First! Fusion Net Energy Gain

[fskimospy]

I don't think Chernobyl or Fukashima are relevant to the US nuclear industry with its complex regulations. TMI happened 45 years ago and was not exactly catastrophic. Taken as a whole, the US nuclear industry and its governing regulations have an excellent safety record. ANd we're not the only ones. France has 55 reactors, most for 50+ years, and has never had a single accident.

When you compare the net impact of nuclear since the 1950's to the burning of fossil fuels, fossil fuels have caused at least 2 orders of magnitude more deaths.

Air pollution is hugely, hugely costly. It kills thousands a year in the US alone and way more than that globally.

Nuclear vs. fossil fuels is like the plane crash vs. car crash phenomenon. Statistically car travel is way less safe than plane travel yet the big plane crashes are the ones everyone remembers.

 

[interchange]

We're not used to building nuclear power plants anymore. There are significant challenges with this that just aren't common to other kinds of construction. It ends up costing way more money than it ought to to make a new nuclear plant (see: Vogtle).

 

[Zorba]

I don't think Chernobyl or Fukashima are relevant to the US nuclear industry with its complex regulations. TMI happened 45 years ago and was not exactly catastrophic. Taken as a whole, the US nuclear industry and its governing regulations have an excellent safety record. ANd we're not the only ones. France has 55 reactors, most for 50+ years, and has never had a single accident.

When you compare the net impact of nuclear since the 1950's to the burning of fossil fuels, fossil fuels have caused at least 2 orders of magnitude more deaths.

TMI was hours or less away from being a much bigger deal.

The problem with these debates is that people fundamentally have little understanding of probability, especially with regards to risk severity. The 737Max has a better accident rate than US nuclear power.

Aircraft that must be analyzed to have no catastrophic single point failures and no multipoint catastrophic failures with a rate more than 1 in a billion flight hours still crash. Aircraft use the same fault tree analysis techniques developed by the NRC for nuclear power plants. When you do this analysis it becomes clear that you can not eliminate the risk, only push the probability below acceptable levels. What is the acceptable probably of wiping out a large part of the US and associated watersheds? While remembering the same method that said the 737Max MCAS couldn't result in a catastrophic accident is what is used for these plants.

The idea that the safety record of 100 reactors in the US or 55 in France proves a major accident will never occur is a bad use of probability. The comparison to fossil fuels is like saying conventional weapons have killed many orders of magnitude more people than nuclear weapons, so we shouldn't worry about nukes.

I was a big supporter of nuclear power for a long time, but between becoming trained in safety engineering and learning more about the accidents that did happen and how close they were to being much worse I've lost faith humans can operate it error free over the long term. I am very much excited about new nuclear power technologies that might have far lower consequences of failure.

 

[Zorba]

Air pollution is hugely, hugely costly. It kills thousands a year in the US alone and way more than that globally.

Nuclear vs. fossil fuels is like the plane crash vs. car crash phenomenon. Statistically car travel is way less safe than plane travel yet the big plane crashes are the ones everyone remembers.

Yeah, generally killing hundreds due to one mistake or error gets more attention than killing one. As it should. The philosophy of higher consequences need lower probability of failure is why air travel has gotten so much safer.

Car fatality rates also aren't that high, there is just a shit ton of driving in this country, so it seems like a lot. Again because people are bad at probabilities. Car fatality are about 12.5 deaths per billion miles, or approximately 375 per billion hours. I don't have all the numbers in front of me, but this likely isn't much worse than commercial aviation.

Also, we have driven a ton of safety features into cars over the last couple decades.

 

[fskimospy]

Yeah, generally killing hundreds due to one mistake or error gets more attention than killing one. As it should. The philosophy of higher consequences need lower probability of failure is why air travel has gotten so much safer.

Car fatality rates also aren't that high, there is just a shit ton of driving in this country, so it seems like a lot. Again because people are bad at probabilities. Car fatality are about 12.5 deaths per billion miles, or approximately 375 per billion hours. I don't have all the numbers in front of me, but this likely isn't much worse than commercial aviation.

Also, we have driven a ton of safety features into cars over the last couple decades.

If you're talking about US commercial aviation then driving is vastly, vastly worse. Essentially for US commercial aviation the passenger death risk from crashes is zero (last commercial aviation crash was in 2009). It's 1.1 per 100 million highway miles as per BTS. (2015 most recent year available)

Fatality Rates by Mode | Bureau of Transportation Statistics

www.bts.gov

This was my point though - I think the average person considers flying to be less safe than driving due to the publicity behind crashes despite the fact that this is manifestly not the case.

