Experts: The only way to save the planet is through nuclear energy

[Noomz]

Which is still better than what we do with the waste of any other source of power.

And... Chernobyl did what, again? You really have no idea what you're talking about, do you?

What is your solution, then? I mean, realistic solution. If we can make Fusion work, go for it, sure. But until that's real, how would you like to power the world?

One great solution is to change the methods by which we produce things that require power, to change our wasteful ways of life and to actually care. More efficient production, more efficient living, less wasteful everything.
SOME carbon emitions aren't gonna end it all. It's just that the rates at which we do it are absurd.
Are you fucking serious? "Chernobyl did what?" And you're calling ME ignorant? Have you ever bothered watching any documentary on Chernobyl? Anything at all?
Well since you're apparently too fucking lazy to even think, here's a link to one so you can stop embarassing yourself.


Perhaps I should also mention Three Mile Island in the US?


I'm sure I don't need to mention Fukushima to you.


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To put things in perspective. One of the members of this eat conferance cult owns a private yacht, that has the same emmisions on a three week trip, as 200 families with a diesel car emmits in a year. And these are the peopme that tell you that cow farts are a problem.

This guy gets it.

We must change our extremely wasteful living. EVERYONE, not just me doing recycling. High and low, everyone needs to change. BUt especially factories need to change, they stand for waaaaaaaaay more pollution than anything else. But all they've ever done is push it on the regular people, to say that it's our fault that we don't recycle or stop making cows fart.

[Acidbaron]

Nuclear would mean major government subsidies, i'm not a big fan of industries that need to be kept afloat by taxpayers while the same taxpayer is already paying for his own personal consumption for it.

The reality is they simply are too expensive and for what they produce, mostly due to immense build cost of such a project that by the time it is paid off you need expensive maintenance and repair cycles.

Green energy is an industry where the technology gets more efficient and thus cheaper and more durable. So i disagree that nuclear is the future, nuclear is there to help us transition into the future nothing more.

[Najnaj]

Powering the whole of Europe on wind/solar energy is a pipe dream. Thorium reactor or nuclear fusion (if ever viable) is the way to go.

Solar is reasonably viable today and developing fast. Effectiveness is doubling and costs halving every few years it seems like.

Having said that, it isn't there yet and nuclear as of right now is the best realistic option. It is clearly superior to fossil fuels both with short and long term damage to us and the planet.

[Skulltaker]

One great solution is to change the methods by which we produce things that require power, to change our wasteful ways of life and to actually care. More efficient production, more efficient living, less wasteful everything.
SOME carbon emitions aren't gonna end it all. It's just that the rates at which we do it are absurd.
Are you fucking serious? "Chernobyl did what?" And you're calling ME ignorant? Have you ever bothered watching any documentary on Chernobyl? Anything at all?
Well since you're apparently too fucking lazy to even think, here's a link to one so you can stop embarassing yourself.


Perhaps I should also mention Three Mile Island in the US?


I'm sure I don't need to mention Fukushima to you.

I know perfectly well what Chernobyl did. I've even been to Prypjat. And it came nowhere near as close to make central europe uninhabitable. It didn't even make the Ukraine uninhabitable. So far, it has cost 4000 people it's life, and while that is regrettable, it is nothing compared to the thousands that lose their lives due to air pollution every year. Guess what, Kiew wants to increase tourism into the surrounding restricted area. Up to one million visitors per year.

As for three mile island, correct me if I'm wrong, but you're talking about the 79 incident? Even though it was a rather severe accident, no adverse effects on the health of any inhabitants was found.

As for Fukushima, one worker has died due to overexposure to radiation so far. Of course, long term numbers will increase. From a statistical point of view, though, Nuclear energy is by far the safest we have broadly available.

Since you like videos so much, I'd reccomend you this one.

[AwkwardSquirtle]

Wrong.
Fusion is the way to go.

I agree. Let's also arm our soldiers with phasers and move to mars.

[Noomz]

I know perfectly well what Chernobyl did. I've even been to Prypjat. And it came nowhere near as close to make central europe uninhabitable. It didn't even make the Ukraine uninhabitable. So far, it has cost 4000 people it's life, and while that is regrettable, it is nothing compared to the thousands that lose their lives due to air pollution every year. Guess what, Kiew wants to increase tourism into the surrounding restricted area. Up to one million visitors per year.

As for three mile island, correct me if I'm wrong, but you're talking about the 79 incident? Even though it was a rather severe accident, no adverse effects on the health of any inhabitants was found.

