes good long term sense, what's sustainable.
Nuclear has so much potential, is so compelling to me. But I do not see a species organized or driven enough to meet with the very long lived complexities and challenges, do not see the appetite to do the job extremely well. We are very safe about it, but ultimately our scope is short cheap reactors, not doing nuclear in a big lasting fashion, at scale to justify figuring out systematically.
Breeder reactors remain this fancy expensive thing we once did, but don't do again. Cancellation of Integral Fast Reactor & failure to make a PRISM derivative is a really sad failure to mature; here we had a much cheaper safer proloferation-safe way to care for the whole nuclear lifecycle, and we never could muster the try, to see how we might do better. What few reactors that are getting built tend towards unambitious fuel-inefficient simple designs, that saddle us with long term problems.
Edit: -2? What nonsense. Say something! I spent the effort to lay out a view & case, have some decency, downvote-squad; contribute back.
The thing linked to doesn't show it not to be true. It gives point estimates of 0.03 deaths per TWh for nuclear and 0.02 deaths per TWh for solar (and higher figures for everything else) and says "the uncertainties around these values mean they are likely to overlap".
So it indeed doesn't show that "nuclear is the safest" is true, and if forced to guess on the basis of the numbers there you'd do best to guess that actually it's second-safest after solar, but it also doesn't show that "nuclear is the safest" is false" and a more accurate description would be "wind, nuclear and solar are all comparable to one another, and all much much much safer than any fossil fuels, there probably isn't that much difference between them, and we don't really have the data to tell what order they should go in".
(Some slightly more concrete numbers: total electricity generation of the US is about 4000 TWh, so those figures suggest an average of about 120 deaths per year if that were all nuclear and about 90 deaths per year if it were all solar. For comparison, according to https://www.statista.com/chart/6024/causes-of-death-in-the-u... these are on the same order of magnitude as "deaths by lawnmower" and "deaths by autoerotic asphyxiation".)
It would probably have been better to say something like "the safest, along with solar and wind power". But everything we know is perfectly compatible with nuclear in fact being the safest, or the second safest, or the third safest.
There’s a lot of dudes on a lot of roofs for solar. A lot of electrical work done, maybe by electricians, probably by mildly upskilled roofers.
I would be highly skeptical that solar is safer than nuclear. There’s just so much poorly regulated low skill low accountability construction work going on keeping it all running.
You are right, th link shows that nuclear is the safest right after solar, if you count dead/Terawatt-hour. 0.03 for nuclear and 0.02 for solar.
Solar is still very small (and intermittent) when it comes to production, for instance, less than 2% for US (source: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2023-10/U...). This single new UK nuclear power plant alone would account for 7% of UK production according to the article.
It's funny. I suppose Rank Order is not that useful when the top two ranks are very similar. The linked data is Nuclear 0.03 deaths / Solar 0.02 deaths.
But we shouldn't use the rank order claim then haha. In fact, there's not that much utility to it consider 1,2,3 are in one class and then 4 is two orders of magnitude higher, and then 7 and 8 are one more magnitude higher.
Article reads as overly dismissive of safety measures as well. Seems to be implying that measures to prevent construction workplace accidents are driving the cost up, for example.
Well it doesn't need to imply it, those measures do drive up the cost without debate. It's fine that they do though as we value people's lives more than that.
The article basically lists all of the problems with the common law system. I tend to agree that it would be cheaper to build a large civil project under another system of laws but unless you are planning a revolution you have to take the political and administrative conditions into account.
American units are actually pegged to metric standards, and quite a few people use SI units here and there.
I don't see cm overtaking inches anytime soon though.
Just the other day, I opened up my fancontrol-gui and saw my CPU temperatures all in the 200⁰F range, I almost vomited in disgust, then thought this is how Europeans must feel. Who uses Fahrenheit for CPU temperature monitoring (legitimate question)?
Fahrenheit is still better for daily weather though.
31k page environmental document. My God, why even bother with nuclear when you can slap out coal power plants instead of dealing with that regulation mess.
To an unskilled observer, it sure must appear that in most countries, doing literally anything on a scale greater than a moderately-sized industrial hall is bound to be shut down by an unspoken alliance of bureaucrats, tree-huggers, and various public-private partnership agencies that want to get in on the money.
I live in Portishead (mentioned in this article), we frequently see great barges sail by with massive blocks of concrete destined for HPC. Quite a spectacle to behold!
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Hyde Park is about 1.4 km2, so that would be 70 km2, which even in a dense country like the UK is not that much. It seems like a no-brainer to go for solar instead.