Edit - I think the same is the case with nuclear. People think it is unsafe because of some high profile accidents but it has killed a lot fewer people than fossil fuels.

 

[K1052]

The biggest argument I see for keeping the present US reactor fleet for now is that it's a large source of reliable non-emitting power. A decade or so from now we will probably not need a good chunk of it and older units can be progressively retired without increasing overall electric generating emissions.

 

[Zorba]

If you're talking about US commercial aviation then driving is vastly, vastly worse. Essentially for US commercial aviation the passenger death risk from crashes is zero (last commercial aviation crash was in 2009). It's 1.1 per 100 million highway miles as per BTS. (2015 most recent year available)

Fatality Rates by Mode | Bureau of Transportation Statistics

www.bts.gov

This was my point though - I think the average person considers flying to be less safe than driving due to the publicity behind crashes despite the fact that this is manifestly not the case.

Edit - I think the same is the case with nuclear. People think it is unsafe because of some high profile accidents but it has killed a lot fewer people than fossil fuels.

I wasn't only comparing to US commercial aviation. And there have been US fatalities since 2009 in aviation.

I'm absolutely not saying flying is less safe than cars, I'm saying people have been using that same expression for 30 years without any verification. From a fatality rate standpoint, driving is not orders of magnitude less safe than aviation, especially not to the point that your risk is lower on a multi hour flight than a 15 minute drive to the airport.

1.1 deathes per 100M miles is actually less than the rate I said of 12.5 per billion miles.

I'm curious now, so I'll try to remember to pull the statistics for aviation later.

 

[Moonbeam]

Logic says to itself that logic is best. That does not answer the question of what logic is. One kind of logic looks at the risks and concludes that because reactors are safe they should be built. Another form of logic looks at the risks and the consequences of an accident anyway and concludes the risk though minimal, is owing to potential consequences still just too great.

Some people don’t calculate. They just have a moral instinct that creating poisons that remain deadly for thousands of years and have yet to be, so called, safely stored with all the same risks as the reactors themselves, just looks like insanity. I think most mothers have similar instinctive feelings. Men are more willing to be casual about human life than women it seems. This forum is like nerd city in that respect, in my opinion, lots of brains and low on intuitive feelings. It’s like looking at things through a telescope logically with the intellect and looking down the other end emotionally.

 

[fskimospy]

I wasn't only comparing to US commercial aviation. And there have been US fatalities since 2009 in aviation.

I'm absolutely not saying flying is less safe than cars, I'm saying people have been using that same expression for 30 years without any verification. From a fatality rate standpoint, driving is not orders of magnitude less safe than aviation, especially not to the point that your risk is lower on a multi hour flight than a 15 minute drive to the airport.

1.1 deathes per 100M miles is actually less than the rate I said of 12.5 per billion miles.

I did provide you with verification though?

I would agree that non-commercial aviation is not so much more safe (less safe?) but when people are talking about flying just about everyone is talking about flying commercial.

It is hard to quantify the flight vs. the 15 minute drive to the airport in recent years as the flight number is literally zero but regardless I think the idea that flying is much safer than driving is well founded.

And again this relates to the topic at hand. I think the average person would be more afraid of living next to a nuclear power plant than a coal power plant despite the coal one being way more likely to kill you.

 

[woolfe9998]

TMI was hours or less away from being a much bigger deal.

The problem with these debates is that people fundamentally have little understanding of probability, especially with regards to risk severity. The 737Max has a better accident rate than US nuclear power.

Aircraft that must be analyzed to have no catastrophic single point failures and no multipoint catastrophic failures with a rate more than 1 in a billion flight hours still crash. Aircraft use the same fault tree analysis techniques developed by the NRC for nuclear power plants. When you do this analysis it becomes clear that you can not eliminate the risk, only push the probability below acceptable levels. What is the acceptable probably of wiping out a large part of the US and associated watersheds? While remembering the same method that said the 737Max MCAS couldn't result in a catastrophic accident is what is used for these plants.

The idea that the safety record of 100 reactors in the US or 55 in France proves a major accident will never occur is a bad use of probability. The comparison to fossil fuels is like saying conventional weapons have killed many orders of magnitude more people than nuclear weapons, so we shouldn't worry about nukes.

I was a big supporter of nuclear power for a long time, but between becoming trained in safety engineering and learning more about the accidents that did happen and how close they were to being much worse I've lost faith humans can operate it error free over the long term. I am very much excited about new nuclear power technologies that might have far lower consequences of failure.