As for Fukushima, one worker has died due to overexposure to radiation so far. Of course, long term numbers will increase. From a statistical point of view, though, Nuclear energy is by far the safest we have broadly available.

Since you like videos so much, I'd reccomend you this one.

So we built a dome ontop of it for no reason, I guess? Just let that shit leak, this guy says it's no big deal! All that radiation rain wasn't a problem! The mushrooms in Finland that they couldn't eat until recently, no problem!

The thing is, these are all NARROWLY avoided events that could've been cataclysmic.

A TED-talk? Sheesh. I don't even know where to begin adressing it, because yes I watched all of it. He compares the entirity of radiation exposure from the accidents to the entire humanity's exposure to radiation... He doesn't even mention how the fact that the giant fucking dome we've put on it MIGHT, just MIGHT, be helping prevent actual damage to people. Nor that you can't live in the areas of Fukushima and Chernobyl. He misrepresents radiation by comparing momentary spikes like an airport visit.
Stop watching TED-talks and think it makes you informed. It's a monologue with no self-criticism.

Numerous times, we've NARROWLY avoided absolute disaster. But as you say, it might be safer than everything else. Ironically enough.

[matt4pack]

Nuclear is exorbitantly expensive even without factoring in storing waste for thousands of years and there aren't enough workers with the skills needed to build the plants.

So it's pretty much dead.

[the game]

WE can't save earth. We need to find new planets to destroy

[Skulltaker]

So we built a dome ontop of it for no reason, I guess? Just let that shit leak, this guy says it's no big deal! All that radiation rain wasn't a problem! The mushrooms in Finland that they couldn't eat until recently, no problem!

The thing is, these are all NARROWLY avoided events that could've been cataclysmic.

A TED-talk? Sheesh. I don't even know where to begin adressing it, because yes I watched all of it. He compares the entirity of radiation exposure from the accidents to the entire humanity's exposure to radiation... He doesn't even mention how the fact that the giant fucking dome we've put on it MIGHT, just MIGHT, be helping prevent actual damage to people. Nor that you can't live in the areas of Fukushima and Chernobyl. He misrepresents radiation by comparing momentary spikes like an airport visit.
Stop watching TED-talks and think it makes you informed. It's a monologue with no self-criticism.

Numerous times, we've NARROWLY avoided absolute disaster. But as you say, it might be safer than everything else. Ironically enough.

I'd like to add that I don't agree with everything he says. He fails to adress different kind of radiation and radiation exposure. For example, Radon is relativly harmless compared to inhaling iradiated particles. I don't simply watch any video and blindly accept what it says. But most documentaries are biased aswell. There's a huge amount of comfortable misinformation going around in the public regarding nuclear power plants and radiaton in general. Most people probably don't know what radiation is, or that it occurs naturally, and that we have 'naturally occuring nuclear power plants' on earth aswell.

As for Chernobyl: Iirc (and correct me if I'm wrong), the Sarcophagus is mostly meant to keep iradiated particles from escaping, and what's more important, to prevent water from rain to get inside, since it would wash irradiated material into the ground water to a even higher degree. And yes, Chernobyl remains a huge problem. But the tech of nuclear power plants has evolved immensly. A great deal of technologies were rather unsafe, and many killed people. Look at the Comet airplane. Did that stop us from using Jets? No. We improved, we adapted, we learned. I will agree that, of course, a Nuclear Power Plant isn't a crashed airplane. and that trial and error might not be the way to go. But the options have to be weighed carefully.

Of course, drastically reduced consumption would be amazing. I'm all for that. But looking at the world, globally, there are many developing nations that simply cannot afford to produce with minimal use of power and ressources.

Do I want Nuclear energy? If we find a cleaner, better alternative, heck no. But if we, as in 'the West', would invest in the tech, it could power all of NA and EU, easily, and drastically cut down on our emissions. Natural disasters that would pose a threat to a NPP are relativly scarce. I can't even remember the last earthquake in Germany. Of course, they'd need regular refinement, a plan for dismanteling them bevor they're constructed, etc. In short, a lot of money. Is it worth it? Dunno. I think it would. Then again, our emissions are relativly small comapred to other parts of the world.

I still think it is wrong to be scared of nuclear power. You should, of course, treat it with respect, and not fuck around with it. But that holds true for a great many things.

[TheBeardedOne]

The fear or caution is only because people will just blindly hate it without knowing anything about it.

