We are still screwed: the coming climate disaster

Yes, but not in any practical way. I lived in Phoenix off and on for 30 years, and I really can’t recall a single conversation with another resident about their fear of Palo Verde.

Which, I think is the point he was making.

People who actually live near them realize they’re not scary. Now plop one down in Des Moines and see how people react. People fear change and shit they don’t understand. Nuclear power is pretty scary and hard to understand for most people.

They default to the like 2 disasters ever and nuclear weapons. But a tsunami isn’t going to hit Iowa, Iowa isn’t the old Soviet Union and it’s not a bomb.

Agree, I’m just saying that popular fear isn’t really the reason we don’t build more nuclear.

Eh, I’d say it’s part of it. People were scared of it, so we passed a ton of regulations based on that fear to the point that it became unrealistic financially. For a time the nation was gun-ho about nuclear power, it was the way of the future and all that.

There is no waste disposal solution for fission that is politically acceptable. Nevada has repeatedly rejected the one that made the most sense. Without a waste disposal site, it’s insane to build more nuclear plants, because they have to store the waste onsite, and many have no proper facilities for doing so, or else their supposedly temporary facilities are nearing their limits.

Well, then we all die.

At least we didn’t really try.

Maybe in the decades that they can store the waste onsite, the politics of long-term disposal will change? I mean, we are basically counting on the politics changing on a number of fronts in order to combat climate change at all.

Edit: I guess the more immediate problem is the politics blocks even the early stages of considering to mass deploy nuclear.

Why don’t we treat nuclear waste like we do carbon? Just shoot it into the air! Let God sort it out.

Given that the alternative to being buried under a relatively tiny pile of nuclear waste is being buried under a shit-ton of fossil fuel waste, I’m unimpressed by that argument.

Ohh, that’s much better, kudos!

All the nuclear waste ever produced in the US would fit in one tiny corner — about 10% — of your average coal ash pond.

It doesn’t matter if you’re impressed. State legislatures, and local voters have to be impressed or it won’t happen. That’s the problem. Voters would rather watch the environment turn to shit than permit a nuclear waste storage facility to be constructed two hundred miles away in the middle of a desert.

This isn’t a comment from local voters, it is a comment from you:

It’s perfectly workable for power plants to store their own waste at their own site. It wouldn’t be insane to keep doing that.

I don’t love nuclear power. Every time someone says “another massive failure could never happen again; it’s against the laws of physics!” it seems hubristic to me, and the one in Japan is still awfully recent.

That said, if it’s a necessary bridge technology to get us to Star Trek without choking on carbon dioxide, so fucking be it.

The article is reporting on a scientific study. And that study showed that people judged nuclear more harshly when they knew they were judging nuclear power.

I mean, feel free to argue against the merits of the study, but just saying “that’s wrong” isn’t really that strong an argument.

I think it’s worth considering how incredibly tiny the amount of actual waste produced is.

That’s something that folks really don’t seem to understand. While nuclear waste is bad, it’s also something which is produced in incredibly small amounts compared to power output.

A 1000MW nuclear reactor produces 30 tons of waste per year. By comparison, a 1000MW coal plant produces 300,000 tons of ash per year… Not even including what the coal plant puts into the atmosphere.

30 tons isn’t much, especially considering that you are taking about ultra dense materials. Further, that waste can be reprocessed and used even more.

That’s one of nuclear’s benefits. The energy density of the fuel is immense.

I am arguing the merits. I’m not sure the author of the article you linked actually paid the $20 to read the scientific article or just read the abstract, because the scientific article didn’t explore the causal factors (e.g. fear of nuclear power) but did the outcomes (people support nuclear less than its actual risk). It could be that people are biased against nuclear because it’s astronomically expensive (literally) and takes decades to build.

From the abstract of the actual scientific article:

Our results suggest that dread about nuclear power leads respondents to choose 40% less nuclear generation in 2050 than they would have chosen in the absence of this dread.

To be clear, you are saying that you read the article in it’s entirety, and that it does not support that statement, but instead overlooks simple things like cost.

And that the subjects make their significantly different suggestions when they know it’s nuclear power, based on deep understanding of that power production technology.

No I read the abstract, and it is not about what people’s concerns are with nuclear power. It’s about the ‘sum of those concerns’ leading to people being more wary of nuclear power than they should be. Or at least more wary than when they are given the risks but not the label that it is nuclear.

Anyway, your point on waste, that it is a small dense amount, is valid:

But it’s also a bit of a double edged sword. Hyper concentrated long-lasting waste is in some ways a much bigger problem than an outlet into the atmosphere. For example, security, storage longevity, and the fact that its hyper-concentrated makes it worse. Our bodies can handle small amounts of cyanide just fine, and the FBI doesn’t care if you have a warehouse full of apples or load it into a landfill. Concentrate that cyanide into a beaker, and it is a big concern.

This is pretty much me as well.

I mean, the Titanic wasn’t supposed to sink, bridges aren’t supposed to just collapse, and Trump wasn’t supposed to be electable, yet here we are.

I think a better name for it is “academic study”, and the researchers better labelled as “academics” and not “scientists” as stated in the article, as none of the authors come from hard science departments.

After reading the experiment design, I don’t think it implies what the article is suggesting (that there is an irrational bias against nuclear power). Revealing the label ‘nuclear’ will give the respondent extra information on which to base their decision, beyond the information that is provided by the researchers. If this extra information is useful/rational then they use the knowledge of that label to create a better allocation of energy technologies, if it is from irrational fear or bias then the added information has led to a less optimal allocation.

The design of the experiment does not allow the authors to argue anything regarding the former or the latter. They try to suggest the latter is more likely by saying that the information they provide covers true actuarial risk (along with carbon emissions etc.), so they call the motivation to allocating less nuclear power ‘dread’ (an evocative term to get press interest in the article, good job researchers!). Yet there are many other factors relevant to energy generation, and their death numbers do not cover all of the moments of the risk distribution.

Sure, they come from engineering policy departments. There inherently some element of social sciences involved in that, although i still tend to think such things are science.

Based on other articles that talk about this paper in more depth (I’m not interested in paying for this one paper), it appears that they cite other works to establish that the irrational fear of risk is a major component of people’s decision making in this topic, and that their experiment here was more about establishing the magnitude of the effect.

But again, I’ve not read this entire paper.