I didn't say a major accident will never occur. I'm working off risk analysis exactly as you said. The long history of no serious accidents in both those countries suggests it is an improbable occurence. Yet even if it happens, and we end up with 35K deaths which was basically the result in Chernobyl, we've had 10's of millions die from inhaling smoke particulates from fossil fuel emissions. And the results from Chernobyl have not had the long term consquences predicted. The radiation levels even in the nearest town are at livable levels and have been at least since the early 90's.

Those 10's of millions of deaths from cancer and COPD aren't even taking account of climate change. Any serious look at risk analysis will tell you that nuclear is way less risk in the longrun, orders of magnitude less. The problem with this particular risk fixation is it isn't only based on the association with nuclear weapons. It's also based on the risk stemming from terrible accidents, which always garner more attention and fear than silent killers like air pollution. We simply aren't rational in the way we evaluate and compare risks.

 

[fskimospy]

Logic says to itself that logic is best. That does not answer the question of what logic is. One kind of logic looks at the risks and concludes that because reactors are safe they should be built. Another form of logic looks at the risks and the consequences of an accident anyway and concludes the risk though minimal, is owing to potential consequences still just too great.

Some people don’t calculate. They just have a moral instinct that creating poisons that remain deadly for thousands of years and have yet to be, so called, safely stored with all the same risks as the reactors themselves, just looks like insanity. I think most mothers have similar instinctive feelings. Men are more willing to be casual about human life than women it seems. This forum is like nerd city in that respect, in my opinion, lots of brains and low on intuitive feelings. It’s like looking at things through a telescope logically with the intellect and looking down the other end emotionally.

To me the people more casual about human life would be the ones who opt for the power generation method that kills more people.

 

[fskimospy]

I didn't say a major accident will never occur. I'm working off risk analysis exactly as you said. The long history of no serious accidents in both those countries suggests it is an improbable occurence. Yet even if it happens, and we end up with 35K deaths which was basically the result in Chernobyl, we've had 10's of millions die from inhaling smoke particulates from fossil fuel emissions. And the results from Chernobyl have not had the long term consquences predicted. The radiation levels even in the nearest town are at livable levels and have been at least since the early 90's.

Those 10's of millions of deaths from cancer and COPD aren't even taking account of climate change. Any serious look at risk analysis will tell you that nuclear is way less risk in the longrun, orders of magnitude less. The problem with this particular risk fixation is it isn't only based on the association with nuclear weapons. It's also based on the risk stemming from terrible accidents, which always garner more attention and fear than silent killers like air pollution. We simply aren't rational in the way we evaluate and compare risks.

I think the biggest impediment here is that people do not realize just how bad air pollution is.

A quick google indicates to me there’s a wide range of estimates as to how many deaths are caused yearly by air pollution but all of them are in the multiple millions. The WHO pegs it at 7 million. Of course plenty of this is from sources other than power generation but plenty of it IS from power generation. That’s a lot of yearly Chernobyls needed to catch up.

Air pollution

Air pollution kills an estimated seven million people worldwide every year. WHO data shows that 9 out of 10 people breathe air containing high levels of pollutants. WHO is working with countries to monitor air pollution and improve air quality.

www.who.int

 

[woolfe9998]

Logic says to itself that logic is best. That does not answer the question of what logic is. One kind of logic looks at the risks and concludes that because reactors are safe they should be built. Another form of logic looks at the risks and the consequences of an accident anyway and concludes the risk though minimal, is owing to potential consequences still just too great.

There is a right and wrong answer here though. It comes when you compare the risks of nuclear reactors to the well documented risks of burning fossil fuels. Then realize that every reactor not built is x more oil, NG and/or coal being burned. If we had enough solar panels and wind turbines to put down in the next 5 years so as to reduce carbon emissions to zero, then I'd agree. But we do not.

I don't see any way for logic to dictate against nuclear unless you're just looking at the risks in a vacuum. It's going to take us a lot longer to reach zero emissions if we're waiting for enough solar, wind and geo to do it all for us.

 

[Zorba]

I did provide you with verification though?

I would agree that non-commercial aviation is not so much more safe (less safe?) but when people are talking about flying just about everyone is talking about flying commercial.

It is hard to quantify the flight vs. the 15 minute drive to the airport in recent years as the flight number is literally zero but regardless I think the idea that flying is much safer than driving is well founded.