Chernobyl happened because the technicians decided to test the safety by turning all the safety measures off and that went well. Three mile island was an accident gone right where no one was hurt and no signs of cancer were ever attributed to the leak and Fukushima was because they decided to put the backup generators on stilts and not behind the concrete barriers like the main part of the facility (which ended up being the safest part of the facility and I remember an article that people from the town were going there for safety during the storm but I can't find it again)

It's all hysteria without any real understanding about why it's important. It's relatively the cleanest and best energy source we have.

So basically when humans get involved, shit can get fucked up...

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im surprised nobodys told elon musk the planet needs him

Elon Musk is the most overrated cunt, he has surpassed Steve Jobs level of cuntery. Nothing more than a hype machine douche bag.

[Vash The Stampede]

I'm sure the article was brought to you by the people behind nuclear energy. The future is with batteries not nuclear power.

[Firatha]

I'd like to add that I don't agree with everything he says. He fails to adress different kind of radiation and radiation exposure. For example, Radon is relativly harmless compared to inhaling iradiated particles. I don't simply watch any video and blindly accept what it says. But most documentaries are biased aswell. There's a huge amount of comfortable misinformation going around in the public regarding nuclear power plants and radiaton in general. Most people probably don't know what radiation is, or that it occurs naturally, and that we have 'naturally occuring nuclear power plants' on earth aswell.

As for Chernobyl: Iirc (and correct me if I'm wrong), the Sarcophagus is mostly meant to keep iradiated particles from escaping, and what's more important, to prevent water from rain to get inside, since it would wash irradiated material into the ground water to a even higher degree. And yes, Chernobyl remains a huge problem. But the tech of nuclear power plants has evolved immensly. A great deal of technologies were rather unsafe, and many killed people. Look at the Comet airplane. Did that stop us from using Jets? No. We improved, we adapted, we learned. I will agree that, of course, a Nuclear Power Plant isn't a crashed airplane. and that trial and error might not be the way to go. But the options have to be weighed carefully.


I still think it is wrong to be scared of nuclear power. You should, of course, treat it with respect, and not fuck around with it. But that holds true for a great many things.

One of the biggest things is they also wanted to do with it was give them space to start limited demolition of the old structures without throwing up particulate into the air that were hastly build and start moving things to make it a more stable site as for Noomz hes just another Nuclear hater and does not seem to even know the facts about the events he is talking about.

Radiation for hundred thousands of years for everyone.

Nuclear fission is the worst of all, and the biggest environmental hazard.

Spoken like some truely fearing something for no other reason then they were told to fear it or are ignorent

[Biomega]

Radiation for hundred thousands of years for everyone.

Nuclear fission is the worst of all, and the biggest environmental hazard.

The facts don't support that.

While disasters like Chernobyl or Fukushima look flashy as singular events, nuclear power has BY FAR the best track record among fossil (and quasi-fossil) fuel energy generation.

Fuels like coal, oil, or gas are much more insidious in that their detrimental effects are slow and creeping, but steady. They don't explode in a big disaster - they simply keep spewing poison into the air 24/7, and have been doing so for over 100 years now. Meanwhile, there have been NO major accidents or disasters relating to nuclear fuel storage of any kind, and the cost and effort of maintaining that storage are magnitudes smaller than the cost and effort of dealing with CO2 emissions. You just make better headlines when you write about spooky scary radiation stuff than you do about the quotidian accumulation of greenhouse emissions.

Don't get me wrong - eventually, the ideal SHOULD be to transition to clean, renewable energy as much as possible. But you can't just switch over to wind and water overnight. It's a process that will take decades, and meanwhile power has to come from somewhere - to have that be fossil fuels because you're scared of nuclear power is shockingly irresponsible.

Nobody is denying that nuclear power has risks, but the history of more than half a century of using it indicates that it is a risk worth taking. And the risks are much smaller than people make them out to be, statistically speaking. Even catastrophes like Fukushima and Chernobyl were actually FAR less damaging than people like to think. Chernobyl caused 31 direct casualties (with 15 indirect deaths attributed), while Fukushima caused 52 deaths. That's less than 100 in total. Even if you add massively generous amounts of indirect damages due to higher cancer rates and whatnot, you don't even come CLOSE to the numbers casually accepted for much more mundane - and above all, PREVENTABLE - deaths from things like dysentery, parasitic infections, and so on. Yet no one clamors about those.