It's odd that one person would make a claim, then link to data that shows it not to be true.
Even odder, I've seen this done repeatedly with the same claim. Is it intentional? Some kind of collective mental blindspot?
The safety, of course, is not intrinsic: nuclear material is obviously very dangerous, especially in a running reactor.
The safety record stems from the considerable regulation around building and operating these reactors, and the fact that the reactor has so little external surface area once running:
* A very small fuel acquisition operation in comparison to fossil fuels.
* Likewise, no externally released pollution outside of accidents, which is rare.
* sites chosen for construction are picked for their stability, and are heavily engineered, meaning you also don’t have the installation worksite deaths which run up numbers for wind and solar.
But again, this is only realized if the operational safety onsite is maintained. That said, it’s not the only dangerous power generation site: dammed hydroelectric can be a considerable danger depending on what is downstream.
In general, I think nuclear would be very popular if natural gas and solar were not available; however, the costs to keep it safe are too high for it to be economical compared to those two sources.
I couldn't find the exact Wikipedia article, but this one is still a pretty interesting read.
https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_disaste...
Edit: I think it was this one: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
Though, of course, the exact numbers are contested.
But civilizationally I don't see us as being able to keep doing the right thing with it. If windmills mess up and come crashing down in 20 years, there's negative impact, but locally and short term. If nuclear waste of contaminated decommissioned sites have a particularly bad day in 300 years, it could cause massive long term widescale problems for potentially centuries.
I want this to be something that governments get behind and do, want it to be a high priority that we put beyond the whims of the market. I want better realistic views of pricing in & maintaining the very very very long lived negative externalities. I want intense research in what makes good long term sense, what's sustainable.
Nuclear has so much potential, is so compelling to me. But I do not see a species organized or driven enough to meet with the very long lived complexities and challenges, do not see the appetite to do the job extremely well. We are very safe about it, but ultimately our scope is short cheap reactors, not doing nuclear in a big lasting fashion, at scale to justify figuring out systematically.
Breeder reactors remain this fancy expensive thing we once did, but don't do again. Cancellation of Integral Fast Reactor & failure to make a PRISM derivative is a really sad failure to mature; here we had a much cheaper safer proloferation-safe way to care for the whole nuclear lifecycle, and we never could muster the try, to see how we might do better. What few reactors that are getting built tend towards unambitious fuel-inefficient simple designs, that saddle us with long term problems.
Edit: -2? What nonsense. Say something! I spent the effort to lay out a view & case, have some decency, downvote-squad; contribute back.
So it indeed doesn't show that "nuclear is the safest" is true, and if forced to guess on the basis of the numbers there you'd do best to guess that actually it's second-safest after solar, but it also doesn't show that "nuclear is the safest" is false" and a more accurate description would be "wind, nuclear and solar are all comparable to one another, and all much much much safer than any fossil fuels, there probably isn't that much difference between them, and we don't really have the data to tell what order they should go in".
(Some slightly more concrete numbers: total electricity generation of the US is about 4000 TWh, so those figures suggest an average of about 120 deaths per year if that were all nuclear and about 90 deaths per year if it were all solar. For comparison, according to https://www.statista.com/chart/6024/causes-of-death-in-the-u... these are on the same order of magnitude as "deaths by lawnmower" and "deaths by autoerotic asphyxiation".)
It would probably have been better to say something like "the safest, along with solar and wind power". But everything we know is perfectly compatible with nuclear in fact being the safest, or the second safest, or the third safest.
I would be highly skeptical that solar is safer than nuclear. There’s just so much poorly regulated low skill low accountability construction work going on keeping it all running.
Solar is still very small (and intermittent) when it comes to production, for instance, less than 2% for US (source: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2023-10/U...). This single new UK nuclear power plant alone would account for 7% of UK production according to the article.
But we shouldn't use the rank order claim then haha. In fact, there's not that much utility to it consider 1,2,3 are in one class and then 4 is two orders of magnitude higher, and then 7 and 8 are one more magnitude higher.
Dead Comment
oh, the units people use today :)
"Americans will measure with anything to avoid learning the metric system"
(I know this is about a British power plant but the tongue in cheek remark still works)
I don't see cm overtaking inches anytime soon though.
Just the other day, I opened up my fancontrol-gui and saw my CPU temperatures all in the 200⁰F range, I almost vomited in disgust, then thought this is how Europeans must feel. Who uses Fahrenheit for CPU temperature monitoring (legitimate question)?
Fahrenheit is still better for daily weather though.
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