And again this relates to the topic at hand. I think the average person would be more afraid of living next to a nuclear power plant than a coal power plant despite the coal one being way more likely to kill you.

So using real numbers:

From 2012 to 2021 there have been 1,743 fatalities in commercial aviation (per Boeing) and 584.4 Million Flight hours, this works out to a falaty rate of 2,982.5 fatalities per 1 Billion flight hours. As opposed to cars that are at about 375 per billion driving hours. Yes this is worldwide aviation versus US auto, but the point stands, the idea that cars are so so much more dangerous than airplanes is because people don't sit down and do the math to realize there are vastly more hours in a car than an airplane.

I never said anything about non-commercial aviation, these numbers only include Part 121 and 135 operations.

https://www.boeing.com/resources/boeingdotcom/company/about_bca/pdf/statsum.pdf

I would personally much rather live by a nuke plant than a coal plant. As the risk of a small consequence (me haing health problems from pollution, contaminated water supply, etc) is much higher. At a state level though, that is different has a nuke plant has some probability of taking out a large chunk of your state while a coal plant have zero probability of doing so.

 

[fskimospy]

So using real numbers:

From 2012 to 2021 there have been 1,743 fatalities in commercial aviation (per Boeing) and 584.4 Million Flight hours, this works out to a falaty rate of 2,982.5 fatalities per 1 Billion flight hours. As opposed to cars that are at about 375 per billion driving hours. Yes this is worldwide aviation versus US auto, but the point stands, the idea that cars are so so much more dangerous than airplanes is because people don't sit down and do the math to realize there are vastly more hours in a car than an airplane.

I never said anything about non-commercial aviation, these numbers only include Part 121 and 135 operations.

https://www.boeing.com/resources/boeingdotcom/company/about_bca/pdf/statsum.pdf

I would personally much rather live by a nuke plant than a coal plant. As the risk of a small consequence (me haing health problems from pollution, contaminated water supply, etc) is much higher. At a state level though, that is different has a nuke plant has some probability of taking out a large chunk of your state while a coal plant have zero probability of doing so.

The purpose of travel is to cross distances though, not count hours spent sitting in something, so miles travelled is the important thing here. Cars are much more dangerous because if I’m trying to go from A->B I am much more likely to die driving there than in a plane. I am willing to accept the possibility that for short flights the risks could be more comparable but people don’t usually use planes for that. (As the very large majority of airplane accidents occur during takeoff or landing)

That’s the thing here. The math for flying and nuclear are both clear and they cause fewer deaths than their counterparts.

 

[Zorba]

I didn't say a major accident will never occur. I'm working off risk analysis exactly as you said. The long history of no serious accidents in both those countries suggests it is an improbable occurence. Yet even if it happens, and we end up with 35K deaths which was basically the result in Chernobyl, we've had 10's of millions die from inhaling smoke particulates from fossil fuel emissions. And the results from Chernobyl have not had the long term consquences predicted. The radiation levels even in the nearest town are at livable levels and have been at least since the early 90's.

Those 10's of millions of deaths from cancer and COPD aren't even taking account of climate change. Any serious look at risk analysis will tell you that nuclear is way less risk in the longrun, orders of magnitude less. The problem with this particular risk fixation is it isn't only based on the association with nuclear weapons. It's also based on the risk stemming from terrible accidents, which always garner more attention and fear than silent killers like air pollution. We simply aren't rational in the way we evaluate and compare risks.

Chernobyl could've been much worse if the soviet union hadn't ordered people, like the miners, to give up their life to prevent the situation from getting worse. I seriously doubt that would happen in the US. So you could end up contaminating a large watershed with a meltdown.

I agree with you that risks from silent killers is not appropriately considered and maybe a true analysis would show it'd be worth having a Chernobyl style event, or worse every half century to eliminate coal.

BTW: In my line of work improbable mean 1 in a billion, if you assume all the reactors in the US and France have been operating non-stop for 50 years that is only about 69.6 Million hours, and there has been an accident and several incidents in that time.

 

[Zorba]

The purpose of travel is to cross distances though, not count hours spent sitting in something, so miles travelled is the important thing here. Cars are much more dangerous because if I’m trying to go from A->B I am much more likely to die driving there than in a plane. I am willing to accept the possibility that for short flights the risks could be more comparable but people don’t usually use planes for that. (As the very large majority of airplane accidents occur during takeoff or landing)

That’s the thing here. The math for flying and nuclear are both clear and they cause fewer deaths than their counterparts.