It's the air-crash effect. You see a plane go down on TV, and all of a sudden people are terrified of flying - the fact that they are many times more likely to die on their way to the grocery store is something that they find difficult to comprehend, or even consider. People have trouble internalizing the abstract meaning of statistics, and tend to extrapolate from faulty intuition and lack of knowledge. The more complicated the topic, the more fear colors the biases. And nuclear power (and radiation in general) are quite complicated. That's why it's easy to scare people with them, taking advantage of a vast space of ignorance that can be filled by misinformation and fear. And that doesn't even have to be agenda-driven (though it certainly is quite regularly).

[Granyala]

(Source)

It's easy to understand the fear or caution people have towards nuclear energy, but I do think that we definitely need to invest more into nuclear than we currently are, especially above most fossil fuel alternatives.

Not fission, no.
The future lies with fusion.

Though there still will be the question of highly radioactive waste products, esp once a fusion plant is to be decommissioned. Hard neutron radiation activates pretty much any material.

[Mercadi]

You can only delay the inevitable. If you make a way to reduce cost of living or improve living conditions, there's a baby boom, and we're back at square one, fighting for resources in the end. We are a bunch of monkeys with nuclear bombs, fresh off a tree, with a tribal mindset, naturally prone to xenophobia (unless trained otherwise). My bet is that we'll go down in a war before rendering Earth uninhabitable.

[Biomega]

But they do:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enviro..._nuclear_power

That's what I mean by a lack of understanding of statistics.

Nobody is saying nuclear power doesn't have risks, or that it doesn't have an impact on the environment. But so do fossil fuels, and historically, they have caused FAR FAR FAR more damage than nuclear power has.

[Mercadi]

Nuclear is exorbitantly expensive even without factoring in storing waste for thousands of years and there aren't enough workers with the skills needed to build the plants.

So it's pretty much dead.

At Hanford site the barrels with nuclear waste have been stacked one on top of another, on top of another, for generations. The oldest ones corroded through already. And as fate would have it, it's on the bank of a major river flowing to some large cities.

[Granyala]

If, and this is a huge if, we can somehow take care of nuclear waste in a much better way, nuclear power is not the way to go.
Chernobyl almost made central Europe uninhabitable for fuck sake and it's still a huge risk to central Europe.

You do realize that there are different types of reactors?

1) Chernobyl was driven OUTSIDE of it's technical safety spec. It was pure hubris of the operators and they got bitten in the ass.
2) Chernobyl used graphite as a moderator, a reactor design that is nowadays no longer being used.

Outside of the problem of waste storage, nuclear fission reactors are actually quite safe to operate.

Bottom line though: extrapolating from current energy needs and growth, there will be no way around either fusion or fission. Sure renewable can help somewhat but solar panel efficiency is pretty crap and the earth only has limited quantities of the building materials / surface to plaster.

[Biomega]

Seems you did not read the article. Do it.

Seems like you didn't understand my post.

People are focusing entirely on POTENTIAL risks for nuclear power, while ignoring ACTUAL risks for more conventional means of power generation.

Yes, if everything breaks down and fails, nuclear power has the potential to cause more damage. But that sentence doesn't just have a second part, it also has a first part - and from what we have seen in history so far, even grossly mishandled catastrophes like Chernobyl and Fukushima have not in fact resulted in particularly massive environmental damage, all things considered. Conventional fuels, meanwhile, keep on causing very real, very measurable, and very global damage every. single. day.

In fact the very article you linked features an emissions comparison where nuclear power is the second-least impactful CO2 emission producer, behind hydropower by just under 20%, and ahead of even wind power by almost 60% (to compare, coal power produces about 2,000% more CO2). Those are the ongoing, real, everyday damages - not hypotheticals, not potentials, but here, now, immediate. Even on a larger scale, nuclear disasters have caused a fraction of the damages of just oil-related disasters alone.

If you were to go into worst-case scenarios when making decisions, there's a huge number of products, processes, and entire industries you could worry about. But we don't, because we don't expect everything we put in place to just fail. That's no way to rationally plan for the future.

[Mercadi]

History books will read something like that:

"Humans wiped out their civilization with careless use of nuclear fission in their wars and energy production, which created a radiating greenhouse effect, which they even enforced by the careless production of CO2."

Well, by the next sapient race, in some hundred millions of years, which hopefully learns from our stupidity.

May be this is the reason we haven't found alien intelligent life yet? May be they were like ourselves, a dead-end branches of evolution?