I literally never ever ever said that nuclear caused more death than fossil fuels. I said the consequence of failure is potentially much much higher.

I love how you claim "the math" shows the exact opposite of what I just showed the math shows, though. Long live tried cliches from a time before airbags. Maybe we should do it by "trips" because every trip is important, so let's change the denominator to "trips" instead of time or distance, since I really don't care how far I go I am not doing miles for the fun of it, a trip is what is important. I'm guessing cars will massively win that comparison.

Regardless, the car/flying comparison is so old and meaningless. COVID vs guns would be a much better example.

 

[fskimospy]

I literally never ever ever said that nuclear caused more death than fossil fuels. I said the consequence of failure is potentially much much higher.

I love how you claim "the math" shows the exact opposite of what I just showed the math shows, though. Long live tried cliches from a time before airbags. Maybe we should do it by "trips" because every trip is important, so let's change the denominator to "trips" instead of time or distance, since I really don't care how far I go I am not doing miles for the fun of it, a trip is what is important. I'm guessing cars will massively win that comparison.

You didn’t though. The data shows I am correct.As to what metric to use I picked the most widely used one because it’s simple and clear. As per wiki car travel is ~750x more dangerous than air travel in the US.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_United_States

I don’t think this is a particularly controversial point. Air travel is safer because we invest an enormous amount of time and money into making it safe and for the vast majority of an air trip the risk of colliding with something is near zero. Of course it’s safer.

I‘m happy that we share an opinion on nuclear power because I agree it’s the one that’s backed up by the math. I think the same is true for air travel.

 

[Zorba]

You didn’t though. The data shows I am correct.As to what metric to use I picked the most widely used one because it’s simple and clear. As per wiki car travel is ~750x more dangerous than air travel in the US.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_United_States

I don’t think this is a particularly controversial point. Air travel is safer because we invest an enormous amount of time and money into making it safe and for the vast majority of an air trip the risk of colliding with something is near zero. Of course it’s safer.

I‘m happy that we share an opinion on nuclear power because I agree it’s the one that’s backed up by the math. I think the same is true for air travel.

Your exposure rate is in hours. Regardless, the original point was that people take aviation safety more seriously because the consequence of a single event is much higher than for auto accidents.

The real question for traditional nuclear power is how big is the actual consequence of a failure and whether that is worth it compared to the alternatives. Claiming a failure will never happen based on a selective reading of a small sample isn't really valid.

 

[Paratus]

So using real numbers:

From 2012 to 2021 there have been 1,743 fatalities in commercial aviation (per Boeing) and 584.4 Million Flight hours, this works out to a falaty rate of 2,982.5 fatalities per 1 Billion flight hours. As opposed to cars that are at about 375 per billion driving hours. Yes this is worldwide aviation versus US auto, but the point stands, the idea that cars are so so much more dangerous than airplanes is because people don't sit down and do the math to realize there are vastly more hours in a car than an airplane.

I never said anything about non-commercial aviation, these numbers only include Part 121 and 135 operations.

https://www.boeing.com/resources/boeingdotcom/company/about_bca/pdf/statsum.pdf

I would personally much rather live by a nuke plant than a coal plant. As the risk of a small consequence (me haing health problems from pollution, contaminated water supply, etc) is much higher. At a state level though, that is different has a nuke plant has some probability of taking out a large chunk of your state while a coal plant have zero probability of doing so.

Your life time chance of death from a car accident is approximately 1/101

Odds of Dying - Injury Facts

Knowing the odds of dying is the first step in beating them. New 2022 data shows the risks from plane crashes, guns, falls and more.

injuryfacts.nsc.org

That source couldn’t calculate the odds of dying in an airline crash because so few happen.


From what I could find the average American flys 1.4 times per year while “airline flyers” fly 3.6 times per year. With the risk found in. 2018 on a different site of 1 death per 4.2M flights the lifetime risk (assuming 70 years of flying ) of simply being on flight where a death occurs would be 1/16,667

This site shows the European nuclear industry to have a lifetime risk of 1 in 61,000 dying from nuclear power - similar to wind and solar.

Nuclear Energy

Explore global data on nuclear energy production, and the safety of nuclear technologies.

ourworldindata.org

 

[hal2kilo]

I’m outside the immediate danger zone if something happens at the Pickering nuclear power plant here in the northern Toronto area. Unsure where else we’d get our power from without it with proposed decommissioned of it slated in 2025.

For 2 years, I lived approximately 4 miles from the Milestone power plant in Waterford, CT. I thought it would have been decommissioned by now, but, it still lives. As a side note, I was working in the GD, Electric Boat shipyard at the time installing a data acquisition system for the Trident strategic weapons system. One of the guys that worked in our company used to work for RADCON in the shipyard, and the only time their monitors went off is when Milestone was venting. Oops! here's the link.

Millstone Nuclear Power Plant - Wikipedia

 

[Zorba]

Your life time chance of death from a car accident is approximately 1/101

Odds of Dying - Injury Facts

Knowing the odds of dying is the first step in beating them. New 2022 data shows the risks from plane crashes, guns, falls and more.

injuryfacts.nsc.org

That source couldn’t calculate the odds of dying in an airline crash because so few happen.


From what I could find the average American flys 1.4 times per year while “airline flyers” fly 3.6 times per year. With the risk found in. 2018 on a different site of 1 death per 4.2M flights the lifetime risk (assuming 70 years of flying ) of simply being on flight where a death occurs would be 1/16,667

This site shows the European nuclear industry to have a lifetime risk of 1 in 61,000 dying from nuclear power - similar to wind and solar.

Nuclear Energy

Explore global data on nuclear energy production, and the safety of nuclear technologies.

ourworldindata.org

Yeah, you are much more likely to die from things that are done multiple hours a day versus things you do a couple hours a year. I already showed the death rate per hour of US driving is lower than worldwide commercial aviation. In the last decade, per the Boeing stats posted earlier, there have been ~7.3 deaths per million flights. I think you are looking at the flights with a fatality per million flights data, which is obviously not comparable to total deaths per X in cars. My point was, people suck at probability and risk analysis, pointing out that this thing you do all the time is more likely to kill you than this thing you rarely do is an example of that. That is like saying more people die walking around their house than skiing, therefore walking in your house is more dangerous than skiing.

What is the worst consequence from a wind turbine failing? What the worst consequence from a nuclear power plant failing? How many orders of magnitude more operating hours do wind/solar have than nuclear? Do you disagree that things that have a higher consequence of failure should have a lower probability of failure? In commercial aviation, a failure that would prevent continued safe flight and landing should occur less than once in a billion flight hours. What rate is acceptable for potentially contaminating a major watershed/hundreds of square miles? Or just the billions of dollars in clean up like at TMI?

As reference, remembering "catastropic" generally means a death or loss of vehicle not a meltdown:

 

[Zorba]

DP, forum has been acting up lately.

 

[Moonbeam]

To me the people more casual about human life would be the ones who opt for the power generation method that kills more people.

Not really. Logic would dictate using power generation with a higher death rate if the lower death rate model included a rare but potentially catastrophic event that could render a profoundly valuable piece of real estate uninhabital for thousands of years. Furthermore, all calculations of rosy scenarios regarding all the events of nuclear accidents in the past were calculated in ways to insure they were built. Only hind-sight is 20-20. You are free to take your calculations of what is safer for me and build your reactor as far from me as I can vote to make happen. I bought by the ocean, in part, so I could have as much clean air as my meager income could buy. I have favored renewable energy all of my life. When I was young and stupid, that included nuclear including pie in the sky fission. We should have had a Manhattan Project for solar and wind etc, since the Carter Administration.

Here's a simple form of logic. Ask people if they would prefer to have installed on their roofs free solar cells and battery storage sufficient to get off the grid, or free electricity from a nuclear power plant built next door. I bet I know the 'irrational' answer most people would opt for. It is really just that simple. Rational people have to factor into their reasoning the limits of reason.

 

[Moonbeam]

There is a right and wrong answer here though. It comes when you compare the risks of nuclear reactors to the well documented risks of burning fossil fuels. Then realize that every reactor not built is x more oil, NG and/or coal being burned. If we had enough solar panels and wind turbines to put down in the next 5 years so as to reduce carbon emissions to zero, then I'd agree. But we do not.

I don't see any way for logic to dictate against nuclear unless you're just looking at the risks in a vacuum. It's going to take us a lot longer to reach zero emissions if we're waiting for enough solar, wind and geo to do it all for us.

The nuclear we have is scheduled for closure or continued operation at a rate unknown to me. That may or may not change. I oppose new construction of nuclear, the closing of that option. similarly I oppose the use of fossil resources to meet energy demands as they threaten a mass global extinction event. I believe that green energy can meet the demand ahead of nuclear in any form. I think all resources should go to that and have for decades. I think a war effort in that direction is warranted.